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The landscape of employee mental health as a workplace concern has undergone a remarkable revolution in just a few short years. HR and other workplace leaders spearhead this ongoing shift, centering mental health in benefits packages and employee assistance programs. This evolution continues to take shape in 2024 as new solutions and strategies emerge.
HR leaders who stay informed about changing employee needs and how they can be met through benefits offerings have a competitive edge in attracting and retaining top talent. They’re positioning their organizations as desirable places to work and creating a healthier and better-functioning workplace culture.
Benefits are differentiators
When employees are looking for their next place of employment or considering whether to stay in their current job, the full benefits picture is an essential factor. One recent employee survey found that four out of five employees believe mental health benefits are as significant as physical health benefits, while 81% actively look for workplaces that offer mental health benefits.
Along with attracting employees, organizational health and wellness are other upsides to focusing on quality benefits packages. Ensuring that the right mental health benefits are in place to support employee productivity and engagement lowers absenteeism and presenteeism, keeping companies healthy and running smoothly.
This focus on mental health has led to many emerging strategies, benefits, technologies, and solutions. As we embark on the new year, let’s consider three trends shaping employee benefits in the upcoming months: maximizing healthcare savings, addressing social determinants of health, and unifying benefit ecosystems.
Maximizing healthcare savings
The first trend, which will likely be central this year, involves maximizing healthcare savings, lowering health spend, and ensuring that mental health benefits are effective.
As mental health support remains at the nexus of employee well-being, there’s an increasing concern about return on investment (ROI), as inflation poses a challenge for workplace leaders. Understandably, companies want to ensure their mental health benefits spending shows results with both clinical outcomes and ROI.
Healthcare costs continue rising as inflation and healthcare spending are growing at the fastest rate in a decade. Simultaneously, there is an increasing demand for mental healthcare.
These circumstances have led to a dynamic where employees are asking for and using mental healthcare benefits at increasing levels while employers are trying to meet those needs and still keep spending under control.
Access and affordability go hand in hand
It’s often the case that when healthcare costs go up, employers and health plans may instinctively restrict access to mental healthcare to cut costs. But by driving better access to quality mental healthcare, it’s possible to address rising costs and maximize healthcare savings.
Untreated mental health conditions are proven to drive overall medical spending. If an individual has diabetes, cancer, or a heart condition, medical spend is two to three times higher for those individuals who also have an untreated mental health condition or substance use disorder.
So, what will drive quality mental healthcare in 2024?
Data-driven care is central to better clinical outcomes
If we know that treating mental health conditions and substance use disorders lowers overall health spend, then the care people receive must be effective. Access to care that doesn’t work won’t reduce health spend and hurts the individual needing help.
This is one area where data can be used to ensure better clinical outcomes in workplace mental health solutions through the following mechanics:
- Data-driven provider matching that takes social determinants of health into account
- The use of measurement-based care throughout treatment
- Using systems for better tracking of treatment outcomes
The success of these strategies can be measured by validating the ROI and clinical effectiveness of a mental health solution.
This leads us to the next trend, which involves addressing the social determinants of health in benefit solutions—a critical component of well-being that ensures employees’ basic needs are met.
Addressing the social determinants of health is foundational
Social determinants of health (SDOH) are nonmedical factors that affect health outcomes. They encompass the circumstances and environments in which people live. Put simply, is an individual able to get their daily needs met?
These include:
- Economic stability
- Education quality and access
- Healthcare access and quality
- Neighborhood and built environment
- Social and community context
It’s easy to assume that if someone’s employed, their basic needs are being met. The reality is grimmer.
Forty-five percent of U.S. adults across incomes, have at least one unmet need in the realm of food, housing, and/or transportation. The heaviest burden falls on the shoulders of Black, Hispanic, and LGBTQ+ individuals, who experience unmet basic needs at higher levels compared to the overall employee population.
Addressing the SDOH is a workplace concern.
