An alliance of European employers is calling on HR and
occupational health (OH) professionals to push mental health, and
depression in particular, further up the corporate agenda. Sarah Silcox
investigates why this is necessary.
The “Target Depression in the Workplace” initiative, run by the HR Leadership Forum, brings together some of the largest businesses in Europe.
Occupational Health
spoke to three of them – Barclays, Deutsche Post DHL and Ogilvy &
Mather – about reducing stigma, changing culture and the best ways to
give line managers the confidence to support individuals with mental
health problems.
Depression, along with stress and anxiety, is a major contributor to
long-term sickness absence in the UK, affecting the lives of significant
numbers of employees, their families and the organisations in which
they work. A group of big-name European employers has formed an alliance
to target depression in the workplace, and has recently published a
report as an early first step in its campaign, setting out why employers
must act, the challenges they face and the steps they can take to
reduce the workplace impact of this serious condition (HR Leadership
Forum, 2014).
Depression and impaired work
Depression accounts for 7.2% of the overall disease burden in Europe,
affecting 30 million EU citizens at any one time, according to an
analysis published on PLOS One in March 2014 (Evans-Lacko and Knapp,
2014). The alliance’s report points out that people with depression lose
an average 5.6 more hours a week of productive time than those without
the condition. A joint study by the London School of Economics and
King’s College London quoted in the “Depression in the workplace in
Europe” report estimates that depression costs European business £77
billion a year.
XpertHR resources
Good practice manual: Stress management
Good practice manual: Wellbeing
This loss in productivity is, by far, the greatest contributor to the
overall economic impact of depression and the evidence for an
association between depression and impaired work performance is strong.
During an episode, workers with depression experience a range of
cognitive symptoms, including trouble concentrating, indecisiveness or
forgetfulness for up to 94% of the time.
However, many line managers believe that employees with mental ill
health, including depression, are able to carry on working as normal and
that their organisation’s mental wellbeing policies and practices are
primarily designed to help the employer avoid litigation, the PLOS One
study suggests.
An organisation’s workplace culture and environment strongly
influences whether an employee with depression decides to disclose their
illness. The support and openness of managers, and, in particular,
their willingness to talk about the issues around working with an
ongoing condition, such as depression, are crucial in enabling a person
to stay in work, and also in building a social acceptance of the
illness.
Supporting mental health at DHL
Organisational culture underpins German company Deutsche Post DHL’s
(DPDHL) approach to depression at work. DPDHL launched a corporate
guiding principle, “Respect and Results”, in 2008: “This means we are
always striving for good results, but in ways that show respect for the
individual,” according to Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at the
company. The launch of the principle was an important milestone for
DPDHL, acting as a starting point for a range of initiatives around
building a culture that supports mental health.
Deutsche Post DHL: health strategy
DPDHL believes you can promote workforce wellbeing on four levels, all of which are influenced by health management:
- Health-promoting workplace design – favourable workplace set-up, working conditions, working hours and working atmosphere.
- Qualification/development of decision-making competence – foster
capability to take responsibility and improve stress resilience.
- Individual health promotion – support a healthy lifestyle.
- Respectful company culture and social interaction – open,
transparent communication; culture of respectful feedback; creation of
social networks; and sympathetic interaction.
Its health strategy is guided by one main principle: “Respect and Results”.
DPDHL manages mental wellbeing at four levels, one of which is
described as “respectful culture and social interaction”. Employment is
good for health, and the company uses this inherent advantage to promote
healthy working environments: “Once we’ve focused on this we can then
move on to look at developing a health-promoting company culture by
focusing on relationships between executives and employees, and
strengthening relationships in teams,” Tautz adds.
The role of DPDHL’s OH team of 70 physicians is: to identify
therapeutic needs through referrals; work, if appropriate, with external
specialists to provide immediate help with acute needs; and develop
rehabilitation plans for those returning to work after time off due to
mental ill health.
Barclays’ “This is Me” campaign
Barclays launched a “This is Me” campaign in May 2014 as the central
plank of a year-long initiative on mental health at work. “This is Me”
was born out of the financial services company’s recognition that
depression and other manageable mental health conditions are major
issues in its broader mental health agenda.
“We’re starting by tackling stigma – often when someone calls in sick
with a mental health issue they tend to mask it with a physical
illness,” says Mark McLane, head of global diversity and inclusion at
Barclays. “This is Me” attempts to bring the conversation around mental
health into the workplace, giving all staff (including line managers)
the resources to tackle the issue. It also helps managers and employees
to understand depression better, for example, describing how the
condition can arise at different points in an individual’s life, or how
it can be something that they manage on an ongoing basis.
Barclays’ mental health initiative is based around an online portal,
open to all employees, which provides access to a set of resources from
external organisations specialising in mental health. It also,
crucially, gives access to a community of employees with an interest in a
particular area, enabling employees with a question to pitch it to an
appropriate colleague with relevant experience. Often, colleagues are
able to help each other by signposting additional wellness resources.
McLane thinks this is a “brilliant” approach as it solidifies
Barclays’ expectation that the stigma still attached to mental ill
health will fall, “but it also empowers colleagues to support each other
on depression and other mental health issues”. The community aspect of
“This is Me” does a great job, and it brings all Barclays’ other HR
policies on tackling stigma and supporting people with mental ill health
“to life”, he believes. Line managers are already using the online
community to assist them in supporting people in their teams with
depression, according to McLane.
Building line management capability
Workplace depression in Europe
One in 10 people have taken time off work because of depression,
according to a European-wide poll of 7,065 employees and managers
published in 2012. Other findings from the IDEA survey, which explored
the impact of depression on both organisations and individuals, include:
- An average of 36 working days are lost per episode of depression,
with the highest average occurring in Great Britain (44 days per
episode, on average).
- The highest rates of depression diagnoses were in Great Britain and the lowest in Italy.
- Only 20% of employees in France would tell their employer if they
were diagnosed with depression, compared with the average of 34%.
- Nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or
resources to deal with employees disclosing depression. Among those
managers who stated that they were supported, support from a medical
professional was the most frequently cited source (43% of those with any
support), followed by support from an HR department (30%).
- Awareness of the cognitive symptoms of depression is poor –
relatively low proportions of participants were able to identify
forgetfulness and indecisiveness as symptoms.
Source: Ipsos MORI, Impact of depression at work in Europe audit, final report
Boosting the confidence and capability of line managers to support
team members with depression is challenging, but also crucial to an
organisation’s success in reducing stigma around the issue and fostering
acceptance. All the organisations we spoke to recognise this, and have
introduced training and professional development modules covering mental
health. This management training covers areas such as initiating
sensitive conversations, managing confidentiality and making effective
referrals to specialists, including OH.
