One in four people are facing a mental health condition, and 80% of employees won’t seek treatment because of fear or shame. How does this affect your workplace? What can you do about it? May is Mental Health Awareness Month. It’s a great time to talk about mental health challenges, and how we can break the stigma around talking about them.
In 2015, we launched an initiative within TiER1 called Start the Conversation, aimed at helping people recognize how common place mental illness is and how it effects all of us. Start the Conversation was intended to encourage people within our company to have the courage to talk to friends, family, and others about mental illness as it is so prevalent in all of our lives.
By encouraging dialogue through this initiative, we hoped to impact our employees, helping them deal with something that we knew must be affecting them but was likely insufficiently addressed. Little did we know how much it would impact our culture.
Creating an environment where people can talk about mental health as though it’s a normal life challenge—like any other life challenge—has resulted in numerous stories of people being more comfortable and knowledgeable in seeking help for their family members, their friends, and themselves. This has ultimately made us a healthier organization in every sense of the word.
We also launched this program with you in mind. Our goal was to start the conversation at TiER1, and then give the program to other organizations, free of charge, to be shared with their employees—creating an even greater impact. Piloting within our own organization was just the start.
What is the Start the Conversation journey?
A safe and resilient workforce starts when we’re able to talk about what’s getting in the way of being our best selves.
TiER1 has partnered with mental health experts to create and iterate on an organizational experience that’s designed to break the stigma around mental health through culture and support.
The Start the Conversation initiative is a four-week journey to start the conversation about mental health and well-being at your company or organization. You can learn more about this nationally recognized program and request our Start the Conversation tool kit here.
Stop the Stigma
Our mission is to help you reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness and to encourage conversations about mental health in your families and communities.
Within TiER1, we often say that people don’t exist to serve organizations, but rather, organizations exist to serve people. Organizations broker value between two sets of customers: the ones that pay them and the ones they pay. If as organization leaders we truly want to do something to raise our impact on both, we owe it to everyone to do everything we can to stop the stigma, start the conversation, and help people address the challenge of mental illness that surrounds us every day.
All the resources TiER1 has produced are freely available to other organizations. If we can help you start your journey, reach out to us. But however you do it, make it a priority to support your people in their mental health challenges. It will change their lives and your organization for the better.
