Stop Treating Mental Health Like an HR Perk — Here's How to Make It Part of Your Culture

You can tell a lot about a company by how it helps its employees handle pressure. As a founder and business leader, I believe in proactively acknowledging that mental health is a critical part of a healthy culture.

That understanding doesn't come from a benefits list or an HR hotline. It's reflected in how people talk about stress, how early they ask for help (if they do at all) and how they support each other. While mental health-related benefits matter, education and promoting their value internally are what turn them into tools people actually use.

Join top CEOs, founders and operators at the Level Up conference to unlock strategies for scaling your business, boosting revenue and building sustainable success.

Employees will engage proactively with support and seek help if they are able to recognize early warning signs like chronic exhaustion, irritability, declining performance or isolation from teammates. They are also more likely to do so if they simply know the right language to describe what they are experiencing, and if they trust that being open about their struggles will not cost them credibility within your company.

You can support your employees by helping them develop the skills to recognize when they or their teammates are overloaded or when their teammates are, teaching them how to negotiate, discuss and hold boundaries when the scope of their work changes, and the skills to make clean hand-offs when they are tasked with too much.

Brief, skills-based training fits perfectly here. Video-based mental health training has helped companies of all sizes and across industries better equip their employees to protect, nurture and openly discuss mental well-being. These brief, skills-based sessions can normalize tough conversations, build emotional literacy and create a more prepared — not reactive — work environment.

Building trust through emotional literacy

Trust is rooted in teams having clarity of roles, a shared understanding of their goals and objectives, and empathy for the challenges that each person is facing. At the heart of this is emotional literacy, which is the ability to notice, make sense of, and respond to one another's cues. When people are transparently communicating and listening to one another with compassion, collaboration becomes more seamless.

Leaders don't need to be clinicians in order to make progress on this; they only need to prioritize checking in about workload and well-being, to truly listen and to act on what they hear. You can use simple check-in exercises in team meetings to gain visibility about capacity. Pair that with occasional workshops or facilitated dialogues to give managers a simple playbook for how and when to rebalance work, reset timelines or refer someone to support.

Make confidentiality and acceptance clear so employees know that expressing concern or seeking help will lead to helpful action, not penalties. When teams operate with that clarity and care, collaboration and performance improve, even in times of high pressure.

Education works best when it is integrated into a team's regular routines; it doesn't require building a formal Learning & Development department unless you are a larger company. Include mental health support skills in onboarding and leadership development so that they are learned just like any other job skill. Define the behaviors you expect and practice them regularly until they become second nature.

Related: Thinking of Mental Health Therapy? Go Through This Checklist.

Teach skills that protect engagement

17% percent of U.S. employees are actively disengaged at work. Disengagement often happens when people feel overwhelmed and alone, lowering their effort to just get through the week. Mental health education fills this gap by making well-being a clear, practical goal.

Teach teams to set limits that protect quality but avoid perfectionism. Show how prolonged stress impairs judgment and how to reset priorities when high workloads lead to diminishing returns. Encourage peer support. Lending a hand to cover for teammates during crunch times should be normalized. Younger employees in particular quickly notice culture cues like this and tend to join companies that prioritize well-being and leave those that don't. Meeting this standard is a recruitment and retention strategy.

Most managers haven't been trained on how to handle mental health topics as part of their role. As someone who leads a company that seeks to fill this void by providing workplace-specific mental health allyship training for management and staff, I have seen the impact of providing managers with applicable training and tools to play this vital support role. Train managers to ask questions that reveal a teammate's situation without intruding. Offer clear next steps for common issues like workload spikes or late nights. Make the referral path to professional support easy for managers so they don't hesitate in times of employee need.

With repetition of these first-line-of-defense support strategies for well-being, workplace confidence rises and teams feel steadier because everyone knows the playbook.

There are easy ways to track your company's progress in these areas. Run brief pulse checks on stress, psychological safety and perceived support. Measure your trends on retention, absenteeism and new hire referrals, as well as employee output metrics around project completion and quality. Watch for adoption signals like training participation and early outreach. And put extra focus on areas where the data indicates you are falling short.

Be clear and genuine that your goal is to support your people. It's important that measurement is used to take positive action and build trust, not create an uncomfortable sense of oversight.

Related: How to Support Employees' Mental Health as You Return to the Office

When education is used to build culture, performance follows

Teams that understand stress and communicate clearly produce better work and mo re consistently. While it's unrealistic to eliminate pressure or the need to put in extra hours during crunch times, it is realistic to build skills and trust that prevent burnout.

When targeted mental health education is added into the mix, benefits are used when needed, minor issues stay minor, and your reputation grows for performance and care. That's the kind of company high-potential people choose to join, stay with and recommend to others, which will make a difference as you grow your business.