Advertising and media company Ogilvy & Mather, approaches
workplace depression as part of a wider mental health strategy. Julia
Ingall, the company’s talent management director for the UK division of
EAME, believes that there is insufficient understanding of depression in
the workplace, particularly among line managers, who often find
themselves in a difficult position. “They may not understand what
constitutes ‘depression’, or that it can include work-related aspects,
such as a loss of concentration or change in behaviour towards
colleagues. This can be quite scary for managers,” she suggests.
Ogilvy & Mather is working with consultant, Robertson Cooper, to
deliver resilience training across the organisation, starting with its
leadership level by building it into existing management programmes.
“The lines are blurred between work and home, often driven by
technology, and I worry that people do not get a break,” Ingall says.
Putting the training in place will help managers understand their own
resilience levels, how to build on their personal strengths in addition
to acknowledging weaker areas.
An assessment tool developed by Robertson Cooper, called
i-resilience, has been introduced. It will eventually produce data that
can be interpreted to develop action plans for individuals. “We’ve also
selected eight key HR people to undertake some ‘train the trainer’
programmes so they can understand the issues and roll these programmes
out,” Ingall adds.
DPDHL provides managers with evidence and data on the value of
managing mental health, explaining how their behaviour influences
employees and suggesting ways to minimise the impact of damaging
behaviour and maximise the positive. The company provides e-learning
resources for managers on leading on mental health issues, developed in
conjunction with a German university and the Ministry of Labour.
“We also started a programme of workshops for managers on preventing
depression and burnout in 2012, designed to boost their confidence in
handling these issues,” Tautz explains. The workshops operate alongside
other HR training activities and professional development plans. “The
latest development is a new training programme for senior managers
covering mental health at work,” he adds.
Employee involvement
Involving employees in developing initiatives on depression in the
workplace is a feature common to employers in the Target forum. DPDHL
established health working circles in each branch in 1997, including
representatives from Works Councils, OH physicians and health and safety
experts. “These circles explore how and where to address different
health topics, including many linked to mental health, such as conflict
management, burnout and stress,” Tautz notes.
Ogilvy & Mather is in the process of setting up a wellbeing forum
to work through issues affecting employee wellbeing: “The job of the
forum will be to gather feedback from local offices. We’ve also used
leadership groups to explore six pillars of wellbeing, including the
impact of client demands and our leaders’ clarity of vision, on employee
health,” Ingall adds.
One of the “really interesting” aspects of Barclays’ “This is Me”
campaign is that it is colleague driven, using the company’s established
employee network, Reach, according to McLane. A self-selecting network
of around 700 people with an interest in disability, Reach also
incorporates listening groups, which are formal focus groups of
employees who have self-identified as having a disability, including
ongoing mental health issues.
“These groups are asked for their views on gaps in the organisation’s
approach to diversity and inclusion, for example, how our reasonable
adjustments programme could be made better,” McLane explains. This helps
Barclays develop improvements, which have recently included the launch
of an intranet-based online catalogue of reasonable adjustments which
employees can quickly access without the need to go through an
application/procurement process. “We will also draw on employees’ own
stories as a part of our efforts to tackle stigma; for example, we’ve
started with six people telling their stories about managing their own
mental health problems whilst having successful careers.”
Evaluating interventions
Providing evidence for the effectiveness of workplace initiatives on
depression is the “biggest challenge”, according to Tautz. However, he
adds, there is sufficient global data around to demonstrate the need for
systematic health management, and DPDHL also uses its own employee
opinion surveys and feedback from training sessions for qualitative
evidence. “We also use validated tools such ICD10 to track the incidence
rates for different work-related conditions, in addition to analysing
our absence data.”
Barclays’ “This is Me” is currently a UK-based initiative, but the
company plans to roll it out to the bank’s operations in the Americas
and Africa during 2014: “This expansion will be one of the campaign’s
success metrics,” McLane explains. “We will also look at activity levels
within the community and, later on, will invite people to tell their
stories around the support it provides,” he adds.
Source:
An alliance of European employers is calling on HR and
occupational health (OH) professionals to push mental health, and
depression in particular, further up the corporate agenda. Sarah Silcox
investigates why this is necessary.
The “Target Depression in the Workplace” initiative, run by the HR Leadership Forum, brings together some of the largest businesses in Europe.
Occupational Health
spoke to three of them – Barclays, Deutsche Post DHL and Ogilvy &
Mather – about reducing stigma, changing culture and the best ways to
give line managers the confidence to support individuals with mental
health problems.
Depression, along with stress and anxiety, is a major contributor to
long-term sickness absence in the UK, affecting the lives of significant
numbers of employees, their families and the organisations in which
they work. A group of big-name European employers has formed an alliance
to target depression in the workplace, and has recently published a
report as an early first step in its campaign, setting out why employers
must act, the challenges they face and the steps they can take to
reduce the workplace impact of this serious condition (HR Leadership
Forum, 2014).
Depression and impaired work
Depression accounts for 7.2% of the overall disease burden in Europe,
affecting 30 million EU citizens at any one time, according to an
analysis published on PLOS One in March 2014 (Evans-Lacko and Knapp,
2014). The alliance’s report points out that people with depression lose
an average 5.6 more hours a week of productive time than those without
the condition. A joint study by the London School of Economics and
King’s College London quoted in the “Depression in the workplace in
Europe” report estimates that depression costs European business £77
billion a year.
XpertHR resources
Good practice manual: Stress management
Good practice manual: Wellbeing
This loss in productivity is, by far, the greatest contributor to the
overall economic impact of depression and the evidence for an
association between depression and impaired work performance is strong.
During an episode, workers with depression experience a range of
cognitive symptoms, including trouble concentrating, indecisiveness or
forgetfulness for up to 94% of the time.
However, many line managers believe that employees with mental ill
health, including depression, are able to carry on working as normal and
that their organisation’s mental wellbeing policies and practices are
primarily designed to help the employer avoid litigation, the PLOS One
study suggests.
An organisation’s workplace culture and environment strongly
influences whether an employee with depression decides to disclose their
illness. The support and openness of managers, and, in particular,
their willingness to talk about the issues around working with an
ongoing condition, such as depression, are crucial in enabling a person
to stay in work, and also in building a social acceptance of the
illness.
Supporting mental health at DHL
Organisational culture underpins German company Deutsche Post DHL’s
(DPDHL) approach to depression at work. DPDHL launched a corporate
guiding principle, “Respect and Results”, in 2008: “This means we are
always striving for good results, but in ways that show respect for the
individual,” according to Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at the
company. The launch of the principle was an important milestone for
DPDHL, acting as a starting point for a range of initiatives around
building a culture that supports mental health.
