Leia McKinnon dialed into a meeting with a colleague shortly after her company, TiER1 Performance, went through a program called Start the Conversation.
The program aims to normalize conversations about mental health and how it affects everyone.
McKinnon started the conversation like she normally does. She asked him how he was doing.
He paused.
“Normally I would answer with ‘I’m fine,’” he said. “But I’m really not.”
He told her he is bipolar, and sometimes he has really high highs and other times he has really low lows, and that the last two weeks he was really low.
“I’m just not doing well,” he told McKinnon.
McKinnon, a principal consultant at TiER1, said she changed her tone because she didn’t feel like what they were originally going to speak about was appropriate, given what he had just said to her.
“Seeing the bigger picture made me prioritize what this person needed in terms of support,” McKinnon said.
Even later that night, McKinnon said, she couldn’t stop thinking about the colleague and how honest he had been.
“Had we not created that safe space to have that dialogue, I wouldn’t be in a position to be empathetic like that,” she said.
The program is especially relevant as the pandemic drags on – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said U.S. adults reported considerably elevated adverse mental health conditions associated with COVID-19.
Start the Conversation began in 2015, after the TiER1 team wanted to find a way to have a meaningful impact on the communities in which it serves, said Sarah Ehrnschwender, director of marketing at TiER1.
TiER1 is a Covington-based company whose mission is to improve organizations through the performance of the people who work there. They also have offices in Atlanta, West Chester, Pittsburgh and Indianapolis; and teams in Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C.
“The team got together and said, we can build really cool training and communication,” Ehrnschwender said. “What if we picked an area that would have a big community impact outside the work itself.”
As part of their discussions, several people revealed they were impacted by mental health. The company did a survey and found that 90 percent of the people in the company had some pretty close connection to the impact of mental health.
McKinnon said the survey results struck her.
“I don’t feel like I struggled with mental health, but what I noticed when I went through the survey is that there are connections I wasn’t seeing,” McKinnon said. “One in three TiER1ers is directly affected.”
That more personal translation of mental health impact inside the company opened the door for McKinnon to really pay more attention to the rest of the programming, she said.
Once the survey had been conducted, Ehrnschwender said the team went to the Lindner Center of Hope to see what would be the most impactful area of mental health to explore.
“One of the physicians said the biggest barrier with people getting mental health training is that nobody talks about it,” Ehrnschwender said. “Just getting people to talk about mental illness in the workplace can be the biggest impact we can have. That’s why it’s called Start the Conversation.”
Ehrnschwender said they started with a four week in-person experience. They had a casserole lunch because, Ehrnschwender said, people bring you casserole when you hurt yourself physically but no one thinks to do that for people who are suffering from problems related to mental health.
Then 2020 hit. And the need for companies to have a conversation around mental health intensified.
“We had already started looking at what remote experience would look like,” Ehrnschwender said. “So in 2020 everything was converted to online. Companies can request the toolkit, the facilitator and executives receive instructions for using it, and then they self-sufficiently facilitate the experience.”
Not only did McKinnon benefit from the training in her work environment, but it helped her find a way to talk about her grief when her dad died by suicide three years ago.
“We were strained,” she said. “We had gone 10 years without speaking.”
McKinnon sat down at her computer and posted it to Yammer.
“What was he going through?” she said. “What causes anyone to be so desperate? I just wrote this thing.”
McKinnon said the outpouring of support from her colleagues was incredible.
“Our CEO phoned me directly,” McKinnon said. “I had other people who emailed me privately but said, ‘yeah me too. It happened to me too.’ That was so powerful. And I think it was extremely cathartic. It also opened the door for other people to realize this stigma around sucide – there are other people who are suffering in similar situations.”
McKinnon said she had previously worked in toxic environments.
“If this happened when I was there it may have resulted in me being unfocused and having anxiety,” she said.
Those environments would greatly benefit from Start the Conversation, she said.
“The more awareness you have, the better decisions you can make for your own health,” Ehrnschwender said.
But, she said, if you break your arm, you’re gonna ask around to see who is the best provider and who other people have used. That doesn’t happen as often with mental health providers.
“This is not treatment, and it doesn’t take the place of medical advice,” Ehrnschwender said. “It’s just about how do you have that conversation.”
Read more about Start the Conversation here.
Companies who are interested in requesting the toolkit can go here.