Kathy Pike Transcript: May 21, 2025
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:00:00):
Welcome to the first session of the National Press Foundation’s 2025 covering workplace mental health journalism training. 14 journalists from around the country will be hearing from experts on workplace wellbeing will help them add context and depth to coverage of key challenges faced by workers and companies. Today our keynote speakers expertise will set the proper tone for our journey. Kathy Pike is CEO of one mind, a nonprofit that leverages science to advance discovery, innovation, and workplace best practices to improve mental health. Kathy is also a professor of psychology at Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry and the Mailman School of Public Health. She founded the Columbia WHO Center for Global Mental Health, where she now directs the mental health work design lab. You can read her a full bio on our website, nationalpress.org. Kathy, thank you for joining us today and we are looking forward to sharing your insights into the future of workplace mental health.
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:01:19):
So by way of starting, I just want to say thank you. It’s really an honor and a pleasure to be here listening to all of your stories. I want to say that you are our essential partners in this work, and so I hope to share with you some ideas, some foundational principles as we think about workplace mental health, and also invite you to reach out to me and to further the conversations as we can. As I was listening to people’s self introductions, I also had two thoughts. One is that no matter what your beat is, there’s a mental health angle. It’s always as a clinical psychology, it’s always about mental health or there’s always a thread in a story around mental health. And the others that we each have are stories for why we are here. And in my case, my paternal uncle, uncle Henry lived with schizophrenia.
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He was diagnosed around the age of 20. And although my dad and mom tried to create a safe place for him, tried to address the issues, this is back in the late 1950s, they couldn’t manage to care for him and he wound up a ward of the state in New York and I would go with my dad when I was older. I would go with my dad on Sundays to visit him at Rockland State Psychiatric Institute. And I just watched him fade away because when you live in an institution for your life, especially decades ago, you basically languished. You were held, you were safe and dry, but there wasn’t much else to one’s life. And so I kept thinking, we’ve got to be able to do better than this. And on my mom’s side, there was significant depression and substance use.
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And I think for all of us on my mom’s side of the family and her family of origin, if we don’t know someone who has had some serious mental health issues, we probably do know it. We probably do know someone. We just don’t know that we know someone. So with that framing, I want to move to the story of workplace and emphasize the, I think somebody mentioned we spend more time at work in our waking hours than any other single activity. So our workplaces really matter when it comes to mental health and they matter in terms of addressing the mental health needs that we bring to work and they matter in terms of shaping our mental health. It’s a bi-directional relationship. So I’m going to share a little bit of background. I’m going to leave significant time for conversation and hope that we’ll be able to address the questions that you have as we go along.
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And let me just explain a little bit about how I got to One Mind and One Mind at work. I am a Columbia faculty member, have done work in workplace mental health throughout the course of my career. And what happened about 10 years ago, I would be called in to give talks in workplaces and could you give a lecture on stress and coping to our workforce? And so I was invited in to give this webinar to a very large global financial institution. And I said, sure. And I went in for a prep call. This was before we did everything on Zoom and I went in, it was going to be online, but I went in to meet with them to prep, and they said, the only catch is that you can’t say the word mental health. You can’t say mental health, you can’t say mental illness.
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It’s too pathologizing, it’s too alienating. It’s too troubling for people to hear those terms. You can talk about stress, you can talk about coping, but don’t say mental health or mental illness. So I give this talk online to their global workforce and COVID hits and the curtain gets pulled back. And about a few two years ago, I get called back in by the same organization to give another talk. And the same person is in this lead role as director of Wellbeing. And on her door, like big poster on her door says, feeling depressed, anxious, have any mental health concerns, want to talk? I’m a mental health ambassador. So my point is times have really changed and we’re all, I mean, it’s hard to find a workplace where they’re not talking about mental health. So I think the challenge now, and some of what you all said, the challenge and the opportunity now is to think about, so how do we advance this conversation?
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Because actually continuing to talk about mental health can absolutely advance our agenda or it can get us stuck in ways that aren’t helpful to advancing the agenda. We can talk about that. So One Mind at Work, the work that we do at One Mind is a nonprofit organization. We drive measurable impact on workforce mental health. So the goal here at One Mind at Work is to take good science, build best practices for real impact in the workplace. One of the major challenges today in workplaces is that we actually are now in a situation where workplaces are overwhelmed by point solutions around mental health and wellbeing, and it’s very difficult. I think somebody mentioned you want to be able to understand how to evaluate the apps and all that’s being offered. And with good data and good science, it’s workplaces are overwhelmed. Workplace leaders are overwhelmed right now.
