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While the pandemic may seem like a thing of the past, many employers are still seeing the ripple effects that the upheaval in daily life and the isolation that remote working has had on many people. Now, these effects are manifesting in the form of an increase in requests for mental health care.
Three-quarters of 400 in-house counsel, executives and HR professionals surveyed by Littler Mendelson reported an increase in requests for mental health leave and other accommodations.
Additionally, 86% of respondents at large companies with more than 10,000 employees reported an increase in mental health-related requests.
However, Littler's 12th annual Employer Survey found that only 22% of companies have changed their policies in response to the increase in accommodation requests.
While policy changes often lag trends by a year or two, the gap suggests employers will need to address the lingering effects of the pandemic and other issues impacting workers' mental health.
Littler shareholder Devjani Mishra said that for many workers, the pandemic had “severely” disrupted professional and personal support networks.
“Even if you didn't have any mental health issues initially, it seems likely that you'll start to see some of these issues going forward because of the extreme events that we've all experienced, both individually and collectively,” Mishra said.
Given this reality, Little included a question about mental health considerations in its survey to add numbers to its anecdotal evidence.
“Every event and ceremony that we take part in has really had its ups and downs over the last four years, and all of that has taken a toll,” said Mishra, who leads Littler's COVID-19 task force and vaccination working group and is a member of the company's Holiday and Disability Accommodations Core Group.
“The shared experiences that connect us have been lost and undermined, and I think everyone has felt this, even if just a little bit. Most people, including people who would never say, 'I need mental health attention,' have really struggled to get through the past few years.”
Add to this the stress on workers caused by increasing workloads, bitter social and political divisions, and recent geopolitical events.
Mishra said employees have become more familiar with accommodation and time-off requests practices since the pandemic, and they're also more willing to disclose mental illnesses and neurodiversity issues, such as autism spectrum disorder.
“Our understanding of these conditions is still evolving. People are becoming more willing to say, 'I'm a person who has this and this, and this is what it means to me.'”
Pre-pandemic, it may have been easier for employers to defend their position that certain jobs require employees to come into the office. “When someone says, 'Well, I need this flexibility. I'll come in Tuesday through Thursday, but it would really help if I could get this other flexibility,' it doesn't sound as unreasonable to an employer.”
Mishra advises his employer clients to “think more specifically” about what a particular job actually entails: “If employers really dig in, there are probably a lot of opportunities to create flexibility that would allow more people to work.”
Employers' human resources departments will need to work with companies to determine whether they have legal obligations if an employee falls into a protected class, “but the challenge is that it's not strictly a legal issue,” Mishra said.
“People hope there's a magic answer where they can say, 'Well, someone is quantitatively asking for this much, and this is too much, but this much will be enough.' Mental health is really hard to quantify like that.”
That's why knowing the job description is so important for employers to find creative ways to retain valuable employees for as long as they can. After all, she noted, it wasn't that long ago that many employers were complaining that it was impossible to hire people.
“I know it's time-consuming. It's frustrating. It feels like it's not real work,” she says. “It's hard to manage. It takes creativity. It takes empathy and a desire to work with your employees. You have to say, 'OK, you can't do that, but maybe we can do something close to this. Is that OK?'”
The survey found that employers in the retail and hospitality industries have been the most proactive in expanding policies to address employee mental health concerns, with 36% having made changes compared to 22% across all industries.
The same was true for childbirth and related health care situations in these industries: 57% in childbirth and related health care situations compared to 36% across all industries.
Mishra said that's because industries like retail, hospitality and healthcare tend to have a better understanding of the job description, such as how many rooms a housekeeper needs to cover each day, so they can more easily gauge how much extra help they might need to provide with the property.
Employers also need to keep in mind that younger workers don't necessarily expect long-term commitments from their employers and may be more likely to leave if the company doesn't help them solve their challenges. “You have to continue to be a great company that someone wants to work for,” she said.
74% of employers surveyed said they have seen an increase in requests for mental health accommodations in the past year. The next most common categories of accommodation requests were pregnancy-related leave (53%) and hybrid or flexible work not related to health or family issues (50%).
Employers were most likely to have revised or expanded their policies to accommodate pregnancy (38%), likely due in part to the implementation of the Pregnant Worker Fairness Act last June, which requires employers with 15 or more employees to make reasonable accommodations.
One of the pandemic's lingering effects is an increase in people spending parts of the week working remotely. The survey found that 71% of respondents are working some kind of hybrid work schedule, but more are returning to in-person work. Thirty-nine percent of employers say they have more days of in-person work than remote work, up from 31% a year ago.
Other survey findings showed that 79% of respondents expect a “moderate or significant” impact from compliance and enforcement by the U.S. Department of Labor in the next 12 months, compared with 65% in 2022.
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) “is specifically pursuing an agenda to reform U.S. labor law and overturn decades of established NLRB precedent, resulting in significant changes that will affect both unionized and non-unionized workplaces,” Michael Lotito, co-chair of the Littler Workplace Policy Institute, said in a statement.
