Canadian HR Reporter

www.hrreporter.com 13 "They're unrealistic thinking that a one-off program is going to make a big impact on their benefits usage or on their absenteeism or on their engage- ment. It really is about making sure that you understand what are the sources of stress, or what are the issues that they're trying to address?" Employers should also shift their targets, says Gulseren, and focus on changing how leaders can help by offering courses on mental health awareness education, for example. This training can teach leaders how to recognize mental health issues among employees and how to respond to them. "Across multiple studies, they found that employees whose leaders received the training submitted fewer mental health disability claims. Improving lea ders' m en ta l hea lth litera c y meant improved work conditions for employees, and that's why they led to an increase in their mental health outcomes," she says. Rigor, creativity lead to better results So, what should HR be doing when thinking about implementing or trying out a new program for their workforce? that you care about the health of your employees, then you may very well find it worthwhile to invest in a program, even if it did not produce financial returns and so it's difficult to say whether the money is 'wasted.'" While most wellness offerings focus on improving employee health by changing their habits when it comes to nutrition and exercise, employers should also examine their own workplace practices to achieve similar results, says Gulseren. "Lifestyle programming tends to put the responsibility on the shoulders of employees and give the message that if you perform the right behaviours, you will get to the right result," she says. "However, many studies, including this one, show that employees can only do so much, and we need to improve the work and the workplace to improve the worker. We need to eliminate the common reasons for illnesses in the first place; if there is work overload or working in a toxic environment, teaching people how to exercise may not be that helpful." Perhaps a better descriptor of programs that don't work would be that they have "unrealistic" expectations, says Beuermann-King. " B e f o r e i n v e s t i n g s u b s t a n t i a l resources into a wellness program, I would ask a lot of questions of the well- ness vendor regarding the content of the program. I would ask for evidence regarding any prior evidence of evalua- tions of their programs," says Song. "I would also encourage HR folks to set up some type of evaluation that is as rigorous as possible as opposed to an answer that's potentially confounded or biased by selection or other forces," he says. And don't hesitate to be creative and open to new areas of wellness, says Gulseren. "We know from the literature that indi- vidualized coaching or mental health supports could be really effective and, unfortunately, many benefits pack- ages still don't offer psychotherapy. But besides wellness programs, HR depart- ments also have a very important role in developing healthy family policies. They can work to improve personal-leave poli- cies, harassment policies, flexible-work arrangements, and then they can make a huge impact in that." Find out from the workforce, through surveys and the like, just what might be helpful, says Beuermann-King. "In doing an assessment, [it's about] "Many studies show that employees can only do so much, and we need to improve the work and the workplace to improve the worker." Duygu Gulseren, York University making sure you ask the right questions, like 'What are the major concerns within your team? What are the things that are causing stress in your home life? What are the things that are making it difficult for you to take care of yourself and put self-care strategies in place?' When we ask the right questions, we get the right information that's going to help us to design a comprehensive workplace well- ness program." CHRR

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