On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Brian Femminella, Co-Founder and CEO of SoundMind, a mental health technology company building app-based research and tools for people experiencing trauma, PTSD, and anxiety. Brian brings five years of experience across military service, political activism, and technology research. His perspective on workplace mental health is shaped by communities where the stakes are high and the stigma is heavy: military veterans, first responders, and high-pressure professional environments.
Brian argued that the corporate mental health conversation has matured past the question of whether to invest. Most large employers have benefits in place. The harder question is whether employees feel safe using them. He pushed back on the framing that mental health is a generational concern unique to younger workers. Veterans, mid-career professionals, and senior leaders all carry mental health needs. The companies starting to address this build for the entire workforce, not just for the cohorts that already feel comfortable asking for help.
That conversation matters because mental health is now the most common workforce health concern, and the companies that produce real outcomes are the ones treating destigmatization as a culture project rather than a benefits enrollment project.
Why Mental Health Stigma Persists at Work
The numbers on what unaddressed mental health costs are heavy. SHRM research on workplace mental health finds that 51 percent of workers feel used up at the end of the workday, 45 percent feel emotionally drained, and 44 percent feel burned out. Four in ten say their job negatively impacts their mental health. Burnout is a leading driver of attrition, and the productivity loss alone runs into the hundreds of billions annually.
Stigma persists for one main reason: employees still believe that visible use of mental health support carries career risk. They see who gets promoted, who gets the high-visibility projects, and who gets quietly sidelined. When the pattern looks like the always-on employees winning, the rational move is to keep the mental health work invisible, even when the company is paying for the support.
Companies that move past stigma do three things. They make leader use of mental health benefits visible. They protect employees who use benefits from career consequences. And they build confidential channels for the concerns that fall short of clinical thresholds but still need to be heard.
What Destigmatization Actually Looks Like
What is the single highest-leverage move on stigma?
Senior leaders publicly using the benefits. Not in a one-time campaign, but as a steady drumbeat. The CFO who shares that they took two weeks for therapy. The CEO who blocks Friday afternoons for recovery. The VP who reschedules a launch because their therapist appointment cannot move. Each disclosure rewires what the rest of the company believes is acceptable.
How do you support cohorts that face additional stigma?
Veterans, first responders, and employees in heavily masculine industries face deeper stigma than the general workforce average. The companies producing outcomes for these cohorts use cohort-specific provider networks, peer support programs, and confidential channels designed for people who would not pick up the EAP phone.
What Actually Works: A Framework for Mental Health Support
Design principle one: design for utilization, not for offering
Track and publish utilization rates by cohort. Set utilization targets the same way you set retention targets. Treat low utilization as a program failure, not as evidence employees are doing fine. The conversation in the executive room shifts when utilization sits next to engagement and retention on the dashboard.
Design principle two: protect users from career consequences
Audit who gets promoted, who gets the stretch assignments, and who gets the high-visibility roles. Compare those patterns against benefits utilization data. The companies that actually move stigma are the ones willing to surface the patterns that prove using mental health support carries no penalty.
Design principle three: build confidential intake for the concerns that surveys miss
Use pulse surveys to track wellbeing items quarterly. Pair surveys with confidential intake through a speak-up hotline for the concerns that are too sensitive for a manager conversation but too important to leave unsaid. The combination catches what individual channels miss.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Mental health concerns often surface first as ER cases. A burnout pattern in one team. A leave request that signals deeper distress. A complaint about manager behavior that maps to a wellness gap. Strong cultures treat ER as the safety net that catches what wellness benefits cannot.
How does ER infrastructure support mental health work?
By providing visibility into the patterns that benefits utilization data does not catch on its own. Patterns inform investment in wellness programs, support for work-life balance, and the design of programs that protect rights under the Mental Health Parity Act. The case data is also what lets HR teams build the case for additional resourcing during the budget cycles when wellness work is most vulnerable.
Frequently Asked Questions About Workplace Mental Health
What is the single most effective intervention against stigma?
Senior leaders publicly modeling use of mental health support. The cultural signal moves in months when leaders model the behavior, and stays stuck for years when they do not.
How do you support employees who serve in stressful roles like first responders or veterans?
Use cohort-specific provider networks and peer support models. Generic EAP support often fails employees in heavily stigmatized roles because it does not match the lived experience of the work. Specialty providers and peer-led programs produce dramatically different utilization patterns.
What is the role of confidentiality in mental health support?
Foundational. Employees calibrate from what they see happen to colleagues who disclose. Build the confidentiality protections, then prove they hold by handling the first few disclosures impeccably. The first year of any mental health program sets the tone for the next decade.
How do you measure mental health program success?
Three categories. Utilization rates by cohort. Engagement and burnout items on the survey trended over time. Attrition rates compared between users and matched non-users. The combination tells you whether the program is reaching people, helping people, and retaining people.
What is the biggest mistake companies make with mental health programs?
Treating them as benefits to enroll in rather than as cultural changes to design for. The benefits matter. The culture matters more, because employees calibrate from culture before they calibrate from benefits.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Brian's framing puts mental health where it belongs: at the center of culture work, not at the edges of the benefits program. The companies that produce real outcomes treat destigmatization as a steady, multi-year cultural project that touches leader behavior, manager training, intake design, and program measurement.
That work is not glamorous. It looks like senior leaders sharing their own experiences. It looks like manager coaching. It looks like utilization dashboards reviewed quarterly. It looks like confidential intake that catches what dashboards miss.
The companies that build that infrastructure produce employees who can sustain hard work over careers. The companies that skip it produce burnout that no benefits package can fix.
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