Mental health challenges often creep into the workplace, affecting productivity and the bottom line. Host Wendy Fong and Marjorie Morrison, SHRM’s new executive in residence for mental health, discuss how HR can support employees going through mental health challenges while maintaining healthy boundaries for themselves. This podcast is approved for .5 PDCs toward the SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP recertification. Listen to the complete episode to get your activity ID at the end. ID expires April 1, 2026 Honest HR is the go-to podcast for aspiring and informed HR professionals intent on transforming workplace challenges into golden opportunities. Hosted by Monique Akanbi and Wendy Fong, this podcast brings you insights, trends, and actionable advice through relatable stories from the REAL world of HR. Along with Honest HR, the HR Daily newsletter delivers daily insights, trends, and expert advice, empowering HR professionals to build a productive, engaged workforce and drive organizational success. Subscribe to HR Daily to get the latest episodes, expert insights, and additional resources delivered straight to your inbox: https://shrm.co/voegyz --- Explore SHRM’s all-new flagships. Content curated by experts. Created for you weekly. Each content journey features engaging podcasts, video, articles, and groundbreaking newsletters tailored to meet your unique needs in your organization and career. Learn More: https://shrm.co/coy63r
Mental health challenges often creep into the workplace, affecting productivity and the bottom line. Host Wendy Fong and Marjorie Morrison, SHRM’s new executive in residence for mental health, discuss how HR can support employees going through mental health challenges while maintaining healthy boundaries for themselves.
This podcast is approved for .5 PDCs toward the SHRM-CP and SHRM-SCP recertification. Listen to the complete episode to get your activity ID at the end. ID expires April 1, 2026
Honest HR is the go-to podcast for aspiring and informed HR professionals intent on transforming workplace challenges into golden opportunities. Hosted by Monique Akanbi and Wendy Fong, this podcast brings you insights, trends, and actionable advice through relatable stories from the REAL world of HR. Along with Honest HR, the HR Daily newsletter delivers daily insights, trends, and expert advice, empowering HR professionals to build a productive, engaged workforce and drive organizational success.
Subscribe to HR Daily to get the latest episodes, expert insights, and additional resources delivered straight to your inbox: https://shrm.co/voegyz
---
Explore SHRM’s all-new flagships. Content curated by experts. Created for you weekly. Each content journey features engaging podcasts, video, articles, and groundbreaking newsletters tailored to meet your unique needs in your organization and career. Learn More: https://shrm.co/coy63r
Sponsor: [00:00:00] SHRM thanks Rippling for sponsoring this episode of Honest HR. Rippling automates workflows, eliminating busy work so you can focus on what matters. Rippling believes if you're feeling more frustrated than fulfilled by your HR software, it's time for a change. Share your thoughts at hrdeservesbetter.
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Wendy Fong: Welcome to Honest HR, the podcast for informed and inspiring HR professionals. I'm your host, Wendy Fong. So today we're exploring how HR professionals can support mental health in the workplace. This is a series. Especially relevant now more than ever, given so many rapid changes impacting our workplaces in 2025 and the emotional and human toll that these changes can take on both our work lives and personal lives.
Because, [00:01:00] really, how can you separate the two? Joining us today is Marjorie Morrison, SHRM's new Executive in Residence for Mental Health. Welcome to Honest HR, Marjorie. Thank you, Wendy, for having me. I'm so happy to be here. And we're glad to have you as well. So, to start off, Our audience may not know your background.
If you can give us a high level overview of your background and expertise and also how would you describe your new role at SHRM? You know, what is a executive in residence in mental health?
Marjorie Morrison: Absolutely. Um, I am a California licensed marriage family therapist. I'm also a licensed professional clinical counselor and a credentialed school counselor.
And I have a little bit of a varied, uh, path in all areas of mental health. I always say I've been in mental health my whole life because growing up, my dad was a psychiatrist. And so my family, like on Sunday night dinners, we used to have to have [00:02:00] family meetings. Where we would like talk about our feelings.
