Suggestions for employers to enhance their wellness benefits include expanding massage therapy coverage, providing counselling services and implementing health days where employees can take time off without explaining why.At a time when businesses are being squeezed on all sides, common sense tells finance leaders to trim excess where possible. If employee mental wellness plans are on the list of expenses to cut, however, you could be working against your organization’s best interests.
“Most employers need to re-evaluate enhancing wellness benefits by expanding massage therapy coverage, providing counselling services that could substantially support mental health and implementing health days where employees can take time off without explaining why so they can prioritize their wellness differently,” Walker suggests.
“There’s no denying it: mental wellness directly impacts work,” they say, referencing a World Health Organization statistic that showed mental-health challenges account for US$1-trillion in lost productivity each year. “A commitment to employee health and well-being reflects a long-term investment strategy for organizations that provides a multitude of benefits that directly impact the bottom line.
“This means creating cultural norms that emphasize the importance of well-being for both individual and organizational outcomes, reinforcing expectations for well-being through formal policies and practices, and role modelling expectations from the top-down,” they say.
“Between 15 to 20 per cent of the population is neurodivergent, which means many businesses have neurodivergent workers – even if they don’t know it. However, workplace norms can unintentionally marginalize this group,” Thompson says. “This means many of them are more likely to experience burnout and other forms of mental distress. From a business point of view, you aren’t getting the most out of your talent under those conditions.