So you're telling me that when we're in the workplace, we can talk about our broken ankle, we can talk about our torn acl, but we can't talk about our depression and anxiety. We can talk about our bad back, but don't talk about menopause.

 

What fool made up these rules? And what fools are we if we follow them? This lore crashes directly into the goals of having an optimized and productive workforce. In the 16 years since I opened my first restaurant with my business partner, we've grown our company from zero to over 100 million in annual sales, serving more than 3 million diners per year.

​

How? By never asking our employees to leave their problems at the door and instead by striving to embrace each one as a whole person. That's how we built our company, and that's how we outperform the competition.

​

My hope for today is to shatter some paradigms, tell a little personal story, and plant some seeds with you for a future and a playbook to help create more productive workplaces and more effective employees. First, two quick data points.

​

One in five adults in the U.S. lives with a mental illness. And more than 30% of adults at some point in their life in the US Will deal with an anxiety disorder. Sounds important. And it is. But there's one more that really makes my point.

​

Today, depression and anxiety, just those two disorders, cost the global economy $1 trillion per year in lost productivity. Just those two disorders. My point is mental health is a workplace topic.

​

And as leaders, we have work to do. The work I'm talking about doing is cultural. That's to normalize and destigmatize conversations about mental health in the workplace. And I'd say this work is also tactical. That's the programmatic and resource centric tools that can be embedded in your everyday operations.

​

When we do this work, we elevate the performance of our people and our companies. And I need to clarify, when I say companies and when I say workplace, I'm talking about the whole workplace. I'm not just talking about the human resources department over here, or maybe in a smaller company, just the HR person.

​

I think we know the status quo in most companies when it comes to mental health. The employee hides it, the employer ignores it, or when it does come to the surface, the person's just sort of pushed over to that silo of human resources.

​

That's a paradigm worth shattering. Instead, I want us to position mental health as a workplace operations topic. Because think about it. Companies are generally good at their core operations. They know how to systematize it. Have daily routines, create checklists, have quality assurance.

​

And maybe most importantly, create a vocabulary around operational problems and operational solutions. So here's my logic. Companies employ humans. Humans have brains, and the brain governs the human's effectiveness at work.

​

So brain health or mental health. It's a workplace operations topic. Now, I'm a restaurateur and a business person, not a neuroscientist, clearly. But it seems to me that our brains, like our phones and our computers, have an operating system.

​

And sometimes this human operating system has glitches. Just like the smartphone in your pocket on airplane mode, has glitches. And so you can think about it another way. Think about software that you use at work.

​

Any piece of software that your company uses. Scheduling, supply chain, forecasting. Imagine if it had an intermittent 10 or 20% error rate. You'd stop at nothing to investigate, understand, analyze, and solve or adapt to that glitch.

​

So why don't we do the same thing with the human operating system? Before I dive in and explain how we do this in our company, let me tell you a little bit about my list of glitches and how they affect me at work. So, yeah, I've got a list of glitches, you've got a list of glitches. So what?

​

Right? We've all got a list. Physical, mental, whatever. Right now I've got tennis elbow. It's really pickleball elbow, but that doesn't sound right yet. Big, toe on my right foot, chronically sore, doesn't bend the way that it's supposed to.

​

I had a headache every day, literally every day for four years after I got a concussion, along with some other physical and mental symptoms. I'm doing much better now with those, thanks to some docs who worked on my mind and my body. I struggle with an eating disorder.

​

I deal with something called body dysmorphia. Now, I'll pause my list of glitches there. Trust me, it goes on. And you know what? So does yours. With this last one, body dysmorphia, I understand that I'm thinking incorrectly about myself, but when I look at photos or I think about how I look, the logic gets overwritten by a glitch in my code.

​

And so I think I look awful. Point is, I don't see what you see when you look at me. And so, okay, so what. What does this have to do with me at work? Well, at times, I struggle with obsessive, negative, ruminating thoughts about food Fat and body.

​

So if I'm at work with you, and we're colleagues, you're running the meeting, there's an agenda. You want me to focus, of course, on today's, you know, topic. Problem solving, work product, deliverable, whatever we're doing. What I actually need from you is to move the bowl of Snickers off the table.

