Employee wellbeing is something that increasingly interests managers. Indeed, last year I revealed that the average employer is spending $693 per employee on well-being initiatives per year, with that figure typically rising around $100 per year. The majority of this investment was, however, going into physical health activities, whether it’s the installation of gym facilities on site, or giving employees fitness trackers to monitor activity levels.
What is much less clear is whether such investment extends into mental health. The Thriving At Work report for the British government revealed last year that some 300,000 people with long-term mental health conditions lose their job in the UK each year. It estimates around 15% of us have mental health worries at any one time, ranging from depression to stress.
“We found that in many workplaces, mental health is still a taboo subject and that opportunities are missed to prevent poor mental health and ensure employees who may be struggling get the support they need. In many instances employers simply don’t understand the crucial role they can play, or know where to go for advice and support,” the authors say.
Managerial support
The importance of securing support from your manager was underlined in a recent study published in BMJ Open. The study found that having managerial support resulted in a sharp drop in absenteeism rates in all of the 15 countries analyzed in the research.
The researchers analyzed the Global IDEA audit conducted with 16,000 employees and their managers across 15 countries of various levels of income and cultural norms. Each participant divulged their demographic information, including age, gender and educational attainment, together with their mental health history and attendance record at work.
Equally, the managers in the survey were asked whether they actively offered help and support to anyone in their team suffering from depression.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the responses varied considerably by country, with several thousand people revealing they had been, or were currently depressed. For instance, managers in Asian countries would try and avoid employees with depression and certainly not give them any active support. By contrast, managers in South Africa and Mexico were the most likely to offer help.
Brushed under the carpet
It should probably go without saying that avoiding the matter did little to resolve it, and in many cases exacerbated the problem. Countries where avoidance was highest would also typically have higher absenteeism as a result of depression, with the inverse also being true, that having managers who supported employees with depression resulted in fewer days off as a result.
Interestingly, the education level of employees also appeared to correlate with their level of depression-related absenteeism, with higher educated employees taking more time off than their lower-educated peers. Similarly employees at larger companies tended to take fewer days off than their peers at smaller companies. Lastly, older workers were more likely to come in even though depressed than their younger colleagues.
The authors concede that it is perhaps risky to draw too many conclusions from their findings, not least because owning up to mental health issues, even anonymously for research, is something of a taboo. They accept that their findings don’t really allow us to understand the cause of these phenomenon, but nonetheless they are confident in their belief that managerial support is fundamentally helpful in tackling mental health at work.
“This strengthens the economic case for supporting the development and implementation of effective policies and practices for managers to be able to actively support an employee with depression,” they say. “The business case for intervention through better managerial response is exemplified by the substantial costs associated with mental health problems and evidence from a number of studies that mental health can improve through workplace programmes, with economic benefits to employers.”
