Research has long shown that improving results in any arena requires high levels of engagement from the people participating. The Rams can’t beat the Patriots if the team mentally sits on the sidelines during a game. Paul Thomas Anderson can’t make a blockbuster hit if the crew doesn’t buy in during filming. And your sales team certainly can’t hit its targets if they don’t care about the product or make enough calls. The same is true with mental health benefits: Organizations can’t achieve better mental health outcomes for their employees – and lower healthcare costs for everyone – if employees don’t engage with their mental health benefits.
The problem is, in recent decades, organizations all over have offered employees mental health benefits in the form of traditional employee assistance programs (EAPs). Yet, these traditional EAPs average a low 3% engagement rate, and only 20% of employees are typically aware that their employer has an EAP at all. Part of the low engagement has to do with the EAPs themselves. Many have clunky interfaces and outdated, non-inclusive resources. Plus, they’re primarily reactive, coming into play only after an employee has entered crisis mode.
Proactive EAPs, however, see significantly higher engagement and, thus, improved mental health outcomes. Journey Proactive EAP, for instance, receives an average of 30% or greater employee engagement across the board, coupled with better employee wellbeing, productivity, confidence, stress levels, and lower healthcare costs for employers. This higher engagement isn’t because the employees using them have significantly greater need for mental health support than others. Proactive EAPs see higher engagement because they’re built and implemented with a preventive, proactive approach that prioritizes consistent engagement.
In this article, we’ll discuss what consistent engagement can look like and what strategies organizations can use to achieve it.
What high engagement with proactive mental health benefits looks like
Regeneron, the biotechnology and pharmaceutical company, operates in 14 different countries around the globe with over 15,000 employees. Externally, the company focuses on creating medical breakthroughs to improve patients’ lives through innovation. Internally, however, they realized they weren’t seeing enough improvement in their own employees’ mental health or enough innovation from their traditional EAP. A majority of the Regeneron workforce wasn’t in crisis but still had real need of mental health support they simply weren’t getting. That was even truer for employees in countries for which their EAP didn’t have culturally relevant mental health resources.
In 2023, Regeneron implemented Journey Proactive EAP to solve this problem. Within one year, the company saw a 54% engagement rate with Journey’s mental health resources – 18x the average with traditional EAPs – and 62% of employees were aware of the Journey benefits, which is 3x the average. According to Meredith Marlin, Regeneron’s VP of Total Rewards, they considered the problem solved. “Journey has filled a big gap in our care continuum and our employees have really gravitated to the platform,” Marlin said.
It’s not just Regeneron that has seen drastic improvement in engagement levels using Journey Proactive EAP. Alorica, a customer experience solutions provider with over 100,000 employees in 20 countries, saw their previous 3% employee engagement rate climb to 30% within one year.
VaynerMedia experienced a similar transformation. With multigenerational employees scattered across 20 countries, the media corporation struggled with an extremely low 2% engagement rate with its previous traditional EAP. Within the first year of working with Journey, engagement rose to 32%, and awareness of the company’s mental health benefits, which had previously hovered around 20%, rose to 96%.
The question is: How? How was Journey able to boost engagement so much at these organizations? And how can other organizations do the same to improve mental health support for their workforces?
Structural necessities to enable high engagement and proactive mental health care
Journey employed several strategies with Regeneron, Alorica, and VaynerMedia – and every organization we’ve worked with – to improve employee engagement with their mental health benefits. We’ll share those below. But before applying any strategies, there are a few foundational elements necessary for any benefits program and its digital infrastructure to enable increased engagement.
Ease of use, functionality, and strong user design
The #1 way to ensure people use a tool or platform is to make it easy to do so. If employees can’t find the resources they need quickly, or have to navigate too many pages, they won’t use them. Whatever mental health benefits you provide, the platform they’re delivered through must be accessible to all employees at all times and should be easy to navigate.
Diverse, multilingual clinicians
Part of resources being accessible is making them representative of the people they are for. Make sure your mental health services and platforms incorporate clinicians from all identity groups, and have personnel and resources available in all employees’ primary languages and living locations. This helps ensure every one of your employees can see themselves in the mental health conversation and know they’ll be understood if they seek help.