I had two older sisters. We were four kids and six years. So like a lot of drama that was normal, but my dad like had us analyzing it and stuff. And um, when I went to college and all my friends joined sororities. I joined the university crisis hotline and that was my whole kind of social world. So it really wasn't a surprise at all.
I don't think to anyone when I went to grad school for, for mental health and, you know, became a psychotherapist. So I did, I spent several years working at a children's hospital in San Diego, working with at risk families, at risk youth. I spent several years in private practice, working with a much more high end population, all private pay.
And then I got the opportunity to work with the military and spent several years getting, um, Getting a chance to develop and implement a, what I call a proactive counseling program. People weren't coming in. It was the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. And it [00:03:00] just seemed like if they weren't going to come in, how could we bring services to them?
So I spent a lot of years doing that and scaling it throughout the Marine Corps. And then I founded a nonprofit called Psych Armor, which is online education in the military veteran space on how, how civilians can support veterans. That was my first, uh, Um, opportunity to get to work with Sherm because we developed a veteran ready kind of certification for employers.
And then a little, each one has been like five years, about five, five years. One day I'm like, okay, I've already like outgrew myself out of a job. And then about five years, a little over five years ago, I. I founded a company called Psych Hub. Um, I founded it with former Congressman Patrick Kennedy and, um, it's a mental health education platform and, um, we do a lot of training up, uh, licensed mental health providers, upskilling them into specialties.
And then we also do a lot of consumer education and just launched this marketplace where people could find care, brought CEO to build up that [00:04:00] business. And I just sort of wrapped up that role at the end of December and in January, I get the best opportunity to have what has been just the most amazing role ever is to be executive in residence here.
And at risk of really sounding like I am fully drinking the Sherm Kool Aid, I am like obsessed with Sherm. I think it is the most amazing organization because it truly has a lens. Um, into the workplace that I don't think any other organization has. And I, I've just learned so much through the different kinds of, you know, opportunities I've had to learn from the companies, but whether it's small, medium or large, you know, there's the, the audience of SHRM is incredible.
So my role is like kind of, um, wide in that I get help with mental health vision and strategy. I get to do a lot of work with the foundation. SHRM has a [00:05:00] foundation where mental health actually sits and. It's an incredible group of people that are doing, like, amazing work. So I get to do that, but I'm also helping on the enterprise team, working with some of the enterprise clients.
So I really get to help develop mental health products and services, or like strategies and things like that, and learn. Like, I'm really learning a lot from the SHRM clients of what their needs are, and it's ever changing, right? So it's, um, so that's, that's kind of the, the, the. Uh, role in a, in a nutshell.
Wendy Fong: Oh, that sounds like you've had an amazing career and you got in a very early start with your dad being a psychiatrist. Um, and it sounds like you've been on this amazing journey and gone through all these different experiences that led you to where you are now. So glad to have you be part of the, the SHRM team.
Marjorie Morrison: Thank you. I should also say at Psych Hub, we developed the Workplace Mental Health Ally Certificate with SHRM. [00:06:00] So I've been, I've had an opportunity to work alongside SHRM in my, over the last decade. So yeah. So actually now being here is amazing because I've been always an admirer and a fan, fangirl, if you will, from a side and now it's even better on the inside.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, absolutely. And I know through the SHRM Foundation, you can take that certificate program and even the Veterans at Work, uh, certificate program that we partnered with PSYCHEV. I did that one. You can do it all for free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Marjorie Morrison: Yep. That's great. Thank you for bringing that up. The, the veteran one.
That's correct.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, and, and just learning more about the whole experience and the different branches, like, it definitely taught me a lot going through that program. And it's in their self paced program, so you just take it when you have time. So, definitely encourage our audience to check that out at the SHRM Foundation.
Thank you, Wendy, for that nice plug. So, according to SHRM research, almost half of all [00:07:00] workers are burned out. And I can definitely attest. There was a point where I have been burned out before and trying to recover from that. And nearly a quarter of our workers in the workplace feel chronically anxious.