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So our goal is to serve as a nonprofit that brings good science to inform best practices so that leaders can actually have the real impact that they hope to have. We do that with these four pillars, expertise. We have content area experts who are able to speak to workplace leaders and translate science so that it makes sense and can be implemented effectively within a workplace. We do a lot of educational work with workplace leaders. We host a series of programs all throughout the year for our members. Critically, we are invested in building data and measurement. And one of the things that I can tell you is that there’s a lot going on around workplace mental health where there’s very little data. And so people are spending a lot of time, a lot of resources, and they don’t necessarily have the data to be sure that what they’re doing or what they’re intending to do is having the impact they would hope.
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And then we build Community. One Mind at Work is a community. It’s a movement of organizations. We have about 150 organizations that are members of One Mind at Work and steadily growing. So why does it matter? What we can see from the data that are coming out is that about 15% of working age adults have a mental health condition. 59% of workers report having experienced negative mental health impacts due to work. The good news is that there’s still a significant aspiration and trust regarding workplaces that in fact, workplaces can be a place that can do better. So there’s this hopefulness that actually an opportunity for workplaces to do better. The cost is extraordinary, right? So one of the takeaways that I’ll share now and reinforce later is the most expensive strategy when it comes to workforce mental health is not doing anything. And the majority of organizations are focused in areas that are having much more limited return than they would hope. And we’ll talk about what the complexities of that are. And it really matters because mental health, your workforce mental health predicts a lot of significant factors for the health and success of an organization. So performance indicators like engagement, what we call the three R’s, recruitment, retention and reputation, voluntary turnover, overall, healthcare costs for a company, disability leave, performance and productivity and net promoter score are all impacted by the mental health and wellbeing of your workforce. So if you’re not paying attention to your workforce, your opportunity around performance in the workplace is dramatically handicapped.
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One of the big issues within the workforce right now is that most workplaces are over-focused on worker mental health individual solutions. What I mean by that is they want to buy some product or service that’s going to treat the individual clinical condition to change the mental health landscape in their workplace. It’s not going to work. And we feel very, very strongly that we need system solutions. There’s a proliferation of ad hoc solutions. So if you speak to anybody who runs people talent, hr, they’ll tell you every day they’re getting a dozen solicitations for some solution for their employees mental health. We also observe that there’s a real absence of guidance for business leaders. So with this proliferation of data around the ailing mental health of individual workers, there was this vacuum in terms of guidance for leadership. And that’s an area of focus that we’ve had.
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And the reason we believe this is so important is we have this garden metaphor. When you look at the data for workers and you see data where 59% are reporting negative mental health impacts, if your workers were your garden and the majority of your plants were wilting, you wouldn’t pick one up and say, what’s wrong with this plant? Right? And you wouldn’t try to take care of this one plant. You would understand that there’s something wrong with the conditions. Either the soil isn’t right or overwatering or under watering or too much sun or not enough sun, but you don’t look at the single plant and say, what’s wrong with this plant? And so that’s the shift that we need to make in the workplace. We need to adopt a systems approach within the workplace to have real impact and to see real change in terms of the worker mental health data.
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So I’m going to share with you, we built out the Mental Health at Work Index to help business leaders actually have the data they need to guide informed decisions. What we have in most organizations right now are very well intentioned professionals who often don’t have a mental health background. Mental health often falls under hr and lots of HR leaders are kind of retrofitted, right? They’re trying to catch up because they’re being asked to do a lot of health and wellness that’s not, wasn’t historically part of HR and has become more. So we want to build out this index because we want leaders leadership to have data to guide their decisions so that they spend their time, their employee time, their financial resources in ways that are going to have the greatest impact. Because I think one of the greatest risks right now, the image I have here is the baseball field.
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We’re up at bat. Mental health in the workplace has never had a turn at bat like we have right now, and we’ve got three swings. And if we start focusing on the wrong things or we don’t get decision makers the right data, we we’re going to strike out and we’re going to get put back in the dugout and we’re not going to get another turn for a while. So we need good data. We need to demonstrate that what we’re doing matters and we need to speak the language of decision makers within an organization so that holistically there’s alignment in the investment and this sustained investment in mental health.
