The corporate mental health alliance reshaping Australian workplaces

The Corporate Mental Health Alliance Australia is a group of leading businesses collaborating to create mentally healthy workplaces. This benefits employees, the wider population and national productivity.

Mental health is the shadow pandemic of our time. Some three million working Australians live with mental ill health or care for someone who does. Yet 70 per cent of employees don’t seek help and less than three per cent use an employee assistance program (EAP). Untreated mental health conditions lead to absenteeism, workers’ compensation claims and reduced productivity, costing Australian businesses about $13b every year.

The overall financial toll is far greater. “In 2020 the Productivity Commission estimated the cost of the impact of poor mental health to the Australian economy at large was more than $200b per annum,” says Steven Worrall, long-time Microsoft ANZ managing director, who in September joined Telstra as CEO of its specialist infrastructure arm, InfraCo. “That was in the early stages of the pandemic and I’d suggest it’s only become more pronounced.”

In 2020, Worrall was also part of a group of business leaders who brought their companies together to launch Corporate Mental Health Alliance Australia (CMHAA). Five years on, he remains its chair.

“Mental health is a massive issue in our communities, our families and our workplaces,” he says. “The workplace is a sliver of this conversation, but an important one, because we all see the implications of poor mental health in our workforce — stress, anxiety, burnout, all the way through to more pronounced mental health issues that one in four Australians are likely to experience at some stage in their lives.”

The work of the UK’s City Mental Health Alliance — which, since launching in 2012, has expanded to Singapore, Hong Kong and India — got Worrall’s attention. “I thought we should have one of those here,” he says. Conversations with the respective leaders of Coles, Woolworths, CommBank and others ensued.

“We decided to come together to see how we might share learnings and resources to raise the bar,” he says. “The alliance was set up to be expert-guided and business-led. While none of us are healthcare or mental health professionals, leaders have a vital role to play in creating the conditions for good workplaces — where these issues are discussed, or not, where compensations are made, or not, and where we work to better address these issues, or not.”

An alliance in action

Dr Kim Hamrosi became CEO of CMHAA in 2022,. It was her first foray into an NFP after a career that had included pharmacy, clinical research, health economics and several years with Deloitte, one of the alliance’s founding members.

“We work with HR, DEI and OH&S managers and people leaders, and have our senior group of CEOs and executives, some of whom sit on our board,” says Hamrosi. “We have a ‘fix the work, not the worker’ approach.”

Membership fees start at $10,000 a year and members commit to implementing a range of mental health initiatives across their organisation — and to reporting how they are tackling workplace issues. Sharing resources and data outside the alliance, particularly with SMEs, is a vital part of its aim to improve the mental health of 13 million working Australians.

“We have companies that have the privilege of a lot of resources,” says Hamrosi. “We have a few members-only events, but we make every resource possible publicly available on our website.”

“The CMHAA has grown to represent more than 500,000 working Australians, but we’re not about serving members alone,” says Worrall. “We know there are 45,000 NEDs out there. We’d love all of them to ask, ‘How are we going in this area?’ If the answer is, ‘We could do better’, maybe they can reach out to us.”

Path to productivity

While there are multiple mental-health stressors at play beyond the workplace — including cost-of-living, caring and family responsibilities — companies can support the wellbeing of their people in ways that can influence those external issues. “In organisations where the casual workforce is inevitable because of the nature of their job, how can you give people certainty around rostering?” asks Hamrosi. “That’s a wellbeing factor, because it improves flexibility, autonomy, job certainty and job security. It’s slow, but will impact positively on productivity.”

Coles, Woolworths and Bunnings are among CMHAA members with high numbers of casual workers. “Over the past two years, we’ve focused on a system for a high proportion of our store team members to get ‘desired hours’,” says Coles’ chief legal and safety officer David Brewster GAICD. “It’s about people getting the number of hours per week they would like to work, rather than having to travel long distances for short shifts. That’s been a successful program. The percentage who report they’re now getting their desired hours is high.”

To ensure such initiatives are working, the alliance collects high-quality data, including a biennial survey sent out to each member’s workforce, with 10,000 employees responding to the most recent. “We’re looking at factors that influence work, including burnout, stress, organisational and peer support,” says Hamrosi.

Worrall believes it’s Australia’s largest single workplace mental health survey. “It’s sent out at the same time with the same question set across multiple industries,” he says. “How does our health system need to adapt and respond to the changing realities of Australian life? This data will be an important tool for government and policymakers to leverage in years to come.”

Alliance members also continue their own employee surveys. Coles does so twice a year.

“Over the past four years, we’ve seen responses to statements such as ‘Coles believes in protecting people’s mental health’ have consistently gone up,” says Brewster. “That’s the result of our mental health initiatives rolled out to 120,000 people. Our 20,000 store and department managers all receive in-person training around mental health.”

As well as ensuring managers are better empowered to make decisions around their team’s mental health — such as the autonomy to make reasonable adjustments to roles — considered job design is fundamental to wellbeing and productivity. “Many of our organisations are focusing on work redesign, allowing job crafting for individuals and making sure job descriptions are done well in the beginning,” says Hamrosi.

This extends to employees in other sectors. “We have to manage workload, which means we have to manage job design and the configurations of our roles,” says Dorothy Hisgrove GAICD, national managing partner of people and inclusion at KPMG Australia. “Mental health investment correlates with productivity metrics.”

CMHAA’s Hitting the Limit report illustrates the link. “The productivity impacts across industry are significant,” says Julie Mitchell GAICD, chief general manager of commercial and personal injury at Allianz Australia. “And the insights and recommendations empower organisations to think about mental health not only through the social lens, but through the economic lens. When you’re trying to influence a board, senior executives, stakeholders or government, that information can really turn the dial.”