A Wellbeing Management Software Buyer’s Guide

The full extent of the mental health and wellbeing crisis

Throughout the advanced world, mental illness continues to be one of the leading causes of sickness absence and long-term work incapacity. Numbers are stark.

Nearly one in five adults in the U.S. live with a mental illness, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Almost 3 million Australians have a mental illness, while an additional 440,000 working-age people in the country care for someone affected with mental illnessⁱ. 

In both advanced economies, these elevated rates of mental illness have ripple effects. In Australia, the annual cost of ill health and suicide ranges from AUD 43 billion to AUD 70 billion, according to a parliamentary productivity commission. Every year the direct cost of healthcare expenditure and other services and supports comes in at around AUD 16 billion.

In the larger American economy, the American Psychiatric Association estimated the macroeconomic loss at USD 210.5 billion per year. Every month, a single, surplus poor mental health day was associated with a 1.84 per cent drop in per capita real income growth – the equivalent of USD 53 billion lost in total income every year from 2008 to 2014, according to a separate analysisⁱⁱ.

Productivity loss from absenteeism and presenteeism was one of the key culprits, here. Employees with unresolved depression in the U.S. experience a 35 per cent reduction in their productivity, according to the American Psychiatric Association. In Australia, the Productivity Commission estimates that employees with mental illness take an annual average of 10 to 12 days off due to their psychological distress; total costs from lost productivity range from AUD 12 billion to AUD 39 billion. 

How the pandemic is exacerbating the crisis

The emotional fallout from the COVID-19 crisis is also exacerbating the trend. The Household Pulse survey in the U.S. revealed sharp rises in the number of adults suffering anxiety (from 31.4 per cent to 36.9 per cent) and depressive disorders (from 24.5 per cent to 30.2 per cent).

Rates of depression rose sharply in Australia, as well, from a pre-COVID-19 baseline of around 10 per cent of the population to nearly 30 per cent (27.6 per cent) in 2020, according to OECD data. Anxiety also rose, from 13 per cent to 21 per cent over the same period.

Frontline workers were particularly affected. In the early phase of the pandemic, a survey of critical care healthcare workers in Australia and New Zealand, conducted by a team of public health researchers and captured in the scholarly Australian Critical Care publication, found that between a fifth and a third of respondents reported moderate to extremely severe depression, anxiety, and stress symptoms.

Confirming these numbers, a poll of 10,000 Australian healthcare workers, conducted by Associate Professor Natasha Smallwood of the Royal Melbourne Hospital, came out later in 2020, finding anxiety, burn out, and depression rates of 61, 58, and 28 per cent respectively. So acute was the crisis that respondents confessed to planning to leave the profession outright.

For healthcare workers, specifically, the mental health and wellbeing crisis predates the pandemic. Work pressure and exposure to occupational violence are psychosocial hazards. Healthcare workers deal with both – sometimes daily.

Throughout the 2010s, for instance, the health care and social assistance industry in Australia logged the second highest rate of serious accepted claims caused by mental stress, again according to the Productivity Commission. The industry also saw the highest increase in costs per employee for providing mental health treatment for six months. 

The cost of ignoring duty of care

Nor can the compliance costs of ignoring psychological wellbeing be ignored. By law, persons conducting a business or
undertaking (PCBUs) are obligated to eliminate risks to the health and safety of their employees.

In many countries, health encompasses physical and psychological wellbeing. As a result, employers must consider a
broad array of psychosocial hazards, i.e., aspects of work that have the potential to cause psychological or physical harm.
Aspects of work likely to fall under an employer’s duty of care obligation include:

• Bullying in the workplace
• Fatigue
• Mental stress
• Overseas work
• Remote or isolated work
• Workplace change
• Workplace violence or customer aggression 

And the costs of flouting this component of duty of care have been steep – and might be getting steeper still. In Australia, the cost of workers compensation claims related to work related mental health conditions is about two and half times higher than that of other claims. These claims also involve significantly more time off work for employees. 

Software capabilities to help organisations implementbest-practice wellbeing programs

What’s then to be done to avoid severe compliance costs and recoup lost productivity and engagement? Of course, implementing a best-practice wellbeing program as noted in international standard ISO 45003 is a sure way to manage psychosocial health and safety at work.

What of the start-up costs of getting such a best-practice wellbeing program operationalised, though? Organisations certainly can’t belabour implementation in the face of such an acute mental health (and compliance) crisis. Nor can they afford to launch broad-based wellbeing efforts without an adequate means of tracking effectiveness against organisational targets.

Here, certain digital wellbeing management technologies can help businesses (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, as well as (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement.

