Two years after COVID, a renewed focus on corporate mental health efforts

Wellness webinars. Corporate mental health officials. Redesigned benefits. Extra long weekends.

Twenty-six months into a grueling pandemic, with many Canadians facing the added challenge of returning to the office, companies are taking a variety of approaches to help workers deal with mental health challenges. But experts say verbiage remains a danger that too many boardrooms resort to.

A top-down shift in corporate attitude is key to easing emotional strain in the workplace, where mental health needs to be seen as essential to success rather than a side note, says Denis Trottier, chief health officer mental health of KPMG Canada.

“It’s changing that culture, moving away from, ‘Oh, it’s Mental Health Week, so let’s do something about mental health,’ and moving it to a culture where you put this on the agenda every day,” she said.

“The goal isn’t to make you and your entire team doctors so you can diagnose people. It’s to make the tools accessible to your colleagues… listen to you non-judgmentally and encourage you to access the resources.”

Corporate responsibility is key. Instead of relegating mental health to a corner of human resources, large companies should dedicate a separate team to it, Trottier said.

Many have been unable to update available mental health benefits or promote those that are available, he said. For companies that offer employee and family assistance programs (EFAPs), insurance coverage that can include counseling and therapy, the benefits are insufficient.

“There may be around $500 for counseling. If you’re in Toronto, it’s $225 an hour. After two sessions, what happens? Trottier asks.

BounceBack is an online self-help program offered free of charge by the Canadian Mental Health Association for adults with moderate anxiety or depression. Online programs, including MindBeacon and AbilitiCBT, offer virtual therapy sessions and are free in some provinces and covered by insurance plans in others.

Experts say there is a need as insurers see a surge in demand.

Canada Life has seen an increase in applications for mental health coverage under its employee and family assistance programs since the pandemic began, Executive Vice President Brad Fedorchuk said. The top three concerns were personal stress, work stress, and anxiety.

While demand for EFAP services at Desjardins Group initially decreased at the start of the pandemic, activity levels increased 20 percent between March 2020 and February 2021. Call volumes then tripled between the summer and fall spokesman Jean-Benoît Turcotti said.

Canada’s unemployment rate fell to 5.2 percent in April, Statistics Canada reported Friday, the lowest rate on record since comparable data became available in 1976. Employers are under increasing pressure to retain workers. employed in this market of job seekers.

Still, advocates say some employers have yet to fully accept the importance of responding to the anguish, uncertainty and sense of perpetual limbo that weighs on many employees in the wake of the pandemic.

“Unlike physical health, there seems to be a lot less patience and tolerance for things that affect our mental health,” said Troy Winters, senior health and safety officer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, which represents more than 700,000 workers in the United States. sectors ranging from education and health to aviation.

“Are employers doing anything? Usually very little,” he said, arguing that the necessary “holistic frameworks” are largely not in place.

Instead of just a company-provided gym membership or virtual yoga, tools should include mental health surveys and webinars or health and safety committees that identify points of excessive stress and emotional traps. Equity, diversity and inclusion committees also play a role, Winters said.

Of course, less work and more money don’t hurt either.

“To some extent, it’s positive,” he said of the changes in workload. But too great a burden or lack of flexibility, coupled with wage freezes or collective agreements, undermines morale and mental health and pushes employees to seek work elsewhere.

The Canadian Mental Health Commission released guidance last month to help managers deal with the “epidemic of mental health problems” affecting millions of Canadian workers, Chief Executive Officer Michel Rodrigue said in an interview.

“It’s not a checkmark exercise of ‘I’ve done this, okay, we’re done, thanks, let’s move on’.” It’s really a journey that you have to commit to,” she said.

The commission’s “toolkit” offers approaches to everything from onboarding new staff members, through buddy systems and team-wide welcomes, for example, to how to recognize signs of deteriorating mental health and the best ways to respond, in addition to protecting your own. psychological well-being.

“When you take flights, they always warn you to put on your own oxygen mask before helping someone else,” Rodrigue said. “Managers must protect their own mental health.”

At PwC Canada, the professional services firm has chosen not to require its more than 7,300 workers to return to the office. It has also added five extra long weekends: paid Mondays or free Fridays. And it redesigned benefits to increase mental health coverage, providing an EFAP, an additional $2,500 mental health benefit, and a wellness and lifestyle benefit that can be spent on a variety of services.

“We also had our leaders share some of their own personal stories and struggles so we could really talk about normalizing that conversation,” said managing partner Lana Paton.

Part of the answer lies simply in firmer limits. “During COVID, what we really saw was everyone went remote, it was very easy for home life to start mixing with work life and vice versa,” she said.

“Maybe it’s as simple as getting a personal phone so that at 5 pm it’s off,” Trottier added.

Workplace supports can also go too far, “if it sounds like training or something else you have to do,” she said.

“The trick is to do it on them.”

This report from The Canadian Press was first published on May 7, 2022.