Deutsche Post DHL: health strategy
DPDHL believes you can promote workforce wellbeing on four levels, all of which are influenced by health management:
- Health-promoting workplace design – favourable workplace set-up, working conditions, working hours and working atmosphere.
- Qualification/development of decision-making competence – foster
capability to take responsibility and improve stress resilience.
- Individual health promotion – support a healthy lifestyle.
- Respectful company culture and social interaction – open,
transparent communication; culture of respectful feedback; creation of
social networks; and sympathetic interaction.
Its health strategy is guided by one main principle: “Respect and Results”.
DPDHL manages mental wellbeing at four levels, one of which is
described as “respectful culture and social interaction”. Employment is
good for health, and the company uses this inherent advantage to promote
healthy working environments: “Once we’ve focused on this we can then
move on to look at developing a health-promoting company culture by
focusing on relationships between executives and employees, and
strengthening relationships in teams,” Tautz adds.
The role of DPDHL’s OH team of 70 physicians is: to identify
therapeutic needs through referrals; work, if appropriate, with external
specialists to provide immediate help with acute needs; and develop
rehabilitation plans for those returning to work after time off due to
mental ill health.
Barclays’ “This is Me” campaign
Barclays launched a “This is Me” campaign in May 2014 as the central
plank of a year-long initiative on mental health at work. “This is Me”
was born out of the financial services company’s recognition that
depression and other manageable mental health conditions are major
issues in its broader mental health agenda.
“We’re starting by tackling stigma – often when someone calls in sick
with a mental health issue they tend to mask it with a physical
illness,” says Mark McLane, head of global diversity and inclusion at
Barclays. “This is Me” attempts to bring the conversation around mental
health into the workplace, giving all staff (including line managers)
the resources to tackle the issue. It also helps managers and employees
to understand depression better, for example, describing how the
condition can arise at different points in an individual’s life, or how
it can be something that they manage on an ongoing basis.
Barclays’ mental health initiative is based around an online portal,
open to all employees, which provides access to a set of resources from
external organisations specialising in mental health. It also,
crucially, gives access to a community of employees with an interest in a
particular area, enabling employees with a question to pitch it to an
appropriate colleague with relevant experience. Often, colleagues are
able to help each other by signposting additional wellness resources.
McLane thinks this is a “brilliant” approach as it solidifies
Barclays’ expectation that the stigma still attached to mental ill
health will fall, “but it also empowers colleagues to support each other
on depression and other mental health issues”. The community aspect of
“This is Me” does a great job, and it brings all Barclays’ other HR
policies on tackling stigma and supporting people with mental ill health
“to life”, he believes. Line managers are already using the online
community to assist them in supporting people in their teams with
depression, according to McLane.
Building line management capability
Workplace depression in Europe
One in 10 people have taken time off work because of depression,
according to a European-wide poll of 7,065 employees and managers
published in 2012. Other findings from the IDEA survey, which explored
the impact of depression on both organisations and individuals, include:
- An average of 36 working days are lost per episode of depression,
with the highest average occurring in Great Britain (44 days per
episode, on average).
- The highest rates of depression diagnoses were in Great Britain and the lowest in Italy.
- Only 20% of employees in France would tell their employer if they
were diagnosed with depression, compared with the average of 34%.
- Nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or
resources to deal with employees disclosing depression. Among those
managers who stated that they were supported, support from a medical
professional was the most frequently cited source (43% of those with any
support), followed by support from an HR department (30%).
- Awareness of the cognitive symptoms of depression is poor –
relatively low proportions of participants were able to identify
forgetfulness and indecisiveness as symptoms.
Source: Ipsos MORI, Impact of depression at work in Europe audit, final report
Boosting the confidence and capability of line managers to support
team members with depression is challenging, but also crucial to an
organisation’s success in reducing stigma around the issue and fostering
acceptance. All the organisations we spoke to recognise this, and have
introduced training and professional development modules covering mental
health. This management training covers areas such as initiating
sensitive conversations, managing confidentiality and making effective
referrals to specialists, including OH.
Advertising and media company Ogilvy & Mather, approaches
workplace depression as part of a wider mental health strategy. Julia
Ingall, the company’s talent management director for the UK division of
EAME, believes that there is insufficient understanding of depression in
the workplace, particularly among line managers, who often find
themselves in a difficult position. “They may not understand what
constitutes ‘depression’, or that it can include work-related aspects,
such as a loss of concentration or change in behaviour towards
colleagues. This can be quite scary for managers,” she suggests.
Ogilvy & Mather is working with consultant, Robertson Cooper, to
deliver resilience training across the organisation, starting with its
leadership level by building it into existing management programmes.
“The lines are blurred between work and home, often driven by
technology, and I worry that people do not get a break,” Ingall says.
Putting the training in place will help managers understand their own
resilience levels, how to build on their personal strengths in addition
to acknowledging weaker areas.
An assessment tool developed by Robertson Cooper, called
i-resilience, has been introduced. It will eventually produce data that
can be interpreted to develop action plans for individuals. “We’ve also
selected eight key HR people to undertake some ‘train the trainer’
programmes so they can understand the issues and roll these programmes
out,” Ingall adds.
DPDHL provides managers with evidence and data on the value of
managing mental health, explaining how their behaviour influences
employees and suggesting ways to minimise the impact of damaging
behaviour and maximise the positive. The company provides e-learning
resources for managers on leading on mental health issues, developed in
conjunction with a German university and the Ministry of Labour.
“We also started a programme of workshops for managers on preventing
depression and burnout in 2012, designed to boost their confidence in
handling these issues,” Tautz explains. The workshops operate alongside
other HR training activities and professional development plans. “The
latest development is a new training programme for senior managers
covering mental health at work,” he adds.
Employee involvement
Involving employees in developing initiatives on depression in the
workplace is a feature common to employers in the Target forum. DPDHL
established health working circles in each branch in 1997, including
representatives from Works Councils, OH physicians and health and safety
experts. “These circles explore how and where to address different
health topics, including many linked to mental health, such as conflict
management, burnout and stress,” Tautz notes.
Ogilvy & Mather is in the process of setting up a wellbeing forum
to work through issues affecting employee wellbeing: “The job of the
forum will be to gather feedback from local offices. We’ve also used
leadership groups to explore six pillars of wellbeing, including the
impact of client demands and our leaders’ clarity of vision, on employee
health,” Ingall adds.
One of the “really interesting” aspects of Barclays’ “This is Me”
campaign is that it is colleague driven, using the company’s established
employee network, Reach, according to McLane. A self-selecting network
of around 700 people with an interest in disability, Reach also
incorporates listening groups, which are formal focus groups of
employees who have self-identified as having a disability, including
ongoing mental health issues.