Specific capabilities matter, too – they matter a lot. To that end, the capabilities organisations should be looking for include:

• Manage your wellbeing register. In this age of remote working, senior leadership needs to be able to manage personnel who are not working from the office. That means properly overseeing their wellbeing, according to statutes, and putting in controls to keep staff safe and healthy. To comply, organisations should procure wellbeing management technology that gives them the ability to (1) add individual staff members to a wellbeing register, (2) opt them into different programs to help manage their welfare, and (3) provide summaries of the specific processes being completed and the outputs of these processes.
• Enables ergonomic assessments. Along those lines, safety leadership needs to be able to make sure remote workstations are safe, to mitigate the health risk (particularly of soft tissue injuries and musculoskeletal disorders) to workers. Wellbeing management platforms, as such, must be able to provide organisations with the requisite functionality, so that their workers can complete periodic ergonomic inspections on their remote work setups, whether they are working from home or travelling.
• Facilitates an end-to-end vaccination program. With the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccination, some jurisdictions have put in place mandatory immunisation requirements, particularly for public health workers. Other organisations might simply want to track the immunisation progress of their own workers. Here, wellbeing management platforms should help let managers enrol their workers in these vaccination programs. To do so, platforms should come equipped with workflows that enable mangers to send vaccination eligibility questionnaires to employees; those questionnaires will then be completed on the mobile device of the worker’s choosing. After
  the questionnaires are submitted, the system should send employees a link taking them to an appointments dashboard displaying all available vaccination appointments. Once the appointment is booked, the system would send a confirmation email; the employee would also be able to see the appointment in their dashboard. Finally, an hour after the vaccination appointment, the system would automatically send an email reminder to the employee to upload the photo of their vaccination receipt, for tracking purposes.
•  Sends out wellbeing surveys. Knowledge is power. Leadership can’t implement effective wellbeing effort without monitoring the mental health and wellbeing of their workers over extended time periods. Getting a sense of what’s been going on with workers is the only way to direct resources properly, to maintain and improve wellbeing. Wellbeing management platforms must, therefore, be able to send workers Mental Health Questionnaires. That way organisations have appropriate context, informing them how best to support workers.
• Expedites wellbeing reporting. Being there for workers means giving them a platform to report their concerns, including tipoffs about domestic violence, abuse, and other wellbeing issues. Those platforms should come equipped with portals for workers to tip off higher ups. After seeing those notices (confidential or otherwise), wellbeing coordinators can act effectively.
• Distributes notifications. As noted with the COVID-19 crisis, critical events impinge on the mental health and wellbeing of workers; and those critical events are happening with increasing frequency. Leadership must therefore be able to send out notifications about these crises, whether they are natural disasters, epidemics, riots, or others. Wellbeing management platforms, as such, should create timely notifications to all personnel on the wellbeing register. 
  
  That’s not all. Coordinators must be able to designate (1) notification type, (2) whether any response is required, and (3) the specific type of template in which the notification is sent, as well.
• Allows workers to check in. Not all workers incur the same baseline safety risk. Safety leadership must be able to stay in touch with first responders, lone workers, and those travelling alone who might need special protections. Wellbeing management software must either let these workers opt themselves into periodic check-ins or allow their wellbeing coordinators to assign these higher-risk personnel (to be recipients of) regular check-in notifications.
  
  Senior management also needs a quick way to send out notifications and get speedy responses from all workers to determining whether they staff is ok or needs further intervention.
  
  Along those lines, personnel from different parts of the business might want to catch up and offer support to each other. Wellbeing management platforms should be able to facilitate these regular catchups, as they encourage worker self-empowerment. 
• Empower employees to choose for themselves. Wellbeing programs often work best when workers are empowered to self-select from a menu of available options, whether that’s specific bits of best-practice wellbeing content that make the most individual sense. The same goes for the ability to have workers receive wellbeing reminders, whether to meditate or practice gratitude, then see trends correlated to if/how their mood improves when using the wellbeing tools on offer. Employees should be able to track their own wellbeing, opting in to provide a score of how they are feeling, so that they can self-manage and see if certain practices (e.g., mindfulness, gratitude, limiting social media, meditation, etc.) have been helping. The corresponding ratings would only be visible to workers; managers and higher ups, on the other hand, would be able to see if staff was using platform functionality.
  
  That’s not all, senior leadership might need a way to have employees trigger a duress alarm (within the solution) on the behalf of other employees, if they see that that person is at risk. To facilitate this happening, platforms should enable workers to provide next-of-kin and location data, so that their colleagues are able to trigger an alarm on their behalf. 

Finally, successfully implementing wellbeing practices and programs entails senior management supporting workers to create positive habits. Available in safety management platforms, certain wellbeing management solutions, such as Noggin Wellbeing, help organisations do just that, enabling workers to create and track their own wellbeing targets using analytics that reinforce behaviours based on mood ratings.

That’s not all, the COVID-19 crisis has turbocharged an already explosive mental health and wellbeing crisis; and as safety regulators move to catch up to the advances in the  wellbeing space, the mentally resilient workforces of today will only lengthen their competitive (compliance) advantage over their less developed peers.

Organisations now can’t afford to stay on the wrong side of this divide. Instead, they should invest in wellbeing management strategies and easy-to-use technologies to promote mental health resilience, reduce compliance and injury risk, as well as boost productivity, engagement, and morale.

 

Citations

i. Edie-Louise Diemar, HRM: Employers’ role in addressing Australia’s $220 billion mental health issue. Available at https://www.hrmonline.com.au/ mental-health/productivity commission-employers-role/#:~:text=The%20report%20estimates%202.8%20million,estimated%20%2417%20billion%20 a%20year.

ii. Penn State, Science Daily: Poor mental health days may cost the economy billions of dollars. Available at https://www.sciencedaily.com/ releases/2018/07/180730120359.htm.