Data-Backed Employee Engagement Ideas for Remote Workers

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Cerebral Inc. Apr 14, 2022

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In a remote work environment, it can be a challenge to keep employees engaged in the company, and motivated to perform at their best level. There are, however, several tactics that have indicated higher employee engagement, backed by data-driven outcomes. More importantly, creating a strong employee engagement strategy will pay dividends for talent acquisition and retention in the highly competitive job market. In this blog, we highlight employee engagement ideas for remote workers for a stronger HR strategy and a significantly more motivated workforce.

Employee engagement statistics

The 2021 Conference Board Survey reported that mental health issues could affect up to 69% of your workforce, And 54% of employees feel their organization’s initiatives to support their well-being are not effective.

According to Gallup, 36% of US employees and 20% of global employees are engaged in their work and workplace. Looking at this statistic from another angle sheds light on the large percentage of disengaged employees, and how unfilled they are at their jobs.

With this in mind, it’s critical to think outside the box when creating a long-term, sustainable employee engagement strategy. Yes, happy hours, flexible schedules, and competitive pay are all important aspects of keeping a connection between remote workers and the company, but investing in mental health is often something that has gone unaddressed (partly due to stigma around mental health), and is a solution to many fundamental issues such as high turnover, job fulfillment, and low employee engagement.

Invest in your employees' mental health

Investing in your employees' mental health will not only improve employee engagement but also bring a big ROI back to the company. It’s a win-win. Luckily, largely due to the pandemic and the shift to remote work, organizations are starting to connect the relationship between mental healthcare, total healthcare spending, and worker productivity.

Employee mental health is a long-term investment

In our recently published whitepaper, Leveraging Data Science to Reimagine Mental Health Delivery, every dollar invested in mental health can result in as much as $7 of increased productivity and savings. In short, the current environment presents a unique opportunity for us to rethink how mental health can be optimally delivered to employees.

So, how can companies capitalize on this idea that investing in mental health can result in positive outcomes for both the employee’s engagement and job satisfaction, all while improving company performance? The answer is simple:

Quick access to high-quality mental health care

Speed to care

According to this Forbes article about the modern transition from employee assistance programs (EAPs) to comprehensive mental health solutions, the traditional mental healthcare model of EAP involved referral to outside partners, rather than the new approach which instantly connects patients to in-house clinicians equipped to help with an array of mental health needs.

To give you some perspective, the traditional time to care can be several months. In contrast, with a full-service like Cerebral, employees are connected to care within an average of 1-2 days.

Quality of care

As mentioned above, access to care is the first hurdle that modern mental health companies are addressing, but what sets these companies apart? The quality of care.

Here are two key indicators of high-quality care:

Diversity - When investing in a mental healthcare platform, consider the diversity of the population at the company. Consider all of the different backgrounds, cultures, sexual orientations, and ethnicities each employee has. Does the platform offer a diverse group of clinicians that connect with employees on a cultural level?
Care regimen - Be mindful of the diversity in care needed to provide high-quality care to each and every employee. A cookie-cutter approach is not the answer. Be sure there is flexibility in care regimens, unique to each individual’s needs for care and treatment from anxiety and depression, to bipolar disorder and schizophrenia.

Correlation between access to high-quality care and employee engagement

Data Exhibit

In 2022, we wanted to investigate the correlation between employee engagement and having access to high-quality care. To collect this data, we sent out a Work Productivity and Activity Impairment (WPAI) Survey to employees with access to Cerebal from the following periods of time:

0-90 days
90-180 days
180 days

From the data analysis, we can conclude that patients who spent over 6 months with Cerebral missed over 26% fewer hours from work due to health problems, and accomplished more during normal working hours.

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HR engagement ideas

It goes without being said, the shift to remote work has revolutionized access to the best talent on the market. Offering a remote or hybrid work model is the easiest way to attract and retain the best of the best talent. Beyond offering the flexibility of remote work, here are a few creative employee engagement program ideas including personal KPIs, benefits, and workplace norms.

Personal KPIs

Everyone has goals outside of the workplace, and hopefully, personal KPIs to track the milestones to accomplish those goals, whether that includes traveling, fitness, education, finance, etc. If your company wants to truly invest in your employees' satisfaction, keep an open conversation going about personal KPIs and aspirations and how they are meeting those goals. As a manager, you can help get them to where they want to be with a little extra encouragement.

Benefits

Benefits offered by the company should be strategically implemented with the wellness of employees at top of mind. Strong benefits enable the team to perform at the highest caliber. Two critical important offerings are:

Full coverage of benefits (i.e. insurance fully covered by employer)
Supportive parental leave

Simply put, wellness programs should acknowledge your employees as humans.

Holistic wellness programs

Holistic wellness programs do just that, by supporting physical and mental health and celebrating the vast diversity and unique needs of your organization. It’s time that companies take the initiative to crush any stigma around the importance of addressing mental health by intertwining mental health benefits into the wellness program and making it readily accessible for all employees.

Offering mental healthcare in addition to physical healthcare has proven to increase participation and overall satisfaction in the workforce.