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The mental health at work Index is a leadership tool. The framework emphasizing this continuum of mental health at work is a three Ps framework that we’ve built out. And the three Ps are protect, promote, and provide. When you look at workplaces, historically, the almost exclusive focus was on provide the provision of health services that then expanded to include mental health services. And it’s about how do we provide the right service treatment information to someone when they have a clinical need? A mental health need provision of the right care at the right time for the right person is essential. And we’ve got a huge problem in the country around not having enough care providers and not getting the right treatment to the right people at the right time. Having said that, we will never solve that problem until we also expand the discussion to talk about protection and promotion and going upstream.
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So what we mean when we talk about protect is what are you doing in the workplace to protect your workers’ mental health, to reduce exposure to negative harms, impacts or reduce the negative impact if you know that your workers are going to predictably be exposed to something that is very difficult, emotionally very difficult. For example, someone was talking about healthcare workers, right? If you know run a hospice and people, your workers are dealing really, really critical, difficult existential issues day after day that has a toll on people’s mental health. So you need to know and build your workplace in a way that reduces the risk that causes secondary mental health problems for your workforce. That’s the protection. Promotion is around building skills and systems that actually enable your workforce, your individuals and your systems to respond in a way that allows people and encourages people to flourish.
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What are the structures and systems, the aspects of work that enable individual workers and your systems to promote mental health. So it can be something around skills building, having difficult conversations or resilience, some understanding stress and resilience for an individual. But it also is about promoting building systems that promote mental health, like flexible work time so that people can start and stop work within a range of time to the extent possible so that you can have a workforce that has individuals who are taking care of young children or taking care of an older adult or have some other need that they need to address that they can do that with flexibility. So the three Ps framework of protect, promote, and provide are critical to integrate for real impact. Going back to provide, protect and promote are really your workplace culture. And if you don’t build a workplace culture where mental health is integrated in the system and where mental health is addressed from a position of protection and promotion, you will not have people access services in a timely way, right?
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So we know that most people when they come for clinical care have been struggling with symptoms for an average of seven years. So that’s a reflection of the environments in which we work. And if you work in an environment that is protecting mental health, that’s promoting skills, promoting the capacity to recognize when something’s not right with someone, de-stigmatizing conversations around mental health, we are going to do much better in terms of the provision and we’re going to reduce the mudslide that we have right now where we have so many people who need the provision of services that potentially wouldn’t need that if we were doing a better job upstream. So the three Ps is the framework that we work with around these 10 categories of workplace. So from building out a mental health strategy, what does an organization say about mental health in their workplace?
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Strategy, leadership, organizational culture, workforce involvement and engagement. You need leadership when it comes to mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. If you don’t have leadership support, it’s just not going to survive and have the real impact that you want. But it also can’t just be top down leadership. It has to also be partially driven by your workforce involvement and engagement, work, design and environment. How is your space structured? How is your workday structured? Are how transparent are your policies around promotion, around compensation, et cetera. Communication, mental health, communications, training specific to mental health, mental health resources and benefits, that’s your provision related employment practices. And then critically measuring, monitoring and reporting.
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The first and last, I want to just highlight these two bookends. Three out of four companies do not have a mental health strategy. So I think it was Yogi Berra who said, if you don’t know where you’re going, you might wind up someplace else. And when you don’t have a mental health strategy and you don’t know what problem you’re solving for, it’s very hard to know whether what you’re doing matters. Similarly, in terms of measuring, monitoring or reporting, the vast majority of organizations that are conducting programs focused on mental health and wellbeing are not measuring outcomes, and they don’t have data to support the time, the resources, the expenditure. If you don’t have the data, you are putting yourself in an extremely vulnerable position because workplaces today are under enormous pressures and decision makers are under enormous pressure around what they’re going to keep and what they’re going to cut. And if you don’t have data to demonstrate that what you’re doing matters and ally to the organization, you’re going to be at the front of the line for the chopping block. So these are two really critical pieces, big picture that matter and that make a huge difference in moving from ad hoc strategies of offering a workshop or offering a one-off opportunity to becoming very strategic and data-driven in terms of your work.
