As budgets tighten across all industries, one key area remains protected: employee mental health. In fact, more than 60% of benefits leaders say it’s not just a priority but a higher priority in uncertain economic times. Organizations know that employee stress, already at unmatched levels, could get even worse—putting at risk not just the health of employees but the health of the entire organization.
With that in mind, benefits leaders aren’t cutting back; instead, according to our research, they’re leaning into their employees’ mental health needs. They’re doubling down on mental health benefits that drive higher engagement through better personalization and navigation.
In tight economic times, employers are adding preventive benefits such as Calm Business instead of relying exclusively on a reactive, crisis-oriented approach to employee mental health. With Calm Business, employers can proactively support the well-being of the entire workforce and help keep stress or anxiousness from escalating into more serious conditions and higher downstream costs.
Based on industry research and what we hear from active benefits leaders, three strategies have risen to the top:
- Gain a deeper understanding of how employees are feeling to make it possible to deliver stronger, more targeted mental health programs.
- Offer a more personalized support experience to drive higher engagement with mental health resources.
- Make it easier, through integration and streamlined navigation, for employees to find, access, and use the mental health resources available to them.
At Calm Business, we’ve been laser focused on meeting these needs, continuously evolving our solution to help HR benefits leaders more effectively tailor mental health benefits and integrate them into their workplace culture.
Here’s a preview of what you can expect to be able to do with Calm Business’s new advanced tools.
Keep your finger on the pulse of employees’ mental health needs to guide your programs
Organizations working to improve the employee experience commonly use quarterly employee surveys as part of a continuous listening strategy. But benefits leaders tell us they also need the ability to stay close to employee sentiment and feedback to ensure their mental health benefits evolve with employee needs.
Through the Calm Business dashboard, you can monitor sign-up and engagement rates (and compare yours to those of industry peers of similar size), see the content topics most used by the workforce, and view direct feedback from employees. You can also gain insight into how employees (on an aggregate, anonymous basis) are feeling over time using a repeatable, in-app employee sentiment survey.
With this insight, you’re poised to take action on the issues most relevant to your workforce. If an employee population is predominantly using Calm content focused on anxiousness, you can fine-tune your mental health programs to focus on anxiousness. If resilience is the most popular topic in Calm, you might explore conducting workshops to help employees build resilience.
Customers tell us that the ability to keep their finger on the pulse of employee sentiment will complement their existing employee surveys, allowing them to cross-reference results and drill down with questions designed to get actionable insights. In short, you’ll be able to identify trends, understand the workforce better, and know where to focus your mental health efforts.
Personalize your mental health support to drive higher engagement
Getting employees to understand and use their benefits is challenging for every benefits professional. Several strategies can boost employee engagement with benefits, but none is more important than personalization. When it comes to employee mental health, you need to provide the programs that truly resonate with your workforce. You need to deliver the content that employees will actually use.
That’s the idea behind Calm Business Pathways. Building on insights developed using the Employee Sentiment tool, our Pathways tool allows you to support your workforce’s specific mental health issues. It does so by guiding and educating employees through carefully curated collections of Calm content.
For instance, if your employees need help managing stress or burnout, you can set up the relevant pathway to deliver a set of practical stress-management tools to tackle burnout in the Calm app. Each pathway is time-bound and designed to teach a variety of techniques that employees can easily incorporate into their daily lives.
Our Calm Business customers are excited about the potential of Pathways to make an impact on employee well-being, as reflected in the thoughts of Scott Brown, Group Employee Experience Manager at ERM:
The new Calm Business Pathways feature is exciting to us as a global company with offices around the world. To support our employee community to optimize their mental health anywhere in the world, we can bring a curated set of culturally relevant, stress-focused content to that population and measure its impact. This personalized approach will help us drive engagement and improve employee well-being.
Make it easy for employees to find and use their mental health benefits by bringing benefits together and simplifying navigation
About 80% of organizations offer an employee assistance program (EAP), but the median utilization rate remains stuck around 3.5%. Many factors are at play, but often employees simply aren’t aware of their organization’s EAP or don’t know how to find it when they need it. It’s not surprising, therefore, that employers aren’t just working on improving employee benefits communication; they’re also asking for much simpler mental health benefits navigation.
That’s why we’ve integrated direct access to your organization’s EAP into the Calm app experience. We promote your EAP and your company’s branding within the app to make it easy for your employees to find and access the mental health resources they need when they need them. Because of Calm’s well-known brand and industry-leading engagement rates, the direct link to your EAP in the app will boost awareness and utilization.
At the same time, we’re integrating Calm Business into the day-to-day infrastructure of employees by integrating it with Zoom Meetings and other software commonly used daily by employees.
Evolving continuously together
Employers know that regardless of their industry, they’ll always be accountable for their organization’s health—physical, emotional, and mental. They know that traditional approaches to mental health, which tend to be reactive and crisis-oriented, aren’t enough. They’re adding preventive solutions to support the well-being of the entire workforce, and they’re working to get the most value out of them by offering a simpler, more personalized employee experience.
At Calm, we’re committed to innovating for the future, and the newest Calm Business tools we’ve rolled out are just the beginning.
For more information on proactively supporting employee mental health and well-being, check out our pricing or connect with a Calm specialist today.