Workplace norms

Workplace norms are a standard set of best practices and guiding principles for how employees are expected to conduct themselves in the workplace. For workplace norms to be effective, leaders must “walk the talk” and actively model the enforced norms.

For example, if the company offers unlimited PTO, but the manager of a team rarely takes any time off, the direct reports of that team will not feel comfortable taking the time they need. If the manager walks the talk and takes the initiative to set an example by taking time off, employees will feel empowered to take full advantage of the benefits and come back to work feeling more rested and ready to be fully present.

Ways of working

2-way communication

Communication is arguably the most powerful tool for a company’s success and continuous growth, but it also establishes a strong foundation for employees to express creativity, grow confidence, and ultimately feel empowered to take ownership of impactful projects for the company. All of these elements increase engagement within the workplace.

That’s why two-way communication from the top is so important for employee engagement. Employees who are consistently reminded that their opinions are valued and their concerns are addressed will feel a stronger sense of belonging and invest more of their time and effort into work.

Flexible work schedules

When employees are able to focus more on outcomes, rather than time, they are actually much more productive. In fact, this Forbes article tells us that workers with flexible schedules:

Have achieved more
Were sick less often
Worked longer hours
Were happier at work

Managers

One of the best investments you can make for your company is hiring top-tier managers. Managers set the tone for their direct reports, and it can have a huge impact on how individuals feel about their role and the company as a whole.

Managers play an extremely important role in the success and growth of their team, and it's a great idea to offer education programs for managers to learn effective management skills.

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Telehealth and the Power to Revolutionize Access to Mental health care

The mental health care system is in crisis – overwhelmed in the pandemic’s wake, with patients nationwide suffering from rising cases of anxiety, depression and other disorders. As a result, they are frequently left unable to find psychiatric and behavioral care. Telehealth companies like Cerebral are leading the way in addressing that need, but like any new innovation in health care, there is resistance. Traditional mental health providers feel threatened by this new model, which exponentially improves access for patients across the U.S. The fact is that there’s room and need for both traditional in-person care and telemedicine. Without both modalities, there’s no way we will make a dent in the acute challenges facing people from every walk of life and across the country. Telehealth isn’t a panacea, but it undoubtedly improves access and reduces the stigma associated with services that are out of reach for far too many people. Americans do not have adequate access to mental health care. Nearly one-third of Americans live in an area that has a shortage of mental health care professionals and 60 percent of all U.S. counties – including 80 percent of all rural counties – do not have a single psychiatrist. If patients are lucky enough to secure an appointment, they often have to wait months before their first session. However, it is typical for non-psychiatrists to treat mental illness. In conventional health care, 79 percent of antidepressants are prescribed by primary care doctors, so it’s a misconception to think that psychiatrists are prescribing the lion’s share in traditional settings. Nurse practitioners have a critical role to play. A key to improving access to care is to use experienced clinicians – often nurse practitioners – who play a vital role in the health care system, especially in underserved communities. As front-line clinicians, nurse practitioners are practiced hands in dealing with many aspects of mental health care, and Cerebral’s nurse practitioners are particularly well-equipped and supported to manage mental illnesses. Besides being carefully screened and interviewed before joining the Cerebral team, our nurse practitioners receive additional training and clinical support for the treatment of the psychiatric conditions we see most frequently, including depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, insomnia, and PTSD, among others. Should they want to discuss a challenging clinical situation, they can easily get in touch with a staff psychiatrist within minutes; this ‘second opinion’ line, which we call Curbside Consults, is an innovation that is available to our NPs 12 hours a day, 7 days a week They are well positioned to monitor and counsel patients throughout the process of initial evaluation, treatment, and recovery. A new study out this month (September 2022) found that the ranks of psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners (PMHNPs) are surging as caseloads increase. Notably, the number of PMHNPs who care for Medicare patients jumped 162 percent between 2011 and 2019, compared to a 6 percent decline in psychiatrists, which further underscores how important nurse practitioners are to match the burgeoning demand for care. By utilizing nurse practitioners and telehealth, we are democratizing access to care, and supporting patients who have historically been disenfranchised by the mental healthcare system. . Indeed, nearly 2/3 of Cerebral patients have never had the privilege of receiving mental health care prior to coming to Cerebral. We can only improve what we measure. The vast majority of mental health professionals do not measure clinical outcomes. This would be unacceptable in any other field of medicine: you wouldn’t trust a diabetes doctor who did not regularly check your labs in order to monitor the progression of the disease. Why should depression or anxiety disorders be treated so differently? Telehealth allows us to measure clinical outcomes using tools that are integrated within the care experience. By monitoring how patients are doing via surveys, we are able to better understand whether treatment plans are working, or whether adjustments need to be made. Overall, knowing how patients are doing helps us improve clinical quality and maintain patient safety. Collecting patient outcomes data at scale can also be a benefit. It can establish new baselines for what is most effective for different types of patients, paving the way for the kind of precision medicine approach that has transformed cancer care and other specialties. The bottom line is that the current mental health care system can’t improve access for desperate patients who desperately need care. While there have been missteps and necessary learnings along the way, telehealth has a vital role to play in this process. For tens of millions of Americans who need our help, their well being, and their lives, are on the line.

