Cost Effectiveness

Investing in a mentally healthy workplace has been shown to contribute to effective cost management of absenteeism, grievances, disability, retraining, and turnover, and improved productivity, retention, recruitment, and engagement.

The Government of Canada, Health Canada, has recently published a tool to assess the cost of workplace stress. This tool can be found at:

http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/ewh-semt/occup-travail/work-travail/_cost-cout/index-eng.php

Statistics on workplace mental health from:

Watson Wyatt 2007 Survey Report
"Staying at Work: Effective Presence at Work":

Cost

  • The average participating organization is still spending more than $10.5M a year in total absence claims

Stigma

  • Less than 20% of respondents say the stigma associated with mental illness is a priority they need to address
  • 26% of respondents say they lack the knowledge of how to deal with it appropriately

Long Term Disability

  • 72% of respondents ranked mental health conditions in their top three causes of long term disability

Short Term Disability

  • 82% of respondents ranked mental health conditions in their top three causes of short term disability

Measurement

  • 27% of respondents have no measures to evaluate the effectiveness of their Health and Prevention programs
  • 79% of respondents are not tracking the impact of Health and Prevention programs
  • 76% of respondents are not measuring the cost of lost productivity due to absenteeism and presenteeism
  • 59% of respondents are not tracking the impact of Health and Prevention programs on costs
  • 54% of respondents are not tracking the impact of Health and Prevention programs on employee health
  • 49% of respondents are not tracking the impact of Health and Prevention programs on employee satisfaction

Presenteeism

  • Only 15% of respondents say they are tracking presenteeism and just 18% say their managers are being trained to identify it

Prevention

  • Only 16% of respondents say they have a mental health risk screening program

The study involved 78 Canadian organizations representing more than 464,000 full-time Canadian employees in all major industry sectors