Mental Health Seen As Ultimate Productivity Weapon
Rise of Mental Disorders Becoming Major Business Issue
By Bill Wilkerson
If the World Federation for Mental Health didnt already exist, we would have to invent it.
Interested in every aspect of mental health, and with partners and supporters spread through over 100 countries, WFMH is poised to embark on an historic mission by bringing international business and health leaders together – on a common front – to attack mental illness globally.
For the next two years, the Federation has adopted Mental Health and Work as the theme for World Mental Health Day.
The initiative comes as we awake to what Harvard University and the World Bank have documented as an “unheralded crisis” in world mental health affecting the lives of more than a quarter of a trillion people.
This is the darker side of the global economy.
Former Canadian Finance Minister Michael Wilson, honorary chairman of the Business and Economic Roundtable on Mental Health headquartered in Canada, says the direct and indirect costs of mental disorders equate to about three per cent of his countrys gross domestic product and 13 per cent of the net annual profits of all Canadian companies.
Depression alone costs business in the churning North American economy about $60 billion (US) a year. Until recently, an unknown calculation.
The Chairman of the Roundtable, Tim Price, says simply “mental health is a business issue – and one we had better get our arms around.” He is right, certainly in terms of the amount of employee disability — the principal health cost business faces — that mental disorders cause.
Global Work Days Lost
There is growing awareness of certain attention-getting facts among world business leaders:
- Depression is one of the major sources of disability in the world;
- According to Harvard projections, depression and ischemic heart disease are projected to cause more workdays lost through disability and premature death than any other source of illness or injury;
- Current estimates suggest that mental disorders are costing businesses in North America about $80 billion (US) annually in lost productivity;
- Research is telling us that depression can hasten sudden death through heart attack. Workplace stress is common to both conditions;
- As a percentage of the global burden of disease, depression is growing faster than cardiovascular disease.
The Federation, by dedicating its World Mental Health Day public education program to “mental health and work” in 2000 and 2001 is putting the “unheralded crisis” front and center as a business issue in more than 100 countries.
The Federation has also declared its long-term goal of reducing the prevalence of mental disorders worldwide.
Why all this attention to mental health as a business issue? Whats changed from the days when mental health issues were locked behind closed doors? The answer is pretty well everything has changed. Starting with the world of business itself.
The New Machine Age
In the new economy – the global information economy – the search is on for new forms of productivity, value and profitability. This creates the right blend of incentives and conditions for a workplace which is changing with every new software package.
For a decade past – and probably 20 years to come – a transition is taking us from an industrial economy to an information economy. Globalization – driven by the revolution in micro-processing – is rewriting the rules of business competition.
The famed architect of modern productivity theory, Michael Porter – who wrote the 1985 landmark book, “Comparative Advantage,” states that managers see their principal challenge as retaining ultimate flexibility in response to changing market conditions.
The result is a blizzard of benchmarking, best practices, aggressive outsourcing, feverish nurturing of core competencies in business – a constant rush to beat the competition.
In this rush lie a number of “dangerous half-truths,” according to Dr. Porter. And they are leading more and more companies down paths of mutual self-destruction. They are certainly creating a work environment rife with uncertainty and sudden shifts in corporate direction and priorities.
Michael Porter calls this “hyper competition” – the quest for speed – doing business, as one TV commercial puts it, “at the speed of life.”
“Management tools have taken the place of strategy as business tries to improve on all fronts at once – dragging some companies, ironically, away from a viable competitive position not toward one, ” he says.
This relentless pursuit is creating turmoil for the human condition at work. Dr. Porter says the contest gets played “with no game clock and with the feeling that the goal line never gets closer but continues to recede further and further down field.”
These patterns of business behavior have mental health implications because they inflame a core value of peoples lives – work. Work is not just the job people go to – it is a community they belong to, a location where they meet and see friends, a place where they develop a sense of self and a strength of purpose in life.
In contrast, the loneliness of unemployment for people who have never been unemployed before deepens with the time that passes without work.
We see today the evaporation of job security, too much to do at once (a bigger question than job volume itself) and the birth of the ever-present, technology-driven 24-hour workday.
And paralleling this decade-long intensification of the workplace, society has become hurried, worried and rattled by change. Two great patterns have converged into one complex business issue:
- On the one hand, with an escalation in psychiatric disorders worldwide. This is evident in the rates of disability and premature death now beginning to dominate the global burden of disease.
- On the other hand, with a deepening dependence of global corporations on the minds rather than the backs and muscles of those who work for them. Mental capacity will do the “heavy lifting” in the information economy.
The mental capacity to do productive work is under unprecedented attack from a complicated network of social, economic, biological and genetic forces. “An impenetrable maze” as Harvard researchers have called it.
The stage is thus set for a global business agenda on mental health starting with the proposition that mental health is an important business productivity weapon in an intensely competitive data-based world economy.
In this environment, organizations that promote employee well-being enhance their own competitive position by promoting the mental output of skilled workers. That being true, it is easy to see that management practices – by definition – can either promote or impair emotional stability and functioning in the modern workforce.
In the information or knowledge-based workplace, emotional work hazards – like loss of control over ones job, haphazardly-altered priorities at work, office politics, uncertainty about former “givens” like planned retirement and home ownership – demand as much attention as physical plant and product safety.
Growing evidence tells us that psychosocial factors – such as jobs where performance expectations are high but rewards low – have more impact on employee health than lifestyle considerations. In fact, there are indications that job control – specifically the lack of it – may be as much a threat to the health of ones cardiovascular system as smoking.
Weightiest Cost Is Economic
The weightiest cost of mental illness is indirect and economic. Nearly two-thirds of the cost of depression takes the form of lowered productivity, replacement costs and disability payments.
