Sponsored Article
The current economic climate has had a notable impact on organizations, with many experiencing results such as rising health care costs, inflation and budget cuts. To explore the impact on mental health benefits, Calm Business recently partnered with Reworked INSIGHTS to conduct a survey of 400+ HR/benefits leaders.
Survey results found that even during economic uncertainty, companies see mental health benefits as critical to a positive employee experience, and looking at the most advanced companies allowed us to create a blueprint for how the most successful companies are supporting workplace mental health. Here are some of the most significant findings from the report and how your organization can use them to maximize your benefits.
Inside Current Workplace Mental Health Benefits
Benefits leaders cited many factors that have impacted their employees’ mental health recently, including workplace stress (66%), financial loss (65%) and the changing health of a family member (48%). They also identified the major workplace impacts they’ve observed from the current economic climate, including inflation (51%), rising health care costs (44%) and budget cuts (42%).
The good news is that even amid these negative stressors on both employees and employers, organizations’ dedication toward mental health support has been changing for the better:
- While many benefits leaders said that budget cuts were a major impact of the current economic climate, benefits have mostly avoided being the target of budget cuts. Notably, budgets for mental health benefits are even less likely to be cut than budgets for benefits overall (12% vs. 17%).
- More than half (61%) of benefits leaders say mental health is a higher priority in the current economic climate
- Among the organizations who say they’re adding benefits in the next year, 41% say they are adding mental health preventive benefits and 38% say they’re adding digital mental health therapy.
With rising health care costs and financial stress impacting employees during a time of economic uncertainty, employers realize that health care and mental health benefits are more important than ever.
How to Maximize Your Mental Health Benefits
For companies interested in improving their current offerings, it can be difficult to know exactly what to change or add to appeal to employee needs. Calm suggests these four steps in its blueprint for better mental health to help companies maximize their benefits package:
- Better leverage your benefits offerings by enhancing engagement, navigation and innovation. Lack of awareness can be a major factor impacting employees’ overall use of a benefit.
- Listen to employee feedback when prioritizing benefits. Deciding what benefits to add or cut is a tough decision. Employee feedback will help you make the right call.
- Keep evolving your benefits to reflect shifting workforce needs. Ensuring that benefits adequately support LGBTQ+ and Gen Z mental health needs is becoming increasingly important to employers.
- Leverage mental health preventive care to optimize your mental health benefits. Studies show that for every $1 invested in prevention, employers can expect to save $4 in downstream health care and employee productivity costs.
Learning From the Most Successful Companies
We analyzed the benefits leaders who work for organizations that have recently seen great growth in revenue and/or market share. In general, fast-growing companies try to offer the most appealing benefits packages to employees so they can recruit the most talented people to support organizational growth and success. High growth companies are also:
- Much more likely to have advanced mental health offerings.
- Much more likely to say that these mental health benefits were higher priority than before.
- Much more likely to say that their budget for mental health offerings will increase.
For companies that are growing quickly, it’s important to position themselves as an attractive organization so they can acquire more talent to support their growth. For companies in industries with tight labor pools, good health and mental health benefits may be a deciding factor for job seekers.
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Conclusion
Based on these survey results, we see that mental health is something organizations are prioritizing more than before — especially preventative mental health benefits. In this way, Calm Business can help maximize your mental health benefits in several ways:
- Offer a preventive tool for mental health upstream.
- Drive higher benefits engagement through personalization tools and dedicated CS support.
- Stay close to employee feedback and sentiment.
- Streamline mental health benefits navigation through key integrations.
For more information on the survey findings and what preventative mental health benefits can do for your company, download the white paper below and access Calm’s blueprint for designing your own mental health benefits
