How to Make Measurable Improvements in Workers’ Mental Health

We spend a significant amount of time discussing physical hazards, such as fall protection, energized work, personal protective equipment (PPE) and operational risk management (ORM), in construction and other high-risk industries—and for good reason. Those factors directly affect whether someone goes home safely at the end of the day.

What safety teams do not always talk about enough is what’s happening underneath the hard hat. Mental fatigue, stress, burnout, anxiety and personal struggles all impact how people perform on the job. Those factors may not present the same way as a physical hazard, but they still influence safety performance.

That’s why more companies are starting to move mental health out of the category of standalone wellness initiatives and into everyday safety conversations. Many safety leaders already understand that mental health is important. The bigger challenge is finding ways to integrate those conversations into existing safety systems and measure whether support efforts are creating meaningful change.

An Ongoing Effort

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is only talking about mental health during awareness months or after a crisis happens. If safety is important every day, then mental health needs to be part of those same daily conversations.

At Faith Technologies Incorporated (FTI), we start early. Team members hear about our corporate culture of care program during onboarding, well before they ever step onto a jobsite. Mental health conversations are reinforced throughout our QuickStart safety training program, leadership training and ORM discussions in the field.

The belief that mental health cannot be a one-time campaign is especially important in industries where workers may still feel pressure to appear tough or avoid talking openly about personal struggles. Creating a psychologically safe work environment doesn’t happen through a single campaign or presentation. It happens when leaders consistently reinforce the message through everyday conversations and actions over time.

Mental Health in the Field

For many safety professionals, the challenge becomes figuring out what mental health integration actually looks like operationally in the field.

In practice, it often starts with leaders paying closer attention to changes in behavior and normal day-to-day interactions. Supervisors are not expected to become therapists or solve problems for team members. Instead, the expectation is around building awareness, recognizing when something may be different and helping connect team members to available support.

At FTI, frontline leaders are trained to recognize when someone may seem distracted or noticeably different from their normal behavior. Those changes may not immediately appear safety-related, but they can directly affect focus, decision-making and risk exposure on jobsites.

Travel can also create additional stressors for crews working in construction and similar industries. Workers spending time away from home may be dealing with personal concerns or emotional strain that impacts how they perform throughout the workday.

That’s why more safety teams are beginning to view mental well-being as another input into ORM discussions. Those conversations are often framed around protecting what’s under the hard hat, reinforcing that what someone is carrying mentally can affect how they perform physically on the jobsite.

Often, the most effective interventions are the simplest. It could be a supervisor checking in with someone, a leader noticing a change in behavior or a conversation that helps connect a worker to available support resources before a larger issue develops.

Measure What Works

Measurement remains one of the more difficult aspects of workplace mental health initiatives. Unlike traditional safety metrics, culture shifts and emotional well-being are not always easy to quantify. But safety teams do not need a perfect framework to begin.

A practical place to start is by looking at a few indicators together: awareness, engagement and early intervention.

• Awareness helps companies understand whether workers know what resources are available.
• Engagement data can help show whether people are actually using those resources.
• Early intervention opportunities may help leaders identify concerns before they escalate further.

Utilization data is one example. More employers are tracking engagement with employee assistance programs, coaching services and mental health support platforms to better understand whether workers know support is available and are willing to use. In many cases, higher participation can be a positive indicator that team members trust the system enough to ask for help.

Internal wellness program data showed a 27% FTI team member engagement with our digital health and mental well-being platform, which is above reported benchmark comparisons for both general industry and construction populations. When household family members were included, engagement increased to 34%. That level of engagement matters; it suggests team members are not only aware of available resources, but they are willing to use them when support is needed.

Team member perception data can add another important layer. In a recent wellness survey, 92% of respondents said they understood how to access confidential mental health resources, while 90% said they felt comfortable taking time for their mental health when needed. Together, utilization and perception data can help safety leaders better understand whether workers know support is available and feel comfortable using it.

For any organization, the specific metrics may vary. The important point is to look at multiple signals together rather than relying on one number to define success.

Some companies are also starting to think about early outreach the same way they think about near-miss reporting: as an opportunity to identify risk before a situation escalates. At FTI, team members reaching out to the company’s employee assistance provider for guidance or support are viewed as proactive interventions that may help prevent larger issues from developing.

Leadership Training

Another lesson many companies continue learning is that frontline leaders need clarity around what’s actually being asked of them. Supervisors often hesitate to engage in mental health conversations because they worry they will say the wrong thing or be discuss problems they aren’t trained to handle.

That hesitation often decreases once leaders understand their role is not to diagnose or treat anyone. Their responsibility is to recognize when something may be wrong, respond appropriately and help connect team members with available support systems.

Leadership training at FTI focuses on helping supervisors understand available support resources and how to connect workers with help when needed. That mindset shift has helped make leaders more comfortable engaging in conversations that previously may have felt intimidating or outside their expertise.

Mental health awareness is also reinforced throughout leadership development, safety training and recurring operational discussions instead of being isolated to a single presentation or awareness campaign.

Ongoing Progress

Companies do not need a perfect measurement framework to begin integrating mental health into safety management. What matters most is making the conversation consistent, visible and operationally relevant.

The safety teams making the biggest impact are not necessarily the ones with the most sophisticated systems. Often, they are leaders who consistently reinforce the message and make mental health part of everyday safety practices.

Mental health doesn’t sit outside safety culture. It influences how people respond to situations and perform on the job. For EHS leaders, the goal is not to create a perfect system overnight. It's to start treating mental readiness as a meaningful part of how safe work gets planned, performed and improved. The more companies recognize that connection, the more effectively they can support both team member well-being and overall jobsite safety.