1 in 4 people in the UK will struggle with their mental health at some point in their lives. That involves your employees, co-workers, interns, and everyone else around you. With mental health taking a big hit over the past year and a half since the pandemic came knocking, we should all be paying closer attention to how we can support our employees’ wellbeing.
How can nudge techniques and behavioural interventions help employees improve their mental health?
A common issue in preventing access to mental health support is poor choice architecture and information overload. This can cause an environment in which it’s difficult for employees to be proactive in caring for their own mental health and wellbeing.
But, this can be tackled by improving the way we present information to optimise and nudge employees towards support, such as improving access resources so it’s quick to understand and easy to take action.
Choice architecture is how choices are presented to individuals within a decision-making environment, such as an employee portal. The better we design these environments, the more these interventions can help improve the decisions that employees make.
Information overload is when we’re provided with too much information. Contrary to popular belief, giving someone too much information can lead to inertia, and a resistance to making positive decisions.
For instance, providing employees with 101 of different resource packs and links to third-party support groups sounds like a good idea at first. But, there’s now so much information that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, and the easiest thing for employees to do is to either defer their decision-making to a later date, or to do nothing at all. This can be costly, especially when trying to address mental health and wellbeing.
By simplifying what we present to employees in well designed environments, that take human behaviour into consideration, we can create spaces where employees can thrive.
How can you design your employee portal, office space (physical or even digital), or internal communications resources like newsletters to better present mental health services and support?
Interested in using behavioural science to understand your audiences better? Write to us at contact@lynn.global to get started on your behavioural insights journey.
This article was written by Benjamin Cresswell, Senior Campaign Manager at Lynn.
