Mental Health: Tracking Return on Investment 

To justify these initiatives and assess their return on investment (ROI), leaders may need to effectively quantify their impact. If your organisation is facing these challenges, here’s what you can do.

To support your workforce effectively, it’s essential to explore the risks associated with different life stages. Analysing your demographic risks can help identify how to tailor support for various segments of the workforce and facilitate predictive modelling of potential health trends. Understanding these risks could allow you to tailor your mental health initiatives to meet the specific needs of your employees in both the short and long term. 

Many companies offer a range of mental health resources, including Employee Assistance Programmes (EAP), Private Medical Insurance, counselling, and digital mental health applications. Conducting a comprehensive inventory of these value-added services can help you understand how they address key mental health risks and how they can be deployed at a preventative versus early intervention stage. 

It's crucial to differentiate between preventative measures, such as mental health training and wellness programmes, which help foster a supportive environment and reduce the likelihood of mental health issues arising, and early intervention services, such as counselling and EAPs, which are vital for addressing issues as they emerge. By integrating all services, you can create a comprehensive mental health pathway that supports employees at every stage of their mental health journey. 

Assess your organisation's position on a maturity model of support compared to best practices and take a targeted approach to tailor the support you currently have or plan to implement to mitigate future risks. For example, a benefits mapping exercise can help to design pathway maps which integrate all available services. Through benefits mapping, you can provide clear guidance for your people managers, so that they can more effectively signpost their teams to available services.

Track your investments in mental health services and compare data on benefits utilisation to identify correlations in resource usage. 

A significant obstacle is employee navigation to available resources, which often goes unnoticed or underused. For instance, the average utilisation of EAPs by employees is only 5%². This underutilisation not only limits the positive impact on employee well-being but also represents a missed opportunity to maximise available resources. Highlighting the valuable services offered through the EAP is essential to encourage usage.

In addition to tracking utilisation, it is important to monitor changes in key performance indicators (KPIs) such as productivity, employee engagement, and absenteeism rates. By analysing these metrics alongside utilisation data, you can gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact of your mental health initiatives. Understanding the barriers to utilisation will enable you to implement targeted communication strategies to raise awareness. Additionally, consider conducting an objective assessment of your organisational support using globally recognised tools, such as the HERO Scorecard, to evaluate best practices for supporting employee mental health and overall well-being. 

By focusing on programmes that yield the highest ROI, you can allocate your budgets more strategically. The tools outlined above take a data-led and targeted approach to ensure funds are directed towards initiatives that genuinely support employee well-being and contribute to a healthier, more productive workplace culture.

Sources

1. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10426174/

2. spill.chat/mental-health-statistics/eap-statistics