Speaker 1
Hi, Damien here with Zevo Health and today I want to talk about the organizational costs of poor mental health. The hidden unseen costs to the organization from stress, from anxiety, from depression that we tend not to cost, we tend not to see, which is really unfortunate because the costs both in human terms and in financial terms are significant.
If you were to go and ask your HR manager what percentage of sick leave, for example, is due to poor mental health, is due to stress, generally they’d come back with a figure between three and five percent. That is the official record.
Bear in mind, that is the people who will actually go to their doctor and will get a sick sick leave that says stress, that says anxiety, that basically puts that hand up and says I can’t cope. It’s not the true figure.
The Mental Health Foundation in the UK, one of the biggest mental health charities in the UK, have done studies into this and estimate that approximately 37 percent of your organization’s sick leave is due to poor mental health and stress. Think about what that means for a second. More than a third of your sick leave bill is due to poor mental health.
In financial terms, in human terms, more than a third of the people who are off sick in your organization, on average, are off sick due to stress. It’s a significant factor that needs to be managed. This is what we’re going to look at today. How you can manage that, how you can identify it, and of course how you can start to continuously improve it.
As with any other organizational risk factor, because that’s what this is, it’s a stress, mental health is an organizational risk factor, we’re going to look at managing it, mitigating it and bringing it out into the open. The problem of course is that in addition to the direct costs of illness due to poor mental health, and bear in mind they tend to be higher than for other illnesses.
For example, the average illness length for many mental health issues is four to six weeks, much longer for some of the more severe issues. It costs a lot of money. There are the reputational issues of being an organization where people become mentally ill due to whatever the workplace conditions might actually be.
There are the morale issues where people see other people who can’t cope in the workplace and apparently see nothing being done about it. So the other important thing to keep in mind as well is that when a mental health issue happens in the workplace, it’s generally already quite bad. For many people, their profession, what they do is a central part of who they are. It’s very important to them.
So when people start to have trouble coping, they’ll drop other things first. Their nights out with friends, their leisure activities, the things that would generally help chill them down. As long as they’re getting to work, they’ll think, I’m okay, I can manage because work is so important. And quite often, people who are still going to work have given up an awful lot already. And they’re quite ill.
Speaker 1
And by the time it becomes apparent at work, it can be quite severe. So it’s in everybody’s interests to catch these issues early, to deal with them proactively, and to try and manage things from a financial and a human standpoint. This is very difficult when, according to another study by the Mental Health Foundation, 95% of your staff won’t admit to having a mental health problem.
Despite the fact that we know that one in four people will have a problem at some point in their lifetime, most people will not put their hand up and say, I’m having trouble coping, please help. This is a big problem. It’s a problem that one chunk of your staff knows nothing about, the other chunk of your staff won’t talk about. How do you manage this? How do you cope with it?
It’s worth taking a little detour at this point, because quite often when I’ll come into an organization to give a talk on mental health, on stress management, I’m met with a degree of weariness by the senior management. They don’t really want me to use the word stress. They don’t want me to talk about mental health directly. They want words like resilience because it’s more positive.
This in itself is damaging. It sends the message that it’s not. stress. The other issue that quite often pops up is the idea that we kind of want people a little bit stressed, but a good kind of stress. We want people on their toes, we want them creative and absolutely that should be the case. Stress is not bad. Stress is your body’s way of telling you there are changes, there are challenges.
Focus, get ready for them and be ready to perform at your best, but there’s a fundamental thing that many organisations get wrong in this regard. If you think about the stress response, it’s a very automatic, very quick response. Your heart rate increases, your blood pressure rises, your breathing rate increases, all to get you ready for action. Your muscles tense up.
The stress response physiologically is very, very close to the
Speaker 2
A lot of the physical effects are very, very similar.
Speaker 1
heart rate is way up, your breathing is very fast, but you’re not stressed, you’re excited.
Speaker 2
What’s the difference? The difference is you know you’re safe, you know the fairground ride has been checked, you know people don’t get hurt.
