How well are our biggest companies measuring up on mental health?

One of the joys of what I do is hearing about the wonderful initiatives people are working on to promote better mental health and wellbeing. Occasionally I get so excited I feel the need to tell everyone I know. So, this post is not about the Mindful Business Charter or Byrne Dean but a game changing project from CCLA.

For those that don’t know, CCLA is the largest investment manager for charities in the UK.?They also manage money for faith-based organisations and local authorities and recently entered the retail/wealth investment market for the first time. As you can imagine, they have a strong focus on ethical and responsible investing with an impressive track record in the areas of climate change, biodiversity and the environment, good work and human rights, good health and corporate governance (see www.ccla.co.uk). But it is their work on mental health that has brought the organisation to my attention.

They rightly believe that companies should be taking the issue of the mental health of their people seriously. They are not alone of course – the 2021 World Economic Forum Global Risks Landscape Report cited mental health deterioration as one of the top identified risks in terms of likelihood of it happening and its impact, and where the global response falls short of that potential impact, and where a global coordinated response has the most potential to prevent or mitigate that impact.

In 2019, they used the recommendations of the 2017 Thriving at Work report, and the guidance of representatives from Mind and Public Health England, to engage with 11 companies in their portfolio. In 2020, in response to heightened psychological distress among the population, they gathered a ￡2.2tn investor coalition and wrote to each FTSE 100 company. This initiative is detailed here: download (ccla.co.uk).

They then set about building a benchmark to measure organisations’ approach to mental health and wellbeing. They gathered an Expert Advisory Panel, including Paul Farmer and Dennis Stevenson (co-authors of the Thriving at Work report), and representatives from the Principles for Responsible Investment (and latterly the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health). They also commissioned Chronos Sustainability to run the benchmark’s operations. They undertook a public consultation into the shape and scope of the benchmark, and piloted it in 2021.

The Benchmark is an objective assessment of an organisation’s commitment to mental health, based solely upon publicly available information. It looks at a wide array of 27 different criteria including whether mental health is included in annual reports, the statements made by leaders, membership of relevant initiatives, and much more, divided into four categories – management commitment and policy, leadership and innovation, governance and management and, finally, performance reporting and impact.

Having tested and refined their approach, they have recently published (see CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark UK 100 Report 2022) ?the results of their analysis of the largest 100 UK listed companies with over 10,000 employees. These companies cover a broad range of sectors and together employ over 5 million people. The process has involved engagement with company leaders (where those leaders have responded to the invitation to engage). The resulting report ranks the 100 companies into five bands based on their workplace mental health management and disclosure – I won’t spoil the surprise by naming names but one of the three in the top band does happen to be a Mindful Business Charter signatory! The exercise will be repeated annually giving those companies the opportunity and incentive (armed with a detailed report from CCLA to help them) to make positive change and improve their standing next time.

It is worth noting that the assessment is based on publicly available information, and not, for example, data from the actual experience of the employees in those organisations. That said, on the basis that what gets reported on gets managed, this is a pretty good indicator of how seriously those organisations take the mental health and wellbeing of their people. If you want to know whether the company you are investing your money, or your career, in cares about how their people are, this is the place to look. And there is a broad range – the highest score was 88%,the lowest only 2%.

Alongside the benchmark, CCLA released a Global Investor Statement on Workplace Mental Health and began to invite investors to sign on in support. That statement now has 29 founding signatories with a total of $7 trillion in combined assets under management. Most recently they have written wrote on behalf of the group to the chief executive of each of the 100 benchmark companies.

The next stage, before repeating the exercise in the UK next year, is to run the benchmark on the 100 largest companies in the world with over 10,000 employees and to continue to build an ever-growing investor coalition which can only serve to further encourage the investee companies to improve.

In my humble view this is fantastic and has the potential to drive really positive change. Huge congratulations to the wonderful Amy Browne and the team at CCLA, as well as Chronos Sustainability who conducted the research and independently made the assessments.

For more information go to www.ccla.co.uk/mental-health or contact [email protected].?