The Mental Health Crisis Is a Workplace Problem Too
The CDC says that the United States is in a mental health crisis and that no single intervention will solve it. Improving health means improving the environments where people live, learn, work, and play. Work is one of those environments. Most adults spend more of their waking hours at work than almost anywhere else. Whether business executives think of it this way or not, organizations are one of the most influential environments adults experience every week.
Most workplace responses to the CDC’s warning have focused on access: mental and behavioral health counseling, employee assistance programs, wellness apps, mental health days, and better insurance coverage. Those health-focused programs are important, but access to care is not the same as creating conditions that reduce unnecessary harm at work in the first place.
Public health has always asked a different question than clinical care. Instead of waiting until someone is struggling, public health asks what conditions create health. That is also an organizational leadership question. What conditions at work create health and productivity?
When relationships at work are unclear, trust breaks down, and people spend energy managing uncertainty instead of doing their jobs. When systems are unpredictable or inequitable, people use behavioral strategies that are exhausting to everyone involved. For example, when information is clear as mud, people fill in the gaps with information they assume to be true. When workplace systems fail, people point fingers and blame each other because it is either cheaper or easier than fixing the core problem. Or when organizations fail their managers by providing training and development to “leaders,” most managers are left out, left behind, and frustrated with executives who just don’t seem to understand the realities at work any longer. None of that is a clinical problem. All of it is organizational.
This is one of the reasons we updated the Human Relations Matrix to its second edition, The Human Relations Matrix 2.0.
The Human Relations Matrix approaches organizational health through three interconnected domains: relationships, systems, and information. Healthier relationships support trust, accountability, and collaboration. More effective systems reduce unnecessary friction and confusion and create cooperative ways of working together. Clearer information allows people to make better decisions with less uncertainty. Together, those conditions reduce unnecessary stress while improving organizational functioning.
That framework does not treat illness, although it does apply the trauma-informed principles. Why? Because organizations have tremendous influence over the conditions people work in every day, those conditions either contribute to illness or promote health. Illness is an organizational expense. Health is a productivity driver. It really is that simple. Organizations can either contribute to unnecessary distress or intentionally create healthier environments where people and organizations perform at their best.
Employers are a big part of our health crisis in the United States. That is a fact, not an accusation. It is a recognition that executives are no longer responsible only for organizational performance. Executives are also responsible for the conditions under which that performance is expected to occur.
Healthy organizations are created by building relationships, systems, and information that allow people to thrive.
