It’s important that senior leaders are bought into a mental health initiative for it to work properly. If they’re not, their disengagement will trickle down to the rest of the business.
If they aren’t using a service, or at the very least advocating for it being in place, employees will be scared to use it.
This is true for pretty much any service, mental health or otherwise, but is especially true of mental health initiatives given that the conversation is behind where it needs to be.
While our hope is that senior leaders support mental health initiatives simply because it’s the right thing to do, we understand that sometimes you have to talk a slightly different language.
We’ve seen some people in the past build a bit of a business case around why these services are needed within a business. They’ve shown that attrition figures or sick days are higher than they should be or as compared to their competition, and from that argued that something needs to be done.