Mental health and wellness in the workplace has vast implications on employer brand and corporate reputation. Brittany Golob investigates

Last summer, 21-year-old intern Moritz Erhardt at Bank of America Merrill Lynch was found dead in the shower after working a 72-hour shift. The WHU-Otto Beisheim School of Management student was epileptic, a condition likely linked to his untimely death. However, the incident brought to light the unduly intense working conditions faced by city workers, particularly interns. The press reported on the stressful-to-the-point-of-dangerous conditions plaguing many corporate firms. This came as no surprise to many who had worked in law, professional or financial services. Yet, the extent to which stress had begun to affect workers had become unsustainable. This was the smoking gun if there ever was one on the issue of mental health in the workplace.

The issue, while clearly an HR and internal comms problem, also has implications on recruitment processes and corporate reputation. Prospective graduates who would typically pursue careers with city firms, are becoming more discerning in their job hunting. Issues like stress, internal culture and CSR have become some of the key issues around which prospective employees engage with an organisation. The Harvard Business Review reported that the culture fit and the personality of a company’s workforce were the most prominent factors relating to employer branding among Millenials.

Mental health costs the UK economy £70bn per year – or 4.5% of the overall GDP – according to Business in the Community’s (BITC) Workwell coalition. It costs £1,035 per employee and accounted for 15.2m sick days in 2013 – up from 11.8m in 2010. Pressure is inherent in business, and is often something that galvanises eployees to work to their potential. Pressure, BITC Workwell director Louise Aston says, is a good thing for business. When that pressure turns into stress, however people face ill health and companies have to manage the consequences both financially and in terms of human resources.

Deloitte is a workplace with a competitive, high-performing, internal culture that relies to a certain extent on pressure to best serve its clients. This internal culture is one of the draws for prospective employees. Stevan Rolls, head of HR in the UK for Deloitte says, “We have a great brand reputation in the recruitment market and that is about the opportunities that people are exposed to. Our reputation is as a high-performing, hard-working, client-serving organisation and I think people pretty much understand that when they come here.” Health and wellbeing plays a big role in maintaining that standard and ensuring that Deloitte can fulfill the promises it makes its clients. In turn, a focus on health and wellbeing becomes one of the differentiators for Deloitte in the recruitment market.

Steve Doswell, chief executive of the Institute of Internal Communication, says good internal comms practices can help companies build a strong reputation and thereby attract the best recruits. “If employees know that their employer is taking their wellbeing seriously in all its forms,” he says, “It will come up in conversations outside of work. In that way, a wider constituency gains an impression of the employer, which then gets the reputation it deserves, for better or worse.”

An employer’s brand is becoming more fragile as control over perception is diluted among many stakeholder groups. Social media has had its impact on corporate reputation, in this case, it makes internal decisions, communications and cultures public as employees act as brand advocates to prospective recruits, investors and the media alike. “What really makes you stand out [to prospective employees] is who people meet as they come through the recruitment process and what your employees, your suppliers and everybody else says about what it’s like to work with and for Deloitte,” says Rolls.

Many point to the Millenial generation as a more discerning group of recruits or potential recruits than its forebears. PWC’s Millenials Survey dispels a bit of the myth around the group’s interest in a business. The survey notes that in 2008, before the recession, 88% sought employers with CSR values that they respected. Six years later, the economic situation that has forced many to redefine their career paths, has also pushed values down on the list to 56% of respondents. Millenials in the UK now rank things like career development, training and healthcare as top priorities, or rather, perennially important factors when choosing an employer.

Mental health also has implications on the sustainability and resilience of a business. Niall de Lacy, HR director at Procter and Gamble in the UK and Ireland, wrote in the Workwell report, “We truly believe that our employees are our most valuable asset. We see this as an opportunity to strengthen our business through a healthy and resilient organisation. Therefore it’s an area that is impossible to ignore, one that business can’t afford to ignore either.” Helen Wray, health and wellbeing business partner at Mars Chocolate UK notes in the same report that 2011 – at the height of the recession – marked a period of increased mental illness among salespeople. The company instituted a programme focused on wellbeing and resilience that is now being rolled out to other business units. She says, “We know if we provide a healthy work environment and support our employees with their mental and physical wellbeing, they’re likely to drive our business forward.” Aston agrees that competitiveness in the long term and the development of a sustainable workforce are directly influenced by good practice in regards to mental health.

Maintaining a strong employer brand relies on effective stakeholder relations and internal communications – particularly about difficult topics such as mental health. Since 2008, pressure levels have risen as employees fear layoffs, hours have lengthened, pay has decreased or plateaued and more work has been piled onto fewer employee’s desks, all amplifying the threat of mental illness. This has a severe impact on the business as absenteeism can force colleagues to pick up the slack, thus perpetuating the cycle. Doswell says, “When a machine is churning out faulty goods, you have to stop it and fix it, otherwise you may keep production volumes up but you’ll probably end up losing time and money in rework by having to fix the errors. You can see how that easily translates into a need to repair the damage to people through lost time sickness and to their teams who then have the added pressure of picking up the added workload of their absent colleagues.”

