Alternatives to Workplace Mental Health First Aid you should consider
Intro
At In Bloom, we are accredited mental health trainers focusing on workplaces in Australia (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Canberra mostly). Hence, we will start by saying that we believe the Mental Health First Aid course is a high-quality, useful certification that we recommend to most organisations.
However, like anything, it’s not going to be perfect for all workplaces. In this article, we explore the reasons why Mental Health First Aid may not be the best choice for you, and provide you with a few alternatives, such as mental health awareness workshops that might be better suited.
What is Mental Health First Aid?
First, we should define our key terms. The Mental Health First Aid course is the only internationally recognised evidence-based anti-stigma mental health training program for workplaces. If you deliver the course in person, it’s 2 full days. If you decide to deliver the course in a blended format, it will be ~4 hours of eLearning, followed by 4 hours in-person (or virtual) with a facilitator.
Admittedly, this isn’t the goal of this article, but If you would like to understand the program in more depth, we’ve got a whole section of the website dedicated to the course, and if you want to know more, you should visit it.
Why Mental Health First Aid is a good option
1.The Recognition/Brand Name
Since the early 2000s, MHFA have been working hard to make themselves a global organisation. As of the writing of this article, the program is available in 26 countries. This means that for businesses that operate globally and want an official certificate for their aiders, mental health first aid will carry a brand and recognition that can be useful.
2. Known Model
Mental Health First Aid have trademarked their ALGEE framework. It is indeed a known model that can be easily remembered, with a logical sequence behind the order of events. Here’s how they describe it If you want to learn more about it at a high level.
3. Anything Else?
Mental Health First Aid claim their “Skills based training” and “Flexible Delivery” are 2 other reasons to choose the training. Whilst those are both true, we respectfully disagree that they make the course stand out. Every training and workshop we deliver at In Bloom is a “skills based training” which we can deliver flexibly to meet the needs of our clients. We suspect all other training providers will tell you the same thing about their workshops too.
Why Mental Health First Aid might not be a good option
1.If you do not value the certification
This is a common one we hear when we speak with our clients. Really what HR and WHS workplace leaders want is to know that their employees and managers have the right skills and framework, alongside an accurate level of awareness of mental health issues in the workplace. The certification can act as a nice, recognisable badge that individuals can even add to their LinkedIn profiles, but may not provide any further upside for you.
2. If you are not willing to allocation 2 full days to the training
Employees, and managers especially, are time poor. This is nothing new. It’s common in our conversations with leaders that they share with us not having allocated 2 days of training to anything in the last 12 months, let alone their own area of expertise. Hence, they tend to be unwilling to assign 2 days to mental health training, and despite the importance of the topic, we can’t blame them for this.
3. If you want a globally aligned plan, with employees in countries outside of the MHFA network
If you’re looking to roll out a globally-aligned plan with the same strategy and framework, mental health first aid may not be an option for you. As mentioned above, if you operate in countries that fall outside of the network of 26, you will be out of luck with MHFA.
This has been the case for a number of our clients. Large multinational companies with offices in countries such as Israel (like Monday.com), all countries in South America, and many in Europe, fall outside of the Global Mental Health First Aid Providers network.
What are the alternatives?
A word of advice
Having done multiple types of mental health first aid accreditation, trainings and workshops for years, we’ve found a few key themes that tend to work well. In another article, we will dive more in depth about this, but we mention them at a high-level here.
Training your managers first is a good place to start. Mental health awareness training should not be reserved to managers only. However, we think starting with your managers makes sense. The nature of their role will give them exposure to more mental health challenges, and they can leverage the skills more often.
Run a pilot first. Whoever you choose as a provider, you should start with a small cohort first, collect some quality feedback, and make sure to use it to improve future workshops/training.
Deliver in small groups. We’ve had clients ask us to deliver to more than 25 people at once. We discourage you from doing this. Sensitive topics mean people are less likely to open up, and with bigger group sizes, you emphasise this problem. Bigger groups are also much harder to navigate for facilitators.
A workshop for your managers (2 hours total)
Your first alternative option is to run a simple, 2 hour workshop. As mentioned above, if this is your first step, we suggest you start with your people managers as the target audience here.
A 2 hours workshop can realistically cover 2 learning outcomes. Both learning outcomes will be supported by relevant small group exercises, and summarised with frameworks.
We offer this option at In Bloom with our Workplace Mental Health Awareness for Manager’s workshop. You can see the details here.
A very short course for your managers (2x 2 hours total)
What we consider to be a better option is to extend this to two separate 2 hour workshops. Here you can work more closely with your chosen provider to review together the learning outcomes. You may chose to dive more deeply into 2 learning outcomes (such as Mental Health Awareness Frameworks & Foundational principles of looking out for your team), or add another learning of your choice.
If you would like inspiration, here are some topics we’ve included in the course for which we’ve received a lot of positive feedback for interactive conversations about:
How we can design healthier workspaces that promote wellbeing
How we can have effective conversations around stress, health, and wellbeing
What are the boundaries? What happens in difficult situations when employees claim mental health for poor performance
Concluding Remarks
There’s really no “one size fits all” approach with mental health awareness training for your employees and managers. If your workplace has put together a wellbeing, or DEI committee already, a good place to start is to discuss with the committee what issues there are, and what they think should be done to help train employees.
If you would like to speak with us for guidance, questions or for a sounding board on any of the above, feel free to email us at anytime.
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.