“These groups are asked for their views on gaps in the organisation’s
approach to diversity and inclusion, for example, how our reasonable
adjustments programme could be made better,” McLane explains. This helps
Barclays develop improvements, which have recently included the launch
of an intranet-based online catalogue of reasonable adjustments which
employees can quickly access without the need to go through an
application/procurement process. “We will also draw on employees’ own
stories as a part of our efforts to tackle stigma; for example, we’ve
started with six people telling their stories about managing their own
mental health problems whilst having successful careers.”
Evaluating interventions
Providing evidence for the effectiveness of workplace initiatives on
depression is the “biggest challenge”, according to Tautz. However, he
adds, there is sufficient global data around to demonstrate the need for
systematic health management, and DPDHL also uses its own employee
opinion surveys and feedback from training sessions for qualitative
evidence. “We also use validated tools such ICD10 to track the incidence
rates for different work-related conditions, in addition to analysing
our absence data.”
Barclays’ “This is Me” is currently a UK-based initiative, but the
company plans to roll it out to the bank’s operations in the Americas
and Africa during 2014: “This expansion will be one of the campaign’s
success metrics,” McLane explains. “We will also look at activity levels
within the community and, later on, will invite people to tell their
stories around the support it provides,” he adds.
Source:
An alliance of European employers is calling on HR and
occupational health (OH) professionals to push mental health, and
depression in particular, further up the corporate agenda. Sarah Silcox
investigates why this is necessary.
The “Target Depression in the Workplace” initiative, run by the HR Leadership Forum, brings together some of the largest businesses in Europe.
Occupational Health
spoke to three of them – Barclays, Deutsche Post DHL and Ogilvy &
Mather – about reducing stigma, changing culture and the best ways to
give line managers the confidence to support individuals with mental
health problems.
Depression, along with stress and anxiety, is a major contributor to
long-term sickness absence in the UK, affecting the lives of significant
numbers of employees, their families and the organisations in which
they work. A group of big-name European employers has formed an alliance
to target depression in the workplace, and has recently published a
report as an early first step in its campaign, setting out why employers
must act, the challenges they face and the steps they can take to
reduce the workplace impact of this serious condition (HR Leadership
Forum, 2014).
Depression and impaired work
Depression accounts for 7.2% of the overall disease burden in Europe,
affecting 30 million EU citizens at any one time, according to an
analysis published on PLOS One in March 2014 (Evans-Lacko and Knapp,
2014). The alliance’s report points out that people with depression lose
an average 5.6 more hours a week of productive time than those without
the condition. A joint study by the London School of Economics and
King’s College London quoted in the “Depression in the workplace in
Europe” report estimates that depression costs European business £77
billion a year.
XpertHR resources
Good practice manual: Stress management
Good practice manual: Wellbeing
This loss in productivity is, by far, the greatest contributor to the
overall economic impact of depression and the evidence for an
association between depression and impaired work performance is strong.
During an episode, workers with depression experience a range of
cognitive symptoms, including trouble concentrating, indecisiveness or
forgetfulness for up to 94% of the time.
However, many line managers believe that employees with mental ill
health, including depression, are able to carry on working as normal and
that their organisation’s mental wellbeing policies and practices are
primarily designed to help the employer avoid litigation, the PLOS One
study suggests.
An organisation’s workplace culture and environment strongly
influences whether an employee with depression decides to disclose their
illness. The support and openness of managers, and, in particular,
their willingness to talk about the issues around working with an
ongoing condition, such as depression, are crucial in enabling a person
to stay in work, and also in building a social acceptance of the
illness.
Supporting mental health at DHL
Organisational culture underpins German company Deutsche Post DHL’s
(DPDHL) approach to depression at work. DPDHL launched a corporate
guiding principle, “Respect and Results”, in 2008: “This means we are
always striving for good results, but in ways that show respect for the
individual,” according to Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at the
company. The launch of the principle was an important milestone for
DPDHL, acting as a starting point for a range of initiatives around
building a culture that supports mental health.
Deutsche Post DHL: health strategy
DPDHL believes you can promote workforce wellbeing on four levels, all of which are influenced by health management:
- Health-promoting workplace design – favourable workplace set-up, working conditions, working hours and working atmosphere.
- Qualification/development of decision-making competence – foster
capability to take responsibility and improve stress resilience.
- Individual health promotion – support a healthy lifestyle.
- Respectful company culture and social interaction – open,
transparent communication; culture of respectful feedback; creation of
social networks; and sympathetic interaction.
Its health strategy is guided by one main principle: “Respect and Results”.
DPDHL manages mental wellbeing at four levels, one of which is
described as “respectful culture and social interaction”. Employment is
good for health, and the company uses this inherent advantage to promote
healthy working environments: “Once we’ve focused on this we can then
move on to look at developing a health-promoting company culture by
focusing on relationships between executives and employees, and
strengthening relationships in teams,” Tautz adds.
The role of DPDHL’s OH team of 70 physicians is: to identify
therapeutic needs through referrals; work, if appropriate, with external
specialists to provide immediate help with acute needs; and develop
rehabilitation plans for those returning to work after time off due to
mental ill health.
Barclays’ “This is Me” campaign
Barclays launched a “This is Me” campaign in May 2014 as the central
plank of a year-long initiative on mental health at work. “This is Me”
was born out of the financial services company’s recognition that
depression and other manageable mental health conditions are major
issues in its broader mental health agenda.
“We’re starting by tackling stigma – often when someone calls in sick
with a mental health issue they tend to mask it with a physical
illness,” says Mark McLane, head of global diversity and inclusion at
Barclays. “This is Me” attempts to bring the conversation around mental
health into the workplace, giving all staff (including line managers)
the resources to tackle the issue. It also helps managers and employees
to understand depression better, for example, describing how the
condition can arise at different points in an individual’s life, or how
it can be something that they manage on an ongoing basis.
Barclays’ mental health initiative is based around an online portal,
open to all employees, which provides access to a set of resources from
external organisations specialising in mental health. It also,
crucially, gives access to a community of employees with an interest in a
particular area, enabling employees with a question to pitch it to an
appropriate colleague with relevant experience. Often, colleagues are
able to help each other by signposting additional wellness resources.
McLane thinks this is a “brilliant” approach as it solidifies
Barclays’ expectation that the stigma still attached to mental ill
health will fall, “but it also empowers colleagues to support each other
on depression and other mental health issues”. The community aspect of
“This is Me” does a great job, and it brings all Barclays’ other HR
policies on tackling stigma and supporting people with mental ill health
“to life”, he believes. Line managers are already using the online
community to assist them in supporting people in their teams with
depression, according to McLane.
