Every employee deserves access to mental health support. But access alone doesn’t guarantee someone will use it or that you’ll improve outcomes. Employees and organizations alike only benefit when employees engage with the support available to them – and whether they engage depends largely on whether that support feels relevant to their identity, culture, and life circumstances.
As National Minority Mental Health Awareness Month underscores, the identities and experiences that shape us – whether we’re Black or Brown, Mixed or white, Muslim or Christian, male or female, straight or gay, British or Bangladeshi – also shape our mental health, influencing how we recognize emotional struggles, if we feel comfortable asking for help, and what kind of support feels meaningful. If the support we have access to doesn’t speak to our experiences or engage us intentionally, it may not help us at all.
Inclusive mental health support aims to fix this. When a program is genuinely inclusive, it recognizes people’s differences without stereotyping because of them. It acknowledges that employees aren’t defined by a single aspect of their identity, but that their identities do shape how they engage with care as well as the kinds of care and outreach that may support them best. It discards the one-size-fits-all approach, knowing that offering equal access does not on its own produce equal outcomes. And it offers diverse, flexible, expansive support proactively, where inclusion is front of mind from the beginning, instead of an afterthought tacked on after issues arise.
The financial impacts possible with inclusive mental health are significant. According to the World Health Organization, depression and anxiety contribute to approximately 12 billion lost working days every year, costing the global economy an estimated $1 trillion annually in lost productivity. But with a proactive EAP that’s inclusive by design, organizations have saved an estimated $5,000 per employee per year in productivity and healthcare costs.
Rather than asking employees to accept a program designed for the masses, organizations aiming for truly inclusive mental health support implement programs designed to meet employees where they are.
How Identity and Culture Shape Employee Mental Health
No one’s mental health exists in a vacuum. The cultural environments we grow up in and the communities we belong to directly frame how we approach our mental wellbeing. Family expectations, religious beliefs, language, socioeconomic factors, discrimination history, and previous experiences with healthcare all play their roles, too. They affect how we talk about stress, whether we recognize symptoms of depression or anxiety, who we trust for support, and even whether seeking professional help feels acceptable at all.
This full-picture context is different for every one of us. Two employees having the same symptoms of anxiety may have completely different relationships with mental health care:
- A millennial employee may have grown up talking openly about emotions, making it easier to understand where mental health support could help them. An employee from the Baby Boomer generation, however, may come from a family where mental health was taboo, brushed under the rug, or even considered shameful to discuss.
- One employee may feel perfectly comfortable meeting with a therapist over video right away, having seen therapists several times throughout their life. Another who has never been to therapy may want to begin with self-guided resources before speaking with a clinician.
- A white employee on the West Coast may have had only positive experiences with therapy in the past, always able to find a clinician they could relate to. But a Latino employee in the rural Midwest may have never been able to find a clinician who reflected their identity, someone whom they could feel comfortable with.
Research consistently shows that even when people experience similar mental illnesses, they’re not equally likely to receive care. Utilization of mental health services remains significantly lower among many racial and ethnic minority groups, underscoring the importance of reducing barriers, proactively and purposefully engaging people of different groups, and providing inclusive, culturally responsive support.
How an organization approaches employees’ different contexts is often referred to as cultural competence. The more comprehensive and responsive their offerings, the greater their cultural competence. Increasingly, mental health care professionals also talk about cultural humility. While cultural competence focuses on understanding different backgrounds and experiences, cultural humility recognizes that no organization – or clinician for that matter – can fully understand another person’s lived experience. Instead, it emphasizes curiosity, listening, and continuously adapting support based on what people actually need. Rather than assuming what will resonate with employees for their mental health, HR teams practicing a truly inclusive approach recognize their limits and create opportunities to learn from employees what would be meaningful to them.
Inclusive Support on a Global Level
The challenge of genuine inclusion in workplace mental health benefits becomes even more complex for organizations operating across multiple countries. There, inclusion may start by translating resources into a new language and partnering with local counseling providers. But that’s not where it ends.
Mental health stigma varies dramatically between cultures. Communication styles differ. Family structures, healthcare systems, workplace expectations, and attitudes toward leadership all influence how employees experience mental wellbeing. An engagement campaign that resonates in New York may feel irrelevant, or even uncomfortable, in Singapore. Resources created for employees in Milan may not match the realities facing colleagues in São Paulo or Mumbai. Supporting a global workforce means creating custom, localized mental health strategies and materials that reflect the realities and cultural contexts of employees everywhere – and then engaging them in ways that match.
Journey was designed around this idea. While the platform serves employees in more than 190 countries and 100 languages, each employee’s experience of it is shaped by their context. Journey tailors communications, training materials, provider options, events, and engagement strategies to fit local cultures and realities in every country and region they support. Even the platform home page, featured content, and recommended resources are specific to each employee based on their context. Especially in countries and cultures where mental health stigma remains high, having and promoting tailored self-guided resources can help employees who would otherwise be too afraid to seek care find it in a way that feels less risky.
