Abstract
Background: The importance of maintaining positive mental health in the workplace is a priority for many organizations worldwide. How mental health challenges are addressed continues to evolve as awareness and stigma are brought to the forefront. Effective support needs to consider innovative strategies that promote mental well-being across the system, organization, team, and individual levels.
Approach: The creation of mental health toolkits is one innovative strategy to support employees working in a variety of sectors. Toolkits are composed of different resources aimed at empowering workers, addressing key issues, and offering innovative ideas to address topics such as burnout, workload management, handling conflict bullying and harassment, confronting discrimination and cultivating psychological health and safety. Toolkits have the ability to engage stakeholders to foster culture change in an organization and everyone plays a role in this process. Toolkit users include managers, supervisors, executives, human resource specialists, staff and others in healthcare and educational organizations and settings. Our paper highlights three different toolkits including the Healthy Professional Worker (HPW) Toolkit for Education Workers, Health Worker Burnout (HWB) Toolkit and Psychological Health and Safety (PHS) Toolkit.
Results: These toolkits were curated and utilized in a research capacity between 202 and 2024 to share cross-cutting themes revealing promising practices and lessons learned for future research. Areas of concern were identified and informed the curation process. Capacity, engagement, readiness for change, time, change and survey fatigue are themes that heavily influenced those who interacted with each toolkit, when they interacted with and how much time they spent exploring the resources provided. External factors such as financial resources, political climate, personal burnout, and COVID-9 impacted engagement with the toolkits.
Implications: The sheer volume of resources in each toolkit were overwhelming for partners/individuals to navigate. This led to revisiting the most prevalent concerns from surveys, interviews and focus groups conducted with partners and developing a short list of resources that aligned with the challenges highlighted. Ultimately the engagement process and relationships that were fostered between the research team and each partner organization is what brought each toolkit to life.