Building line management capability
Workplace depression in Europe
One in 10 people have taken time off work because of depression,
according to a European-wide poll of 7,065 employees and managers
published in 2012. Other findings from the IDEA survey, which explored
the impact of depression on both organisations and individuals, include:
- An average of 36 working days are lost per episode of depression,
with the highest average occurring in Great Britain (44 days per
episode, on average).
- The highest rates of depression diagnoses were in Great Britain and the lowest in Italy.
- Only 20% of employees in France would tell their employer if they
were diagnosed with depression, compared with the average of 34%.
- Nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or
resources to deal with employees disclosing depression. Among those
managers who stated that they were supported, support from a medical
professional was the most frequently cited source (43% of those with any
support), followed by support from an HR department (30%).
- Awareness of the cognitive symptoms of depression is poor –
relatively low proportions of participants were able to identify
forgetfulness and indecisiveness as symptoms.
Source: Ipsos MORI, Impact of depression at work in Europe audit, final report
Boosting the confidence and capability of line managers to support
team members with depression is challenging, but also crucial to an
organisation’s success in reducing stigma around the issue and fostering
acceptance. All the organisations we spoke to recognise this, and have
introduced training and professional development modules covering mental
health. This management training covers areas such as initiating
sensitive conversations, managing confidentiality and making effective
referrals to specialists, including OH.
Advertising and media company Ogilvy & Mather, approaches
workplace depression as part of a wider mental health strategy. Julia
Ingall, the company’s talent management director for the UK division of
EAME, believes that there is insufficient understanding of depression in
the workplace, particularly among line managers, who often find
themselves in a difficult position. “They may not understand what
constitutes ‘depression’, or that it can include work-related aspects,
such as a loss of concentration or change in behaviour towards
colleagues. This can be quite scary for managers,” she suggests.
Ogilvy & Mather is working with consultant, Robertson Cooper, to
deliver resilience training across the organisation, starting with its
leadership level by building it into existing management programmes.
“The lines are blurred between work and home, often driven by
technology, and I worry that people do not get a break,” Ingall says.
Putting the training in place will help managers understand their own
resilience levels, how to build on their personal strengths in addition
to acknowledging weaker areas.
An assessment tool developed by Robertson Cooper, called
i-resilience, has been introduced. It will eventually produce data that
can be interpreted to develop action plans for individuals. “We’ve also
selected eight key HR people to undertake some ‘train the trainer’
programmes so they can understand the issues and roll these programmes
out,” Ingall adds.
DPDHL provides managers with evidence and data on the value of
managing mental health, explaining how their behaviour influences
employees and suggesting ways to minimise the impact of damaging
behaviour and maximise the positive. The company provides e-learning
resources for managers on leading on mental health issues, developed in
conjunction with a German university and the Ministry of Labour.
“We also started a programme of workshops for managers on preventing
depression and burnout in 2012, designed to boost their confidence in
handling these issues,” Tautz explains. The workshops operate alongside
other HR training activities and professional development plans. “The
latest development is a new training programme for senior managers
covering mental health at work,” he adds.
Employee involvement
Involving employees in developing initiatives on depression in the
workplace is a feature common to employers in the Target forum. DPDHL
established health working circles in each branch in 1997, including
representatives from Works Councils, OH physicians and health and safety
experts. “These circles explore how and where to address different
health topics, including many linked to mental health, such as conflict
management, burnout and stress,” Tautz notes.
Ogilvy & Mather is in the process of setting up a wellbeing forum
to work through issues affecting employee wellbeing: “The job of the
forum will be to gather feedback from local offices. We’ve also used
leadership groups to explore six pillars of wellbeing, including the
impact of client demands and our leaders’ clarity of vision, on employee
health,” Ingall adds.
One of the “really interesting” aspects of Barclays’ “This is Me”
campaign is that it is colleague driven, using the company’s established
employee network, Reach, according to McLane. A self-selecting network
of around 700 people with an interest in disability, Reach also
incorporates listening groups, which are formal focus groups of
employees who have self-identified as having a disability, including
ongoing mental health issues.
“These groups are asked for their views on gaps in the organisation’s
approach to diversity and inclusion, for example, how our reasonable
adjustments programme could be made better,” McLane explains. This helps
Barclays develop improvements, which have recently included the launch
of an intranet-based online catalogue of reasonable adjustments which
employees can quickly access without the need to go through an
application/procurement process. “We will also draw on employees’ own
stories as a part of our efforts to tackle stigma; for example, we’ve
started with six people telling their stories about managing their own
mental health problems whilst having successful careers.”
Evaluating interventions
Providing evidence for the effectiveness of workplace initiatives on
depression is the “biggest challenge”, according to Tautz. However, he
adds, there is sufficient global data around to demonstrate the need for
systematic health management, and DPDHL also uses its own employee
opinion surveys and feedback from training sessions for qualitative
evidence. “We also use validated tools such ICD10 to track the incidence
rates for different work-related conditions, in addition to analysing
our absence data.”
Barclays’ “This is Me” is currently a UK-based initiative, but the
company plans to roll it out to the bank’s operations in the Americas
and Africa during 2014: “This expansion will be one of the campaign’s
success metrics,” McLane explains. “We will also look at activity levels
within the community and, later on, will invite people to tell their
stories around the support it provides,” he adds.
An alliance of European employers is calling on HR and
occupational health (OH) professionals to push mental health, and
depression in particular, further up the corporate agenda. Sarah Silcox
investigates why this is necessary.
The “Target Depression in the Workplace” initiative, run by the HR Leadership Forum, brings together some of the largest businesses in Europe.
Occupational Health
spoke to three of them – Barclays, Deutsche Post DHL and Ogilvy &
Mather – about reducing stigma, changing culture and the best ways to
give line managers the confidence to support individuals with mental
health problems.
Depression, along with stress and anxiety, is a major contributor to
long-term sickness absence in the UK, affecting the lives of significant
numbers of employees, their families and the organisations in which
they work. A group of big-name European employers has formed an alliance
to target depression in the workplace, and has recently published a
report as an early first step in its campaign, setting out why employers
must act, the challenges they face and the steps they can take to
reduce the workplace impact of this serious condition (HR Leadership
Forum, 2014).
Depression and impaired work
Depression accounts for 7.2% of the overall disease burden in Europe,
affecting 30 million EU citizens at any one time, according to an
analysis published on PLOS One in March 2014 (Evans-Lacko and Knapp,
2014). The alliance’s report points out that people with depression lose
an average 5.6 more hours a week of productive time than those without
the condition. A joint study by the London School of Economics and
King’s College London quoted in the “Depression in the workplace in
Europe” report estimates that depression costs European business £77
billion a year.
XpertHR resources
Good practice manual: Stress management
Good practice manual: Wellbeing
This loss in productivity is, by far, the greatest contributor to the
overall economic impact of depression and the evidence for an
association between depression and impaired work performance is strong.
