Mental Health

Last year Omada’s client portfolio grew by 50%. That growth was seen across all our offerings – team effectiveness, strategic alignment, executive coaching – and it has enabled us to work with companies in several new industry sectors. Happily we also undertook more pro bono work last year than any other, one of our sponsored charities Young Minds receiving some generous donations along the way from the beneficiaries of that work for which thank you.

In a 2019 comprehensive review by Plimsoll Analysis of the top 170+ UK companies in the executive coaching industry, Omada was also rated ‘strong’ and recognised as a ‘beacon of success’.

They are rewarding and exciting news to be able to share. But more rewarding still is the satisfaction of making a difference. It is humbling and very fulfilling to work with executives at the very top of their industries. But we’ve also noticed how increasingly stretched business leaders seem, indeed how much more stretched everyone seems.

Since 2008 business leaders have had to do things rather differently. They have had less access to funding and capital, increased regulation and, in the UK at least, three years working with the looming uncertainty of Brexit. The very definition of stress is uncertainty. Just think of a time when you were particularly stressed and we guarantee it will have been during a period of gross uncertainty for you personally.

In the UK in 2018/19 602,000 workers suffered from work related stress, depression or anxiety, with 12.8 million working days lost. 44% of those cases were attributed solely to unmanageable workload. Workload, lack of managerial support and organizational change are cited as the primary causative factors and as we know, those three factors often march together. Those in professional occupations, i.e. everyone reading this, show the highest prevalence of work-related stress, depression and anxiety at 2,150 cases per 100,000 workers. The total cost to the UK of poor mental health is estimated to be between £73 billion and £97 billion each year. (HSE work related stress, anxiety and depression statistics in Great Britain, 2019)

And it’s not just executives. Today’s average teenager has the same level of anxiety as the average US penitentiary inmate in the 1950s which is a damning statistic indeed.

So what can be done? The answer is a lot but the first step is encouraging a conversation about mental health and well-being in the workplace. One of our clients has a regular Monday morning slot on mental health and well-being with guest speakers and their own team members leading those sessions. That’s a smart investment if ever there was one.

Lord Dennis Stevenson and Paul Farmer led a review of mental health and employers in 2017. Unfortunately like most non-Brexit things over the last three years, it wasn’t deemed particularly newsworthy. But if you’re looking for other ideas to help improve the well-being of your team members or employees, you might like to check out their findings here.

And as always, you can find out more about Young Minds and other supported charity Chance to Shine here.