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So the index, just to give you a little bit of background, I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but just so you have an understanding, one of the things that’s really important about that I referenced and that is important as a distinguishing feature from all of the employee surveys is this is not an employee survey. We’ve got plenty of data on employees. This isn’t a leadership tool that is meant to provide science and data for leaders so that they can make informed decisions about a workforce mental health strategy. So it’s a facilitated self-assessment that reviews that has about half a dozen questions on each of these 10 categories that I just shared with you that gives them a sense of how they’re doing their performance in each of those categories compared to all the companies that have completed the assessment and compared to a standard of practice, a standard of excellence that’s been set by the data and by expert commission.
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So it also provides, it’s not just a data point, but from that data point, we’ve built an algorithm to help leaders then decide what are the top priorities, what three things can they do in the next six to nine months that will make the biggest difference in their workplace to address their priorities. So it really, you can’t boil the ocean, and this is one of those jobs. Workplace mental health is a process, right? It’s never done. It’s something that you’re going to continue to engage in over time. And so it’s about building the structures and systems and mindset to always be on a trajectory of growth and improvement. So we’ve got lots of advice, support and templates and structures for members to build out their mental health at work strategy. I’m going to share with you the findings from the 2024 data collection that was based on 91 organizations, about 2.5 million workers and organizations that range from less than a million to 350 billion revenue.
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So really an enormous range of organizations. As I mentioned, we’ve got, these are the yellow, here is the benchmark of the average of all of the participants. So you can see on a scale from zero to five, they’re in low, low, medium maturity, and the benchmark scores are this orange score. So most organizations have a fair way to go. What you’ll see is that mental health resources and benefits, to go back to the three Ps of protect, promote, provide. Almost all organizations are most mature on the provision category and why that might be interesting from a journalistic perspective. Why is that? It’s, it’s the area where workplace mental health started and it’s highly regulated. Organizations are required to provide certain benefits. So when there are regulations, it matters and companies do the things that they’re required to do. So for me, that’s a message and a message to organizations that don’t want lots more regulation, then they need to take it upon themselves to move things forward.
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Or we are going to see increased regulation around workforce mental health, and maybe that won’t be such a bad thing. We could discuss that. But you’ll see that’s the closest, that’s the one where companies are most mature. You’ll see the least mature, as I mentioned, are around leadership and mental health strategy. And then over here we’ve got measuring, monitoring, and reporting. So I’m going to highlight some of the findings about leadership. And one of the reasons I wanted to highlight the leadership findings and this report focused specifically on leadership is leadership, the CEO and people who have leadership roles by title, their support for workplace mental health matters a lot, but in truth, everyone within the workplace can play a leadership role. And so we want to talk about leadership from variety of angles in terms of impact on workforce mental health. So I mentioned this already about strategy in terms of leadership.
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One of the things that we’re seeing is that leadership for mental health is getting stuck in the C-suite, meaning that we’ve got a majority, vast majority of organizations, 86% have at least one executive with oversight or involvement in their workforce mental health strategy. So at the C-suite, you’ve got the vast majority have somebody who’s leading it, who’s sponsoring workforce mental health, and six in 10 leaders have established workforce mental health as a priority, 57% publicly acknowledging the link between mental health and performance. So you’ve got from 86% to 60%, there’s a drop in terms of what happens when we go from the C-suite to the managers, it’s there, but it’s dropping and it drops further. When you go to the larger workforce, what happens is the only 41% set an example. Anyone who’s a parent, when you become a parent and people say to you, they may not listen to you, but they’re always watching, it’s the same at work.
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And so only 41% of C-suite leaders are modeling good mental health behaviors. That’s a real problem. And it sets a culture that makes it very difficult then for the larger workforce to make decisions that support their mental health. And only one in four hold their direct reports accountable for the advancing mental health. So it’s not part of a review, it’s not part, I think somebody’s going to be speaking to you about bullying in the workforce. Organizations that have high performing bullies are, it’s a big problem if that’s allowed to continue. And in some organizations, because they’re high performing in one area, they’re allowed to behave in ways that actually have tremendously negative effects on the workforce. So the issue here is that we’ve got C-suite sign off and sponsorship, but translating that into real practice day in and day out is falling short work.
