You're likely a thoughtful, bold leader who cares about your workplace culture, well-being and mental health. Also, you're well aware that improving the "mental fitness" or "workplace wellbeing" of your organization can contribute to more focused employees and productive colleagues.*

Perhaps you're familiar with the cold, hard statistics about disengaged employees. For example, Gallup reports:

• Out of 100 million Americans between 2015-2016, 1/3 are engaged at work, 16% are actively disengaged, and 51% are not engaged, but simply “there”.*
• In Canada, over 500,000 employees are unable to work on any given day of the year due to a mental health challenge.**
• In the UK, over 40% of long term absence among non-manual workers is caused by stress or mental illness.***

As the numbers suggest, employee engagement challenges are locally and globally pervasive.

Importantly, I'm sure you can also imagine the very real, human stories often hidden behind those cold statistics on mental and emotional wellness, work, and the workplace.

For example:

• Perhaps your otherwise star employee is unable to focus after learning how his son was just diagnosed on the autistic spectrum yesterday
• Maybe you've noticed how your most reliable coworker has been making all sorts of uncharacteristic mistakes since he learned his closest friend is scheduled for a risky surgery next week.
• Your team might be burnt-out from last week's 70hr work-week. Some of their partners and kids aren't happy with them for working those late nights and weekends. So, they're just not able to give you the energy or effort you need.

Of course, you might be seeing any number of other reasons for disengagement. Maybe what you're seeing play out include tales of bereavement, separation or divorce, family troubles at home, compassion fatigue and any number of possible concerns in one's wellbeing.

Depending on the mix of your colleague's openness to "speak-up" and how your organizational culture handles your employee's mental/emotional fitness--the overall challenge is this: perhaps there are some "systemic gaps" to be addressed.

Even the most "mental health savvy" workplaces are not 100% mentally and emotionally fireproof. There are just so many wheels to turn and only so much time in a day that it's sometimes difficult to sustain your best intentions and implementations.

While there has been great progress from the more thoughtful workplaces (e.g. offering flex days, some mental health accommodations in policy), you're also here because you also believe that much more can be done.

• You'd like to maximise the sustainability of mental fitness at work, and even grow it.
• You want to create habits, promote attitudes, and even practical systems to ensure your employees are given the best opportunity to succeed--for themselves and for your organization.

Whether you've learned about the importance of employee engagement and mental health from research reports, white papers, or from your own daily observations and interactions--your efforts to promote and support mental fitness at work are more important than ever, for a time such as this.

So what would it mean for you to discover and implement meaningful solutions for mental and emotional well-being in your workplace culture?