Speaker 1
it’s okay to feel excited. This is where you want your staff, you want them interested in challenges, interested in changes and excited to actually grasp those changes and run with them. How do you do that? It’s exactly the same way as you do in the fairground. You start by making people feel safe. How do you do that?
You make sure you know the difference between leadership on one hand and management on the other. Leadership is all about change and a good leader in a good organization will constantly push change, improvement, adapting to the market, adapting to competitors, adapting to new products. That’s what a leader does. Unfortunately, people at a fairly basic level don’t like change. They’re wary of it.
Change means uncertainty. Change means possibly poor outcomes and in so many organizations I’ve seen we have great leaders, fantastic at pushing change, at explaining change, at trying to get people involved in change. What you need on the other side, managers. What’s the difference?
Managers are all about certainty, consistency, about helping people to know how things are going to be on a day-to-day basis. What’s going to happen if I have an issue with another staff member? When am I going to get paid? What are the rules and regulations for taking time off? What are the norms in the office? What’s expected of me?
Management is far less interesting in some ways than than leadership but it’s absolutely fundamental to making your staff feel safe. People like to know where they stand. They like to feel that they can trust their organization, their team lead. People are basically social animals. We thrive in supportive social situations. You’ll see this in family situations.
Stable families raise creative, curious children, organizations that are stable, organizations that engender a sense of trust, engender staff who feel safe in being creative, in trying out new things, in embracing change. So fundamentally in an organization by all means lead. Be interested in change but also don’t neglect management.
Before you can help people to grasp challenges as challenges and not as threats you have to let them feel safe. This is done through good management. Certainty, consistency, trust. That is your framework for good mental health in the organization. There will always be stress.
There will always be times when organizations have to change quickly, have to react quickly and these are the times that are risky for the organization because people will naturally experience stress.
But if they feel safe, if they trust their managers, if they trust their colleagues, if they know communication is going to be open and honest and if they know where they’re going to stand, they’ll be far more ready to actually launch into those changes with a much more positive attitude. That said, we still have the issue of getting people to talk about stress and talk about mental health.
Some of the cognitive effects of stress are that you focus in on yourself. This is absolutely normal if you’re threatened.
Speaker 1
It’s a good survival instinct to focus on yourself, to focus on your own well-being and also to think short-term. I’m in danger, I need to do something to save myself straight away. But in the organization, this translates into staff who aren’t communicating, staff who are focused in on themselves rather than on the organization and staff who won’t reach out.
This is the fundamental problem for organizations with mental health is on their own, staff won’t initiate conversations. This is something you have to do as leaders in organizations. How do you do that? You can start with people like me, with sessions to normalize mental health. I can tell my story, I can explain what happened in my own organization, I can highlight the good outcomes.
However, we talked about mental health as an organizational risk and it’s by far the more effective method to manage it as an organizational risk. Stress, mental health, should be in your organizational risk register. The likelihood of it happening, the severity of it happening for various different departments and what your response will actually be, it should be championed.
Again, like other specialist functions in an organization, like data protection, like health and safety, you need someone to champion mental health. Otherwise, it won’t happen by itself. Appoint a mental health champion.
Appoint someone whose job it is, both to enable people to talk about mental health as a normal function of the business, which is exactly what it should be, but also to manage mental health as a business risk in the organization. It should be quantified, it should be mitigated, and it should be subject to a process of continuous improvement.
You’ll see the health of your staff improve, you’ll see the health of your balance sheet improved, and it’s a good move for everybody involved. That’s me for the day, folks.
In this webinar, we sat down with Damian McCourt, a High Performance Coach in stress management, workplace mindfulness and wellbeing. to discuss the impact that poor mental health in the workplace can have on organisational costs. According to the World Health Organisation, one in four people in the world will be affected by mental or neurological disorders at some point in their lives. Adults spend roughly one-third of their lives at work; therefore, workplaces are a key setting in which to promote positive mental health.