​

And I know it can, sound a little funny, and people laugh sometimes when I say it, they laugh a little bit when I ask them to do it, but it's actually not funny when you have the problem that I have. What it is, it's disruptive to my ability to do my best work.

​

Okay, so one glitch, My glitch. And just because in that moment, what I need for me to focus is to move the food trigger from my sight, we could have another colleague who needs the opposite. What they need in that moment is a chocolate bar within reach to soothe their peaking anxiety.

​

And this is obviously not just about snacks. And, you know, whether I can reach them or you can reach them. The point here is mental health in the workplace. It's a multiplayer game. We're in it as individuals and we're all in it together.

​

So to optimize our performance, I see that we've got work to do in three categories. First, create a culture where employees are encouraged and embraced. Bring their whole selves to work. Second, get to know our employees and our colleagues, of course, strengths and weaknesses and what makes them thrive.

​

I think we do that. But deeper than that, get to know their glitches and their kryptonite. And then third, invest to build a mental health informed workplace that can adapt to these glitches and provide support for them.

​

See, when we do this, we're able to lift up our people and get much better performance from them. So when we're going to have a conversation about mental health in the workplace, we have to have a conversation about return on investment.

​

This is a business conversation. And I can assure you the ROI on your spend and your effort to build a mental health informed workplace can be fantastic. Lower turnover, higher morale, lower error rates, less absenteeism.

​

That list of return on investment goes on. So the question is, how do we get there? Well, it depends where you and your company are on this journey. Maybe it's about a culture shift or a culture change, or maybe you've got the culture pieces in place and it's about the tactics.

​

I think of all of this together as the playbook. I could distill my company's playbook down for you into a few components. Culturally it's probably clear that you're getting from me. I think a leader should embrace your truth, share your stories about your glitches, normalize the conversations.

​

And this myth that the hr, department is the only place that we can safely or legally or effectively talk about hr. It's a myth, shatter it. That goes hand in hand with the stupidity of telling people to leave their problems at the door so we can move the culture.

​

And then we get into the tactics. And in our company we have gotten measurable results with tactics like having all of our new employees, day one at orientation, download an app on their phone that lets them communicate with company leadership.

​

Two way anonymous communication to say what needs to be said. We invest in another app based service that gives all of our employees and their direct family members access to licensed psychologists for therapy by a text message or video appointment.

​

We pay for experts, practitioners, educators to come into company meetings and gatherings and to teach us about how to see signs of depression and anxiety and other mental health concerns and then how to have conversations which potentially lead to support.

​

Sometimes people just need conversations. Sometimes, sometimes they need to climb that ladder or explore those buffet of support options. Oftentimes those experts that we bring in are local practitioners, psychologists or psychiatrists in the areas where we have restaurants.

​

So I proactively build a relationship with these service providers and their offices so that when my employees have a crisis or a unique need or need to get in for an appointment, there's already familiarity and a proactive relationship so we can get our people what they need.

​

And these situations, they really do arise. And then one more example of a tactic in our playbook, we use a third party to come in and teach our chefs and our managers. And again, this is just a restaurant. It could be any kind of business. So these experts come in and they teach our chefs and managers about mental health first aid.

​

So hopefully these examples are things that you can either add to your company's playbook or used to start your company's playbook. And again, know that when it comes to return on investment, tactics like this can be measured.

​

I started today with Hope and I'll finish with Hope. I hope that together we can make mental health a common workplace topic. As simple as mental health is health. Ensuring that our brains and our employees and our companies flourish into the most valuable versions possible.

​

Not us who, government, church, NGOs. I admire and I am grateful for the work that people do in all of those entities. And it will never be enough. This is about us at work, in our lane, the lane of helping our people truly become the strongest, healthiest versions of themselves.

​

When you do this work, when you embrace your truth, when you encourage your team to do the same, you're not only lifting up your employees in your company, you're impacting your community and the world around you, person by person.

​

This is about changing the world one workplace at a time.