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It’s said that people accept a job and they quit a manager and managers are really, really important around workers’ mental health. The data are really clear. A recent study showed that your direct manager actually has maybe as much or more impact on your mental health than your partner, your domestic partner, your wife, husband, partner relationship. So figuring out how to provide the right training and the right opportunities for managers in supporting and conveying and the importance of workforce mental health, modeling healthy behaviors is really, really critical. 77% of organizations report that managers allow work time for participation in work, mental health activities, but fewer than one in three report that managers make mental health efforts personally meaningful to their team. So there’s a gap here. There’s a real opportunity here to grow manager understanding and support for anyone who’s doing work that is global or around culture and ethnicity or marginalized groups. This is also another place that’s really important because depending on who your workers are, the way in which you engage them around mental health is going to matter a lot. And managers need that. Education managers are key to meaningful mental health programs, but only 33% a third of managers actually get any feedback from their direct reports on how they’re doing related to mental health and wellbeing. A third tailor their practices to specific needs of the department and about a third, recognize employee participation in organizational mental health initiatives.
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So it’s there, but it’s really not integrated in a way that’s having optimal impact. The result is that they’re losing a huge opportunity because organizations with comprehensive manager training that incorporates workforce mental health see significant rises in their employee satisfaction and their employee engagement. So in a work environment where there are a lot of issues around managing stress and coping and uncertainty right now, having your manager better prepared to address the mental health needs of their teams will go a long way in terms of your workforce engagement. And when you’ve got higher engagement, you’ve got better performance.
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One area that has yet to really hit the radar for workplace mental health is board governance. And we’re in the process of finishing up a study looking at where boards, how boards address workforce mental health and where does it fit in to the governance responsibilities of a board. It’s a really interesting question because the young professionals or young workforce entering workplaces today expect that mental health and wellbeing will be part of discourse, will be part of how we do the work of work. Those 20 somethings are entering a workplace with expectations that are wildly different from the individuals who are sitting on the governing boards who are in their sixties or seventies or eighties, right? And expectations about what a workplace should look like, how you manage stress and coping, and what that means for the senior leaders is really critical because if you’re the CEO and you’re trying to respond to your workforce and you’re trying to hit high marks on those three Rs of recruitment, retention, and reputation, but your board doesn’t appreciate the role of mental health and wellbeing as a strategic imperative, you’re going to really be caught in a difficult position.
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So only one in 10 organizations actually formally define the board’s role in mental health strategy and only about a third share any real information about mental health and wellbeing in their reporting to the board. That’s a really interesting and huge gap for a governance responsibility. And when we think about both growth of an organization and risk in today’s world, so when you overlook workforce mental health, 41% of employers say the board is supportive when leadership raises these issues, but they’re not core to what the board is thinking about. And only 15% of boards are actively engaged on this topic. But where boards are actively engaged, you see that organizations where the boards are actively engaged 70%, they score 70% higher in overall program maturity on this index, which translates into higher performance on all of those performance indicators that I mentioned.
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So I’m going to stop here with just a few key takeaways that for me are top of mind as I think about the work you’re doing and helping message on this. Gone are the days where mental health, where workforce, mental health, mental health in the workplace is no longer a perk. It’s a strategic imperative, and the data are very clear. If we want resilient organizations, we need to build environments where mental health is protected and promoted, not just treated. We need to go upstream. We need to consider the three Ps framework to have real impact on the issues that we’re seeing across our society and across the globe. Today.
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As I said, every organization formally only one in four organizations has a real mental health strategy. But that means three out of four have a default mental health strategy, and that’s the most expensive strategy because when you don’t pay attention to mental health and wellbeing, the cost to your people and the cost to your organization are unknown risks to you and not calculated. But we can actually run models and demonstrate that the most expensive strategy is to not have an intentional strategy. If you just start to look at voluntary turnover or disability or presenteeism, it’s the most expensive strategy.
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Fourth point, we will never, never have enough clinicians to care for the mental health needs of our workforce. If we don’t go upstream, we will not solve this problem by training more clinicians. I’m a clinician, I’m a clinical psychologist. I think we could triple the number of clinical psychologists and social workers and marital and family therapists and psychiatrists, the solution. We do need more providers. We absolutely need more providers. But alone, that strategy will not address the needs that we have in our society. The real opportunity for us in terms of addressing workforce mental health is in addressing how we do the work of work, because work is not working for too many people.
