Shifting the conversation on mental health and employee wellbeing

Many businesses want to do training on mental health, to make it part of the induction process or roll it out to tens of thousands of employees in multiple sites. But the problem is that the vast majority of mental health training solutions require onsite, day-long, classroom-based external sessions—a significant time and cost investment that often only the largest or most progressive companies can afford.

The growth of mental health first aiders has of course greatly expanded the numbers of workers who have contact with a trained professional, but this still does not solve the problem of how to get everyone in a company to understand the key issues and aspects of mental health.

VinciWorks’ approach to mental health awareness training

Online training for compliance has been used to great effect for many years, and VinciWorks has been at the forefront of e-learning in the fields of money laundering, bribery, sexual harassment, GDPR, and other compliance topics.

We believe mental health is as much of a compliance topic as any other subject our clients train on. We want to treat it as such, so just like how businesses roll out data protection or health and safety awareness courses and refresher courses on their Learning Management Systems, we’ve enabled mental health training to reach the masses through a new online, customisable course.

Our 20 minute e-learning course, Mental Health: Wellbeing at Work e-learning course takes users on an interactive journey to understand the basics and the law, how to take care of yourself, how to take care of others, and how to spot signs and symptoms. The course also includes a module for managers and a customisable section for businesses to highlight specific initiatives, policies and procedures.

We’ve utilised the latest in e-learning and experience design to provide an immersive and practical online learning experience. Further, we’ve used our innovative reporting tool, Omnitrack, to offer pre-built assessments that can be rolled out across an entire workforce. These include a personal stress risk assessment and work/life balance assessments that enable HR teams to identify individuals and teams at risk of stress, even before specific symptoms develop. HR teams and management teams can use that information to develop team-specific stress reduction action plans, such as providing extra resources to overstretched teams, reminding specific users of mental health procedures the company has in place, or simply taking extra time to ask how people are doing.

To change the culture on mental health, it cannot be seen as a parochial, specialised subject. It must be integrated into the compliance and training life of the company. By providing a succinct, useful, practical and interactive e-learning course on mental health, we are hopefully making a contribution to seeing mental health as a compliance topic along the lines of equality, diversity, data protection or health and safety. Neither mental health nor mental health training should have a stigma attached. To change the conversation, we need to make it part and parcel of compliance, which is why we’ve introduced this new and innovative mental health compliance course for all staff.