Even if you build it, they may not come: challenges in the uptake of workplace mental health toolkits

Abstract

Background

Strategies to promote workplace mental health can target system, organization, team, and individual levels exclusively or in concert with each other. Creating toolkits that include these different levels is an emerging innovative strategy to support employees working in various sectors. Our paper describes the development, implementation, and refinement of two different online toolkits: the Healthy Professional Worker Toolkit for Education Workers and the Health Worker Burnout Toolkit.

Methods

The Knowledge to Action Framework guided the team during the development and early interventions phases of toolkit development. Stakeholder engagement regarding the intended use of the toolkit of promising practices for workplace interventions was integrated throughout with different forms of feedback in a research capacity between 2022 and 2024.

Results

Reflecting on the different phases of the KTA Framework, we describe first the engagement involved in building the toolkits and then on their utilization. Our toolkits were built to include different resources aimed at empowering workers, teams, and employers offering innovative ideas to address the mental health-leaves of absence and return to work cycle in one case and the different forms and consequences of burnout in the other. Criteria for inclusion were informed by ongoing research with a range of stakeholders and other intended toolkit users including managers, supervisors, executives, human resource specialists, staff, and others in healthcare and educational organizations and settings. In the implementation phase, the volume of resources available in each toolkit considered a strength by some was overwhelming for some partners and individual workers to navigate. Capacity, engagement, time, and readiness for change, are themes that heavily influenced if and when organizations interacted with each toolkit, and how much time they spent exploring the resources provided.

Conclusion

It is critical to ground toolkits in the experiential evidence of workplace mental health as is linking these to evidence-informed interventions that correspond to workplace concerns. Organizational readiness to adopt and adapt resources and implement changes is a key consideration. Ultimately, user engagement is what brought these toolkits to life.