Mental health affects everyone, the effects of stress need not

It was National Stress Awareness day earlier this month; did you even notice?

Don’t feel bad if you didn’t, the sad fact is that half your people are living with stress every day – it’s going unnoticed in every workplace across the UK.

Our research from our latest Employee Insight Report, indicates that almost half of UK workers know someone who’s had to give up work because of stress. Does that correlate with your exit interviews?

Let me be clear, we’re not talking about the broad topic of mental ill health, we’re talking about stress – a runaway illness that is quietly crippling organisational performance and effectiveness and impacting thousands and thousands of lives every day.

Our research findings suggest that, despite having its own day, record amounts spent on treatment and celebrity endorsement we still have a long way to go to cracking it:

Just 33% of employees would feel comfortable talking to their employer if they have a mental health issue, like depression.
75% of respondents said they have felt stressed at work over the last 12 months, but only 20% have taken time off work because of stress.
44% say they know a colleague who had given up work due to stress.
A worrying 36% said that they knew colleagues that had complained of being stressed in the past, but their employer hadn’t done anything to help.
19% said their financial worries affect their work.
Stigmas around mental health still persist and just 31% of employees in UK would be happy to talk with their work colleagues about taking time off following mental health issues and 56% wouldn’t do it.

The increasing incidence of stress related absence, growth in psychiatric claims and the dramatic shift in income protection incidence overwhelmingly supports the view that workplace interventions are failing to tackle the cause, failing to offer the right support and failing to protect the vulnerable.

I hear clients consistently talk about the associated implications of social stigma, the very real gap in line management capability and a lack of robust early identification and triage solutions.

So, what can leaders do differently?

I spend my time working with clients to build clever implementable solutions when the reality is, as the evidence shows, we need to get back to basics. Effective mental health solutions is a far more complex multi factorial issue than many organisations or leaders appreciate.

In my view organisations and their advisers must look beyond the claims statistics, the absence data and stigma to plan and implement robust, effective workplace mental health support programmes.

This doesn’t mean ditching therapeutic karaoke (it’s a thing – Google it). Surprisingly it does mean working on a simple-to-implement organisational audit and line manager training.

When combined with common organisational interventions, like an EAP, they provide the foundation of an effective mental health triage programme which exposes gaps, raises awareness and, importantly, empowers your front line managers to spot the signs and intervene – before more of your people become part of the unpalatable workplace statistics in our research.

Mental health effects everyone, the effects of stress need not.

Alistair Dornan is head of health management at Capita Employee Benefits.

This article was provided by Capita Employee Benefits.