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And the best organizations are moving from ad hoc, reactive, single point vendor solutions to systems approaches that are strategic and upstream. And lastly, I would say mental health. People talk about soft skills. If you ever try to change someone’s behavior, you know that that’s not soft, that’s not an easy thing to do. So I want to say that mental health, it’s not a soft issue, and it’s not. And addressing these issues aren’t soft skills. This really requires shifting our mindset to understand that in the world we live in today, our people, every business leader will tell you the greatest asset of our organization or our people, people’s health at the center of people’s health sits mental health. And addressing mental health will not only improve the health and wellbeing of your individual workforce members, but it will improve performance of an organization and it will actually result in public health shifts for our society.
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And so the real opportunity here is for us to make that shift from reactive ad hoc clinical focus, only clinical focus. We need to have one eye on clinical care for sure, because even if we go upstream and even if we address lots of issues upstream in terms of protection and promotion, people get sick and people have real mental health needs, and we need to have the right people available to provide the right care at the right time, but we’re going to be much better able to do that when we take a systems approach. So with that, I want to leave time for conversation, questions and discussion. Thank you.
Michelle Marchante/Miami Herald (00:44:21):
Yes. Hi. So it struck me that you talked about how the default is actually the most costly for businesses, but it makes me think in South Florida, the majority of businesses, like in Miami-Dade County are small businesses. They’re locally owned. So these businesses don’t have a lot of resources. Many of the employees have insurance through the Affordable Care Act or don’t have insurance. So I’m wondering, when you talk about looking at the data, how do these types of businesses, which are also majority Hispanic and black, which traditionally also avoid talking about mental health, that Sigma is very, very strong in these communities. What is your advice to get these businesses to care for these owners to care and resources for them to actually look at trying to get that solution in their own place?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:45:13):
About half of our members are organizations that would be considered small, medium enterprises. And your point is really, really critical to this larger discussion. One of the, and I fully agree with you and in response to that, one of our strategic objectives at one line at work is to create an opportunity for pooled resources for small medium enterprises because we think that may be a way to at least provide some of the opportunities that larger organizations can afford to smaller enterprises. So if the small business owner can somehow through this association actually have access pooled resources, it will make it more affordable and more standard and thereby get more services to that workforce, that workforce is the most vulnerable in lots of ways. And so we also need to think about public health approaches because those are also going to more likely be individuals that are the lower wage earners or in small restaurants or part-time so they don’t have insurance coverage.
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And we have a structure that works against being able to provide those resources for them. So one of the strategies that we’re exploring with a very large company is how to bring together resources for small medium enterprises so that to increase access. But there are other ways that small businesses have advantages because they know all their workers and they might be from a similar cultural background, so they recognize certain cues that others wouldn’t recognize or they know how to speak about a certain issue because we share a similar cultural background. So also just creating enough information that is culturally sensitive and really easy to use. Nobody has a lot of time, so it’s got to be really easy for the small business owners to use to share out to their workforce. And so that’s a key issue that we are actually hoping to tackle.
Rachel Jones/NPF (00:48:00):
Please introduce yourselves before you.
Aneri Pattani/KFF Health News (00:48:08):
Thank you. Hi, my name is Aneri. I’m a reporter for KFF Health News. I wanted to go back to something you said at the beginning of your talk about how there’s a lot more conversation about mental health, but we need to be moving that forward. And if we don’t, we risk getting stuck talking about it, and there can be negative ramifications from that. I’m wondering if you can just expand a little bit on what that means.
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:48:28):
I think it’s really important that we talk about the critical mental health issues in our society. There are certain tropes right now that I think aren’t helpful. So there’s a trope right now about how the younger members of the workforce are fragile and are overly anxious. And although it’s true that if you look generationally, you’ll see that young adults in the workforce are reporting higher degrees, more anxiety, more clinical symptoms of anxiety, depression, stress. That in part is because we’ve spent decades telling them to talk about their mental health. And so let’s not fool ourselves 50 years ago, the people who were new to a big organization were stressed and they were anxious and they just weren’t allowed to say anything. So I think we need to be careful about not over pathologizing because the risk then, and there is, I also think there is to some degree, every generation has a job in the story in telling the story.
