Everyone has a responsibility to protect the mental health of our society, including ourselves, and of our local communities. During the pandemic, many charity workers felt stressed, overwhelmed or burnt out. This poses a risk not only to charity operations, but also to the incredibly valuable work they are doing to serve our communities.
This is a universal problem that extends across workplaces, and it’s difficult for both charities and businesses to know how to best support and nurture workforces to protect their mental health. Although most people spend the majority of their time working, we are least likely to talk about our mental wellbeing whilst at work. Creating a positive environment at work will boost the ability to retain skilled employees, increase productivity and reduce financial losses.
‘Protecting and promoting good workplace mental health is a business imperative’
Through their investments, charities can help to push for progress in improving practices around workplace mental health. CCLA started to examine the subject of emotional wellbeing and mental illness at our investee companies in 2019. Since then, the pandemic swept across the globe, lending a greater level of urgency to the campaign. A combination of remote working, social isolation, quarantine, bereavement, and pending recession have had unprecedented mental health consequences for a great number of people. This is a unique time to address workplace mental health with no historical parallel from which to learn.
As long-term investors, we believe that protecting and promoting good workplace mental health is a business imperative, relevant not only to a company’s duty of care to its employees but also to its bottom line. We recognise the mutual benefit to investors, businesses, charities and society of taking action on mental ill-health in the workplace. Today, public and investor awareness of the importance of workplace mental health is growing, as is the moral and business case for improving it.
Mental health benchmarking for investors
CCLA has spent the past two years building the CCLA Corporate Mental Health Benchmark, which provides a window into how the world’s largest companies approach and manage workplace mental health. The benchmark is designed as an investor tool. It takes a ‘management systems framework’ approach, allowing us to evaluate the scope of leadership commitments, related policies, and workplace programmes in place at large businesses. The method ensures that we pay particular attention to the internal governance conditions necessary for changing corporate actions on workplace mental health. This initiative calls on companies to acknowledge workplace mental health as an important issue and report annually on progress.
Fully integrating mental health into business strategies and governance takes time, and so far, we have found that companies are at different stages of their journey. We want to encourage companies to improve over time and celebrate good practice, not stigmatise those who are just beginning. Positively, there is no shortage of willingness from companies to improve in their practices. Missing, is a clear framework for them to follow, and an assertive call to arms from investors. CCLA aims to fill this void.
Amy Browne is stewardship lead at CCLA Investment Management
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