So, you know, given these stats, and I'm sure you know, like, tons of other stats as well on mental health in the workplace, you know, why would you say HR in particular have this crucial responsibility to help employees access, like, mental
health resources and really reduce the stigma of mental health in these current times?
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah. I mean, I think the stats are Very indicative. I think we see it. We're seeing it everywhere, right? We're seeing it even in youth and schools. I mean, anxiety is high. Um, and so we're having that, you know, I would say kind of. Like in multiple places, burnout is, is interesting, you know, and I, I, my theory on it is that it really comes down to setting [00:08:00] a lot of boundaries and boundaries are really tough, especially when different organizations have different cultures.
And so therefore setting boundaries can be really different when somebody. Um, comes to you at work with a mental health issue. And I, I would imagine you would feel this or anyone in the audience, everyone can relate to this. When someone comes to them with a problem and they share that with them, it can feel overwhelming to the other person sometimes where they feel like they have to solve it.
And that could be like a, you know, an employee, if you're a manager that reports to you, but it could be a peer, it really could be. Or if it's HR, right? What it doesn't really matter what the role is, that can be very stressful and feeling like you have to fix it or solve it. And that leads to burnout, right?
So it's, it all kind of ties together. So you think one of the keys is like really learning how [00:09:00] to set boundaries and how to do a couple things. You know, one of them I'd say it's really important that, that People learn how to be empathic because so much of what we need to do is just be understanding, you know, understand some, so much of how, how to say to somebody, I hear you.
I know that must be really difficult. Those active listening skills that we learn, but sometimes forget. And I think there's an element of that. And then at the same time, being able to know This is not a conversation I should be having anymore. Now it's getting into a situation that probably shouldn't be as involved in and knowing how to refer and where to refer that person to for the benefits.
And we could talk about the benefits. But I think it's super important for everybody in a company to know that path. And bigger companies have, you know, sometimes, you know, more people, or they have sometimes the insurance companies [00:10:00] have care navigators, some companies, if they're large, have accommodation and leave teams, but it's really important that you get to know where are we sending people, you know, where, and, and making them feel that they're cared for, that their feelings are valid, valid.
And, you know, that they empathize with them and then sending them off that those boundaries will really help, I think, with burnout because then you're, you're starting to put some parameters into your day to day work.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, that definitely makes sense because I feel like we were as a society and even with organizations and technology advanced so much where we're always on 24 7, you have your smartphone, your device, you can constantly be checking texts and emails and always responding like to your point, depending on the workplace culture, they might, your work might always change.
Want you to be on or, and having to set those boundaries, like, okay, so nine to five, or what [00:11:00] are the parameters for that to prevent burnout? Um, I love what you said about. Empathy, having empathy with each other, like as peers and also from managers to employees. And also it's important if that, that workplace culture creates that environment of empathy as well.
Right.
Marjorie Morrison: We talk a lot about psychologically safe environments, you know, and that, that is a culture decision. That's a company decision of like, what are we, and there's no right or wrong way to do it. Right. But how do we create an environment where people feel safe? Cause you talked about stigma a little bit earlier and, you know, stigma is really changing, right?
It used to be nobody wanted to come and talk about their mental health with anyone. And now I think, gosh, I hear HR professionals tell me all the time. Um, or even, you know, just managers that employees have their. much more open to say I have anxiety or I am neurodiverse or I have, you know, [00:12:00] depression or I have to leave on Fridays to go to the therapist or whatever, whatever it is.
And that's a, that's a really good thing. But it also puts sometimes makes the other person feel like, shoot, I don't know. What I'm supposed to do about that, right? And I think the, the, the answer is just listening and helping somebody feel like their feelings are valid and that you are, you know, empathic and that it's okay to share, but at the same time that you're not taking on this role of having to be a therapist and being able to kind of, you know, make that referral.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, and as an HR professional, we're not trained necessarily to have the tools to be therapists. And like we said earlier, we're not there to solve, we're there to be active listeners and then refer them to the appropriate resources. So, they can be cared for in the right way.