Sep 14, 2022

For Enterprise

How Telehealth Can Increase Access to Mental Healthcare for College Students

Millions of students are set to return to college campuses all over the country over the next few weeks. While this is an exciting time for many students, it can be a challenging one as well, and one that has only been complicated by the effects of the pandemic. According to the CDC, three out of four Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 now report poor mental health resulting from the pandemic. This is among a population that is already more prone to mental health issues, with significantly greater portions of young adults in college reporting struggling with conditions such as anxiety and depression than their unenrolled peers. For example, a recent survey conducted by Fortune found that 43% of college students report struggling with anxiety and 33% report struggling with depression, compared to 29% and 27%, respectively, of US adults in general. Suicide and suicidal ideation rates are also especially high in college students: according to the National College Health Risk Behavior Survey, 10.3% of respondents reported seriously considering attempting suicide, 6.7% had made a suicide plan, and 1.5% reported they had attempted suicide one or more times in the 12 months preceding the survey. The good news is that many students suffering from these conditions see the value in seeking support from mental health care providers. According to a recent survey, 60% of prospective college students now say that mental health services are a very important factor in their search for a university, a statistic that has jumped significantly in the wake of the pandemic. University presidents and leadership also recognize the need: according to the American Counsel on Education, 68% of university presidents view student body mental health as one of their most pressing issues. The bad news is that, despite that awareness, many universities struggled for years to adequately meet that demand, making access challenging for students and creating barriers to care for many. The reason for this gap is largely due to resourcing issues. Most schools only offer in-person counseling options, and there are simply not enough credentialed providers to go around. Colleges have attempted to address this in the past by triaging patients through a “stepped care” model, under which students initially receive the least resource-intensive form of care and are only allowed a more fulsome approach if it is deemed necessary. Other schools have capped the number of sessions an individual can schedule with a provider in an attempt to free up appointment time. Either way, it is clear that there are not enough traditional mental healthcare resources to meet the needs of America’s college students. This is where telehealth and Cerebral come in. As a telemental health care provider, Cerebral can help plug the resourcing gaps that many colleges are experiencing. Cerebral provides students suffering from mental health issues with the ability to book an appointment with a provider within days, alleviating some of the historically lengthy wait times for college counseling services. Cerebral is also able to quickly adapt to a patient’s needs, allowing students to increase or decrease their care as needed and without restrictions. Furthermore, students can now receive care in the comfort and privacy of their dorm, which will lower the threshold for seeking care. Some students find it intimidating or shameful to walk into the counseling centers. We already actively partner with a number of universities to offer this kind of hybrid approach to mental health care for students. For example, we partnered with Arkansas Colleges of Health Education (ACHE) to provide all students access to Cerebral’s telehealth services. A hybrid approach such as the one deployed by ACHE should be considered the future of mental health care on college campuses as university officials continue to look for ways to expand access and meet demand among their student populations. College is a stressful and intense time for many, and adequate mental health support can make navigating it all the more manageable.

Sep 9, 2022

For Enterprise

Age Verification and What it Means for Access to Care

At Cerebral, we work hard to implement one of the best age and identity-verification processes in the telehealth industry, one that meets or surpasses legal requirements while helping patients access mental health care within days. Our process is an improvement over your typical brick and mortar facility, where ID checks are done manually by front-office staff. The verification process is not without friction, however, so it is our goal to create a seamless process that doesn’t restrict access for the patients who need it most. Improving the verification system is not a simple undertaking but we are working closely with providers and using the latest technology in-house to ensure we treat only those who are eligible for care. Our process begins with a manual ID review for new patients by clinicians, who also verify identifiers such as birthdate and address, and then compare photos to prospective patients by video. If a health care provider can’t definitively confirm the data, we direct providers to let prospective patients know we cannot serve them, and promptly cancel their account and make refunds. As an additional level of security, we ask individuals to upload images from a government-issued identification document (such as a passport or driver’s license), which we then compare to live photos of their face using Persona, a sophisticated software program that is a further safeguard in recognizing accounts of those who are under 18. This system is an important part of any new patient experience at Cerebral, but it is especially critical to ensure that we do not provide services to patients under the age of 18. Psychiatric and behavioral issues affect people of all ages, not just adults, and access to mental health care for those under the age of 18 is especially complicated. In many states, children are prohibited from receiving care without the consent of their parents or legal guardian. At Cerebral, we do not work with patients under the age of 18. The advent of telehealth has brought new possibilities to our field, but also new challenges, such as age verification. We are dedicated to improving access to mental health care services wherever we can, while going above and beyond to ensure compliance with all applicable laws. We are constantly refining and improving our safety and quality measures to ensure we deliver best-in-class care so that our patients can feel better, sooner, and so that we can help our patients achieve positive clinical outcomes.

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