Four Things to Do Instead of a Mental Health Lunch and Learn
Photo credit: Canva
By Kristin Bower
Stop hosting mental health lunch and learns. There. I said it.
Do you know who attends a lunch and learn about mental health? People who are interested in learning about it. They might even be people who already know about mental health and mental illness.
Do you know who doesn’t attend them? The employees and leaders in your organization who need to learn about mental health.
OK, maybe don’t stop providing these learning opportunities but please don’t use them as your primary source of awareness and education. Because a single lunch and learn held during mental health week in May or on World Mental Health Day in October won’t change anything. If you can show me research that proves me wrong, I will happily change my stance!
Research that does exist shows that our collective and individual mental health in Canada (and worldwide) is not good. Not good at all. About 20% of us will experience a mental illness in this year alone. By the age of 40, 50% of us will have had a mental illness.
Mental Illness and the Workplace
Let’s consider that number for a moment: 20%. Now apply that to your team and your organization overall. That’s a significant percentage of your employee population who are either struggling with a mental health challenge now or will be within the next year.
Research also tells us that stigma remains a very real barrier to seeking help, receiving treatment, and managing our mental health. In a 2019 survey of working Canadians:
75% of respondents said they would be reluctant – or would refuse – to disclose a mental illness to an employer or co-worker.
Respondents were nearly 3 times less likely to want to disclose a mental illness like depression than a physical one like cancer.
Top reasons for this reluctance were: the belief that there is stigma around mental illness, not wanting to be treated differently or judged, and being afraid of negative consequences, such as losing one’s job.
Yet 76% of respondents also stated that they themselves would be comfortable with and supportive of a colleague with a mental illness. So maybe we just need to give our employees and leaders the permission to talk about this in the workplace, yes? Yes.
Start With Leaders
If the human case for increased awareness of mental health and mental illness in the workplace doesn’t quite resonate enough for you, how about the business case? According to authors and researchers Jim Clifton and Jim Harter (you may know them as the Strengths Finders guys from Gallup), as written in their book Wellbeing at Work: How to Build Resilient and Thriving Teams:
“In organizations where employees believed that wellbeing was not only prioritized but also well managed, organizational performance was more than 2.5X greater than for those where employees rated health and wellbeing as poorly managed.”
But here’s the thing: most people leaders don’t know what to look for in an employee who might be experiencing a mental health challenge such as a mood disorder or addiction. Providing all your leaders (from the C-suite to senior leaders and line managers) with skills training can help them to feel more confident in leading their teams.
Create a Leadership Learning Plan
Leaders need to put their oxygen mask on first, so to speak. If we want to create workplace cultures where employees feel that they can talk about mental illness, we need to better support our leaders first. Here are topics to include within a leadership learning plan (and yes, you need a leadership learning plan) for new and existing people leaders:
Common mental disorders and how they can show up in the workplace
How to discern between the need for mental health supports and performance management
An understanding of legal imperatives: the Duty to Inquire and the Duty to Accommodate
How to talk to an employee who might be struggling with a mental illness
How to foster psychological safety within a team
How to build resiliency and counter burnout
Self-care and wellness for leadership teams
4 Things to Do Instead of a Lunch and Learn
Once you have provided learning opportunities for leaders, you can begin to consider how your organization will better support employees overall. Here are some things to do BEFORE you book that next lunch and learn:
Create a clearly defined health and wellness strategic plan that includes measures.
Allocate a reasonable budget and people resources to do the work (think of this as an investment rather than a cost).
Invest in effective mental health and wellness tools (hint: it’s more than massage therapy, think mental health first aid attendants, for example).
Hold leaders held accountable for modelling mentally healthy behaviours (and support THEIR mental health, too!).
We MUST shift our mindset when it comes to what we prioritize in workplaces. If you never see a return on investment on a product or service that you offer, should you keep offering it? No. Bad business decision. Which brings me back to lunch and learns. Yes, they can be a useful element of a larger mental health strategy and plan. But a lunch and learn alone won’t change anything.
As the saying goes, old ways won’t open new doors. And when we bring the topic of mental health out of the closet, we shine some light on it. And I think we could all use a little more light and hope in this world.
P.S. Want to add mental health workshops to your leadership learning plan or some help creating a strategic plan? Reach out to Leda HR today!
1 Mental Illness and Addiction: Facts and Statistics | CAMH
2 Ipsos (2019). Mental illnesses increasingly recognized as disability, but stigma persists. Retrieved from https://www.ipsos.com/en-ca/news-polls/mental-illness-increasingly-recognized-as-disability
Kristin Bower is a partner in Leda HR and a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant living, learning, unlearning, and working in Metro Vancouver on the ancestral and unceded lands of the Katzie (q̓ic̓əy̓) People. Endlessly curious, she is dedicated to making the world a better place, one small act or conversation at a time, preferably over a cup of coffee!