FactSet, one of Journey’s current partners, offers a good example. With employees spread across 19 countries, the B2B technology company recognized that conversations around mental health differed greatly for its employees throughout Asia-Pacific. Despite experiencing mental health conditions, Asian adults consistently have among the lowest rates of mental health service utilization in part because stigma remains high in the region. Journey came in to deliver training to employees across Asia about mental health matters, but did so using ideas and language that took the prevailing cultural stigma into account, focusing on understanding emotional triggers and supporting colleagues through difficult times rather than seeking therapy or taking mental health days.
Inclusive Mental Health Is Good for Business
Creating more inclusive mental health support is fundamentally about helping employees thrive, but it also makes organizations stronger.
First, inclusion helps employees feel understood, respected, and safe – qualities that increase the likelihood that they’ll utilize the mental health resources available and seek help early, reducing downstream healthcare costs from escalated conditions caught too late. It ultimately removes barriers that often prevent employees from engaging with care in the first place. In fact, with Journey’s inclusive design and engagement strategies driving preventive utilization, organizations have avoided up to 17 high-cost visits per at-risk employee per year.
Why? A sense of real inclusion at work builds connection, community, and belonging among employees. And as former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s “Framework for Workplace Mental Health & Well-Being” stated, connection, community, and belonging are essential components of a mentally healthy workplace. This is in no small part because employees who experience a genuine sense of belonging are more resilient during periods of stress and more likely to contribute fully and build stronger relationships with colleagues. Those outcomes not only reinforce themselves for individuals, but they also ripple throughout an organization.
Gallup’s research echoes that finding. Employees who feel their opinions matter and who work in environments where they experience belonging demonstrate higher engagement, improved performance, and lower turnover. Together, these lead to increased productivity and fewer safety incidents.
5 Characteristics of Truly Inclusive Mental Health Support
Organizations that offer truly inclusive support tend to share the following characteristics:
1. Universal accessibility—anytime, anywhere, for anyone.
Employees should be able to access care in the language they’re most comfortable speaking, through formats that fit their preferences, and at times that work with their schedules. Resources should also be easy to find, simple to navigate, and available before someone reaches a crisis.
Just as importantly, support should extend beyond counseling alone. Educational content, guided exercises, manager resources, self-assessments, and preventive tools that engage employees early and often all help them strengthen their mental wellbeing long before they need clinical care.
2. Ensure employees can see themselves reflected in their care.
Trust is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone will seek mental health support. Representation plays an important role in building that trust. Employees are often more comfortable engaging with care when they can connect with clinicians who understand their language, culture, identity, or experiences on a personal level.
Representation also extends beyond providers. The examples organizations and HR teams use, the stories they tell, the images they share, and the topics they prioritize all communicate who belongs and whose wellbeing matters. When they show a broad spectrum of people – all races, backgrounds, genders, identities, and concerns – every employee has the opportunity to see it’s them that belong, their wellbeing that matters.
3. Make support locally relevant.
A global mental health strategy should feel consistent in its purpose and availability while remaining flexible and intentional in its methods of delivery. Mental health awareness campaigns, training, educational resources, communications, and platform language and imagery should reflect local cultures, customs, and workplace realities. It should incorporate important holidays and dates, acknowledging different minority groups in each region. Organizations should also equip managers with the cultural awareness and practical skills to recognize when employees may be struggling, respond in ways that are appropriate for them, and point them to the most relevant resources that can provide the best help.
4. Personalize the experience.
Inclusion and personalization aren’t the same thing – but they’re powerful when they work together. An inclusive mental health strategy ensures every employee has access to support that speaks to them and creates specific engagement campaigns to proactively reach employees of all groups and experiences. Personalization goes a step further to recognize that even employees with similar backgrounds may benefit from different kinds of support at different points in their lives.
One employee may be navigating burnout after months of caregiving. Another may be adjusting to becoming a first-time manager. Someone else may be struggling with grief or raising a teenager. Sending a standardized email to all of them does none of them any good. Inclusive support means proactively sharing resources that address the specific situations they’re facing, when they’re most likely to benefit from them, in ways that make sense according to their culture.
Journey’s technology enables exactly this kind of support: Journey Signal™ AI intelligence engine identifies signals like employee mood and behavioral changes, new life events, and major local events and emergencies to help organizations recognize emerging mental health risks before they escalate. These insights trigger timely digital and human outreach so employees can engage with the right support at the right moment.
5. Invest in employee-led communities.
Feeling included breeds a sense of belonging, and vice versa. Organizations can strengthen both by supporting employee resource groups (ERGs), affinity groups, and other peer-led communities where people can build meaningful relationships around shared experiences or interests. These groups create opportunities for employees to learn from one another, find encouragement, and realize they aren’t navigating life’s challenges alone.
The Future of Workplace Mental Health Is Inclusive by Design
The most effective mental health strategies don’t treat inclusion as a standalone initiative, set forth in words and left alone thereafter. They recognize that inclusion is what drives employee engagement and makes mental health support effective in the first place. It’s part of the fabric that creates wellbeing for every single employee. You can’t offer the same resources to people in different circumstances and expect each of them to thrive equally. You must instead offer the same quality of resources, created with purposeful differences and promoted through intentionally unique engagement strategies, to provide equitable opportunity for every employee to thrive.
Ultimately, the future of workplace mental health is about much more than expanding access to care. It’s about creating support that employees recognize, trust, and actively choose to engage with. Because even the best mental health resources can’t improve wellbeing if they remain unused.
