To mark May’s Mental Health Awareness month, digital health startup Ginger has released its “2019 Workforce Attitudes Towards Behavioral Health Report“. This comes at a time when mental health conditions are affecting 1 in 5 U.S. adults (close to 50 million people), based on U.S. National Institutes of Health data. It also stands that approximately 1 in 25 adults in the U.S. (11.2 million people) experiences a serious mental illness in a given year that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities.
Focusing on the workplace, Ginger has conducted a survey of 1,200 U.S. full-time employees with full employer-provided benefits. The concluding results reveal that the U.S. workforce reveal that 48 percent of workers, male and female, have not gone into work due to stress; and that 50 percent of workers have missed at least one day of work due to stress within the last year. Within these two sets of statistics, Gen Z and millennials are identified as the groups more likely to miss work due to mental health challenges.
The survey also shows that many employees are motivated to seek help, but employers are lagging in delivering benefits that meet employee needs. This leads to many workers having to look elsewhere for support, with one-third of people stating they have paid for behavioral health care out-of-pocket because their benefits didn’t cover it. To address this, more can be done in terms of utilizing modern technology, with 74 percent of workers indicating that mobile access would increase their likelihood of using behavioral health benefits.
Increasingly employees are expecting the employer to have in place mental health support schemes. This is especially highlighted as something of importance by millennials. In fact, 91 percent of workers believe that their employer should care about their emotional health and 85 percent of workers note that behavioral health benefits are a key consideration when evaluating a new job opportunity.
In terms of employee benefits, behavioral health benefits outranked other progressive “perks,” including gym memberships, free meals or fun office environments, according to the survey. This demonstrates that behavioral health services are not just a “good-to-have offering,” but are becoming a pivotal benefit that can help to attract new millennial talent to companies.
