Nine Reflections for Employers During Mental Health Awareness Month
Alex Simmons, Co-Founder + CEO
May is Mental Health Awareness month, and for employers, the past two years have given much to reflect on. As Boon approaches the second anniversary of launching with our first customer, a lot has changed, not only in the way that we work, but the way we live.
What have we learned in two years of operating during a pandemic? We summarize nine key takeaways that matter to your employees – and how we can help.
The Top 3 Universal Employer Challenges
After thousands of conversations with various HR leaders and C-suite executives across the globe, we’ve heard three key themes repeated by everyone:
“How can I better recruit and retain top talent?” – Personally, I’m exhausted by the ‘Great Resignation’ jargon, but like it or not, talent acquisition and retention is the biggest challenge most businesses are facing today.
“My team is stressed and burnt out, and we need to find ways to support them” – This has been true for a long time, but COVID has accelerated the empowerment of employees to say “I need help”
“How can we build and maintain culture in this new remote / hybrid work environment?” – After two years of working remote, many businesses struggle to maintain their company culture. The absence of face-to-face interactions have made building great management a challenge for some of the biggest companies in the world.
Even as pandemic restrictions come to an end, the problems employers face continue to grow as job vacancies are left unfilled and top talent feels the heat from burnout. Addressing these concerns is the best way to ensure your organization gets the help it needs.
The Burden on Managers is Greater Than Ever
One of the most common challenges we run into at Boon is working with fast-paced, high growth companies where managers are faced with unprecedented challenges to lead today’s remote/hybrid environment. The role of managers has evolved to include managing the “whole” employee, at times even being asked to serve as “pseudo-therapists” in order to successfully manage their teams.
But managers aren’t qualified therapists, nor should they have to be. While a good manager supports and develops their team, putting the onus of employee mental health on their shoulders isn’t part of their job description, and makes them less effective at completing their required tasks.
This dynamic has accelerated through COVID and has only become more complex through the evolution of remote and hybrid work. Businesses we work with, mostly small to midsize companies between 50-1,000 employees, don’t have a solution.
People Ops is Stretched to the Brink
As primary employer challenges today are largely centered around recruiting, retention, and culture, there has naturally become a much larger role for People Ops. Most People Ops teams in today’s midsize businesses involve 1-3 people, and they are being stretched extremely thin. In a recent survey by Forbes of more than 500 HR professionals, 98% of HR leaders responded that they are burnt out.
If HR leaders are already being stretched super thin, yet they are typically the ones spearheading new initiatives regarding recruiting and retention, how are they going to find the bandwidth to drive meaningful change?
Investing in Employee’s Personal & Professional Growth Isn’t a Matter of “IF”, but “WHEN” and “HOW”
The three universal employer challenges above have led me to believe that prioritizing professional and personal growth is no longer an option. Employees are no longer willing to work blindly for a company that doesn’t support them. Before taking a new position, job candidates are now asking themselves “how does this company’s culture and core values align with my own?”
If you are looking to recruit and retain top talent, it’s not enough to simply offer top dollar. What is your stance on flexibility? Work/life balance? Are you investing in me personally and professionally? These questions have all become hot button items for people looking at their future employer.
Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) Aren’t the Entire Answer
Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs) have long been the solution that businesses have turned to to take care of their team’s emotional well-being. As the need for more robust emotional well-being services became more of a priority during COVID, naturally, many employers turned to an EAP to solve their challenge.
Interestingly, we’ve found traditional EAPs to be designed more as a crisis management tool – an end of the line resource made available to employees for situations such as substance abuse, divorce, suicidal ideation, depression, etc.
Does EAP serve a purpose in the workplace? 100%. But is it the kind of resource that employees are looking for when it comes to helping them work through their everyday challenges (i.e., stress, anxiety, burnout, etc.)?
The proof is in the pudding. Average EAP utilization for employees is between 1-3% and we have found that the majority of employees we speak to don’t even know it exists within their own company.
The Convergence of Mental Well-Being and Professional Development
We’ve seen an interesting dichotomy start to unfold as it relates to supporting your team in the workplace. On one end of the spectrum, you have EAP and other behavioral health resources. In some form or another, these resources are aimed at solving employer challenges around mental health.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have professional development – i.e., becoming a better leader, navigating difficult conversations, learning how to delegate, managing in a remote/hybrid environment, etc.
At Boon, we’ve found that 50% of the employees engaged with our coaching services have never used coaching or therapy before. We are incredibly proud of this statistic. Further, we’ve found that 75% of these first-time coaching users first view Boon as a professional development resource, but more than half transition to also utilizing us for their mental well-being.
There is an accelerating convergence between mental well-being and professional development. Approaching one without the other leaves a big void in the support of your team. Boon’s ability to provide a flexible, personalized 1:1 coaching relationship in either direction, personal or professional, is part of what makes our service truly differentiated.
Boon is a Benefit Employees Consistently Use (and Love)
Businesses seek benefit solutions that their team are actually going to use. Several of our customers have been burned in the past by other wellness programs or EAPs that their team didn’t use or get value from.
Since launching Boon, we’ve achieved an average employee utilization of more than 30% across our customer base. That is roughly 10x the average utilization of a standard EAP program. The best part? It isn’t a “try it once and forget about it” story, either. The average duration of an employee relationship with a Boon coach is 8 sessions, or roughly four months. We are creating sticky, impactful connections between employees and our coaches, all while maintaining 96% average employee satisfaction from people who have used our service.
Providing Tangible ROI to Our Customers Matters – and we Deliver
Employers are more eager than ever to offer more substantial resources that support the growth of their team personally and professionally. But they want (and should want) to see ROI. At Boon, we’ve broken down ROI into a few key areas:
Resilience is our primary metric for tracking mental well-being. At the end of the day, the goal of our coaching is to arm employees with a toolkit to better handle life’s challenges and, in turn, bounce back quickly from adversity. Thus far, we’ve been able to show that 85% of the employees who have worked with a Boon coach for six sessions or longer have improved their resilience. While it may be difficult to quantify what this means in dollars and cents, there are decades of strong academic literature that support a very strong level of correlation between resilience and several company success metrics, such as productivity, engagement, overall work satisfaction, and employee retention.
Our other big metric is employee retention. We know this is an obstacle that almost every company we encounter is trying to solve. After six months of working with Boon, we’ve seen that on average, Boon users are more than 50% less likely to turnover than non-Boon users. According to Gallup, the average cost of turning over one employee is anywhere from ½ to 2x the salary of said employee. Across our customer base, we’re saving anywhere from $3 to $10 for every dollar spent on Boon from employee retention alone.
Other metrics we track at the individual level include productivity, work satisfaction and work/life balance. We are excited to be seeing improvements of 25%, 40%, and 15%, respectively, after working with a Boon coach for six sessions.
We are not just a benefit that employees love. The impact is real.
A New Sector is Forming in the Benefits World. We’re at the Forefront.
Culture as a service. It might sound a bit cringy but think about it: businesses need to be to put their culture on display both internally and externally if they want to recruit and retain top talent. People leaders, who generally would be spearheading these initiatives, are spread incredibly thin. What are companies going to do? What if you had a partner outside of your company that could help you drive culture?
This is where Boon plays. We have become the go-to employee recruiting and retention tool for businesses looking to show your people you are invested in them both personally and professionally.
—— ——— ——— ——— ———————————————————————————————————————————