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah. And you know, I always say this, like, when someone comes to you with a problem or they're sharing something, first of all, it's the most, it's the best compliment [00:13:00] someone can give you because they feel like, they feel safe and they feel like they can trust you with something.
So, that's like the first thing. And most, the second thing is most of them don't want you to solve it. They're not really looking for an answer. They're looking for a listener. And so, listening is key. Key. Really? So many times if you ever get this feeling of like, Oh my gosh, what should I say? What should I do?
Somebody is just listening. And just saying, wow, I would imagine that would be really hard or how are you, you know, how are you doing with that? And, you know, just asking caring questions, open ended questions, people will share.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, that's a good point. Someone really has to trust you to be able to open up about something personal in their lives.
And, I mean, if we look at mental health stats, you could even compare it in parallel to like stats on like loneliness. Like how people are feeling more isolated and lonely nowadays. Like, do you know your neighbors now as well? And you know, when we spend more time at work, we spend [00:14:00] more time with our coworkers than with like friends and family.
Um, so going back to like setting boundaries, that's important as well to, and taking an active approach to set boundaries on what healthy is, healthy relationships are for you. And for, you know, your employees as well, um, and making sure that they have the, the resources.
Marjorie Morrison: I think you're absolutely right about loneliness too.
I'm glad you brought it up because it is, um, it's almost like an epidemic, they say, you know, and it's not, by the way, it's global. It's happening everywhere. And a lot of it is because we are on social media. We're not quite connecting with people the way we need to connect. And we learned it from COVID, right?
I mean, isolation is not, it's not healthy. Nobody, nobody thrives. We need, we need people. We need human touch. We need human connection. We need sense of purpose, right? We need to feel like we're part of something [00:15:00] that's bringing meaning to the world. And when we feel. And first of all, everyone feels lonely from time to time.
It's not like any of us are ever like, Oh yeah, you will never feel lonely. Right? Like we will always go through periods of our lives where sometimes more than others where we feel lonely. I think that's less of the problem. It's more about knowing what to do about it when you feel it and knowing that, okay.
I know or identifying this as loneliness. Part of what happens with mental health is we don't know we're going through something when we're going through it. It's like you look back and you're like, wow, I was like really depressed and I was really stressed or I was really heartbroken and I didn't really quite know it when I was going through it.
You know? So I think it's really important for people to recognize how do they feel when they feel lonely, right? Is it a physical feeling? Like, what is it that makes that's going on with you? And then if you can. Put a remedy in place, like, you know, ask a friend to go for a walk, whatever it is. [00:16:00] It's, there's no right or wrong way to do it.
Like literally it could be going in, going to have a meal with someone, going, you know, doing an activity with someone, going on a hike. Like it, it doesn't matter, but it's, it's that connection that will really help.
Wendy Fong: Yeah. So sounds like mental health, it's a very individualized experience and journey for someone and an employee.
So HR professionals. need to be able to, to recognize that and. So, how would you suggest that they approach, like, conversations with employees about this? Like, also respecting, like, privacy and, and boundaries, too?
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah, I think it's a great question. So, first, I would say it really does vary from company to company because some companies have, you know, different cultures and that's a beautiful thing, right?
So, it really depends on the company's kind of philosophy around, you know, how involved And by the way, we're talking peers. We're talking, you know, [00:17:00] manager, kind of employee, uh, people, managers, things like that. I think that understanding that. If we just come up with the basic reality that everybody shows up to work with something, they show up with themselves, their physical, you know, or virtual, their intellect, their, their ability to do their job.
But every, but people go through all kinds of things in their life that are independent, you know, at home. And it might be a divorce. It might be that they're caring for a, parent. It might be that they are sending a kid off to college
and they're, you know, sad about that. There are so many different things that can happen in someone's life that are kind of regular transition things that everybody goes through.
I mean, maybe not everybody gets divorced, but people know what a breakup is, or there's a different kind of a loss that they might be going through. So I really do think it's really critical that HR professionals, that they learn to [00:18:00] understand that some of these things are Transitional and like, I always say this is a very trite thing to say, but this too shall pass.