During an episode, workers with depression experience a range of
cognitive symptoms, including trouble concentrating, indecisiveness or
forgetfulness for up to 94% of the time.
However, many line managers believe that employees with mental ill
health, including depression, are able to carry on working as normal and
that their organisation’s mental wellbeing policies and practices are
primarily designed to help the employer avoid litigation, the PLOS One
study suggests.
An organisation’s workplace culture and environment strongly
influences whether an employee with depression decides to disclose their
illness. The support and openness of managers, and, in particular,
their willingness to talk about the issues around working with an
ongoing condition, such as depression, are crucial in enabling a person
to stay in work, and also in building a social acceptance of the
illness.
Supporting mental health at DHL
Organisational culture underpins German company Deutsche Post DHL’s
(DPDHL) approach to depression at work. DPDHL launched a corporate
guiding principle, “Respect and Results”, in 2008: “This means we are
always striving for good results, but in ways that show respect for the
individual,” according to Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at the
company. The launch of the principle was an important milestone for
DPDHL, acting as a starting point for a range of initiatives around
building a culture that supports mental health.
Deutsche Post DHL: health strategy
DPDHL believes you can promote workforce wellbeing on four levels, all of which are influenced by health management:
- Health-promoting workplace design – favourable workplace set-up, working conditions, working hours and working atmosphere.
- Qualification/development of decision-making competence – foster
capability to take responsibility and improve stress resilience.
- Individual health promotion – support a healthy lifestyle.
- Respectful company culture and social interaction – open,
transparent communication; culture of respectful feedback; creation of
social networks; and sympathetic interaction.
Its health strategy is guided by one main principle: “Respect and Results”.
DPDHL manages mental wellbeing at four levels, one of which is
described as “respectful culture and social interaction”. Employment is
good for health, and the company uses this inherent advantage to promote
healthy working environments: “Once we’ve focused on this we can then
move on to look at developing a health-promoting company culture by
focusing on relationships between executives and employees, and
strengthening relationships in teams,” Tautz adds.
The role of DPDHL’s OH team of 70 physicians is: to identify
therapeutic needs through referrals; work, if appropriate, with external
specialists to provide immediate help with acute needs; and develop
rehabilitation plans for those returning to work after time off due to
mental ill health.
Barclays’ “This is Me” campaign
Barclays launched a “This is Me” campaign in May 2014 as the central
plank of a year-long initiative on mental health at work. “This is Me”
was born out of the financial services company’s recognition that
depression and other manageable mental health conditions are major
issues in its broader mental health agenda.
“We’re starting by tackling stigma – often when someone calls in sick
with a mental health issue they tend to mask it with a physical
illness,” says Mark McLane, head of global diversity and inclusion at
Barclays. “This is Me” attempts to bring the conversation around mental
health into the workplace, giving all staff (including line managers)
the resources to tackle the issue. It also helps managers and employees
to understand depression better, for example, describing how the
condition can arise at different points in an individual’s life, or how
it can be something that they manage on an ongoing basis.
Barclays’ mental health initiative is based around an online portal,
open to all employees, which provides access to a set of resources from
external organisations specialising in mental health. It also,
crucially, gives access to a community of employees with an interest in a
particular area, enabling employees with a question to pitch it to an
appropriate colleague with relevant experience. Often, colleagues are
able to help each other by signposting additional wellness resources.
McLane thinks this is a “brilliant” approach as it solidifies
Barclays’ expectation that the stigma still attached to mental ill
health will fall, “but it also empowers colleagues to support each other
on depression and other mental health issues”. The community aspect of
“This is Me” does a great job, and it brings all Barclays’ other HR
policies on tackling stigma and supporting people with mental ill health
“to life”, he believes. Line managers are already using the online
community to assist them in supporting people in their teams with
depression, according to McLane.
Building line management capability
Workplace depression in Europe
One in 10 people have taken time off work because of depression,
according to a European-wide poll of 7,065 employees and managers
published in 2012. Other findings from the IDEA survey, which explored
the impact of depression on both organisations and individuals, include:
- An average of 36 working days are lost per episode of depression,
with the highest average occurring in Great Britain (44 days per
episode, on average).
- The highest rates of depression diagnoses were in Great Britain and the lowest in Italy.
- Only 20% of employees in France would tell their employer if they
were diagnosed with depression, compared with the average of 34%.
- Nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or
resources to deal with employees disclosing depression. Among those
managers who stated that they were supported, support from a medical
professional was the most frequently cited source (43% of those with any
support), followed by support from an HR department (30%).
- Awareness of the cognitive symptoms of depression is poor –
relatively low proportions of participants were able to identify
forgetfulness and indecisiveness as symptoms.
Source: Ipsos MORI, Impact of depression at work in Europe audit, final report
Boosting the confidence and capability of line managers to support
team members with depression is challenging, but also crucial to an
organisation’s success in reducing stigma around the issue and fostering
acceptance. All the organisations we spoke to recognise this, and have
introduced training and professional development modules covering mental
health. This management training covers areas such as initiating
sensitive conversations, managing confidentiality and making effective
referrals to specialists, including OH.
Advertising and media company Ogilvy & Mather, approaches
workplace depression as part of a wider mental health strategy. Julia
Ingall, the company’s talent management director for the UK division of
EAME, believes that there is insufficient understanding of depression in
the workplace, particularly among line managers, who often find
themselves in a difficult position. “They may not understand what
constitutes ‘depression’, or that it can include work-related aspects,
such as a loss of concentration or change in behaviour towards
colleagues. This can be quite scary for managers,” she suggests.
Ogilvy & Mather is working with consultant, Robertson Cooper, to
deliver resilience training across the organisation, starting with its
leadership level by building it into existing management programmes.
“The lines are blurred between work and home, often driven by
technology, and I worry that people do not get a break,” Ingall says.
Putting the training in place will help managers understand their own
resilience levels, how to build on their personal strengths in addition
to acknowledging weaker areas.
An assessment tool developed by Robertson Cooper, called
i-resilience, has been introduced. It will eventually produce data that
can be interpreted to develop action plans for individuals. “We’ve also
selected eight key HR people to undertake some ‘train the trainer’
programmes so they can understand the issues and roll these programmes
out,” Ingall adds.
DPDHL provides managers with evidence and data on the value of
managing mental health, explaining how their behaviour influences
employees and suggesting ways to minimise the impact of damaging
behaviour and maximise the positive. The company provides e-learning
resources for managers on leading on mental health issues, developed in
conjunction with a German university and the Ministry of Labour.
“We also started a programme of workshops for managers on preventing
depression and burnout in 2012, designed to boost their confidence in
handling these issues,” Tautz explains. The workshops operate alongside
other HR training activities and professional development plans. “The
latest development is a new training programme for senior managers
covering mental health at work,” he adds.
