After two years of a public health crisis, it is unsurprising that mental health and wellbeing have been thrust into the spotlight. Stress, the isolation of lockdown and remote working – and the change in routine as workers return to the office – all present challenges.

A study has shown that somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of people in the UK suffer from mental health problems such as stress, anxiety, or depression. Furthermore, the number of people suffering from mental health problems increased from 2019 to 2020 as the pandemic began.

This in turn costs the UK economy over £117.9 billion per year, according to a report from the London School of Economics. This comes in part due to lost productivity, including absenteeism and presenteeism, as well as the cost of care.

All this presents a growing need for businesses to understand and prioritise the mental wellbeing of their employees. Having a coherent and unified strategy is vital to minimising the negative effects of poor mental health and ensuring workers feel valued.

To explain this, DIGIT spoke with Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland (ICAS) Marketing Director Janice Hutchinson and Author & Psychotherapist Gin Lalli about their experience creating a mental health and wellbeing strategy at ICAS.

Mental Health

For a long time, mental health has been a taboo subject. Its status as an invisible affliction means it has often been side-lined, historically – organisations neglected it and individuals didn’t raise it. In high pressure environments, admitting to burn-out or needing help can be seen as weakness.

“A lot of businesses really shied away from this,” Hutchinson said. “In many respects, the pandemic has forced the conversation. It’s gone from being a marginal topic to being considered a key part of a business’s strategy.”

For ICAS, the creation of their mental fitness strategy solution came about largely through “learning on the job” so to speak. Developed by Hutchinson at the start of 2021, it aimed to encourage an open and honest dialogue on mental fitness.

“We started with a blank piece of paper,” Hutchinson notes. “And from that blank piece of paper we’ve made huge amounts of progress in a relatively short space of time.”

The ICAS strategy is built around a three-year vision, with an ambition to be the gold standard for mental health.

To reach that, the first year was dedicated to breaking down the stigma around mental health and encouraging conversations. 2022 sees ICAS providing resources to act as a facilitator for its employees’ mental health.

The strategy involved every ICAS staff member receiving mental health training, along with twelve mental health allies given two days of in-depth training.

ICAS also dedicates two months of every year to one of six themes, with mental health and wellbeing one of them.

“That means we dedicate all our content, our webinars, magazine, etc. to mental health and wellbeing,” Hutchinson says. “It’s talked about on all our boards and committees, all our governance, so you constantly reinforce the messages.”

First Steps

One of the first things necessary to build a strong mental health strategy is networking – finding people who have done what you want to do, learning from their experience and adapting their decisions.

“When I started, I went to a head-hunter and asked for examples of businesses who do mental health really well,” Hutchinson says. “And from that, I built a stakeholder map of five or six people – Gin was one of those.”

Perhaps the most important piece of advice for anyone looking to build their own mental health strategy is to learn from others. Find examples of similar, successful strategies and pick the bits that translate.

“I think a mistake too many people make is they’re too blinkered and think they hold all the answers,” Hutchinson says. “Build a network, don’t believe you’re going to have all the answers yourself.”

Even once the strategy is in place, it mustn’t be allowed to stagnate. Constant feedback, and acting on that feedback, is important to keep it improving and adapting to new challenges.

“If you try something and it fails you can learn so much from that. It might take a little bit longer, but you will get there,” Lalli says.

“For me, the game changer was when I realised it’s a combination of passion and purpose,” Hutchinson says. “We have a clear vision, a shared purpose, but it’s the passion that everybody’s bringing to deliver that purpose.”

Across the Board

But perhaps the most important factor to implementing a strategy is to ensure that it meets with approval from the top, while also working with every level of the organisation.

“Buy-in from the chief executive is absolutely critical, in combination with representatives from right across the business at a grassroots level,” Hutchinson says.

“At ICAS, we’ve done it from both angles. We’ve done top-down buy-in from the CEO, and also a grassroots approach.”

As such, it is up to leadership to drive the mental health conversation. They must be proactive, acting as facilitators and giving their colleagues tools and permission to work on their own wellbeing.

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“The reality is any leaders in the business should have this on their agenda,” Hutchinson says. “If their teams aren’t well and aren’t looking after themselves, they’re not going to perform at their best and their business is therefore not going to perform at its best.”

Perhaps most importantly, mental health is a growing priority for younger generations. Failing to take it into account means leadership risks alienating a growing section of their workforce.

“This is what the new generations want,” Lalli notes. “They want a leader that has empathy for them as people, not just the figures and the targets.

“If younger people in that team are seeing those leaders, who often tend to be older, that’s related back to them that this is a company that’s trying to look after me as a person,” she adds.

Wellbeing

Organisations that prioritise wellbeing help increase productivity by reducing absenteeism and presenteeism. In turn, this breeds greater loyalty and innovation. At a time when many within the tech sector are dealing with a skills shortage, it can help reduce turnover.

For companies that take mental health seriously, the return on investment can be substantial.

“For a member of staff on long-term sick leave for mental health issues, it’s not unfeasible for that to run for at least six months,” Hutchinson explains. “If you take the cost of covering the job, the impact on the team, counselling, and support, you’re not far off a year’s salary.

“What this is about is getting people talking so they don’t get to the crisis point. If someone feels like they’re not coping, rather than keeping quiet until they go off sick, they actually talk to people about it.”

But perhaps more importantly, more workers are treating their mental health as essential. As such, employers neglect it at their own peril.

“It comes back that to passion and purpose – you’re giving people a purpose, and that drives a passion that a lot of people haven’t had,” Hutchinson says. “You will see absence levels go down over time because people will talk more before they get sick, whether it’s even physical or mental.

“People want more than a pay rise now,” Lalli adds. “They don’t want bonuses and money. They want a quality of life.”

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