Employees aren’t just asking for quality mental health benefits — they’re willing to stake their job decisions on them. According to Modern Health research, 73% of employees and 81% of managers indicated they’d be more likely to stay at a company that offered high-quality mental health benefits. Yet many employers are still missing the mark with employee assistance programs (EAPs) that fail to engage team members and yield low adoption rates.

This article explores how organizations can boost their mental health benefit utilization and employee engagement — and how Lyft, a Modern Health customer, did so by offering personalized mental health benefits that fit the needs of its diverse workforce.

But before we dive into Lyft’s story, let’s look at the impact benefit utilization has on employee well-being and business’ return on investment (ROI).

The Impacts of Mental Health Benefit Utilization

When it comes to mental health benefits, utilization and engagement rates aren’t vanity metrics — they paint a picture of how well employees are being taken care of and a company’s overall ROI.

Causes of Low Benefit Utilization

Modern Health research reveals that fewer than one in three employees who enrolled in mental health benefits, typically EAPs, feel those programs actually met their needs. Reasons for low engagement include:

• Irrelevant services
• Limited professional providers (even in large networks)
• Cost barriers

As a result, employees experience massive accessibility issues, with 35% of employees waiting at least three months to get an in-person appointment with a mental health care specialist. 

When employer-sponsored benefits fail to meet employee needs, organizations suffer from various costs related to untreated mental health conditions in the workplace, including poor productivity, turnover, and high health care costs.

We’ll explore how increasing engagement can help mitigate these costs below.

Advantages of High Benefit Utilization

When employees utilize their mental health benefits effectively, it doesn’t take long for employers to recognize the following benefits:

Health Care Cost Savings

Health care costs related to mental health concerns have skyrocketed. Spending on mental health treatment and services reached about $280 billion in 2020, and untreated mental health conditions are associated with a shocking 3.5x increase in medical claim spend. One 2022 study showed that individuals with major depression spend an average of $10,074 yearly on health costs — or higher when hospitalization or suicide attempts are involved.

When these costs are absorbed through employer-sponsored benefits, employers experience a poor ROI. This is where accessible and effective mental health care can help companies save on health care costs. Supporting employees’ mental well-being allows them to recover faster and avoid future symptoms.

Reduced Stress

Personalized mental health care has a clear history of reducing stress — but this means nothing if employees aren’t using their mental health benefit. By offering accessible care designed to support mental well-being in various modalities, employers can recognize higher employee engagement, leading to lower stress levels in the workplace. 

Improved Productivity

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), depression and anxiety have a direct impact on productivity — leading to a global economic loss of $1 trillion per year. More specifically, depression can lead to issues like absenteeism, tardiness, poor work quality, and missed deadlines.

In fact, research reveals that employees with untreated depression:

• Experience a 35% reduction in productivity
• Lose an average of 27.9 days due to unproductivity
• Miss an average of 31.4 days per year

By providing benefits that support the needs of all employees, employers can eliminate these related costs, improving both employee productivity and output quality.

Increased Retention

Turnover is an expensive symptom of inadequate mental health benefits. According to Gallup research, replacing a manager costs 200% of their salary, losing a technical employee costs 80% of their salary, and frontline workers who leave cost employers 40% of their salary.

As noted above, a significant majority of employees are willing to stay or leave their employer based on the availability and quality of their mental health support. Providing thorough, equitable care is an essential aspect of retaining top talent.

Learn how to increase mental health benefit engagement among frontline employees in this short guide.

Improved Morale

In many cases, employers with a global workforce fail to provide care modules that offer equitable access to all employees. Beliefs and values influence how we think, speak, behave, and interact.

By providing culturally centered support that incorporates different employee perspectives, languages, and cultural backgrounds, employers can provide equitable support to all employees, leading to an improved sense of belonging across the workforce. 

Case Study: How Lyft Boosted Benefit Utilization and Reduced Costs With Modern Health

In mid-2019, leading transportation platform Lyft searched for a new mental health solution to support its guiding values, including "be yourself" and "uplift others."

By partnering with Modern Health, the company achieved a substantial financial ROI, reducing costs by more than 55% year over year and setting accurate budgets. They also expanded access to care and delivered a unified global experience to better meet international team members’ needs.

Soon after rolling out Modern Health benefits to employees, Lyft saw a striking increase in engagement. While only 14% of Lyft’s workforce and dependents engaged with the company’s previous mental health solution, 45% of Lyft’s workforce and dependents actively engage with Modern Health, and an incredible 61% are registered.

