What particularly is popular in relation to Employee Mental Health Programs Schemes at this moment?The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life—including your home, work, and social life. Burnout can also cause long-term changes to your body that make you vulnerable to illnesses like colds and flu. Because of its many consequences, it’s important to deal with burnout right away. A successful organisation depends on employee wellbeing. A paper entitled ‘Does Worker Wellbeing Affect Workplace Performance?’ investigated the relationship between employees’ subjective well-being and workplace performance in Britain. They found a clear correlation between the average level of job satisfaction at the workplace and workplace performance. However, they found zero association between levels of job-related affect and workplace performance. Although there has been notable progress in organizations opening up the conversation around mental health and investing in well-being initiatives, the data still show a disparity when it comes to wider mental health support in workplaces. Across Europe the levels of absenteeism, unemployment and long term disability claims due to work related stress and mental health problems have been increasing. For example: Around 10 percent of long-term health problems and disabilities can be ascribed to mental and emotional disorders. Organisations should adopt an organisation-wide approach to promoting the mental wellbeing of all employees, working in partnership with them. This approach should integrate the promotion of mental wellbeing into all policies and practices concerned with managing people, including those related to employment rights and working conditions. If burnout seems inevitable, try to take a complete break from work. Go on vacation, use up your sick days, ask for a temporary leave-of-absence, anything to remove yourself from the situation. Use the time away to recharge your batteries and pursue other methods of recovery. 

Beyond insurance coverage, in-house wellness initiatives can also boost employee happiness. Many companies have taken steps toward this with office yoga or meditation, onsite massages, and work from home flexibility. Mental ill-health is the single largest cause of disability in the UK. The wider economic costs of mental illness in England have been estimated at £105.2 billion each year. This includes direct costs of services, lost productivity at work and reduced quality of living. Mental ill-health is responsible for 72 million working days lost annually. Every year it costs business £1,300 per employee whose mental health needs are unsupported. Ignoring your mental health can lead to some serious health consequences. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), approximately one in five American adults (or 43.8 million) experience mental illness in a given year. This is a sobering statistic that should remind both employees and employers why it’s so important to prioritize mental wellbeing. As an employer, you have a duty of care to look after your people's mental health. This means you must do all you reasonably can to support health, safety and wellbeing - and this includes stress levels. Discussing ideas such as managing employees with mental health issues is good for the staff and the organisation as a whole. 

Take StockWorkplace wellbeing programs are integral for an organisation's staff, encouraging and promoting health and wellbeing. Even in the most positive workplaces, a certain amount of stress is inevitable—but many employees just aren’t very successful at managing it. Instead, they become overwhelmed, unproductive, and anxious. When left unaddressed, this workplace stress can quickly lead to burnout and create health issues. Carrying out an assessment of your workplace can give a clear picture of the state of the organisation as a whole. This enables you to understand what factors affect staff mental health in your workplace and what needs to be done to make improvements. If you have to take time off with a mental health problem, returning to work can be quite daunting. But it can also be an important part of your recovery, and you don’t have to be a hundred per cent well to go back. you don’t have to apologise or justify being unwell, any more than you would if you were recovering from an accident or operation. Having a company wellness programme and managing it effectively are two very different things, and the costs of mismanaging health and wellbeing issues can be huge. To be successful, you must ensure that health and wellbeing initiatives are regularly advertised internally, readily available and running smoothly. Thinking about concepts such as 

employers duty of care mental health is really helpful in a workplace environment.

In the near future, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if a company’s desirability correlates directly with its mental wellness program. People increasingly realize the value of having adequate support from their employer. And as time goes on, the companies who adopt these practices best and fastest, will be the ones who start pulling away from the rest of the pack. Companies can have good intentions for supporting employees’ wellbeing, but that doesn’t mean that they’re experts in mental health. When it comes to providing care and guidance, businesses should turn to the professionals. Unresolved mental health issues may cause absence, loss of productivity and high staff turnover, and it is employers who bear the associated costs once they hit the bottom line. Organisations that take meaningful action to promote employee wellbeing will, therefore, enjoy a competitive advantage over those that don’t, or that merely pay lip service to it. The only way to know if your employees are afraid of speaking up — in other words, how psychologically safe or unsafe they feel — is to ask them. Anonymously, of course. Ultimately, the conversation on mental health starts with you and you need to foster a positive culture on the subject. People find it difficult to talk about mental health at work and unfortunately, there is still a stigma attached to it. But you can improve upon it by encouraging such conversations and normalising it. Communication that emphasizes that leadership cares about concepts such as how to manage an employee with anxiety should be welcomed in the working environment.

Prioritising Employee EngagementValued employees are lost when employers do not invest in mental health. Staff turnover as a result of employees leaving their jobs due to mental health problems costs £2.4 billion each year. Only support and strategic leadership from the top will create organisational cultures where management styles based on openness and mutual respect can flourish. The senior management team will influence how managers throughout an organisation see their jobs and the extent to which they place a priority on people management. Make sure communication methods are seamless. Establish an ‘open-door policy’ to let your employees know you’re always available should they need to talk. Schedule regular one-to-ones to catch up with employees, check in on them and give them regular opportunities to talk about things on their mind. To incorporate mental health into the workplace organisations should be ensuring that managers are able to motivate employees and provide them with the training and support they need to develop their performance and job satisfaction. This should be done alongside increasing understanding of how management style and practices can help to promote the mental wellbeing of employees and keep their stress to a minimum. Remember that doing nothing is the biggest risk of all in regards to mental health. An opinion on 

workplace wellbeing ideas is undoubtebly to be had in every workplace in the country.

Everyone’s experience of poor mental health is different – so two people with a diagnosis of depression may have very different symptoms and need different adjustments. This may seem complex, but often the person will be the expert on their condition and know their own support needs. In essence this means managing the person as an individual, in the same way that you flex your general management style. If employers and Government work together to reduce the number of people who leave work with mental health problems to even the same rate as those with a physical health condition, this will prevent around 100,000 with a long term mental health condition leaving employment each year. This is entirely measureable and achievable, and will be a key way of determining success. Given the high levels of stress and poor mental health we are seeing in the workplace, there is a growing demand for innovative and proactive ways of managing our mental health at work. The Wellness Action Plan (WAP) is inspired by Mary Ellen Copeland’s Wellness Recovery Action Plan® (WRAP®): an evidence-based system used worldwide by people to manage their mental health. People with mental health conditions need to be confident that their employer will make any changes required by law so that they are not at a substantial disadvantage to colleagues without a disability. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently recognised that burn-out is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. For employers not investing in wellbeing initiatives, workplace wellbeing support can be a difficult notion to comprehend.

Self-reported Mental HealthAn EAP is a benefit programme intended to help employees deal with personal problems that might adversely impact their job performance, health, and wellbeing. This includes issues such as relationship problems, money worries and other pressures. Support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, by telephone, although increasingly EAP providers are also providing their services through the internet. Small businesses have the right attitude to mental health but don’t have the resources to implement comprehensive strategies - we need to penetrate them as soon as possible as the current reach is very limited, possibly, fewer than 10% of SMEs have a mental health strategy in their workplace. We all have mental health and we all have a responsibility to look out for ourselves and each other. You can find more facts relating to Employee Mental Health Programs Schemes in this 

Health and Safety Executive article.

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