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And this generation is amplifying the story, and there’s going to be an over amplification. There’s going to be some correction. So when you have normative degrees of stress or normative degrees of feeling anxious or a day where you feel sad, we need to make sure that we are correctly labeling, calling that feeling and not depressed. And we need to be sure that we’re calling. Feeling stressed is not a clinical condition. And so because the over pathologizing of what should be a normative range actually reduces resources for the people who really need the clinical care, and we should, we need to be strategic about how we validate what everyone’s experience is, but also create a comfort in a range of emotional experience and not pathologize that. So that’s a piece of what I’m saying. The other thing is that there’s a great quote from Socrates about what’s the matter with kids today?
(00:51:19):
And there’s a way in which I think we run a risk also in the mental health conversation today of older generations talking about young people who can’t spend any time away from their phones. And so I always ask them, I say, well, why? I’ll keep your phone for a few days and no, you can’t have my phone. So it’s something that’s an issue for all of us. So we should understand that these issues around technology, for example, are impacting all of our lives. This is not unique to the younger generation. We need to think about how to move forward constructively. So those are a few of the things that are important to me. And the other thing is, if you look around, if you, in the small business restaurant in Miami, you’re going to see some young people who are just working hard and making their way, and they’re totally switched on all the way up to the kids who are graduating from the finest universities and going to some prestigious training program. And I think we don’t want to lose track of actually the ways in which each generation is flourishing because those are the people who are going to help us solve the problems. And when you start to just talk about a whole generation that’s anxious, I actually don’t think it’s helpful. I
Julia Carpenter/Independent (00:52:52):
Thank you. Hi, I’m Julia Carpenter. I’m a freelance journalist. I wanted to ask if there is an industry or a sector that you see doing this well or at least better?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:53:14):
That’s a good question. There are, how would I put this? There are more resources in larger organizations, so they’re able to actually do things. They’re actually able to advance innovation in workplace mental health more readily than smaller organizations. Back to the point around small medium enterprises. And for me, having been in academia for so long and nonprofit organizations working with these very proud uber capitalist organizations, and when you grow up in academia and nonprofit organizations, you can be very suspect of the for-profit engines. But actually, I think nonprofits are doing among the worst because there’s so much stress and the economic resources are so limited that the issues around supporting people’s mental health and wellbeing are really personal. They become very personal. And so nonprofits do the best in terms of having a small culture of community and supporting one another, knowing each other and supporting.
(00:54:48):
But in terms of organizational capacity to really support long-term, it can be very difficult. So lots of small nonprofits talk a lot about very, very high turnover rates that are due to mental health and stress. Also, nonprofits wind up doing a lot of work that’s really hard, so people can only do it for a little while because they’re not getting paid well and they’re not getting the benefits and they don’t have the institutional supports. And so I would say that’s a group that’s really vulnerable and that I care a lot about. So I want to see what we can do for nonprofits and for other organizations that are doing it really well. The professional services organizations are this paradox of doing it really well, but also not quite yet addressing some of the more fundamentals of work. And so consulting groups that are very much tuned into the health and wellbeing of their people, but also struggle to put limits on travel and hours of work, but they’re very much about people. So they have a lot of innovative programs
Speaker 6 (00:56:12):
Pass it that way.
Kaela Roeder/Technical.ly (00:56:15):
Hi, I’m Kaela from technically the part where you talked about board involvement in mental health programs really stood out to, or the lack of involvement. And I was wondering if you have advice for A CEO who wants to implement things more, how to convince the board that it should be a priority?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:56:35):
So we’re just completing this study. We’ve got a few more interviews and then there’ll be a more formal, I could give you a fuller picture. But what we’re hearing from board members is that although most board members now believe they will say mental health matters, and they will say that they understand that mental health of the workforce contributes overall to the positive performance and productivity of the workplace. They don’t see it as a major board issue except in the context of risk. So I think that’s where we’re going to wind up putting it, that board serve a governing, have a governing function, and there they’re going to start by reducing risk exposure and then potentially investing further in other ways that they can promote mental health. But I think the foothold is going to be around risk.