How are SDOH related to workplace mental health?
Workplace stakeholders are beginning to recognize that the ability to fulfill basic needs affects how people function at work and their overall mental health and well-being.
An employee is much more likely to need costly and intensive physical and mental healthcare down the road if they are:
- Sleeping in their car
- Don’t have access to adequate or nutritious food
- Can’t afford medicine for a physical health condition
- Don’t have access to a therapist who can help them with a mental health condition
Ignoring SDOH can increase employee health spend
When people aren’t able to get their basic needs met, their mental health, physical health, and well-being suffer, as they are forced to delay care, seeking to prioritize food, housing, and other essentials. Consequently, they have worse overall health outcomes and are also:
- Over twice as likely to report poor physical health
- Over five times as likely to report mental health issues
- Twice as likely to report higher healthcare utilization
- Miss over six days of work in the past year
Previously, this causal relationship has rarely been acknowledged in mental and physical healthcare. Fortunately, this is beginning to change.
In the coming year, new technologies will help HR and workplace leaders access more data about SDOH regarding their employee populations, giving them insight into strategies for aligning benefits to address related health outcomes.
What can you offer to reduce the impact of SDOHs?
As a workplace leader, it’s essential to ask yourself how you can ensure workplace conditions don’t exacerbate an employee's ability to get their basic needs met or inadvertently make it more difficult to access mental and physical health care.
Consider these small steps:
- Assess the prevalence of unmet basic needs in your population via surveys, focus groups, and more
- Offer continuing education funds
- Consider student loan repayment support
- Promote retirement planning and budgeting services offered through existing vendors
- Explore opportunities to offer financial assistance, such as emergency rent, utility bill, or car payment relief
- Provide flexible paid time off
Unifying and integrating benefits ecosystems
Now that we’ve identified two ways benefits might evolve over the next year, let’s discuss the final trend.
HR and benefits leaders spend a lot of time identifying, implementing, and developing benefits programs. So, when employees don’t know that they exist or are frustrated with how structurally fragmented their benefits are, it becomes costly and disheartening for employers and employees alike.
One survey shows that over a third of employees (28%) are either unable to access or dissatisfied with their ability to access their benefits from a single platform.
In the next year, many employers are looking to streamline and better integrate benefits with the end goal of higher employee engagement. Employers will find that better engagement entails better clinical outcomes for mental health benefits. Employees can’t get help for mental health challenges if they aren’t engaging with care in the first place.
Bettering employee engagement and satisfaction
It’s frustrating for an employee to seek help for something they believe is covered in their benefits package and can’t gain access. At that point, they may be discouraged from using their benefits, and unhappy with their organization for allowing barriers to exist.
Many companies are moving toward unifying their benefits packages to encourage easy access and engagement. One example is using a single front door and seamless data-sharing between benefits.
Engagement leads to better mental health outcomes
There is clear data correlating the amount of time and effort an individual invests in obtaining care and whether they engage in care.
In other words, if someone has to make multiple phone calls and jump through hoops to find a therapist that’s covered under their benefit while also experiencing a mental health challenge, the likelihood that they end up entering care is significantly lower.
But if someone asks for help and gets it quickly without hurdling many barriers, they are more likely to enter care and follow through with a treatment plan, leading to better outcomes and lower overall health spend.
Communicating the value of mental health as an employee benefit
As conversations around employee benefit strategies for this year are taking place, HR leaders are in a position to convey the value of quality mental health benefits to stakeholders by foregrounding data.
Showing the ROI of addressing your employees’ mental health, the clinical outcomes, and the associated boost in workplace productivity, engagement, and retention builds a strong case for including a quality mental health solution in employee benefit packages.
There’s never a wrong time to invest in employee health and well-being, especially since this has a clear ROI for both organizational and employee health.
Explore the emerging 2024 mental health trends, spanning from the impact of technology and global strategies to family mental health support.
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