Like knowing that this is a process you're going to get through it. It's going to be a little tough while you're going in it, but like just giving them the hope to know that like, that you're going to come out the other end. I think so much of life is managing expectations and to be able to feel that hope to know that like, you have to process this, but you're going to be okay.
And okay, doesn't go from, you know, bad to good. It's like, it might be that. More hours than not you feel good and as time goes on it slowly subsides. So I think one thing that HR professionals can do is really kind of just get educated in being good listeners, right? Having good boundaries, knowing what's Okay.
And not okay to talk about. And as soon as someone starts to ask you, you know, questions about what do you think I [00:19:00] should do about the fact that my, I I'll be honest with you. I got a call today and it's a CEO. And he said, it was personal. He said, my, His wife, it's his second marriage, daughter is 18, got into a fight with her boyfriend and attempted to take her life and took a bunch of pills and, and, and he was like, I don't know what to do.
And I don't want to go to our benefit, our, our HR benefits cause it's, it was a personal issue. So I think that's another really good example of like sometimes what we bring to work is personal. And I think we have to be able to realize that. it becomes work when that person isn't really able to function so well at work.
Right. And so like, I was able to kind of help him strategize on how to help this person, but I didn't fix it. I wasn't like, don't let me talk to her. Let me see. I didn't do that. I was like, here are a few things that you could do, you know? And [00:20:00] he was like, should she be a mother or should she be stern? You know, I'm like, you know, I, I, I gave some of my like, you know, Tips, if you will, but I think so much Wendy is just learning how to be a good listener.
That's how you can start to have these conversations and, and you can create spaces for people to share. Every single solitary company goes through this. It
doesn't mean that there's something wrong with like, your employee base, if your employees are having a lot of anxiety or depression or whatever it might be, stress, burnout, all those things.
We all relate to it and we all have that. So it's more about how are we going to manage it, you know? If you're having a high turnover and retention is a big issue, you probably need to be thinking about how are you going to manage this at a macro level a little bit better than, um, ignoring it because ignoring it isn't going to help, but we also need people to [00:21:00] do their jobs.
So it's like that fuzzy gray area of I care about you and we have benefits to help you, but you still have to use our benefits. That's what they're there for, but you still have to show up for work and get your job done.
Wendy Fong: I love that example that you shared that you, it's like that expression, like you want to teach someone to fish, not like give them the fish.
Marjorie Morrison: That's exact. That's a great analogy. Yeah.
Wendy Fong: And, um, like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, like giving people that hope, like I love that saying that, you know, when you're looking at the glass, like half empty, it is hard to see like the glass half full. So Even something as simple as that, like instilling that little bit of hope and then providing the resources like as needed to like guide them so they can fish for themselves if a future situation were to come, that they have the tools and even have the resiliency, right, to solve [00:22:00] themselves.
Marjorie Morrison: You're absolutely right. I, I often talk about like options. So if you're in a dark place, think about it as like a dark tunnel and every option is like a ray of light in this dark place. So if you feel like you have a few options, you all of a sudden already start to feel so much better. So that's why understanding what the benefits are.
And there is. So many mental health benefits. I say this all the time. I have yet to find a benefits person, team, HR that does not have adequate benefits. People talk all the time. Oh, you know, they don't have good mental health benefits. Like that is not true. I, I, I do not, I have yet to see that. And part of that reason is because there's so much.
private equity and VC influx into mental health and that there's been so many what we call roll ups and aggregators and specialty care. There's all kinds of, of like solutions out there. Some are point solutions, some are apps. [00:23:00]
There's an abundance of things that it's like, there's no shortage of. what to do for someone.
I think the trick is that you have to know what is right for that person, what they need. And the navigation stuff can be like a little tough. I think we, we have a lot of work we could do on screening and assessing better, uh, helping people get to the right care because mental health is not one thing.
