CEOs’ new mental health road map

Led by an A-list of C-suite executives, a new nonprofit is developing a playbook to guide companies in supporting employees’ mental health, Jennifer A. Kingson reports.

Why it matters: Recognizing that burnout from the pandemic has even reached the corner office, Project Healthy Minds is trying to reduce the stigma of mental illness by getting CEOs to talk openly about their struggles — and to enact meaningful policies.

Driving the news: Project Healthy Minds is building what it calls the “first direct-to-consumer digital mental health marketplace” — a one-stop shop for finding a crisis hotline, a psychiatrist, a substance abuse treatment program or other relevant help.

• “We want to build an Expedia.com for mental health services,” says Phillip Schermer, founder and CEO of Project Healthy Minds, who previously helped guide mental health strategy at BlackRock.
• Another goal is to create national standards to guide companies’ mental health efforts.

Who’s on board: Supporters include Bill Kolb, chairman and former CEO of McCann Worldgroup; Jeff Raider, co-founder of Warby Parker and Harry’s; Jacqui Canney, chief people officer at ServiceNow; and Brian Offutt, chief workforce innovation and operations officer at Weber Shandwick.

What they’re saying: During the pandemic, “you had employees absolutely on the edge,” said Kolb, adding that several McCann employees recently died by suicide.

• Rattled by those deaths, Kolb personally called the employee assistance program (EAP) hotline to test his company’s safeguards — and was kept on hold for 12 minutes.
• When a human picked up, “the first thing I had to do was not talk about the fact that I’m about to kill myself, but tell my employee ID number,” Kolb recalled.
• After that, “we started doing things really, really rapidly” to help, like offering the Headspace app and “Wellness Wednesdays,” where guest speakers talk about mental health hygiene.
• The company also started training all workers to be “mental health advocates,” and to be able to recognize emotional distress in colleagues and others.

“No matter how much brainpower, time or effort you put on this, there’s no silver bullet — no quick fix,” Kolb tells Axios.

Where it stands: McCann Worldgroup hired Project Healthy Minds to build a mental health training program for its executive board and senior executives.

• Kolb “thought it was important that leaders get trained on these topics,” said Schermer, noting that the curriculum was built in collaboration with the National Network of Depression Centers.

What’s next: Project Healthy Minds plans to compile a robust library of research on best practices in mental health programs, plus develop metrics by which companies can be assessed.

• There’s a need for “standardized measurements” that prospective employees can look at, Schermer said.
• Investors who evaluate companies by the yardstick of “ESG” — environmental, social and governance practices — could use a firm’s mental health policies as a way to size up its “social” performance.

The bottom line: “We’re in the bottom of the first inning of a long game in reimagining what it means for companies to support employee mental health,” Schermer says.

 
-ICYMI: Scoring worker productivity

How closely should companies track workers? That’s the question at the heart of a fascinating New York Times deep dive published over the weekend.

Why it matters: Employers have wanted to keep a close eye on their workforce since time eternal.

• That desire is now being fed by new tools, like software that tracks whether someone is at their desk.
• But closely monitored workers told the Times that the practice is “demoralizing” and “toxic,” and some question whether the resulting data is even useful.

The takeaway: “The most urgent complaint, spanning industries and incomes, is that the working world’s new clocks are just wrong: inept at capturing offline activity, unreliable at assessing hard-to-quantify tasks and prone to undermining the work itself.”

Alex’s thought bubble: My managing philosophy is this: As long as you’re doing what’s expected of you, I don’t need to know whether you’re at your desk every minute. Go for a walk — it’s good for you!

Πηγή: axios.com