'The best thing is to say, ‘We have a problem here and we're going to take action''
Should leadership worry about employee mental health before it’s an identifiable problem?
Many HR leaders may believe that being proactive about mental health in their organization will benefit the organization in the long run. Framing it in the lens of the return on investment (ROI) and productivity could be the key to getting things started with their executive teams, according to Cailey Brown, head of HR at Skip.
“In my experience, being proactive with employees’ mental health is always less expensive than being reactive,” says Brown. “So if we wait for a crisis to happen, that’s where the cost, both to the human and also financially to the organization, is so much higher — if you can prevent having those health challenges, whether it be physical or mental, we're better positioned in terms of the cost.”
Building a business case with metrics
Brown says she builds the case for proactive mental health initiatives with metrics executives already recognize. Turnover rates, sick time, short and long-term disability, and exit-survey feedback all feed into her team’s business cases, while engagement surveys add qualitative weight by highlighting whether people feel supported by their managers and whether benefits are actually usable in practice.
“I work really closely with a leadership team all the way up to our CEO, and they really understand that a healthy team is a high-performing team,” says Brown.
For HR leaders facing tighter scrutiny from finance, disability and benefit trends are a critical starting point, according to Faye Gagné, Manager of Employee Relations and Wellness at Henry Schein Canada. Gagné says she leans heavily on carrier data to ground the discussion, using objective measures that resonate with finance and operations.
“We have mainly looked at our disability leave information and benefits usage, such as [employee assistance program] utilization,” she says, adding that after introducing a more structured, prevention-oriented wellness program, “we have seen a nine per cent decrease in [mental health] claims, and also a 10-day decrease in average duration of a mental health claim.”
Shorter claims, increased productivity
Fewer disability claims and shorter duration on average of claims can be directly linked to an organization’s bottom line. A recent study in THE Social Science & Medicine journal using the 2022 Canadian Community Health Survey found that productivity losses climbed as self-reported health declined, with workers in poorer health reporting more days absent and more time working while unwell. Health status was “inversely related to productivity losses,” underscoring that mental and physical health are tightly bound to work output.
Brown also points to other indirect data that can put together a holistic picture of the ROI of proactive mental health programs by building out the full view of everything involved when someone goes on mental health leave.
“We have to be realistic about connecting dots directly all the time, as there are going to be a lot of elements in there,” she says. “But if you look at exit survey data, that'll give you a bit more of an indication, along with leaves of absence and the cost to hire someone who's potentially an interim to backfill that person — what's the cost of the recruitment that goes into that, and the cost of the knowledge that left, the time to train someone that's new and all of that?The cost of that person leaving is massive.”
Insurers are also warning that waiting until an employee is off on disability is the most expensive way to manage mental health risk. A 2025 Canada Life report found that while mental health conditions account for roughly 30 per cent of disability claims, they drive about 70 per cent of total disability-related costs, and claims tend to last longer than those for physical conditions.
The same report linked a prevention-focused strategy to measurable returns. Employers that implemented a formal mental health strategy saw a return of $1.62 for every dollar invested, rising to $2.18 after three years as programs and culture matured, according to Canada Life.
Leaders as multipliers of value
However, designing a proactive mental health program alone isn’t enough to lock in ROI — leadership behaviour and accountability often determine whether mental health strategies stick or quietly stall after launch, according to Brown. “Our leaders really own engagement survey results so that’s not an HR survey, it’s a leadership survey,” she says.
Results are broken down to team lead level so that managers can see the connection between daytoday culture, psychological safety, and outcomes such as engagement and sick time.
“There's a high level of ownership through every layer of the organization to own those results and to create a culture where people feel safe, valued, and connected to the why,” says Brown. “It permeates through every level of the organization.”
Gagné has embedded similar expectations through policy in her organization. She’s led the creation of a respectful workplace policy that defines the behaviours the company wants to encourage, rather than focusing only on what is prohibited.
“It was a conscious decision to create additional accountability for our leadership team, but then also empower our team to have good conversations with one another to grow that psychologically safe work environment,” she says. By managing more issues through this lens, her team is able to coach leaders and employees instead of defaulting to formal investigations, and to reinforce everyday habits that protect psychological health before problems arise, she adds.
Both Brown and Gagné believe that executive role-modelling is non-negotiable if organizations want to see a genuine shift to proactive mental health programs and the minimizing of costs before they get too big to handle.
“I think they need to role model it all, I think they need to take the time that they need to get better when they’re unwell,” says Brown. “They need to be humble and vulnerable, and to display those things every day and really talk about mental health and supporting our people.”
Why organizations can’t wait for a mental health crisis
For HR executives, the emerging research and practice point in the same direction: minimizing the cost of mental health means attention before it shows up as a spike in claims or a cluster of resignations.
Canadian norms on absenteeism and presenteeism show that health status and productivity are inseparable, while benefit and disability analyses consistently link mental health conditions to a disproportionate share of costs. The Canada Life analysis suggests that ROI improves as organizations sustain their efforts over multiple years, rather than treating mental health as a short-term campaign.
“If people are working in this type of environment that’s positive, supportive, and psychologically safe, I don't think that it needs a lot of data to indicate that,” says Gagné. “The organization would see an increase in productivity and, most likely, a decrease in disability and absenteeism, potentially — organizations should always be striving for that.”
Proactive care less expensive than reactive
For leaders still asking whether they really need to worry about mental health before it becomes a visible problem, inaction doesn’t keep costs down — it simply shifts them into buckets of lost productivity, longer leaves, and higher turnover, according to Brown. The organizations seeing the strongest ROI are those treating mental health as a core business metric today, not a crisis to be managed tomorrow.
For Brown, the key point is to get leadership into the mindset that proactive care is much less expensive than reactive.
“The best thing is to say, ‘We have a problem here and we're going to take action, we're going to support our team members and it might cost this much upfront,'” says Brown. “But the return that we're going to get is going to be tenfold, because our people will feel taken care of when it matters most.”
This article is part of our Monthly Spotlight series, which in March focuses on mental health. Full coverage can be found here.
