5 Tips to Make the Most out of your Mental Health Training
Intro
At In Bloom, we’ve delivered mental health awareness training to more than 50 organisations in Australia and New Zealand in 2022. We’ve delivered the training online, in-person (in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide mostly) and in blended fashion.
The transition from having to do everything virtually whilst we were in lockdowns, to having the opportunity to hold sessions in person again was welcomed warmly. We learned a lot in the last 5 years of holding mental health mental health awareness training for employees and managers, so we thought we would share 5 lessons that we think are important considerations for running your training.
Of course, any training is heavily contextual, therefore some of these points may not be valid for you. We trust that you will know best what to do with this information and apply it well.
#1 - Agree on the learning outcomes with your facilitator
Our experience in the past 5 years led us to realise that Mental Health Awareness Training means different things to different workplaces.
At In Bloom, we have a standardised agenda for our Mental Health Awareness Training for Managers (you can see it here), but we make sure to have a review session prior with everyone of our customer to make sure we’re on the same page about these learning outcomes.
These review sessions have been instrumental in understanding the context of your workplace, your unique challenges, the target audience you wish to deliver to, areas of mental health training you want to highlight, and unique resources we can create for you to have in your wellbeing library.
#2 - Run a pilot first
We suggest it's good practice to run the first session as a pilot. For this you will need to warn participants that mental health awareness is an important topic you want the workforce to be better enabled on, and acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers on the best way to roll this out continuously.
Running a pilot session will allow you to collect vital feedback on what was well received, what was most useful, and what needs to be improved or made more relevant to the target audience. Depending on how much resources, mostly time, you want to allocate to mental health training, you may decide to collect feedback from participants both before, and after the session. Only collecting feedback after the session can be useful also, but may not provide a benchmark for comparison.
In a future article, we’ll dive deeper into feedback to collect from your sessions. For now, at a high level, here’s a few things we think are important to collect feedback on:
What was most useful?
This is important because it highlights the part of the course that provides the most value. In can help the facilitator anchor more exercises, and take-away resources on this point.
What needs to be improved?
This question tends to highlight logistical things (more or less breaks, timing of the session, etc..), points that are not explained deeply enough, and parts of your framework that are not getting the right allocation of time.
What can be further contextualised for your role?
More on this coming below, but this can help provide situational information that may be good to address as a whole group, on in small group exercises. Of course, everything will be anonymised by your facilitator.
#3 - Train Managers First
This has been a point of contention with some HR and WHS leaders we’ve spoken with in the past, for good reason, but we maintain our perspective that training your managers first is good practice.
The reason to train managers first is because their role puts them in a unique position where they have an outsized impact on the wellbeing of their staff. Also, managers that are not equipped with basic principles of mental health first aid will likely struggle to handle difficult situations.
Our perspective is that all managers should receive mental health awareness train
ing, in the same way that we’ve enabled them with bullying and harassment training, and other important issues such as unconscious bias training.
Depending on the size of your organization, and how many managers you have, you may be able to start with managers that have self-elected to take part. This offers the benefit of creating initial momentum, as their excitement will spread to other leaders. This can also offer you the right context, people and momentum to create a mental fitness committee inside your organisation.
#4 - Deliver in Small Groups
Sensitive topics means participants are less likely to feel comfortable sharing. Whilst this sounds obvious, it can be tempting to want to hold a session with 30 managers if these are all the managers you have, and call if done with.
It would be much better to run 2 or 3 cohorts in this case. That way, you are less likely to have only extroverts sharing in small group exercises. Small groups are also easier to handle from the facilitators perspective, helping to make sure she can offer value to every participant.
#5 - Prepare and promote beforehand
We did write in a previous article that we are cognisant of the demands of training placed on managers. Taking 2.5 hours out of your day (or 5 hours total depending on how you choose to structure your training), is no small ask.
To help make the most of your investment in enablement, we suggest a series of small, simple messages prior to the sessions to prepare participants for what they can expect from the training.
We think it’s best to send a series of short communication messages, rather than pack everything into 1 comprehensive email. This is because long emails tend to get filled in the “for later” bucket and never actually read.
In a future article, we will share examples of sample communication you can send to participants beforehand.
Concluding Remarks
Considering there’s so much best practice to mental health awareness training for managers and employees, we will share more ideas in the part 2 of this article. Hopefully you found this useful. If you have any questions, ideas, and would like to respectfully disagree with some of the points we make; feel free to!
You can write a comment below of send us a email.
About the author
JP is the Head of Business Operations at In Bloom.
Having been a leader in the corporate world for nearly 10 years, he’s experienced first-hand the challenges that come from a lack of enablement about mental health as a manager. JP has delivered mental health awareness training to dozens of organisations based in Sydney and Melbourne.