Employee mental health is a crucial issue for employers as they navigate motivating employees, recognizing achievements, and giving employees the space to find balance between their work and personal lives. Since employees tend to come to their direct managers with mental health challenges like burnout, stress, or personal issues affecting their work, front-line managers aren’t typically trained to handle these situations.
This blog will explore why it has become increasingly critical to train front-line managers as part of a comprehensive employee mental health strategy, including current training gaps for front-line managers and how to empower managers using tools like incentivized training.
Mental Health in the Workplace: Why the Stats Matter
To truly understand the urgency of training front-line managers, it's important to look at the numbers:
- 76% of U.S. workers reported at least one symptom of a mental health condition in the past year.
- Over 60% of employees say their job is the biggest factor affecting their mental health.
- 41% of employees say their manager impacts their mental health more than their therapist.
And yet, only 31% of managers feel equipped to have mental health conversations with their teams. These gaps in preparedness and impact highlight the urgent need to train managers as the first line of support—and underscore why investing in this training delivers results. Companies that prioritize mental health see a 4x ROI on average, thanks to reduced absenteeism, improved retention, and better team morale.
Mental Health Support Starts with Front-Line Managers
Effective employee mental health programs start with processes to facilitate early intervention. Front-line managers are often the first to observe signs of burnout, withdrawal, or overwork. According to the American Psychological Association (APA), managers are a key line of defense in protecting employee mental health. With even 3 hours of training front-line managers can learn skills on when and how to intervene in a mental health crisis, and how to support employee mental health by creating a positive and safe work environment.
Front-line managers also provide a critical alternative to HR or People teams, as employees often feel more comfortable speaking with someone they work with regularly and have a stronger interpersonal relationship with. While HR policies are vital in outlining an employee mental health support program, HR teams can’t always respond as quickly or personally to employee mental health crises as direct managers.
For managers to feel comfortable handling mental health issues with their direct reports, it’s critical that mental health support is woven into their general leadership training. Workplace mental health initiatives should be kept in mind as they build their own leadership style and create their individual team’s dynamic.
Great managers balance performance and team dynamics and support. According to Spring Health, the team dynamics should include creating psychological safety, modeling a growth mindset, encouraging authenticity, providing continuous feedback, and applying situational leadership. Empowering managers to incorporate mental health and psychological support into their leadership style will help create the safe space employees need to confide in their managers when something is off.
The Training Gap—and Why It’s a Risk
In today’s professional environment, most managers receive little to no training on how to handle mental health conversations or identify warning signs. According to Inc., this lack of preparation can lead to missed opportunities for early support and intervention. Managers require training because of the sensitivity of mental health, often worrying about saying the wrong thing, whether confronting another employee’s mental health is their responsibility, and most importantly, on a basic level, what to do when faced with an employee mental health challenge.
Training front-line managers to identify and navigate employee mental health issues can help managers define boundaries and reduce uncertainty about their individual responsibility. When boundaries are clearly defined and managers know when to provide one-on-one support to employees it reduces avoidance and promotes informed intervention, avoiding poor handling of mental health events. Training can and should also focus on practical support. Providing managers with the “what to do” when mental health crises arise. When properly trained, managers don’t need to solve mental health problem, but they do need to recognize when an employee needs help and have the practical knowledge to respond appropriately.
The gap in mental health training for managers can be a business liability. It increases risk, reduces retention, and erodes trust. Untrained managers can have profound impacts on employee engagement, general morale, and even increase absenteeism and turnover. Employees want to feel supported at work and having managers that know how to handle a conversation about mental health is a big element of that support.
Empowering Managers with Incentivized Training
The training gap front-line managers face can be overcome with simple, fundamental training that offers foundational mental health literacy, teaches boundaries and referral processes so employees can get the help they need, and normalizes emotional check-ins during 1:1 meetings. However, managers are busy. They usually manage a team of people and have individual responsibilities of their own. So how can you ensure that managers not only receive training, but also absorb it so they can apply it when necessary?
Connecting this training to business outcomes is important, as you would any new business initiative. Spring Health, says companies that train managers see higher employee retention, reduced absenteeism, and stronger team morale. Communicating this at a manager-level is important. Make sure managers know that being well trained leads to more productive, happier teams, reflecting better on their personal profiles within the organization.
Another lever to use when encouraging training is incentives. Whether you use incentive rewards for completing training or smaller spot rewards for engagement and participation during training modules, you need rewards that will be valuable to a wide variety of people. Options like gift cards allow employees to select rewards that resonate with their lifestyle choices.
When ordering incentives for a specific initiative like training front-line managers on employee mental health, consider a tool like the Engage2Reward™ Gift Card Ordering Platform. Not only will your organization recognize bulk discounts on gift card orders, but digital delivery is instant, and you can tailor the gift card brand choices to your program, allowing you to align mental health programming with health and wellness brands. The Engage2Reward Platform also provides dynamic features like the Engage2Reward™ Choice Card, which allows recipients to allocate their gift card to a brand they like or find useful. If the Engage2Reward Choice Card doesn’t fit your program, the Engage2Reward catalog offers over 250 unique e-Gift card brands, including prepaid reward card options.
When companies invest in manager mental health training—and make it rewarding—they see ROI in both human and business outcomes.
Employee mental health is no longer a “nice-to-have”—it must be a leadership imperative. It starts with the people employees interact with every day. Don’t wait for burnout to show up on exit interviews. Equip your managers now with mental health training in the workplace. With the right training—and a little incentive through platforms like Engage2Reward—you can empower your managers to be a confident first line of defense in mental wellness, and build a culture where employees feel seen, supported, and safe.
