A few years ago, Pammi Bhullar, now the director of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) at Edelman Financial Engines, had a colleague who was grappling with anxiety and not given a welcoming space or enough mental-health resources to deal with it. Bhullar’s friend found a new workplace that not only allowed her to talk about her anxiety, but by giving her tangible mental-health resources, allowed her to be a more productive and overall better employee. Plus, she created a support system within the inner circle of her colleagues. “If she thought she was going to get a panic attack, she had a support system who recognized the early signs,” Bhullar told moderator Patia Braithwaite, the health director at Well+Good, during a From Day One webinar titled, “Enhancing Employee Mental Health and Wellness Benefits.”

This anecdote goes to show that investing in employee mental-health and wellness resources is not just an act of care, but it also has tangible benefits, such as employee retention, reduced absenteeism, and higher productivity. This is especially true in the late Covid era, when employees find themselves reprioritizing their relationship to work and questioning their identification with their own line of work.

A Challenge, Exacerbated 

With the pandemic, a lot of challenges came to a head. The trend toward remote work had been increasing in recent years “... and the pandemic gave us a leap off the cliff,” said Anastasia Norton, who until recently was director of total-rewards management at USAA, which mainly serves the military community. “It was an entirely new environment in which to operate. The traditional means of connecting were no longer relevant,” she said. With such a paradigm shift, how could leaders reach out to employees, and find ways to connect with them now that everyone was essentially a hermit? “We had to rapidly shift our paradigm, figuring out how to connect with them and how to support them,” she said.

In this context, going to work stopped being the central part of people’s routines. With work-from-home policies, people started spending their whole days with their families, partners, and their kids, so that the idea of work being central got pushed to the side. Yet this shift also led to depression: Christine Celio, Ph.D., the national clinical director for mental health integration in primary care at One Medical, observed that her own psychotherapy patients went from asking, “How do I progress in my career and life?” to “What am I even doing?”

Managers Stepping Up

In this shift, the ideal benefits package should put therapy and wellness front and center. “You can’t understate the managers’ roles, to make sure they liberate their teams by checking in on them,” said Bhullar. “Do you have the resources you need? Do you have the accommodation you need? Are you set up appropriately?” are some of the questions that should be asked she said.

It’s crucial for managers to know people well enough to gauge when something is not right. “Prioritizing the relationship with direct reports is the most important thing,” said Marni McDowell, senior director of global well-being at Micron Technology. “We all heard the data that people don’t leave bad work, they leave bad leaders.” Celio, a licensed clinical psychologist, has some tips for managers to detect early signs of distress. They’re usually behavioral. “People make themselves and their lives a little smaller. They binge-watch TV instead of reaching out to friends, they tend to have trouble sleeping or they sleep too much. “How we behave correlates to how we feel, how we feel influences what we want to do,” Celio said. She recommends managers do weekly check-ins to get a sense of whether people aren’t doing as well as they used to do.

This relationship is not one-sided. “One thing to keep in mind is that workers look to their employers,” said Jake Spiegel, a research associate at the Employee Benefit Research Institute. “Employees really trust employers are going to pick a suitable suite [of benefits] for them, helping them improve the quality of being. Employers have a role to play, but employees trust them.”

Towards a Better Understanding of Mental-Health Challenges 

More mental-health and wellness awareness also means getting rid of stereotypes. In the first place, stress is not to always be considered an inconvenience. “A stress-free work environment is not an ideal place to work,” said Celio. “We need our deadlines, we need structure.” In addition, burnout and structure-related stress are not necessarily related. “What has been coming up in the pandemic is that burnout creeps in when people feel overwhelmed, when they feel that what they do doesn't matter, that there’s lack of fairness and lack of control,” Celio continued. “We’re not all in the same boat, but we’re all in the same storm.”

Not being in the same boat especially pertains to the intersection between mental health and DEI. In certain underrepresented communities, Bhullar noted, there’s a lot of stigma around mental health, so people might not seek help nor openly talk about trauma, anxiety, and depression. “There’s the triggering of highly visible or invisible aggressions. Often those individuals become the educators, to someone who’s an ally,” she continued, indicating that educating allies can also be a burden.

Harnessing Data and the Potential of Digital

“When it comes to mental health benefits, there’s not a lot of data: it’s the Wild West,” said Spiegel. “What we found, though, as doctors’ offices closed, is that there's a pretty enthusiastic take on telemedicine. You’d think digital natives would be more likely to embrace it, but we found that the average age of a telemedicine user is higher than the average age of a person preferring an in-person appointment.”

“It’s such a time commitment to go to therapy,” echoed Celio. “Going to the office, parking, checking in and out. The convenience of a telehealth appointment, the ability just to log on  and then log off, has been so helpful for so many people.”

Sure, cost remains a hindrance, but there are ways to mitigate the expense. “One of the ways we tied it together is a program where people earn points, so premiums are lower,” said Norton. “Usually it’s healthy activities, or virtual seminars, prerecorded resources on stress, anxiety. We incentivized that behavior so they could lower the premiums. We get info out there and it makes sense for them.”

Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.