Amira Sweilem/nj.com (00:57:55):
Thank you. Amira Sweilem, nj.com and the Star Ledger. I wanted to ask a question actually about training managers on being culturally sensitive. How do you see the current political climate and reversals on DEI policy in the workplace affecting workplaces wanting to give managers this training if at all?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (00:58:22):
The good news that I have observed at this point is that the vast majority of organizations that were committed to DEI are continuing their DEI work. They may be scrubbing their websites. They may not put it on the front page of their annual report, but all now we have a select group because these are organizations that have become members at One Mind at work. But even beyond that, in other settings, organizations that were committed to diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging are staying the course even if they’re doing so less publicly. And what I’ve heard, we have a board member at One Mind who actually was formerly had a senior CHRO role, excuse me. She wasn’t A-C-H-R-O, she was chief diversity equity inclusion role at a very, very large US global organization who lost her position because their company removed that role.
(00:59:46):
But so there are companies that are using it as a moment to, if they hadn’t really bought in, they’re using it for their organizational, whatever other strategies they have in place. But a lot of organizations are bringing the commitments around diversity and inclusion into health and wellbeing. And so I think chief wellness officers are going to be focused on inclusion because we know that when you’ve got an inclusive workforce, you’ve got a healthier workforce. When you’ve got a diverse workforce, you’ve got better decision making. Those data are really there. And so most organizations in our experience are holding on to these principles, even if they’re doing so quietly.
Amira Sweilem/nj.com (01:00:41):
Sorry, if I could just really quick follow up. Is that information available in the report or through studies
Kathy Pike/One Mind (01:00:50):
Or, we haven’t addressed it in this report, but I’m happy to follow up with you with some other information. Thank you so much.
Speaker 9 (01:00:55):
Yeah, and especially these organizations, when you’re talking about DEI that are partially or fully government funded, that’s the huge difference. I mean, I’m at Marshall University, we’ve got about 15,000 kids, and the rebranding has just gone on, but you get the kids at the L-G-T-B-Q Center or the kids at the African American Foundation where they peeled the name off and they’re just calling it the community organization or some such thing, just rebranding. And you go and talk to the people that are working in there, we’re still going to handle the mental health problems. We’re still going to do this. Although tough for ’em, it’s tough for an awful lot of ’em. It’s really in reporting. If you got somebody that’s either partially or fully government funded, that makes a huge difference. And you could do a dearth of stories on that. A couple real quick, when you talk about the percentages at the beginning of mental health impacts and conditions, are you talking about clinical? Are you talking about stress, depression, bipolar? Is that what you mean by impacts and conditions?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (01:01:58):
That’s right.
Randy Yohe/West Virginia Public Broadcasting (01:01:59):
Okay. And when you talk about the difference on overfocus on mental health and then adopting a system, I did a series of stories with our EMS department statewide in West Virginia because we got a new cabinet secretary, and for so long ambulance drivers and MS and EMTs had a suck it up attitude. It doesn’t work in 2025, and the mental stresses are incredible, and people were quitting, committing suicide, all this stuff. So they first tried the cooking cutter approach, let’s go with mental health RS app, or let’s use this little company that puts it out for five grand or something like that. And that worked in a way. But I think that when you’re talking about systems approach, I mean, what that CEO did was get a group of professionals that went out with somebody that was going to a six car pile up where there was nastiness all over the road. And I mean, it was blood and guts, if you will. And so is that what you mean by systems when you combine?
Kathy Pike/One Mind (01:03:07):
Yeah, so what I was saying, the over focus on, and don’t get me wrong, I’m going to say it again and again, and I hope that it will be appropriately quoted. I don’t want to say we need fewer clinicians or we don’t need more clinicians. We do, but that won’t solve the whole problem. It’s not just about more clinicians. The big solution is upstream and is in the protection and promotion. And so having new systems in place, and what I can tell you, it’s Randy, right? Randy, really exciting that. We are just embarking on a partnership with a police force. We’re embarking on a partnership with an ambulance and E-M-S-E-M-T Team Construction. These are places that tend to have been, had a culture where you just suck it up and you don’t talk about it. But these are places where there’s an enormous amount of movement and opportunity right now. It’s really exciting going back to places that are doing it well and not doing it well. I actually think there’s huge opportunity and there’s a lot of great energy around addressing mental health and wellbeing in these ambulance, EMT firefighters, police squads, what do we call them? Police force, responders forces, thank you. Police forces. There’s huge, there’s this shift that’s happening, and it’s a moment where there’s huge opportunity.
Rachel Jones/NPF (01:04:50):
We have gone over time, but I hope you all will use the opportunity to follow up with Dr. Pike on all of the data sets and research that they’ve done. And Kathy, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.
