Can we put a cost on mental health?

Can we put a cost on mental health?

This week is Mental Health Awareness week.?A report in 2020 (pre Covid) by Deliotte and Mind shows the costs of poor mental health to UK employers have increased by 16% in two years, now costing up to ￡45 billion a year.

?It’s estimated that every year, the costs of poor mental health for every colleague comes to around 5.8%.?And that’s across all age groups.?

The Deloitte report also suggests that these costs may be work – there’s still a large proportion of people (colleagues) who won’t admit that they’re struggling.?So how can we measure the impact that this has on others, when their colleague is unproductive or takes unexpected and frequent time off?

The pandemic pressure cooker

One result of the pandemic is more people are experiencing difficulties than ever before.

The pressures of our personal health, family life, lack of escape and even taking time for holidays has meant that our focus has moved away from our own mental health and wellbeing.

Our levels of resilience are seriously lower than they’ve ever before.

At work, things that we would have been able to tackle previously, may now feel like climbing a mountain. We’re worried about job security, the cost of living crisis and change in our sector.?And when you’re thinking that you can’t afford to put the heating on, it’s very brave to raise your hand and say things aren’t ok around here.

Engagement surveys aren’t enough

Against this backdrop, designing the changes to your employee experience and culture based on a stand-alone annual engagement survey just doesn’t feel like enough. This has been even more obvious since 2020 – our feelings about work couldn’t have been more different in April than they would have been in January.

The reality is when any business experiences its own seismic change, they need to know how this will affect their employee experience and where their weaknesses (and strengths) already were. What habits and features are already in place to support changes in personal resilience? And what needs to be topped up to stay active and relevant?

Across the Envivo Group, we really want to make sure our colleagues know that we understand how this impacts on them, which is why we’ve put some initiatives in place to try to help.?When the Living Wage increased, we made sure we could increase our pay rates so that in all of our businesses, every colleague now earns more than the living wage.

And we’ve launched Envivo extras; offering colleagues the chance to top up their salaries by living our values, winning a weekly lotto or acting as an Envivo hero.?

We know that mental health matters to our colleagues and we're making sure we take the time for them.