Linked – Mental health training for managers could save organisations millions of pounds, study finds
If I asked how many of my readers worked somewhere with some Employee Assistance Program that included some options for mental health treatment, I think many would say yes. If I asked if the treatment options available fit the need, I suspect the yes population would be diminished, but that’s a discussion of another time.
The relevant question for this post, however, would be to determine if your direct manager was any help in the process. Were they aware of and knowledgeable enough about the EAP to help you find what you were looking for? Were they educated enough to know what their role should be in helping you navigate working while getting help? Were they supportive or dismissive?
I’ve mentioned before that in some of the worst of my mental health struggles, I had a manager who helped me manage the process and was incredibly supportive of me doing what I needed to do, and I later had a manager who made the entire thing awkward and unbearable for me. This was at the same company. Nothing about the rules or the program changed, but my manager did. That made all the difference between me staying and being productive and walking out the door.
Based on UK numbers, this article should make organizational leaders stop and think. Have we equipped our managers to exist in this area with their reports?
The study, published in journal Plos One by a team of experts at the University of Nottingham, found a “strong association between mental health training for line managers and improved staff recruitment and retention, better customer service and lower levels of long-term mental health sickness absence”.
The researchers claimed this was the first study, to their knowledge, to demonstrate empirically the link between training around mental health for line managers and better business outcomes.
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