Train middle managers to be sounding boards for employee mental health concerns

Discussing mental health in the workplace used to be taboo—perhaps on par with bellowing about the latest Succession spoilers in a silent break room. Though a surge in burnout during the pandemic seemingly upended the stigma surrounding it, discussions of mental health at work have become gradually normalized over the last decade, Rachel Davis, chief people and culture officer at Crunchbase, explained to HR Brew.

Now, more organizations than ever before depend on middle managers to provide a receptive ear to their direct reports who may be experiencing emotional difficulties, she said. Middle managers are “the first line of defense when they see their employees having out-of-character behavior or performance issues.”

Instead of parachuting middle managers into the trenches and expecting them to be able to handle mental health issues with ease, organizations need to provide specialized training in the area, HR pros told HR Brew. Training exercises can run the gamut and take on various forms, but live role-playing scenarios with HR can acquaint middle managers with how to address a potentially sensitive issue, stressed Dimitra Dimitropoulou, an HR consultant and former HR director at the software developer MAJiK Systems. “It’s delicate, in the sense that not everyone is going to want to have a conversation about mental health,” she said.

While one-off training scenarios are useful, it’s important to stress that the parameters of these conversations are ever evolving, so HR should be in continuous dialogue with managers about best practices, Davis said.

Why middle managers? According to a recent study from UKG’s Workforce Institute, which surveyed 3,400 people across 10 countries, 69% of respondents said their relationship with their manager impacts their mental health—the same proportion who reported that the same is true for their relationship with their spouse.

Middle managers are well-positioned to assist employees who may be struggling because they lead teams on a more granular, day-to-day level. This may put them in a position to “recognize [mental health concerns] first, so making sure that they’re trained up is important,” Davis said.

Not LARPing, exactly. Both Dimitropoulou and Davis have spearheaded training programs and stressed the usefulness of mock exercises that simulate dialogue between manager and employee. In that paradigm, it’s important to show managers how to lead an employee to bring up issues on their own terms, because launching straight into vulnerable territory can be daunting for an employee.

Frustration with work processes might be masking deeper-seated troubles, Dimitropoulou explained. She advised opening conversations with employees with questions related to work: “Is your role what you thought it was going to be? How aligned is it to the job description and what you signed on [for]?” That kind of generalized introduction may open the door to a more vulnerable discussion about what’s really at play, she said.

At Crunchbase, Davis’s team runs “pop shops” (short for people operations shops), which involve HR teams meeting “our middle managers on a regular basis to do check-ins about what’s going on with their teams and how we can help support them and provide guidance to them.”

Davis emphasized continuous dialogue between managers and HR to address mental health, because mental distress manifests in different people in different ways. “You have to ensure that you’re continuously updating what those programs look like…because there’s lots of different factors that can affect mental health. And they affect individuals differently as well.”

Persistent dialogue is paramount, because the takeaways from training exercises can feel fleeting. “There’s great things to do around formalized training, but then that training ends. So, continuously talking about that and continuously providing the resources are the most important things you can do for middle managers,” Davis said.

Don’t let them fall behind. Much like the mental health of HR professionals, it’s possible that the struggles of middle managers might be overlooked as they present themselves as sounding boards for their teams.

In Crunchbase’s pop shops, Davis noted that managers are informed about employee assistance plans, not only for their direct reports, but for themselves. Mental health is a normalized aspect of the company’s DNA, she said, with information about resources sprinkled throughout the Leave of Absence policy. The company regularly takes days off for “Mental Health Monday.”

While all mental health initiatives include middle managers, Davis stressed a more intensive approach to letting them know they’re not alone, even if it may seem like they’re primarily there to be listeners. “We have a very top-down, bottom-up focus on our mental health to make sure there’s touch-points throughout the organization…Middle managers know that the resources they’re offering to their direct reports are also resources for them.”