3 critical success factors for mental wellness programs

One thing we notice as we work with highly stressed teams is the immediate boost to morale and positivity from the very fact employers are now prepared to invest in their mental health.

We hear statements like “I’ve been here several years and I see the stresses we’re all working under, but I can’t honestly recall a time when the company was prepared to invest in our personal resilience in the direct and immediate way you guys are offering”.

Let me be clear. The typical initiatives we see rolled out in the name of mental health support, well intentioned as they are, generally lack three main elements

i) they’re not sustainable

ii) they’re not targeted to specific role pressures

Iii) they’re not measurable.

Sustainability is important because mental health support needs to be integrated into the working week. It also needs to be accessible, easy to apply and deliver tangible long term results - or people won’t stay committed. This should form part of your staff retention strategy.

‘Targeting to specific role pressures’ might seem a bit vague. But we know from the work we are doing that certain jobs attract certain kinds of challenges which are not generalisable across broader roles.

Reducing the challenge to: “Everyone is stressed, right” might be glossing over the more nuanced signals - the specific ways in which stress is manifesting.

Let me give you an example.

A SOC team leader reported he had difficultly switching off, even on days off. We delved in and saw he was carrying a limiting belief - “a fear of letting his team down if he was unavailable”.

The protocol we use is able to go into the heart of the problem and defuse it *at the core level*, deliver a clearer perspective on why that belief was not serving him, and the insight itself can be enough to reach a rapid resolution.

He came to see there was an opposing belief that also wanted to be heard. “I’m not serving my team if I can’t effectively recharge”. See how it works? Countervailing beliefs can be encoded to deliver role specific outcomes.

As I mentioned two days ago, working at the level of belief is a powerful way to get people to recalibrate their relationship with work. The fact is work pressures are not likely to resolve. But what if we could catalyse a shift in perspective, changing they way you see and respond to things you can’t necessarily change. The results at an individual level can be astonishing! At a team level, transformative.

And it opens the way for insights into changing what *can* be changed.

But none of this counts for much if we can’t also measure progress. Partly because the changes might be subtle, and creep up on you over time. So giving people the ability to measure and track as they go not only supports the business case for investing in mental health, but shows them the subtler gains are real.