There is no denying that the past few years have been turbulent for the global workforce. With the threat of Covid-19 and the sudden introduction of work from home – for those able-, business teams across the world adapted fast and continued working – almost as normal.

While the world felt like it was falling apart, people everywhere had to keep it together. Only now, two years on, signs of burnout are starting to creep in, and mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety are sharply rising.

This not only affects the day-to-day life of millions of people but also the operation of businesses across the world, with employees too unwell to work.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Preventative care can stop people reaching a point of distress, but it needs to be widely available. When a person goes untreated, it often stems from two things: a lack of awareness and limited access to resources.

By offering business teams access to mental wellbeing services, both at a preventative and interventive level, organisations can provide a solution and help combat the ‘other’ global health crisis: mental health.

Why intervention and prevention are equally important?
Typically, wellbeing services provided to people are reactive. It’s normally only once a person is living with depression, for example, that they reach out for help. Generally, this is also the moment that an employer will intervene and offer support – either through time off work or a combination of time off and funded healthcare.

Before this point, in most workplace settings, there is minimal mental wellbeing care provided. However, with Lancet research recording a 25% increase in anxiety globally since the beginning of the pandemic, and the ever-rising numbers of mental health conditions, there has to be another way. And there is.

If organisations provide mental wellbeing services to employees, such as therapy, wellbeing courses, and guided meditation classes, workers can learn techniques that help them avoid that point of distress. Over time preventative care will reduce the number of people reaching that critical tipping point, contributing to a happier, healthier, and more productive workforce.

The mental wellbeing toolbox
Some may doubt how genuinely useful building a ‘mental wellbeing toolbox’ is, but this normally stems from a lack of mental health education.

Consider it like exercise – just as regular exercise contributes to better physical (and mental) health, lowering  your chance of disease, practices such as mindfulness, meditation, journaling, and therapy can reduce the chance of facing a mental health condition too.

It’s easiest to illustrate how helpful building a mental health toolbox is when explaining the technique in a different scenario. Imagine there is a local lake in which people consistently get into trouble when swimming – to the point that people need to be saved. While rescue teams could stay at the lake, catching people just before they drown, the true solution would be to figure out why people are struggling in the lake and introduce a measure that stops it altogether.

The people swimming represent employees, and the lake, work. Millions of employees are ‘drowning’ in mental health conditions, and the rates are not slowing down. Chronic stress, depression, and burnout are just a few conditions employees are battling every day.

So, instead of sending in the rescue teams, we need to find the cause – and stop it. And to do this, people must learn the techniques for healthy mental wellbeing. But first, we need to break down the barriers that prevent people from accessing care: awareness and resources.

The spectrum of Mental health
This is where employers can help: by making it standard practice to offer mental wellbeing services to business teams, organisations can radically improve the health of their staff. And if this happened across the globe, we could turn the sharp rise in anxiety and depression, into a sharp decline.

To understand the positive impact of providing both preventative and interventive mental wellbeing to the entire team, consider mental health on a spectrum. As an individual, our mental health fluctuates daily; however, most importantly, it will never be the same as our friends, family, or colleagues.

Not only will different treatments be needed for one person at various times in their life, but an entire workforce will need a wide range of wellbeing services to meet their varied needs.

For one person, speaking with a life coach, working on goals, and setting habits might help maintain healthy mental wellbeing.

Whereas for another, the difficult mental health days could be much more regular, and therefore they need immediate interventive care, such as therapy, time off, or even medication.

At the moment, people accessing mental wellbeing services are typically suffering with poor mental health and in need of immediate interventive care. The goal is for individuals to have access to support before they are in a crisis.

Look after your team, and they’ll look after your business
In every business, employees will have unique needs – it’s rare for employers to know what these are, and therefore, impossible to know which care to provide.

So, introduce mental wellbeing into your business as a standard, encourage daily wellbeing practices to become habits, and create a culture that celebrates caring for yourself as well as one another.

As rates of burnout, stress, anxiety and depression fall, you will have a happier and more productive team, able to thrive at work.

Mental health doesn’t have to be a global health crisis: the answer is right in front of us.