Improving Levels of Depression and Anxiety With Benefit Utilization

Lyft’s increase in benefit utilization and engagement yielded real clinical results for employees: 61% of members who indicated elevated levels of depression and anxiety experienced clinical improvement or recovery with as little as four one-on-one visits with a therapist or coach. As a result, users are happy with the benefit, leaving an aggregate of 76 NPS. 

Lyft also praised Modern Health’s ability to support employees through traumatic events and global crises through community Circles related to current events and disparities affecting marginalized populations.

In this quick research guide, discover how Modern Health’s Circles (video-based group therapy sessions) impact employees’ receptivity to using mental health services.

How to Increase Mental Health Benefit Engagement and Utilization

Lyft isn’t the only company to increase their workforce’s utilization of and engagement with their mental health benefits. For organizations with the same goal, here are several factors to consider when revamping benefits or choosing an entirely new solution.

1. Prioritize Excellent Customer Experience and Diverse Offerings

How accessible mental health benefits are to employees will largely determine how much they use them, if at all. For this reason, organizations should choose a benefit solution that makes it easy for employees to access the care they need, no matter what issue they’re facing.

Modern Health, for instance, offers a wide range of mental health services ranging from crisis intervention to prevention. Some of these offerings include:

• Self-guided digital tools
• Access to licensed therapists
• Video-based group therapy sessions called Circles
• Global network of certified behavioral health coaches
• On-demand crisis care
• Clinically validated assessments for personalized mental health care
• Stress management resources

Modern Health’s case studies highlight multiple companies that have experienced astounding results due to expanded access to mental health support through multiple modules of care. Lyft, as mentioned above, recognized an impressive 45% global engagement rate with 61% clinical improvement or recovery for members with elevated depression and anxiety.

When employers meet the needs of their employees with multiple modalities of care, employees are more likely to engage. With this engagement comes improved results that boost workplace satisfaction and reduce turnover.

Mental health care shouldn’t be a one-size-fits-all. Learn how mental health care preferences impact benefit utilization and engagement in this research study.

2. Focus on the Benefit’s Value of Investment

Many providers overemphasize direct financial savings related to mental health benefits to set benchmarks for value. This focus fails to address barriers to care that are common among traditional EAPs. 

In contrast, Modern Health focuses on the effectiveness of mental health benefits by analyzing the value of investment (VOI), which includes:

• Employee engagement and satisfaction
• Retention
• Health claims spend
• Productivity
• Reduced instances of burnout

This allows organizations that partner with Modern Health to achieve higher engagement rates with improved accessibility and speed to services, resulting in greater overall well-being.

3. Ensure Global Accessibility

According to the WHO, 12 billion working days are lost every year worldwide to depression and anxiety alone. Although there are known, effective treatments for mental disorders, more than 75% of people in low- and middle-income countries receive no treatment due to:

• Limited investment in mental health support
• Lack of trained mental health care professionals
• Social stigma surrounding mental health conditions

According to research, therapy is twice as effective in a person’s native language, yet the services traditional EAPs offer in multiple languages are often limited. This keeps many employees in global companies from utilizing their mental health benefits.

For this reason, choosing a benefit solution that offers globally equitable and culturally centered care can significantly impact employee engagement. For example, around 60% of Modern Health’s global registered members engage in at least one service, and 25% use both one-on-one sessions and self-guided digital resources.

Lyft's senior manager of benefits and mobility, Tanner Brunsdale, noted: “After working with Modern Health, we learned many team members hadn’t felt included in the therapy-only offering. For some global team members in particular, for whom therapy carries a heavy stigma, coaching and the self-guided resources available through Modern Health were an instant draw.”

4. Remove Any Other Roadblocks to Care

Employee benefits that go unused because of roadblocks to care offer little value to employers or employees. Common obstacles to benefit utilization include:

• Long wait times when scheduling appointments
• Limited providers that accept employees’ insurance
• Limited mental health professionals who specialize in employees’ specific conditions or lifestyle/cultural needs
• Difficulty finding time for appointments due to poor work-life balance

These roadblocks are more widespread than you may think. Although one in three adults experiences anxiety or depression, over 115 million Americans live in an area with a shortage of licensed clinical therapists. Furthermore, only 55% of psychiatrists accept insurance compared to 89% of other health professionals.

As employees seek companies that better meet their needs, equitable mental health benefits will be vital in attracting and hiring talent, essential for employee retention, and helpful in generating increased workforce productivity and efficiency.

Modern Health Helps Drive Employee Utilization of Benefits for Improved ROI

To navigate the demands of the modern workplace, employers need to provide mental health benefits that ensure employees are receiving the high quality support they need. To learn how your organization can meet the needs of your evolving workforce, contact one of our mental health experts today.