On February 4, we hosted an insightful webinar for and with HR leaders across Canada to share best practices in creating a valuable Workplace Mental Health Program. We were joined by executives from some of the leading organizations in Canada as they opened up about their personal experiences from challenges and triumphs. To help you to skip over their mistakes and smoothly implement their best practices, register to view the webcast with their advice here.
We know the pandemic has severely impacted the mental health of employees across the nation. The state of the traditional mental health care model in Canada shows us that employees need our help - they need increased access to effective therapy that's covered by their employers:
To support you as an HR professional, we've outlined the essential building blocks which can be used to implement a successful Workplace Mental Health Program:
By registering to watch the webcast, you will hear real stories from:
Celine Boffo, Vice President, Human Resources, Personal & Commercial Banking at RBC: “We want to make sure that sponsorship comes from all places and when employee resource groups emerge, we also encourage and sponsor them or fund them for what they want to do because sometimes the best advocates come from the most unexpected places and you don’t need to look for them, they will emerge – they want to share their stories, they want to move this forward and help their colleagues. Multi-faceted and multi-level sponsorship is making [our mental health programs] successful for us.”
Peter Neufeld, VP of Leadership at Maple Leaf Foods: "...HR is very much the enabler and less the face...culturally, we’re in a place right now where everyone is attuned to mental health. The piece of advice I would give in terms of what to look out for [when looking for the right people to speak to mental health initiatives] - employees are amazing at being able to detect authenticity. I think that’s a really critical element. When you have people who are going to be advocates, they have to be able to be authentic and vulnerable, and people just need to see the credibility and have the internal belief…that’s the essential element, even if a person can check every other box, this should be the piece that determines whether or not you should consider them and give them the profile to actually come forward.”
Brett Seifred, Partner at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP: “In terms of a grass roots network, once you tell your story, you will be astounded at the appetite and the need for healthy minds initiatives and support.”
Andrea Malloni, HR Manager at NVIDIA: "Some of the pulse surveys that we were conducting indicated that the primary challenges people were facing had little to do with access to technology or some of the pragmatic tactical access of keeping a business running - it was really about the feeling of disconnection and isolation that people were feeling. This forced us to think more creatively about what their needs really are at the time...needs were so diverse we had to offer multiple solutions for them, and our thinking has shifted over the past year."
For more information on how to build a transformational Workplace Mental Health Program, contact us today.