It's a lot of things. It's like, you wouldn't go to a cardiologist for a broken foot, you know, but we kind of consider it as generalists and there are these evidence based interventions that are called that because they have been proven to be more effective at treating different symptoms. So we don't treat eating disorders like we do complicated grief or, you know, OCD or, you know, there's different interventions.
And like, I'll give you an example with OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, there's an intervention called ERP. And when a client, if you will, an employee is [00:24:00] seen by a provider that's using it, their success rate is about 70%. Um, but if it's 70 or even 80%, but if it's just OCD and it's like talk therapy, it can be like really, really, really low.
So you would ask yourself, so why wouldn't anybody use ERP for OCD? Most people don't They don't understand it. They don't understand A, what their symptom is or diagnosis, but I like to call them symptoms because sometimes people like stamp the diagnosis and they feel like they have that for the rest of their life.
But whatever that symptom is, it's important they know and then learn what the evidence based intervention is and go find that type of provider because you will have significantly better outcomes no matter what the symptom is.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, that totally makes sense. Like, as the stigma of mental health is slowly going away, I hope, I mean, I feel that personally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marjorie Morrison: I totally think it is.
Wendy Fong: And people are educating themselves, I mean, you can, like, research anything about [00:25:00] different symptoms or what you're feeling or what it could be, then you would go, like, this route. Just like how we approach, you know, physical health and, like, your example about different doctors and specialists.
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah, that's exactly right. It's like, you know, you're like, you wouldn't, you would go to a cardiologist if you were having a heart problem. Maybe you would go to your GP at the beginning or general practitioner, but you know, with mental health and also just cause what you need now. next year, next month, it might be something different too.
You know, I'm very big on prevention and I'm very big in the concept of like, let's use mental health to stay mentally healthy so you don't get mentally ill. Just like you use physical health to try to stay healthy so you don't get physically ill.
Wendy Fong: Yeah. It is all interconnected. Yes.
Marjorie Morrison: Yes.
Wendy Fong: And you had touched upon, I want to bring back to the conversation, you had talked about how mental health, it can impact like an employee's productivity.
And so just [00:26:00] like looking at the how this impacts like the bottom line for an organization. If you need to make a business case, like revenue, retention, um, even saving on health insurance costs for the company, I'm sure.
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah. You're absolutely right. I feel like we're doing a better job at the business case.
I think it wasn't, we were struggling with it. Um, a little bit more in the past because utilization has gone skyrocketed of mental health resources. So people might feel like, you know, you know, this is costing us money, but it's not really when you put in all of those factors that you, that you just mentioned, you know, I, I recently read that of the highest cost healthcare conditions that people could get.
You know, cancer, diabetes, uh, heart disease, 50 percent have a mental health diagnosis. So when you think about it, isn't that right? So when you [00:27:00] think about it like that, getting people. early. Let's just say, you know, someone comes to you and they say, Hey, I was just diagnosed with cancer. Really what we should be saying is, okay, in addition, you should start now to go see someone and there are therapists that work on what we call comorbid conditions, right?
Like you actually have a, in addition to your, you know, You have more than one thing going on, right? You have the cancer, but with it, imagine the anxiety that you have with that, you know? Are you getting feeling like depressed or
what else is going along with it? You're managing other people's anxiety who are worrying about you.
So all these things like we just need to get educated on, okay, someone has a diagnosis and they come to that. Let them know ahead of time, like you, you would much rather have someone go in early all of a sudden have a really compound mental health issue later.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, and, and what you said earlier too, prevention, we want to prevent.
Um, mental health care from [00:28:00] getting worse and escalating, um, to be even worse for someone. Cause no one, we don't want anyone, we don't want people to go through that, to be in that dark place and not get the resources they need.
Marjorie Morrison: Right. Mental health America has a saying before stage four. And I love that because it's like, you don't want to, you know, find cancer at stage four.
So why do we wait until we're in crisis to go get mental health care? You know, it doesn't, it doesn't really. It doesn't make sense when you like look at it from the outside. So, you know, the idea is what do you need to be mentally healthy? And it should be something you think about every day, something you're focusing on every day and in an environment, a work environment where it supports that because you will end up with healthier workforce, both mentally healthy and physically healthy.
