By Aly Nesson, Director of People & Culture
When Mental Health Awareness Month rolls around, your team often looks to people and culture leaders, like me, for quick fixes. Think webinars on work-life balance, in-office massage sessions, listening sessions, a company-wide half-day off. These are all great ways to quickly and temporarily support your people. But long-term frameworks are more valuable than one-off buzzwords and events. Employee mental health is elevated when we empower our teams with the support and flexibility that meets their unique needs.
Part of my frustration with campaigns like this is that mental health, and its solutions, vary so much. What does it mean when we ask if an employee is “stressed” or “burned out?” How do we understand the many lived experiences, work stresses and personal commitments across our whole team?
For me, workforce mental health is not about using buzzwords and one-size-fits-all solutions. People and culture leaders – that’s “the HR folks” in more familiar terms – best support mental health when we give our team two key things: flexibility and support. Our goal should be to provide the tools and trust that our people need to drive their own journey, while coaching and supporting them through this process.
What it looks like in practice
“We give employees support and flexibility to work however works best for them.” It’s easy to put on a PowerPoint slide, but trickier to model day-to-day. But here are some guiding principles that we have found success with at Stratacomm.
Flexibility might mean allowing a team member to flex their workday around childcare commitments or health appointments – get your work done, but we won’t flip out if you close your laptop from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. to handle pickup.
Support could mean generous paid time off (PTO) policies that give our people the opportunity to unplug, recharge and focus on their passions. It could mean parental leave policies that provide the time to welcome a new child into the family.
Or maybe it’s saying, we know that client deadline kept you crazy busy last week; after that 60-hour rush, please take a breather and head out early. Or ensuring that benefits packages include coverage for mental health services so everyone can find their own form of support.
Not every person will use each of these benefits the same way. But this framework of flexibility and support can help each individual feel more empowered to balance their work life and personal life in a way that makes sense for them.
Making an impact on the work
To put it bluntly: How can you expect someone on your team to commit their full bandwidth to solving client challenges when they’re still mentally focused on a childcare problem or health concerns? That’s why I guide teams to focus on employee outcomes and work quality, not tracking the specific hours they’ve got hands on keyboards. So long as there’s clear communication and coordination to meet deadlines, this type of flexibility makes our team stronger partners for our clients.
We see that people who are empowered and supported show up in meetings more confidently, sharing more creative ideas. These are the folks who delight our clients with clear, responsive and insightful communication; the team members who enjoy the metal bandwidth to stay curious, engaged and connected to their work. When you don’t have those life-admin stressors clogging your mind, it’s easier to focus on the task at hand.
The leaders role in making it real
Flexibility and support do not sustain themselves. They start on a foundation of mutual trust and require leaders at every level to model them, consistently and visibly. That means being explicit about how mutual trust works: People are empowered to manage their time and energy, and in return, they communicate openly and ensure the work gets done. It is not a free pass; it is a professional compact.
If an early career employee perceives flexible policies as something that only comes with seniority, the framework has already failed. The most powerful signal a leader can send is not a policy document but acting upon those policies in their own work. It is signing off early on a Friday after a long week, blocking focus time, taking their child to baseball practice – or whatever else they need to do to balance their personal life and their work schedule.
Culture flows downhill. If we want people to trust the framework, we have to live it first. And that does not happen by accident. We invest in developing our managers and coaching them on how to approach flexibility not as a policy to enforce, but as a conversation to have. Regular, frank conversations at every level of the business ensure all team members know that asking for what they need is normal and encouraged.
This is not simply a May initiative
At Stratacomm, we see that this strategy helps keep our team more engaged, more insightful and more impactful to our clients’ business. We trust and empower them with benefit policies and flexible support that enable each person to find their own way of managing their day — flexible working arrangements, open PTO and comprehensive healthcare programs that ensure everyone can make their job work with their life. And because we invest in our managers, these are not just policies on paper.
When people are trusted with the flexibility and support to manage their whole lives, they show up more fully. They are more creative, more committed, more connected to the work. That’s so much more than just a people and culture strategy. It’s the foundation of our business strategy.
