Mental Health-Related Leave Is Rising. It’s Time to Talk About Why.
May is Mental Health Awareness Month, a perfect time to talk about reducing one of HR's most predictable costs.
Most HR teams find out about a mental health-related leave the same way they always have: the request lands on someone’s desk. The workforce data saw it coming weeks ago.
May’s Mental Health Awareness Month is the right time to rethink how your organization handles leave. Executive attention lands on mental health questions. Budget conversations are live. It is the month to see the signals sooner to potentially address issues building up to a leave before the request happens.
7 signals show up in workforce data before they show up in claims.
meQ’s research, drawn from more than 200,000 employees, identifies seven signs that predict burnout:
- Poor sleep
- Stomach, head, and back aches
- Lack of work-life balance
- Low satisfaction with life
- Poor stress management
- Trouble managing emotions
- Low work engagement
Each one shows up in workforce data weeks or months before a leave request ever gets filed. Which means HR can see which groups of employees are heading toward leave in time to do something about it.
How one Fortune 50 company cut absences dramatically.
Resilience training is how HR turns those signals into fewer leaves. A Fortune 50 media and technology company put it to the test.
Its call centers had a problem: absenteeism was high and the usual programs were not working. EAP, yoga, and meditation had all been offered, and employees were not using them.
After rolling out meQ’s resilience training, the company ran a study against a matched control group. The meQ group saw 4 fewer absences per employee per year.
Across 12,000 employees, that adds up to $3 million in savings and a 20% lift in resilience scores.
Resilience training cuts the risk of unplanned absence.
Resilience is not a personality trait. It is a set of skills your people can learn. These skills help employees manage stress, handle emotions, and stay steady under pressure.
The business effect shows up in the numbers. Employees with low resilience are twice as likely to miss work in any 30-day window compared to their most-resilient peers. After rolling out meQ to build workforce resilience, another meQ customer cut disability leave by 25%.
Those reductions add up fast.
3 questions to bring to your next benefits review.
For HR leaders, the work is less about adding another benefit and more about connecting the data you already have to the outcomes you already own.
Three questions worth bringing to the meeting:
- Which groups of employees are showing the earliest signs of stress risk right now, and what do we know about them?
- How early can we see those signals before a leave request is filed?
- What support is reaching those employees, and what is it actually moving?
These are questions you can answer through predictive workforce intelligence.
What Mental Health Awareness Month should leave behind in May.
The version of Mental Health Awareness Month that matters is the one that gives HR leaders something to do with the awareness after the intranet banners come down.
That means moving from measuring problems after the fact to seeing them coming. It means catching the signals weeks before a leave request arrives. And it means matching those signals with resilience training that reaches the specific employees who need it.
The work might start in May, but it runs all year.
See the signals sooner.
meQ is the workforce intelligence and well-being platform that turns early signals into targeted resilience training, so fewer employees reach the point of mental health-related leave.
Talk to meQ to see how predictive workforce intelligence can change your leave numbers this year.
