Good morning!
Yesterday, Oct. 10, was World Mental Health Day, which is focused on mental health education, awareness, and advocacy.
One panel at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit took the day to examine the connection between mental well-being and employee engagement, with insight from Walmart, Accenture, Levi Strauss, and Etsy executives.
Levi Stauss added mental health questions to its employee engagement tracking—and ditched its employee assistance program.
The company incorporated mental health into employee engagement, adding mental well-being questions to its standard internal surveys. Employees answer questions about their workload, whether they can balance all tasks, and what else is happening in their lives. Tracy Layney, executive vice president and CHRO, said it’s also important for executives to discuss their mental health candidly.
“I talk pretty openly about my own challenges with mental health, and other leaders do too,” she said. “By doing that, we do destigmatize."
Levi Strauss also partnered with Lyra Health, a mental health services provider, instead of sticking with a traditional employee assistance program. With Lyra, employees get access to 17 sessions with a professional annually, a benefit the apparel company expanded to all global employees on Tuesday.
“All of our 20,000 employees, wherever they sit in the world, in places where there may be even less access to mental health resources than we have here in the States, have access to this,” said Layney.
Etsy collaborates with its mental health ERG.
“Our mental health ERG…is probably one of the more active ERGs that I've ever seen anywhere. And the conversations that happen on these calls, in these meetings, are extraordinary,” said CHRO Kim Seymour, adding that it helps her understand the expectations of her younger workers.
“We admire the fact that they will set their boundaries, and they're not playing around about it,” she said. Collaborating with ERGs to understand employee sentiment also helps the e-commerce company act on shared concerns and be transparent about how it's supporting employees based on acquired data. “I think that has been a game changer," said Seymour.
Walmart uses AiRCare to support at-risk employees.
The retail giant uses AiRCare, a mental and behavioral health platform, to help at-risk employees get help when needed. The platform uses privatized data to reach individuals with high-risk factors proactively.
“We've directly received notification of individuals that were literally ready to end their lives, that were contacted by a professional, that got into counseling,” says Donna Morris, Walmart’s executive vice president and chief people officer.
Accenture prioritizes four determinants of mental health at work.
Accenture’s focus on employee mental health is part of its “net better off” people strategy, where the professional services firm looks at four key factors:
–Whether employees are physically, emotionally, and financially well.
–Whether employees feel connected and have a sense of belonging.
–Whether employees think their daily work is purposeful.
–Whether employees are building market-relevant skills.
“If you can fire on all four of those dimensions, you unlock two-thirds of an individual's potential at work,” said Ellen Shook, Accenture’s chief leadership and human resources officer. But she also thinks executives should shift their perspective from mental health to mental wellness.
“If you could get ahead of the mental health issues that people are experiencing, you can really change the course of people's lives, [and] of company outcomes,” she added.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