The fact that mental illness is a business issue may seem a long unrecognized statement of the obvious – but not at the Chrysler Corporation in the United States. There, it has been reported that psychiatric admissions of Chrysler employees actually went down 12 per cent in one year and length of stay dropped 22 per cent.
The reason: earlier detection, better psychiatric health benefit programs and greater success among health care professionals in matching diagnosis and treatment methods.
From an employers perspective, depression is a nasty form of disability, characterized by longer duration and the lack of clinical instruments to really identify the stages of recovery and the pace of safely returning to work.
The stress invasion is hurting business.
The relationship between stress and employee performance is complex. Nonetheless, business people today can identify the indicators of a stressful environment by analyzing absenteeism and sick rates, excessive insurance premiums, employee satisfaction levels and turn-over rates.
Stress management strategies are becoming commonplace in business. Not all are effective. But some, including a post office in the United Kingdom which has realized a 60 per cent reduction in absenteeism and benefit costs in a two-year comparison, prove that they can and do work.
No Size Fits All
Methods to reduce employee stress are not available in “one size that fits all.” Variables range from the culture of the organization to the coping skills of the individuals in it. It is safe to say, though, that negative stressors multiply in the face of relentless change and pervasive uncertainty, among them:
- Unreasonably long hours, work overload and work underload alike;
- Role ambiguity, role conflict and unclear mandates;
- Undefined but (somehow) important work relationships that contribute little but distraction;
- Poor communication up and down the hierarchy and laterally among peers;
- Job insecurity intensified by unresponsive managers, mistrust, over-promotion, vicious office politics, and imbalance between life and work obligations.
Stress-related disability insurance claims are on the rise. Stress can trigger depressive episodes and conditions which, in turn, are the largest source of disability. Present day studies indicate that the effects of negative stress on human health have been underestimated and researchers are now looking at the connection between stress and the recovery rates of cancer victims.
The Healthy Organization
Some of the worlds largest corporations are investigating ways to optimize human health as a competitive advantage, aligning corporate self-interest with mental health issues.
The globalization of markets has made it absolutely imperative for firms to gain access to skilled people who are the source of 21st century innovation. There will be a colossal war for talent as the 21st century unfolds.
In this context, look for new metrics to value company assets outside of conventional methods – metrics which are pronouncing, in effect, the book value of human capacity.
We are entering the decade of organizational health.
Corporate climates that promote teamwork, open communications and profit-sharing with employees correlate with lower per-employee disability costs.
Profitability of Human Health
Work climate factors such as employees understanding of company goals and objectives and managements respect for their employees and their time, coupled with employee job satisfaction militate in favor of lower rates of disability, workplace accidents and absenteeism.
In the information economy, more than ever, corporate success will depend on resilient, well-adjusted, and motivated employees – those with skillsets and mindsets that will sustain the competitive edge of companies in the new economy of sustainable mental performance.
From these skillsets and mindsets flow “thought content” which is injected into products and services to differentiate one company from its competitors.
Business is passing from an industrial age which was defined by machines that could perform repetitive tasks better and faster than people, to an information age where machines depend on skilled people who are able to visualize the -next dimension” of customer value. This is the heartbeat of innovation.
Dollar Value of Mental Output
The dollar value of mental performance among “knowledge workers” in the information economy is exhibited day-in and day-out.
Through knowledge workers, the concept of mass customization has emerged as a staple of the new economy.
Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into new company high-tech stocks whose sole assets are the creative thinking power of the people behind those stocks.
In 1991, corporations, for the first time, have spent more money on information technology than industrial production equipment. Today, they spend more on telecommunications than oil.
This is the face of the economy of mental performance; the economy of innovation; the economy of “thought content” as the principal source of comparative advantage; the economy of mental health as a business asset.
And in that light, one of North Americas leading media executives, Paul V. Godfrey, CEO of Sun Media Corporation in Toronto, Ontario, calls upon business leaders everywhere to get acquainted with the facts – that is, how the costs of mental illness and the asset value of mental health affect the bottom-line of their business.
He says that business must have a mental health agenda and must:
- De-stress todays workplace;
- Modify the pressures placed on working people by technological change and the accelerating speed of life;
- Improve productivity through healthy management practices;
- Impress upon government that there are good economic reasons to increase research spending in mental health. Mental health is a research orphan getting less than two per cent of the total medical dollars in most nations;
- Design human resource policies aimed squarely at enhancing mental health in the workplace;
- Provide briefings for boards of directors stating the impact of mental health on business performance.
Individuals can take action too:
- Reduce the stockpiling of unnecessary e-mail, voice-mail and faxed messages on colleagues systems. This is a source of tremendous stress;
- See your own success as the outcome of your cooperation with others. This will cut into the preponderance of competitive office and workplace pressures;
- Recognize that stress is an individual thing. All of us must identify our own barometer of when and how stress affects us. Professional insight can help you calibrate this personal barometer, enabling you to work with your supervisor and co-workers to reduce the sources of stress most hurtful to you.
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Grateful acknowledgement is made to the author of this article, Mr. Bill Wilkerson, Special Advisor and Representative to International Business for the World Federation for Mental Health. Mr. Wilkerson, a business executive, is also President of the Business and Economic Roundtable On Mental Health based in Canada. He has collaborated with Dr. Edgardo Perez on “Mindsets, Mental Health: The Ultimate Productivity Weapon,” which is available in c/o Carol OBrian, tel: 519 824-1010 Ext. 599. Mr. Wilkerson can be reached at the Business Roundtable residence at GPC Communications in Toronto, Canada, tel: 416 598-0055 Ext. 271.