Employee involvement
Involving employees in developing initiatives on depression in the
workplace is a feature common to employers in the Target forum. DPDHL
established health working circles in each branch in 1997, including
representatives from Works Councils, OH physicians and health and safety
experts. “These circles explore how and where to address different
health topics, including many linked to mental health, such as conflict
management, burnout and stress,” Tautz notes.
Ogilvy & Mather is in the process of setting up a wellbeing forum
to work through issues affecting employee wellbeing: “The job of the
forum will be to gather feedback from local offices. We’ve also used
leadership groups to explore six pillars of wellbeing, including the
impact of client demands and our leaders’ clarity of vision, on employee
health,” Ingall adds.
One of the “really interesting” aspects of Barclays’ “This is Me”
campaign is that it is colleague driven, using the company’s established
employee network, Reach, according to McLane. A self-selecting network
of around 700 people with an interest in disability, Reach also
incorporates listening groups, which are formal focus groups of
employees who have self-identified as having a disability, including
ongoing mental health issues.
“These groups are asked for their views on gaps in the organisation’s
approach to diversity and inclusion, for example, how our reasonable
adjustments programme could be made better,” McLane explains. This helps
Barclays develop improvements, which have recently included the launch
of an intranet-based online catalogue of reasonable adjustments which
employees can quickly access without the need to go through an
application/procurement process. “We will also draw on employees’ own
stories as a part of our efforts to tackle stigma; for example, we’ve
started with six people telling their stories about managing their own
mental health problems whilst having successful careers.”
Evaluating interventions
Providing evidence for the effectiveness of workplace initiatives on
depression is the “biggest challenge”, according to Tautz. However, he
adds, there is sufficient global data around to demonstrate the need for
systematic health management, and DPDHL also uses its own employee
opinion surveys and feedback from training sessions for qualitative
evidence. “We also use validated tools such ICD10 to track the incidence
rates for different work-related conditions, in addition to analysing
our absence data.”
Barclays’ “This is Me” is currently a UK-based initiative, but the
company plans to roll it out to the bank’s operations in the Americas
and Africa during 2014: “This expansion will be one of the campaign’s
success metrics,” McLane explains. “We will also look at activity levels
within the community and, later on, will invite people to tell their
stories around the support it provides,” he adds.
An alliance of European employers is calling on HR and
occupational health (OH) professionals to push mental health, and
depression in particular, further up the corporate agenda. Sarah Silcox
investigates why this is necessary.
The “Target Depression in the Workplace” initiative, run by the HR Leadership Forum, brings together some of the largest businesses in Europe.
Occupational Health
spoke to three of them – Barclays, Deutsche Post DHL and Ogilvy &
Mather – about reducing stigma, changing culture and the best ways to
give line managers the confidence to support individuals with mental
health problems.
Depression, along with stress and anxiety, is a major contributor to
long-term sickness absence in the UK, affecting the lives of significant
numbers of employees, their families and the organisations in which
they work. A group of big-name European employers has formed an alliance
to target depression in the workplace, and has recently published a
report as an early first step in its campaign, setting out why employers
must act, the challenges they face and the steps they can take to
reduce the workplace impact of this serious condition (HR Leadership
Forum, 2014).
Depression and impaired work
Depression accounts for 7.2% of the overall disease burden in Europe,
affecting 30 million EU citizens at any one time, according to an
analysis published on PLOS One in March 2014 (Evans-Lacko and Knapp,
2014). The alliance’s report points out that people with depression lose
an average 5.6 more hours a week of productive time than those without
the condition. A joint study by the London School of Economics and
King’s College London quoted in the “Depression in the workplace in
Europe” report estimates that depression costs European business £77
billion a year.
XpertHR resources
Good practice manual: Stress management
Good practice manual: Wellbeing
This loss in productivity is, by far, the greatest contributor to the
overall economic impact of depression and the evidence for an
association between depression and impaired work performance is strong.
During an episode, workers with depression experience a range of
cognitive symptoms, including trouble concentrating, indecisiveness or
forgetfulness for up to 94% of the time.
However, many line managers believe that employees with mental ill
health, including depression, are able to carry on working as normal and
that their organisation’s mental wellbeing policies and practices are
primarily designed to help the employer avoid litigation, the PLOS One
study suggests.
An organisation’s workplace culture and environment strongly
influences whether an employee with depression decides to disclose their
illness. The support and openness of managers, and, in particular,
their willingness to talk about the issues around working with an
ongoing condition, such as depression, are crucial in enabling a person
to stay in work, and also in building a social acceptance of the
illness.
Supporting mental health at DHL
Organisational culture underpins German company Deutsche Post DHL’s
(DPDHL) approach to depression at work. DPDHL launched a corporate
guiding principle, “Respect and Results”, in 2008: “This means we are
always striving for good results, but in ways that show respect for the
individual,” according to Andreas Tautz, chief medical officer at the
company. The launch of the principle was an important milestone for
DPDHL, acting as a starting point for a range of initiatives around
building a culture that supports mental health.
Deutsche Post DHL: health strategy
DPDHL believes you can promote workforce wellbeing on four levels, all of which are influenced by health management:
- Health-promoting workplace design – favourable workplace set-up, working conditions, working hours and working atmosphere.
- Qualification/development of decision-making competence – foster
capability to take responsibility and improve stress resilience.
- Individual health promotion – support a healthy lifestyle.
- Respectful company culture and social interaction – open,
transparent communication; culture of respectful feedback; creation of
social networks; and sympathetic interaction.
Its health strategy is guided by one main principle: “Respect and Results”.
DPDHL manages mental wellbeing at four levels, one of which is
described as “respectful culture and social interaction”. Employment is
good for health, and the company uses this inherent advantage to promote
healthy working environments: “Once we’ve focused on this we can then
move on to look at developing a health-promoting company culture by
focusing on relationships between executives and employees, and
strengthening relationships in teams,” Tautz adds.
The role of DPDHL’s OH team of 70 physicians is: to identify
therapeutic needs through referrals; work, if appropriate, with external
specialists to provide immediate help with acute needs; and develop
rehabilitation plans for those returning to work after time off due to
mental ill health.
Barclays’ “This is Me” campaign
Barclays launched a “This is Me” campaign in May 2014 as the central
plank of a year-long initiative on mental health at work. “This is Me”
was born out of the financial services company’s recognition that
depression and other manageable mental health conditions are major
issues in its broader mental health agenda.
