970x125
By: Bernie Wong, MHS, Movement Building & Research Lead
Systems thinking equips HR and organizational leaders to better balance the well-being needs of their people and ambitious business goals in an increasingly competitive economic climate. While employers have made substantial headways in recent years by investing in mental health programs like therapy benefits or Mental Health First Aid, employees continue to report persistent challenges.
We know from our work at Mind Share Partners that many leaders want to better support their people, but struggle to translate that intent into a sustainable strategy. In our experience, the solution isn’t any one specific program. It’s a way of thinking—systems thinking, that is.
The Role of Systems Thinking in Supporting Workplace Mental Health
Systems thinking treats problems not as isolated instances to solve for, but instead as an outcome from a complex network of interconnected parts—the “system.” Without this mindset, it’s easy to oversimplify solutions. For example, if you look at homelessness without a systems lens, you might think, “Someone doesn’t have a home, so let’s get them a house, and the problem is solved.” But homelessness is shaped by far more than access to a physical home. It’s connected to multiple systems, from physical health to education to transportation. Each of these systems affects both whether someone becomes homeless and how they experience it.
The same idea applies to workplace mental health, it might seem like employee well-being is an individual problem to fix with therapy or self-care resources. Without systems thinking, employers focus on partial solutions that only offer relief rather than tackling root causes across the workplace system. In fact, a landmark study from Oxford University looked at 46,000+ workers across 230+ organizations and found individual solutions for employee mental health were largely ineffective. But when employees are well, companies do well, too. Further research by the university showing employee well-being tied to better firm profitability and firm value.
Research shows workplace mental health challenges like burnout stem from the workplace itself, not the people in it. Systems thinking allows you to step back and examine the entire “system”—from onboarding, to performance reviews, to revenue goals—to understand why and how certain practices may unintentionally create mental health challenges.
How Can Leaders Apply Systems Thinking to Workplace Mental Health?
Systems thinking is a muscle. It’s a way to approach problems that we have to continually train. Here are a few key ways to get started.
Understand the overall system
In Mind Share Partners’ Ecosystem of a Mentally Healthy Workplace framework, we map out key parts of the workplace system: the people, policies, practices, accountability mechanisms, and more. This framework is a starting point to help leaders understand the many intersecting parts of the organization and how to lay the foundations for employee well-being.
Ask the right questions
While there’s no single, universal formula for systems thinking that works for every issue, there are many prompts that can aid your approach for mental health. For example, consider:
What is the root cause of this problem? And what’s the root cause of that?
How is this being informed by other parts of the organization?
How is it impacting other parts of the organization?
How can I design programs, benefits, and engagement strategies that are informed by and address these root causes?
How might this solution provide relief vs. real solutions?
How is this solution uniquely advantageous for our organization?
There are many other tools to train your brain around systems thinking. But it’s important to remember that it isn’t something you do from afar. It requires talking with your employees deeply understanding the experiences that ultimately inform the challenges that you are trying to solve for.
Materialize thinking into action
Of course, systems thinking has to be followed by concrete action. In a previous blog, we outlined key stages of the employee journey, like onboarding, and example ways to support mental health. This way, support happens as a regular part of an employee’s day-to-day work, not in response to crisis, and is built into the way the organization actually functions—again, the system.
Examples of Systems Thinking in Action at Companies
At Mind Share Partners, we’ve helped organizations apply systems thinking to integrate mental health and well-being into every part of the workplace system.
One example is OLLY, a San Francisco-based wellness benefit company. They made mental health a part of their social impact mission, and their CEO, Hanneke Willenborg, spoke externally about combatting mental health stigma. Mind Share helped OLLY survey their employees year-over-year to better understand experiences around work and mental health. We delivered training to managers and employees around topics like mental health, burnout, self-care, and more, and facilitated strategic discussions as a regular part of their executive leadership strategy meetings.
Mind Share also worked with a national Fortune 500 retailer to integrate systems thinking as a part of their discovery and employee learning strategy. We facilitated focus groups with employees across businesses, functions, and regions to identify opportunities to build upon as well as emergent needs to address. This discovery process culminated in an ongoing year-over-year strategy encompassing live training and virtual e-learning modules for managers as the main line of defense for a largely front-line workforce.
The success of businesses is contingent on the well-being of their people—and vice versa. Through a systems approach, employers can meet both needs as they continue to navigate an ever evolving future of work.
About the author
