The start of the new year is an excellent time to survey the current workplace culture your organization totes and make necessary changes to help your company grow. In recent years, the stigma around mental health has been changing. Many companies have adopted mental health programs and included resources in insurance packages. But we still have a long way to go to create a widespread shift in workplace cultures across the corporate landscape. 

Future of Work and Wellbeing keynote speaker Petra Velzeboer shares her insights from her career and life experiences to help guide companies to a more holistic view of mental health. She is a dynamic and engaging global TEDx speaker, psychotherapist, author, and CEO of mental health consultancy PVL. With a focus on the future of work, she addresses topics impacting employees, managers, and C-suite leaders. Velzeboer challenges conventional approaches to well-being, emphasizing positive psychology, elite performance, and building dynamic teams for sustainable success.

Drawing from her personal journey, including being raised in a cult, Velzeboer shares a compelling story of resilience and mental health transformation. She offers practical solutions to workplace challenges, addressing issues like burnout, anxiety, and depression. Her expertise extends to working with renowned organizations, translating her experiences into solutions for teams, promoting bravery, and fostering elite teamwork. Her work with organizations like PwC, Channel 4, and Accenture involves keynote speeches, team talks, workshops, and masterclasses.

Petra's approach, comparing cults to corporations, is adaptable to diverse audiences, including employees, leadership teams, and HR or Diversity and Inclusion teams. She also provides advice on effective and inclusive well-being strategies that address diversity, gender issues, and leadership styles.

For the new year, we’ve taken her most impactful pieces of mental health advice and laid them out as a roadmap to promoting better well-being within your company in 2024. 

Mental Health DOs 

Take Individual Responsibility 

Velzeboer urges individuals to adopt healthy lifestyle habits, maintain a clear work-life boundary, and partake in activities that positively impact their mental health. While organizations play a role in offering supportive programs, Velzeboer emphasizes that it is ultimately up to each person to integrate these practices into their daily lives.

Start 2024 by researching your company’s benefits and packages and making sure you’re up to date on the latest policies. Make it a goal to take full advantage of everything your team offers, whether that’s free therapy sessions or a professional development fund.

Focus on Prevention

Velezboer tells her audiences and clients to build their mental health resources based on the 80/20 rule — 80% of resources should be allocated to prevention, with only 20% put towards crisis support. This new year, it’s time to focus on building up a resilient mindset that will uplift one’s mental health. 

This paradigm shift helps to empower individuals to explore what good mental health looks like, emphasizing aspects of thriving and excelling rather than perpetuating a focus on struggle and crisis. While providing guidance for those who are struggling is undeniably crucial, Velzeboer urges companies to refocus and create an environment where less of that is needed.

Celebrate Employees 

Velzebore urges leadership to focus on bravery in the workplace. Building positive mental health is more than just meditating and therapy. Leaders can play an active role in supporting their team’s mental health by encouraging employees to step out of their comfort zones, take risks, and express their authentic selves. 

Celebrating successes, encouraging risks, and taking an active caring interest in employees can all help build stronger teams and support mental health. Make time in 2024 to intentionally celebrate those you work with. 

Make Culture Shifts

In 2024 be a leader by spearheading the cultural shift in your office around mental health. It’s no secret there are stigmas surrounding mental health. In order to beat the stigmas, talk openly about mental health and reshape the narrative around it.

Foster positive mental states within your teams by initiating conversations focused on gratitude and accomplishments. Questions like "What's one thing that's going well for you?" and "What are you grateful for today?" can shift focus to the positive aspects of life and address mental health in a new light. 

Lead by Example

You can explain a healthy work-life balance to your team. You can tell them to sign off at 5 pm sharp. But you must practice what we preach. If you’re reaching out to them outside of work hours, they will feel obligated. There is explicit culture (what’s written in the handbook) and implicit culture (what people observe over time) and implicit culture will always win. 

In 2024, make sure you’re leading the culture changes you want to see. Allow others a healthy work-life balance by giving it to yourself. 

Mental Health DON’Ts

Don’t Focus on Mental Illness

We need to reposition the entire narrative around mental health. So many people still think mental health means depression and anxiety, or some other diagnoses. This mindset leads to a workplace approach centered around crisis support. It looks like, “When things go wrong, access this benefit or resource.” If we only talk about mental health when things go wrong, nobody wants to be associated with it unless they’re pushed to their edge and they are in crisis. 

Don’t Put a Majority of Resources Towards Crisis Intervention

As we mentioned earlier, only about 20% of allocated mental health resources should be put toward crisis intervention as opposed to prevention. Many companies completely ignore prevention, put 20% toward intervention, and siphon off the rest to other areas of the company. In 2024, do not wait to address problems; stop them before they become problems. 

Don’t Create a Workplace People Need to Recover From

No matter what your explicit company culture or handbook says, employees will always follow the implicit rules. If leaders are staying late, responding to emails outside of work hours, or skipping their vacation days, employees will follow. And this kind of workplace will burn people out. 

This will cause them to find ways to mentally distance themselves from the strain of working in a place with policies they don’t agree with. Maybe it’s an extra glass of wine at night or scrolling through Instagram a little longer than we should. Employees and leaders alike know the signs and it’s up to them to make implicit changes within a company. 

Don’t Settle for Surviving

The PR version of mental health advocacy includes a subscription to the Calm app in the health insurance package and creating policies around crisis support. You hear organizations selling new hires benefits and tools for mental health, but are employees engaging with them? Most of the time the answer is no because of the stigmas around using them. 

If we reposition the narrative to sound like “we all have mental health all the time” we can create a culture where people can thrive, not just survive. That is the basis for addressing corporate mental health. 

Don’t Let Your Ego Hold You Back

Nobody knows what they’re doing in this new age of work with remote and hybrid offices. We’ve never been here before. Even the teams who adopted virtual meetings early on have never worked in a workforce that’s predominantly remote. We are in an experimental phase. The person who pretends to know it all is a danger to everyone. We need to be okay with failing, otherwise, we’re not taking risks and we’re putting unrealistic expectations on our teams. 

To create a healthy culture in this new workplace we need more collaboration. We need to think, “How do we figure this out together?” If you have a growth mindset you can discuss what works and test until you find something that fits.

Ring in the new year with new goals to promote a more positive mental health in the workplace. Follow Future of Work and Wellbeing keynote speaker Petra Velzeboer’s advice and foster a new mindset around wellbeing in 2024. Contact Executive Speakers Bureau to bring Petra Velzeboer to your next event to share her message with your team for a better year.