Robust digital resources
An important part of accessibility is offering digital mental health resources tailored to different audiences and available at all times. This includes widely applicable resources on things like self-care habits, stress management, financial wellness, and building resilience. But it also means resources that speak to specific identities, circumstances, or life stages, such as Black mental wellness, becoming a new parent, coping with social and political unrest, and mental wellness for nurses. Having easily accessible, comprehensive digital resources is a key factor for preventing serious mental health conditions – most often, the resources solve issues before there’s a need to escalate an employee’s case to a clinician.
Diverse, multilingual clinicians
Finally, make sure your mental health services and platforms incorporate clinicians from all identity groups, and have personnel and resources available in all employees’ primary languages and living locations. This helps ensure every one of your employees can see themselves in the mental health conversation and know they’ll be understood if they seek help.
6 strategies to boost engagement with mental health benefits
With the foundational bases covered, here are 6 key strategies HR and benefits leaders can use to significantly bolster engagement with mental health benefits among your workforce:
- Provide clear EAP and mental health benefits onboarding sessions. Whether implementing a brand-new EAP and benefits program, or trying to improve engagement with your current program, make sure everyone in the organization knows exactly what their benefits are and how to access them. This means integrating mental health benefits into onboarding for new hires, but it’s also a good idea to host onboarding sessions for all employees a couple of times a year – and promote them heavily. This allows you to catch those employees who missed it before or those who haven’t yet taken advantage of their benefits and may need a refresher With Alorica, Journey hosted eight different onboarding sessions in the first few months after implementation, and they were able to reach 40,000 employees.
- Employ a consistent, focused communication strategy to keep mental health top of mind. Send daily emails with quick mental health tips, links to relevant digital content, and/or prompts for short, app-enabled mental health check-ins. Send monthly newsletters with more robust articles, coupled with toolkits tailored to your organization’s needs. Display physical posters about the mental health benefits in every office and primary team location, and refresh the posters to promote new initiatives.
- Integrate mental health benefits tools into the systems and interfaces your employees use every day. Beyond email, that means Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or whatever software is most used. Make it as easy as possible for them to click into the tool so they’re more likely to use it and can do so the moment they need support. For employees who spend less time on computers and more on their feet – in hospitality, construction, retail, and entertainment, for example – provide physical, site-specific tools like standalone tablets, digital kiosks, or posters with QR codes directing employees to mental health apps or resources. By providing tools that meet employees where they are, literally and metaphorically, organizations reduce barriers to engagement and make mental health support a natural part of the workday.
- Run customized campaigns around mental health concerns of specific regions, populations, times of year, geopolitical events, etc. Help more employees feel seen by creating campaigns – whether emails, newsletters, in-person events, Slack channels, or workshops – sharing mental health tips and tools unique to their circumstances, highlighting the resources available to them, and offering strategies to help. VaynerMedia saw great success with this strategy. “Navigating generational differences around mental health in the workplace can be tricky,” said the company’s Chief Heart Officer, Claude Silver. “We launched workshops that addressed specific generational concerns and created communication strategies around those concerns,” all sharing flexible support options so that everyone, regardless of age, could access help.
- Offer hands-on mental health training for HR and managers. Employees in these roles are key culture carriers in every organization. They also have the most frequent touchpoints with individual team members and, often, the greatest chance of catching signs of mental health concerns early and providing support when employees reach out. But doing that requires knowing what warning signs to look out for; how to foster open, affirming conversations about mental health and appropriately respond to concerns; and where to direct team members for additional help. Mental health training gives people these tools and builds awareness of the mental health benefits among those most likely and able to encourage their use Regeneron offered mental health training to all their managers as well as over 300 summer interns in an effort to educate and equip early-career professionals about the importance of proactive mental health care.
- Foster a deep collaboration with employee resource groups. Meet with them consistently and collaborate to build mental health programming relevant to their members. Partnering with ERGs can help give HR and benefits leaders a better understanding of what employees need most and the ways they can support them. It also allows employees to see and hear from their benefits leaders regularly, in meaningful and contextually significant ways Working with Journey, Regeneron’s benefits leaders held monthly planning calls with the ERGs for African American employees, Asian American and Pacific Islander employees, and LGBTQ+ employees to co-design mental health campaigns, events, and wellness initiatives recognizing and celebrating these communities during Black History Month, AAPI Heritage Month, and Pride Month.
Higher engagement, improved prevention, better mental health outcomes
Taken together, these strategies illustrate a simple truth: when mental health support is proactive, consistent, and culturally attuned, employees are far more likely to engage. And when engagement rises, so does the potential for meaningful prevention, better mental health outcomes, and lower healthcare costs across the board.
