05/19/2021

Mental Health Starts at the Top

Destigmatizing mental health issues can transform organizational culture

The coronavirus pandemic has revealed the fragile mental health of our workforces and executives are seeing the need to take a proactive, humanistic approach to addressing it. Ignoring employee needs would be synonymous with ignoring the well-being of the company itself, since cultural and behavioral changes that address the mental health of their workforce are a pre-condition for growth. We are only just past the one-year anniversary of the pandemic, and many of the long-term mental health effects are still unknown. But a subtle change is already taking place in many companies’ cultures, increasing the focus on mental health and taking thoughtful, yet systematic approaches to become “mental health resilient.” 

Over the past year, Deloitte conducted a series of CEO surveys in collaboration with Fortune to gain insight into CEO perspectives on the pandemic and other recent events. In October 2020, CEOs were clear that employee well-being was a key focus area: nearly three out of four CEOs said they had been concerned about their own and their executive team’s mental health and well-being over the past six months, while 90 percent said they had taken action to support the mental health and well-being of their employees. In our most recent survey—fielded in the first two weeks of January 2021—98 percent of CEOs agreed that employee mental health and well-being will be a priority even after the pandemic is over.

What approaches would CEOs do well to consider? Becoming “mental health resilient” will call on the compassion and humanity of CEOs and their leadership teams, now and into the future.

Please select this link to read the complete article from SSIR.