Employee mental health challenges affect companies worldwide. Due to reduced productivity linked to anxiety and depression, for example, a total of 12 billion working days are lost globally every year. A recent survey with HR professionals across 10 Asian countries found that 82% of employees in this region still have significant mental strain. And across the ocean, UK employers still lose GBP 51 billion annually to poor mental health, with nearly half stemming from presenteeism, where employees are at work but are not fully functioning.

The stakes are particularly high for large multinational companies that operate across different regions. Not only are their organizational structures more complex, but their well-being strategies and programs must cater to a wide cross-section of global workers with different ethnic backgrounds, beliefs, value systems, attitudes about mental health, and more.

Despite real money spent on interventions from wellness apps to counseling services, chief human resources officers, regional heads of people and culture, and well-being leads at several multinationals have told me they’re not seeing enough uptake by their employees. In fact, some workplace mental health initiatives and trainings suffer from such low engagement that companies wind up not expanding or continuing them at all, and initial energy spent on the programs goes down the drain.

What’s stopping these companies’ mental health initiatives from engaging employees and creating real change?

My consulting experience with over 60 global and regional organizations has led me to conclude that the main pitfalls for mental health initiatives across cultures tend to be about three things.

First, many HR officers mistakenly attribute initiative failures to local cultural norms and stigma, assuming that individuals in some locations are simply unwilling to discuss mental health when, in fact, there’s another underlying issue at play. Second, when stigma does come into play, they wrongfully assume that silence and disengagement mean that attitudes of particular groups of employees are unchangeable.

‍

Read the full article here.