Workplace Mental Health: May 2025 EN:Insights Forum

The May EN:Insights Forum delved into the critical topic of mental health in the workplace, offering actionable strategies and lessons from a new SHRM research series, Healthy Minds, Healthy Business: Case Studies on Workplace Mental Health. This month’s forum spotlighted the series’ first case study, “Body, Mind, and Spirit: Hilton’s Comprehensive, Data-Driven Approach to Workforce Mental Health and Well-Being For All.”

The forum also featured insights from Marjorie Morrison, SHRM’s mental health executive in residence, and Sally Windisch, a researcher at SHRM. The bottom line is that “healthy employees lead to healthy workplaces,” Windisch said.

The presentation highlighted Hilton’s data-driven approach to workforce mental health, focusing on resilience, balance, and leaders’ role in fostering supportive workplace culture.

Here are five critical insights from the research.

Research Insight 1: Mental health in the workplace is not just a matter of employee well-being but also a critical factor influencing organizational outcomes such as engagement, productivity, and retention.

SHRM’s 2025 Workplace Mental Health research highlights the growing importance of addressing mental health challenges and the benefits of doing so:

• 31% of U.S. workers report feeling stressed because of their job often or always.
• 30% of U.S. workers said they would take a pay cut to receive better support for their mental health.

Research Insight 2: Globally, 1 in 5 workers said their job has had a negative impact on their mental health, according to What Global Workers Want and the Global Worker Experience, part of the SHRM 2025 Global Worker Project research series. 

This study also reported the following statistics:

• 43% of global workers said their job has had a positive impact on their mental health.
• 37% said their job has had no impact on their mental health.

According to the 2023 Work in America Survey by the American Psychological Association, many workers experience negative signs of burnout related to:

• 31% of survey participants reported emotional exhaustion. 
• 26% reported a lack of motivation to do their best. 
• 25% reported a desire to keep to themselves. 
• 23% reported a desire to quit. 
• 20% reported lower productivity. 

Hilton Case Study: Hilton is among the organizations that report positive returns from their mental health programs. In fact, 88% of hotel-based Hilton team members reported feeling balanced and healthy.

• 85% of Hilton team members expressed comfort discussing mental health and well-being with their managers.

This is particularly notable when compared to broader workplace trends, where “43% of workers worried that if they told their employers about their mental health condition that it would have a negative impact on them in the workplace,” Windisch said.

“Hilton’s strategy is truly making strides in the way workers seek and receive mental health support, with twice as many team members feeling comfortable discussing their mental health with their managers compared to broader workplace trends,” she noted.

Research Insight 3: According to SHRM's 2025 Workplace Mental Health research, organizations are seeing positive impacts from their investments in mental health programs and resources. Specifically, HR professionals said the following areas are most likely to benefit from these programs:

• Employee engagement and morale (62%)
• Performance (42%)
• Retention (42%)
• Absenteeism (40%)
• Productivity (39%)

This underscores the importance of fostering a workplace culture where mental health is prioritized, measured, and supported through accessible and impactful initiatives.

Research Insight 4: Using metrics and data can help you evaluate and improve your organization’s mental health programs.

“Only 17% of HR professionals report that their organizations assess the effectiveness of mental health resources,” Windisch said. However, organizations that do evaluate these initiatives are significantly more likely to report a positive return on investment (ROI), with 85% seeing measurable benefits. In contrast, among organizations that do not evaluate the effectiveness of their mental health resources, only 33% report that their initiatives demonstrate a positive ROI.

Hilton embodies a data-driven approach to mental health by integrating external insights such as industry trends, academic research, and competitive benchmarking with internal metrics such as employee feedback, surveys, and aggregated claims data. This strategic alignment has enabled Hilton to implement impactful initiatives that prioritize employee well-being.

Hilton successfully:

• Expanded its network of mental health professionals and reduced average wait times for appointments to 0.8 days.
• Introduced a third-party concierge service to alleviate caregiving-related stress, which led to employees collectively saving an estimated 24,000 hours.

Research Insight 5: Be proactive in educating your employees on the mental health resources available at your company with the goal of supporting them in times of need.

According to SHRM’s Employee Mental Health in 2024 Research Series:

• 67% of U.S. workers are unaware or only somewhat aware of the mental health resources their company provides.
• 55% of U.S. workers feel their company offers too few mental health resources.

This highlights a significant gap in awareness and accessibility that organizations must address to support employee well-being effectively.

Marjorie Morrison: Navigating Mental Health: Strategies for Good and Bad Days

Marjorie Morrison is the mental health executive in residence at SHRM, where she leads efforts to advance workplace mental health and create thriving workplaces. A licensed mental health professional and entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience, she co-founded Psych Hub, a leading mental health education platform, and developed a proactive counseling program for the Marine Corps that is still in use today. She is also the author of The Inside Battle: Our Military Mental Health Crisis (Military Psychology Press, 2012).

