Managing the mental wellness
of your workforce in the
new millenium--
The emerging role of
Human Resource Management (HRM)
Developing a Mental Wellness Approach to
Managing Your Work Culture
The 1999 Staying at Work survey (Watson Wyatt's annual barometer of national employer disability management trends) reported the most cited factors increasing disability costs were the following: poor plan design, lack of supervisor involvement in return-to-work, sick leave abuse, job dissatisfaction, and preventable health problems. With the exception of plan design, each of these traits has a behavioral management component. HRM has an opportunity to design alternative approaches to confront unhealthy and/or ineffective performance, communication, and teaming behaviors in the workplace. Again, these traits and behaviors show up in the workplace, and require HRM interventions that address the work environment because the environment impacts individual mental health and adaptive behavior.
Once HRM chooses to confront mental wellness factors in its workforce, it can perform four specific activities, which will provide the initial outcomes in reducing mental health and behavioral disability-related costs. First, generate employee and supervisory feedback about employer practices and work culture traits that contribute to stress or depression. This process provides HRM with ratings on its disability management practices, mental health-related resources like EAP and Work/Life, and HRM ADA/FMLA2 policies. Second, conduct 'audits' of your training and HRM consultant resources to assess their ability to reduce work culture variables that contribute to mental health-related disability. Third, analyze various medical and EAP vendor data to assess their expertise to manage disability (versus just injury or symptoms) and improve mental wellness in your workforce. This will provide HRM the knowledge to create employee management and environmental changes to reduce these costs. Understanding the uses of this data reinforces the value of HRM in the disability management team dynamic (alongside risk management, benefits administration, etc). Fourth, implement a strategic plan for changing work culture and employee management protocols in response to your overall assessment. Such a plan would include staff training, behavioral performance standards for supervisors, and proactive (vs. response-oriented) strategies for reducing disability-related events or behavior in the workplace.
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Utilizing Risk Management in HRM
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