In the UK, incidents like the death of Erhardt or news of city workers committing suicide (about 12 instances have been linked to workplace-induced mental ill health) has compelled businesses to take action. Organisations like Mind, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and BITC alongside the Engage for Success movement – a community of internal comms, HR and other practitioners concerned with employee engagement – have similar interests in regards to mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. Last October also saw the launch of the City Mental Health Alliance – a coalition whose goal is to attack the stigma attached to mental health.

In mental health and employee wellness, words have power. Stress – one of the key contributors to mental illness – is a word that has seen its power diluted due to misuse. For mental health professionals and those involved in workplace wellbeing, stress, depression, anxiety and serious disorders like schizophrenia and bipolarity are words with immense power. The challenge facing businesses – particularly the line managers and HR and IC experts who deal with these issues most often – is that these words also have a stigma attached to them. Rolls says, “There is a stigma around mental health but the more you talk about it the more that stigma diminishes.” Removing a stigma requires more than just a will, businesses have to redefine the culture around health and wellbeing in order to normalise mental health issues. Emma Mamo, head of workplace wellbeing at Mind says, “The main aim is to normalise mental health and to put it on a par with physical health so that people feel able to speak openly about their mental health at work without stigma or discrimination.”

Internal communicators, human resources teams and line managers alike are called upon to address mental health in the workplace. Director of All Things IC, Rachel Miller, says internal communicators should learn what language to use when discussing mental health, “The power of storytelling shouldn’t be overlooked – you may be able to share stories from your workforce (with permission of course) to help myth bust and demonstrate the advice that is in place, or work that is under way to support employees. It could also show where you have work to do to improve as an organisation, which is just as valuable.” Most experts agree that the first step lies in removing the stigma from mental health in the workplace by addressing it head on. Doswell says, “The best way to address taboos is to talk about them openly. Building discussion about mental health issues into routine workplace dialogue can only help challenge prejudice, make people more attuned to the mental health of their colleagues and give everyone clear direction on how to help and where to get help when it’s needed.”

Some companies are well on their way in that journey. Deloitte, for one, works with the BITC and took Mind’s Time to Change pledge – a voluntary promise businesses can make to address mental health issues internally. Rolls says that Deloitte, in order to sustain its high performance environment over time, addresses mental health consistently. It has a number of so-called mental health champions – often business leaders – who act as impartial, third parties – aside from health professionals and line managers – available to employees who wish to discuss a health-related issue. Mamo says this is an effective approach, “Managers might not feel equipped to support staff experiencing stress or a mental health problem, so it’s vital that wellbeing measures have the buy-in of senior staff.” Beyond that, the organisation had, alongside SANE, a non-profit organisation, a large, black sculpture of a dog placed in its offices in London. The dog moved around the company’s locales and featured statements and comments about Deloitte’s attitude toward mental health.The idea behind these directives, says Rolls, is to normalise discussion about mental health; to make it something employees can feel comfortable discussing with their managers so that if they need to seek treatment or time off work, they will do so and, in the long run both improve personally and improve the strength of the business. “The thing to avoid is running campaigns about mental health. Mental health is always part of what we’re talking about it,” Rolls says.

Marks & Spencer also provides consistent support for employees with the aim of “Developing emotional resilience to the day-to-day demands and conflicts at work or at home or in suffering with specific mental health conditions such as depression,” a spokesperson says. The retailer runs a confidential, round-the-clock telephone support line alongside in-person counseling and an extensive wellbeing framework.“Businesses are starting to realise that small inexpensive changes can make a huge difference and reap rewards in terms of staff productivity, morale and retention,” Mamo says. She says one of the challenges facing businesses is a misunderstanding around mental health.

In the long term, it’s become almost a consensus in the city, and indeed among the organisations and coalitions addressed above, to eradicate the stigma surrounding mental health. “The agenda has really reached its tipping point,” Aston says. “For all the organisations I talk to, stress is up there as a major concern. We’re working longer, harder and in tougher times and it’s not going to go away. There’s a very strong business case in terms of costing a lot of money, but there’s also the injustice in terms of unnecessary suffering. People are suffering in silence when it doesn’t have to be this way.”

There is a business case to be made in reducing stress in terms of the sustainability of a hardworking staff. But that case can be equally proven by the impact on reputation and brand a poor internal culture, as affected by mental ill health, can have on a company. An employer’s brand is only as strong as its people and its people need the tools to maintain that strength. The heart and mind of a company goes beyond it’s shiny interiors or expensive computer systems. It’s about culture, about language and about all kinds of wellbeing. Rolls says, “The building is just a building, the organisation is the people that are in it."