“The healthier you are, the more impact you can have. Taking time for yourself is not selfish ... it’s strategic, and it allows you to role model how to do it right,” she said.

Here are a few excerpts from Morrison’s Q&A during the May 2025 EN:Insights Forum. 

How do you personally prioritize your mental health amidst the crazy demands that I know you have?

Marjorie Morrison: I want to just first start by saying I do not have all of this figured out — it’s a work in progress for me. I work really hard at it, like so many of us do. But I think that it’s different for everyone. For me, it’s about giving myself permission. It’s about saying that it’s OK to not have to be “on” all the time or saying “no” to something, you know? For me, it’s making sure that you take care of yourself. I just try to say to myself, “Just be kind and give yourself some grace to not be OK today.”

So I’m struck by the notion of good days and bad days, and you know I don’t care how happy and how mentally fit you are as a person; we all have bad days. What do you do on the bad days? How do you help yourself on those bad days?

Marjorie Morrison: That’s such a great question. And you know what else, too? It’s like good moments and bad moments in a day. It’s not even like a black or a white day. It’s the in between all of them, and I also really do believe we need those difficult times. That’s actually what we grow from. That’s how we get stronger. That’s how we learn more, so they’re not always bad — in so many ways they’re really important. I truly believe that we all approach our mental health differently. For me, it’s, “I got to get stuff done,” because if I’m super stressed or sometimes it’s because I have too much to do and ignoring it actually is going to make it worse. Now, for some people, it’s like, “I got to take a break to come back and do it.” That’s why I say it’s whatever works for you. 

What are one or two simple, actionable steps that HR leaders can take to take care of their own mental health?

Marjorie Morrison: I think it’s just being at the top of the list. I am not going to say any of the cliche things of eat healthy, exercise, get a good night’s sleep because then you beat yourself up when you don’t do it. I think kindness is so important, and by the way, the kinder you are to yourself, the kinder you are to other people. I’ve never said “I love you” to myself. You guys should try it. It is so powerful because we say “I love you” to the people we care about. But do we ever just stop and say [to ourselves] “I love you”? I think that sometimes, it’s just as simple as being kind to yourself. 

What barriers do organizations commonly face when implementing mental health programs, and how can leaders address those barriers?

Marjorie Morrison: I really strongly believe that the barriers right now are really the challenges around screening, assessing, and navigating. I don’t feel that barriers are like there’s not enough mental health benefits. Especially now because I think most people have seen this since COVID-19, there has been so much venture capitalist and private equity investment in mental health. So now there’s all of these roll-ups, right? Like it used to be, “I was a therapist,” a “single shingle” we call them. Now they’re all part of these bigger groups, and they all take insurance, which means that there are so many more in-network benefits that people have mental health with. The barrier is that most people don’t know what they need. They know they’re not doing well. 

We tend to not get help until we’re in crisis, so we’re not doing a great job at prevention. Once you’re in crisis, it’s hard to know what the underlying issue is that you need help with. And as I stated earlier by talking about these evidence-based interventions, I think it’s getting people to understand what their needs are. And we built, for SHRM, the balance assessment, which evaluates over 40 different mental health issues to help employees understand their symptoms and get matched to effective in-network resources. EN members can get free access to the tool here.

How can organizations use data to measure the effectiveness of their mental health programs?

Marjorie Morrison: You really could look at it more longitudinally, like how is your health spend? The earlier you get your mental health treatment, hopefully, your total spending should go down. That’s a larger metric data that you could look at. You could look at how many people are utilizing the mental health benefits that you have. 

There’s a couple of different ways to look at how you’re measuring the benefits because there’s so many different ones, such as an AI one, a talk one, a peer support one, EAP; really, it’s so complicated. Why do we keep having conversations? Because it’s not easy. But those are ones that we could be looking at. But then there’s also psychological safety, like actually surveying your employees and using that data as well. You can’t just use one of them because different people have different experiences. We’ve all seen this. You can put the same people in the same room and give them the same thing, and one has a bad experience and doesn’t feel like you’re doing enough. And another one feels like you’re doing great, which is why these stats look good. So I think it’s really important to do a comprehensive review. But we have a lot of data now, and we should use it.

Well, we have time for one more question, Marjorie. What is one piece of advice that you’d give to leaders who feel guilty about taking time for themselves?

Marjorie Morrison: Well, have you heard the expression that guilt is the tax we pay for caring? I really love that because you know I’m Jewish, so I always joke that we just have Jewish guilt. But my Catholic friends say they have Catholic guilt. I think we are literally just raised with this whole guilt thing as part of our culture. But you know, the truth is, the healthier you are, the more impact you can have. And so, taking that time for yourself, it’s not only for you; it’s for everybody else, too. It’s not selfish. It’s strategic, and you are role modeling how to do it right.