“We’re starting by tackling stigma – often when someone calls in sick
with a mental health issue they tend to mask it with a physical
illness,” says Mark McLane, head of global diversity and inclusion at
Barclays. “This is Me” attempts to bring the conversation around mental
health into the workplace, giving all staff (including line managers)
the resources to tackle the issue. It also helps managers and employees
to understand depression better, for example, describing how the
condition can arise at different points in an individual’s life, or how
it can be something that they manage on an ongoing basis.
Barclays’ mental health initiative is based around an online portal,
open to all employees, which provides access to a set of resources from
external organisations specialising in mental health. It also,
crucially, gives access to a community of employees with an interest in a
particular area, enabling employees with a question to pitch it to an
appropriate colleague with relevant experience. Often, colleagues are
able to help each other by signposting additional wellness resources.
McLane thinks this is a “brilliant” approach as it solidifies
Barclays’ expectation that the stigma still attached to mental ill
health will fall, “but it also empowers colleagues to support each other
on depression and other mental health issues”. The community aspect of
“This is Me” does a great job, and it brings all Barclays’ other HR
policies on tackling stigma and supporting people with mental ill health
“to life”, he believes. Line managers are already using the online
community to assist them in supporting people in their teams with
depression, according to McLane.
Building line management capability
Workplace depression in Europe
One in 10 people have taken time off work because of depression,
according to a European-wide poll of 7,065 employees and managers
published in 2012. Other findings from the IDEA survey, which explored
the impact of depression on both organisations and individuals, include:
- An average of 36 working days are lost per episode of depression,
with the highest average occurring in Great Britain (44 days per
episode, on average).
- The highest rates of depression diagnoses were in Great Britain and the lowest in Italy.
- Only 20% of employees in France would tell their employer if they
were diagnosed with depression, compared with the average of 34%.
- Nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or
resources to deal with employees disclosing depression. Among those
managers who stated that they were supported, support from a medical
professional was the most frequently cited source (43% of those with any
support), followed by support from an HR department (30%).
- Awareness of the cognitive symptoms of depression is poor –
relatively low proportions of participants were able to identify
forgetfulness and indecisiveness as symptoms.
Source: Ipsos MORI, Impact of depression at work in Europe audit, final report
Boosting the confidence and capability of line managers to support
team members with depression is challenging, but also crucial to an
organisation’s success in reducing stigma around the issue and fostering
acceptance. All the organisations we spoke to recognise this, and have
introduced training and professional development modules covering mental
health. This management training covers areas such as initiating
sensitive conversations, managing confidentiality and making effective
referrals to specialists, including OH.
Advertising and media company Ogilvy & Mather, approaches
workplace depression as part of a wider mental health strategy. Julia
Ingall, the company’s talent management director for the UK division of
EAME, believes that there is insufficient understanding of depression in
the workplace, particularly among line managers, who often find
themselves in a difficult position. “They may not understand what
constitutes ‘depression’, or that it can include work-related aspects,
such as a loss of concentration or change in behaviour towards
colleagues. This can be quite scary for managers,” she suggests.
Ogilvy & Mather is working with consultant, Robertson Cooper, to
deliver resilience training across the organisation, starting with its
leadership level by building it into existing management programmes.
“The lines are blurred between work and home, often driven by
technology, and I worry that people do not get a break,” Ingall says.
Putting the training in place will help managers understand their own
resilience levels, how to build on their personal strengths in addition
to acknowledging weaker areas.
An assessment tool developed by Robertson Cooper, called
i-resilience, has been introduced. It will eventually produce data that
can be interpreted to develop action plans for individuals. “We’ve also
selected eight key HR people to undertake some ‘train the trainer’
programmes so they can understand the issues and roll these programmes
out,” Ingall adds.
DPDHL provides managers with evidence and data on the value of
managing mental health, explaining how their behaviour influences
employees and suggesting ways to minimise the impact of damaging
behaviour and maximise the positive. The company provides e-learning
resources for managers on leading on mental health issues, developed in
conjunction with a German university and the Ministry of Labour.
“We also started a programme of workshops for managers on preventing
depression and burnout in 2012, designed to boost their confidence in
handling these issues,” Tautz explains. The workshops operate alongside
other HR training activities and professional development plans. “The
latest development is a new training programme for senior managers
covering mental health at work,” he adds.
Employee involvement
Involving employees in developing initiatives on depression in the
workplace is a feature common to employers in the Target forum. DPDHL
established health working circles in each branch in 1997, including
representatives from Works Councils, OH physicians and health and safety
experts. “These circles explore how and where to address different
health topics, including many linked to mental health, such as conflict
management, burnout and stress,” Tautz notes.
Ogilvy & Mather is in the process of setting up a wellbeing forum
to work through issues affecting employee wellbeing: “The job of the
forum will be to gather feedback from local offices. We’ve also used
leadership groups to explore six pillars of wellbeing, including the
impact of client demands and our leaders’ clarity of vision, on employee
health,” Ingall adds.
One of the “really interesting” aspects of Barclays’ “This is Me”
campaign is that it is colleague driven, using the company’s established
employee network, Reach, according to McLane. A self-selecting network
of around 700 people with an interest in disability, Reach also
incorporates listening groups, which are formal focus groups of
employees who have self-identified as having a disability, including
ongoing mental health issues.
“These groups are asked for their views on gaps in the organisation’s
approach to diversity and inclusion, for example, how our reasonable
adjustments programme could be made better,” McLane explains. This helps
Barclays develop improvements, which have recently included the launch
of an intranet-based online catalogue of reasonable adjustments which
employees can quickly access without the need to go through an
application/procurement process. “We will also draw on employees’ own
stories as a part of our efforts to tackle stigma; for example, we’ve
started with six people telling their stories about managing their own
mental health problems whilst having successful careers.”
Evaluating interventions
Providing evidence for the effectiveness of workplace initiatives on
depression is the “biggest challenge”, according to Tautz. However, he
adds, there is sufficient global data around to demonstrate the need for
systematic health management, and DPDHL also uses its own employee
opinion surveys and feedback from training sessions for qualitative
evidence. “We also use validated tools such ICD10 to track the incidence
rates for different work-related conditions, in addition to analysing
our absence data.”
Barclays’ “This is Me” is currently a UK-based initiative, but the
company plans to roll it out to the bank’s operations in the Americas
and Africa during 2014: “This expansion will be one of the campaign’s
success metrics,” McLane explains. “We will also look at activity levels
within the community and, later on, will invite people to tell their
stories around the support it provides,” he adds.
Source: Evans-Lacko S and Knapp M, PLOS (2014). “Importance of social and
cultural factors for attitudes, disclosure and time off work for
depression: findings from a seven country European study on depression
in the workplace”.
Source: Evans-Lacko S and Knapp M, PLOS (2014). “Importance of social and
cultural factors for attitudes, disclosure and time off work for
depression: findings from a seven country European study on depression
in the workplace”.
