Five questions to ask your benefits suppliers to build an inclusive mental health policy

Modern workforces are more diverse and distributed than ever, and work schedules, career paths, and life trajectories are rapidly evolving, even as teams unite across oceans and time zones. This presents a new challenge for employers – building an inclusive mental health policy that encompasses people from diverse backgrounds with unique experiences and life situations.

This could perhaps be why, even as many employers add benefits and make policies more flexible, research from McKinsey shows that most employees don’t agree that their mental health is adequately supported at work.

Making your mental health policy (and your benefits) inclusive is more ambitious than it may appear on the surface. So where do you begin? Well, you can start by asking existing and potential benefits suppliers the right questions. Here are five that you can ask your suppliers today to begin building a more inclusive benefits offering tomorrow.

1. Is the benefit convenient and easy to access?

When it comes to building an inclusive mental health offering, accessibility should be a top priority. After all, if your team are unable to access services then they won’t be able to reap the rewards of using them and take-up will be low.

For example, you might consider whether traditional in-person therapy and mental health support can truly be easily accessed by people with busy schedules or those who live in rural areas. Making your benefits easy to access can ensure all of your team benefit from them and, in turn, help support their physical and mental wellbeing.

2. Does it offer options to help a wide range of people?

Diverse workforces come with diverse needs, and these must be considered in the selection of mental health and wellbeing benefits. Check with your supplier that your healthcare benefits help as many people as possible, and that they’re relevant for your workforce.

If you’re in an office environment then a provider offering support for email overwhelm and mindful desk posture is likely to appeal to a large section of your workforce. But workers in a retail or construction environment may not relate. Match the needs of your team with the offering.

3. Is it personalised and flexible?

There should never be a one-size-fits-all approach to your rewards and benefits offering, and each one should be flexible enough to cater for a wide range of employees. For example, think about your paid holidays – they’re a much bigger piece of the wellbeing puzzle than many of us imagine. This is why they should ideally be personalised for each individual, and highly flexible, so that they can be used for differing priorities, such as individual’s religious and cultural celebrations, birthdays and important family or personal occasions.

4. How does it address inclusivity (and prevent bias)?

Although it’s difficult to remove all inbuilt biases from a benefit (whether it’s an in-person service, or a digital-first product), there are still steps you can take to reduce their impact and make them as inclusive as possible. Check with your supplier that there are processes in place to prevent bias, such as employing a diverse team of developers and guarding against a biased algorithm. Not sure what to ask? Check out this post on avoiding bias in benefits offerings.

5. How are data and privacy protected?

Data protection and privacy can also play a part in creating inclusive benefits. Your employees need to know that their data is safe and anonymised, so make sure that your supplier follows data storage best practices.

You can add an extra layer of security to your data protection by working with a third-party regulator. In the case of Koa Health, our data protection solutions were recently audited (and approved) by the Eticas Foundation. An ethics-based approach to handling people’s data can reassure your staff that you take their data, its protection and fair use of it seriously.

Building an inclusive mental health policy (and the benefits strategy to support it) is an ongoing project that will have to change and grow with your organisation. It’s challenging, but putting diversity, equity and inclusivity at the heart of your mental health policy, and the employee benefits that support it, will set the foundations for a happier and more productive workforce, and in the end, isn’t that what we all want?

The author is Charlotte Hilton, UK & international commercial director at Koa Health.

This article is provided by Koa Health.