How to write a mental health and wellbeing strategy for SMEs

You need a plan which focuses on what is going to have the most positive impact on your employees

WORDS: BY AMY MCKEOWN, AWARD-WINNING HEALTH CONSULTANT

Over recent years there’s been an explosion in talk about health, mental health and wellbeing. The pandemic has highlighted the need for a robust ‘employee wellbeing’ strategy, meaning that many employees in charge of people have adopted new roles with little warning or training. The plus side of all this is that at an individual, organisational or societal level, we have never been more aware of our own, and others’, health and mental health. This won’t change any time soon. In fact, with health providers backed up and waiting lists at an all-time high, who pays for healthcare and how we access it is going to be a major over the next decade, if not more.

Many organisations are now either doing, or want to do something, around health, mental health or wellbeing: how to support and engage employees. Having a good organisational programme is no longer a ‘nice to have’. It has to be a core part of any people proposition. Employees are demanding it, rates of ill health are high after the pandemic and employee wellbeing is becoming a board agenda item. The wellbeing and health provider markets are booming and employees are increasingly expecting apps, support and training in these areas from their employer.

At the risk of sounding negative, many of the strategies being put in place won’t actually work. Whilst this might sound controversial, there is a simple reason for this negativity, which is that most wellbeing strategies are not actually strategies. They are collections of well-intentioned activity cobbled together to demonstrate how seriously an organisation is taking health and mental health. They are tactics, not strategy.

What organisations tend to do is to provide a plethora of things or activities around health and wellbeing – the list is endless! Mindfulness, fresh fruit, resilience training, Mental Health First Aid, webinars, stand up desks, Employee Assistance Programmes, screening… These are the sorts of thing needed to start to tackle health and mental health in the workplace, however, these activities alone are not a strategy, they are the pieces of the jigsaw.

To build a structure or a plan, you first need to know what you are aiming at. What does success look like to your organisation? Once you know this, you can look at what you already have, and what else you will need to get there. So, for instance, if the long-term aim for your mental health strategy is to reduce absence, then you start with looking at what your current absence rate is, what is causing it and how this can be reduced. Then, you decide what jigsaw pieces you need to put in place to carry this out, how they will link together and how you will measure the impact of what you are doing.