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Employers agree that mental health benefits will be essential to retaining talent in 2023. But getting employees to use them is a challenge to which CRM platform HubSpot can attest.
In January 2021, HubSpot launched a mental health benefit offering more than 7,000 employees access to the mental health platform Modern Health. Less than two years later, 53% of HubSpot’s staffers have signed up to work with a coach or therapist, and 67% actively engage in meditations via the platform. It’s a notable feat considering the national average for employee assistance program utilization sits below 10%.
HubSpot’s senior director of culture, Eimear Marrinan, says the key to adoption among the company’s employees started with laying the foundation for a culture that prioritized mental health and well-being.
“Something that’s core to HubSpot is normalizing and destigmatizing mental health and making sure our employees feel psychologically safe to talk about mental health in the workplace,” she says. Only then was it possible to roll out a full-scale mental health program with confidence that it would be well received.
HubSpot’s Modern Health partnership offers employees up to eight free coaching or therapy sessions annually. Coaching sessions are 30 minutes, while therapy sessions are about 50 minutes long. (If employees wish to continue beyond the free eight sessions, they must pay out of pocket.)
HubSpot would not disclose specific figures on the reduction of staff burnout but says it cut the percentage of employees who report burnout in half between the first quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2022.
Marrinan attributes the high employee utilization to transparency from HubSpot’s executive team. Its CEO Yamini Rangan and chief people officer, Katie Burke, have shared their experiences with the mental health platform and encouraged managers to similarly model this behavior for the teams by allowing them to take time off for sessions. The company also launched psychological safety training for managers to better support workers.
“Employees need to see their leaders talk about mental health, and they need to see their leaders be vulnerable and acknowledge when they’re also struggling,” Marrinan says. “That [helps] employees to feel like they actually can utilize the benefit.”
And after launching such benefits, she adds, leaders must constantly seek feedback and make changes to ensure high uptake.
Amber Burton
amber.burton@fortune.com
@amberbburton
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