When yours is a workplace where wellbeing is emphasized and employee satisfaction is so high, there is virtually no attrition, it might seem there is no need for additional culture improvement strategies. But for Denver-based MINES & Associates (MINES), an international business psychology firm, their sponsorship of an employee wellness summit unexpectedly led to the discovery of the H.O.P.E. Certification (Helping Our People Elevate through tough times) program, a wellness initiative they knew immediately would take their existing efforts to a whole new level.
“The MINES team that was at the Wellness Summit sponsored by the H.O.P.E. leadership team and the Colorado Office of Suicide Prevention, they were very inspired by what the heard at the H.O.P.E. demonstration,” says MINES CEO, Dr. Dani Kimlinger. “They came back and said, “It’s cool that we were a sponsor, but you know, maybe we could learn some extra things for ourselves. We would like to be part of this process. Can we apply?”
“We have provided mental health services for nearly 44 years internationally and consider ourselves experts in the field of what we do,” Kimlinger says. “But we are also humble enough, frankly, to know that there's more to learn, more to grow. We can always be better. We can do more, we can do better. So, of course, we were interested in H.O.P.E. Certification.”
What is H.O.P.E. and how does it work?
Similar to how the Zero Suicide framework is used in healthcare settings to ensure the safety of patients, H.O.P.E. focuses on healthcare staff and is a novel program for organizations seeking to engage their workforce, promote resilience, and develop and sustain a caring culture. Or in the case of MINES, to take such a culture even deeper.
H.O.P.E. Certification is implemented over a 12-month culture-changing period with quarterly training and ongoing coaching on how to implement the nine evidence-based best practices, developed from the research literature and lived experience that form the National Guidelines for Workplace Suicide Prevention.
Similar to how LEED Certification promotes environmental health in organizations, H.O.P.E. Certification provides a path to psychological health and safety in the workplace. It begins with leadership buy-in and then gets at the root of whatever is eroding workplace resilience.
Because the program is customized according to the participating organization’s strengths and weaknesses, it addresses the root causes of mental health challenges within that specific workforce in that specific workplace and builds upon what is already beneficial. In addition, there is third-party verification of completion and external verification to ensure guidelines are met.
Kimlinger says that she was persuaded to greenlight the application to H.O.P.E. by one employee in particular, who had a close family member die by suicide. “We've never had an employee suicide that I am aware of, and we've been around for 43 years. But with that being said, suicide does still impact us.”
Discovering and filling gaps in access to wellbeing tools
Despite already having a culture focused on the wellbeing of all employees, the internal auditing process of H.O.P.E. found some gaps MINES was previously unaware existed, a process that at first made Kimlinger uneasy, but in the end yielded positive results.
“We brought in an outside facilitator and we did get a lot of great information,” Kimlinger says. “Our H.O.P.E. team had earned the respect, appreciation and trust from the organization, so we never had difficulty bringing people together for the focus groups. The H.O.P.E. Team also managed the anonymous surveys through the process. From what the H.O.P.E. Team shared, tt sounded like people were really open. Leadership and HR were not part of the focus groups but were invited to participated in the survey.” ,
Feedback did show, however, that despite there being a wealth of wellbeing resources at the company, some MINES staff members were still unaware of how to best take advantage of them. To address that, the MINES H.O.P.E. certification team, a group of in-house individuals who volunteered to drive the process, created a comprehensive document, listing all the resources, how to access them, and contact information for each, then distributed it company-wide.
They also went further and created a harm reduction tool kit geared toward suicide prevention not just in the workplace, but in the home as well, and distributed it to all of MINES’ remote employees as well as keeping one in the office so that all employees would have access to the potentially lifesaving interventions.
Creating a national peer support network
Another realization the MINES’ H.O.P.E. team had was that they would likely benefit from a peer support network. The problem, they decided, their departments for “peers” were too small to be peer supports for one another. However, they did have a national trade association of peers they might turn to instead.
“We realized that our peers in the industry could benefit from the same kind of support we were building internally,” said Kimlinger. “So we pitched the idea of a national peer support group toa trade association , with a group of about 40 other companies like us – these companies could be considered competitors really, but also our friends and peers – and it took off. Now, professionals from across the country will be able to connect and help each other through the challenges of their work in “like positions.””
Leaders emerge from within
Another benefit to having implemented the H.O.P.E. certification program at MINES was that it allowed employees who’d not previously flexed their leadership muscles to have the chance to do so. Says Kimlinger: “We had a couple of people on our H.O.P.E. team that are more “behind the scenes” ordinarily. But with the certification process, we got to see them be leaders because they all owned different processes and pieces of the program. We're really proud of our team, I just appreciate so much that they all stuck together and did this.”