And then to your point, you have higher productivity.
Wendy Fong: That's great. Um, well, Just to wrap up, I mean, this has been a really great and insightful conversation. I loved having you on, Marjorie, but if you had [00:29:00] a crystal ball, like what changes would you like to see in how employers, you know, organizations, HR in particular, approach, you know, supporting mental health?
And we did touch on some of those things.
Marjorie Morrison: Yeah, it's my favorite question actually, and this is why part of I love this role is because I'm getting to talk to more and more companies and learn more and more. I think that. We need to be thinking, I think it's moving more toward a model of traumatic events, both macro and micro.
And what I mean by that is having employers understand what the repercussions of significant events. So we talk about like the fires in LA, right? If you're a smaller regional company that's, or even a large one that has a presence in LA, how do you manage the fact that Many of our employees may have lost their homes or may have been have to be relocated because of smoke damage or maybe the office is gone.
What do you do? Like we talked about if someone has, [00:30:00] you know, a health condition, how are we handling things like loss and grief? Like the things that we had that we touched upon that someone comes into the workplace with things. You know, I, I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me, my God, when I was going through my divorce or when I was doing this or that.
I could barely, I felt like I was comatose. I could barely function. I mean, so when you think about these things, like employers, even AI, right? When we think about people being afraid that AI is going to replace them, I, I put it under the umbrella of traumatic trauma, right? And how do we, how do we make it so that.
Um, we know preventively how to handle or what we think we're going to do to handle these traumatic things that happen to everybody and both on the micro level and the macro level and, you know, and then like ahead of time having a strategy and then what do you do, you know, to implement it when it actually happens.
And I mean, I think it could be administration changing. It could be, [00:31:00] you know, just, there's so many things that. I think affect employees. And I, so I'm, I'm hopeful that we're moving in that direction and away from just this workplace, mental health workplace wellbeing, because it doesn't mean anything.
It's like an empty word, you know, it's more about what are you actually doing about, you know, these events that are going to happen and will happen and in, in, in, in one capacity, you know, or another. And, um, I think. That is something that employers can, you know, and Sherm helps with this too, um, and not to, you know, again, keep tooting the Sherm, the Sherm, uh, approach, but, you know, Sherm is spending a lot of time and energy and resources in really coming up with helping companies being that trusted voice for companies to help them think through how are they going to do it?
Cause it doesn't look the same. Companies are very different. And, um, but I think it's, [00:32:00] Getting to be more nuanced, like how we're dealing with some of these things that we know our employees are going through coming up with those strategies and knowing and then training our managers on how to
execute by the way, the more that the managers do it, the less that it falls on HR, right?
So the more we can get, you know, managers to sort of manage, make those referrals or whatever, then we can kind of free up to bring this full circle, Wendy, free up HR from doing some of these things that do cause a lot of burnout.
Wendy Fong: Yeah. Cause they're the ones interacting with employees day to day. So they also need to be trained and not just.
Having mental health as like a buzzword that a company cares about, but implementing, like you said, the strategies and processes, uh, within the entire company and making sure everyone is equipped with the tools they need. Yes. Well, I mean, we could talk all day, Marjorie, but we gotta wrap it up. I've really, [00:33:00]
Marjorie Morrison: I've loved this.
I really did. Thank you so much. I, I'm always just so happy when mental health makes the conversation, you know, mental health is at the table. So thank you for taking the time to, to even have this conversation.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, absolutely. We need to have more conversations like this and we could schedule another another time to chat as well.
So thank you so much for sharing your insights with us.
Marjorie Morrison: Hope to talk to you again soon, Wendy.
Wendy Fong: Yeah, definitely. Well to wrap it up for our audience, that's It's going to be this week's episode of Honest HR. So Honest HR is part of SHRM's HR Daily flagship content series. You can head over to SHRM. org slash HR Daily to learn more and sign up for our daily newsletter.
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