On this episode of Reimagining Company Culture, we sat down with Alyssa Petersel, LMSW, Founder and CEO of MyWellbeing. Alyssa built MyWellbeing to match people with the right therapist or coach while supporting mental health providers in growing their practices. Her team has reached more than 28 million people through mental health content and matching, and her own background as a therapist and writer shapes how she frames the conversation: with clinical precision and an aversion to jargon.
Alyssa argued that the corporate mental health conversation has matured past the question of whether to invest. Most large employers now do. The harder problem, in her view, is utilization. The benefits exist. The communications campaigns run. The actual usage rates stay low because employees still associate accessing support with reputational risk inside the company. The companies starting to move utilization metrics are the ones treating stigma reduction as a cultural project, not a benefits enrollment problem.
That conversation matters because mental health is now the most common workforce health concern, and the gap between what companies offer and what employees feel safe using is the largest driver of avoidable productivity loss in most industries.
Why Mental Health Programs Underperform
The numbers on what unaddressed mental health costs are heavy. SHRM research shows that 51 percent of workers feel used up at the end of the day, 44 percent report burnout, and unresolved depression alone accounts for a 35 percent reduction in workplace productivity and roughly 210 billion dollars in lost economic value annually in the United States. Employees experiencing burnout are nearly three times more likely to be actively job searching.
Most company programs do not fail because of the benefits design. They fail because the surrounding culture sends the opposite signal. Public meetings reward visible long hours. Promotions go to the always-on. Slack norms reinforce immediacy. In that environment, an EAP brochure does not move utilization. The cultural countersignal is too strong.
The companies starting to see utilization shift are doing two things. They are training managers to model healthy boundaries publicly, including their own use of mental health benefits. And they are setting up confidential intake channels for the wellbeing concerns that are too sensitive for a manager conversation but too important to leave unsaid.
Reaching Employees Who Will Not Reach Out
Why does utilization stay low even at companies with strong benefits?
Because using benefits feels visible in ways using a 401(k) match does not. Employees worry about being seen on the bench, being passed over for projects, or being labeled as fragile. The companies moving the dial on utilization make it easier to access support without creating any visibility moment with managers, peers, or HR.
How do you support employees of color and other underrepresented groups specifically?
Inclusive matching is the unlock. Employees in underrepresented groups disproportionately want providers who share lived experience, and the standard EAP network often cannot deliver that. Vendors and benefits designs that prioritize inclusive matching see meaningful utilization differences across cohorts that a single network cannot produce.
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 DEI targets. Treat low utilization as a program failure, not as evidence that 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: train and reward managers for boundary modeling
Manager behavior is the single largest driver of whether benefits get used. Train managers to share their own use of mental health support, to publicly close their laptops at reasonable hours, and to push back on always-on norms. Recognize the managers who do this in the same forums that recognize revenue performance.
Design principle three: instrument wellbeing alongside engagement
Use pulse surveys to track wellbeing items quarterly. Pair pulse data with deeper employee surveys to ground trends in qualitative input. Then connect the survey themes to your benefits utilization data to spot the disconnect between what employees say they need and what they actually use.
Where Employee Relations Fits
Mental health concerns often surface first as employee relations 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 employee engagement programs treat ER as the safety net that catches what wellness benefits cannot.
How does ER tooling support mental health work?
By giving employees a confidential channel to raise wellbeing concerns short of a benefits enrollment moment. Patterns in that channel become a leading indicator that benefits utilization will not catch in time. The data also helps HR teams pair wellness programs with the cultural changes that make them usable, and to flag situations where rights under the Mental Health Parity Act need attention.
Frequently Asked Questions About Mental Health at Work
What is the most important step a company can take this quarter?
Audit your mental health benefits utilization by cohort. The data will tell you whether the gap is benefits design, network access, manager behavior, or stigma. Without that audit, every other intervention is a guess.
How do you talk about mental health without being clinical?
Lead with the operational language employees use. Sleep, focus, energy, recovery. Most employees will engage with those words before they will engage with diagnostic language, even when the underlying need is the same.
What role do EAPs still play?
A foundation, not a strategy. EAPs cover the basics and remain useful, but their utilization rates are too low to be the centerpiece of a mental health program. Pair them with deeper benefits, inclusive provider networks, and cultural work. For more on running wellbeing programs, see our piece on professional wellness month.
How should companies respond when an employee discloses a mental health concern?
With humanity first, accommodation second, and confidentiality always. Train managers on what to say and what not to say. Make sure the manager knows where to route the conversation, and make sure the employee knows their disclosure does not carry career risk.
Is mental health support a cost or an investment?
Investment. The productivity, retention, and absenteeism math has been consistent for two decades. The companies that still treat it as cost are the ones still losing employees to companies that treat it as the productivity lever it is.
The Bottom Line for HR Leaders
Alyssa's framing pushes mental health out of the benefits silo and into the culture conversation where it belongs. The benefits matter, but they are necessary, not sufficient. The companies that move utilization and outcomes are the ones that pair benefits design with cultural change.
That cultural change is operational. Manager behavior is the lever. Confidential intake is the safety net. Benefits utilization data is the dashboard. None of those pieces is glamorous. All of them are required.
The companies that build them produce employees who can do their best work and stay long enough to do it. The companies that skip them produce slow attrition and visible burnout that everyone can see and no one can name.
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