The programming committee for the 77th Annual SAM International Business Conference is pleased to announce the acceptance of the presentation Organizing Mental Wellness Resources Offered to Employees, authored by Taylor Reed and Benjamin Thomas of Radford University and the University of Louisville.
Presentation Abstract: The pandemic has inflicted a range of stressors on organizations and employees. Within this setting, businesses face unprecedented competition for talent and demands for greater accommodation of employees’ individual needs, while employees seek resources and latitude for their mental wellbeing. Together, employees and businesses alike face a convoluted landscape of programs, opportunities, or benefits to support, restore, or enrich the mental wellness of employees, including EAPs, Mental Health Condition treatments, disability accommodations, Stress Reduction Techniques, Workplace Spirituality, Financial Wellness, Resilience Training, and more. This poster aims to provide an organizing framework for categorizing these different types of offerings in professional settings, based on these programs’ origins and their intended purposes. This research advances conversation on workplace mental wellbeing by incorporating both mental health condition perspectives (i.e., improving/addressing disordered mental health) and positive wellness perspectives (i.e., maximizing and protecting mental wellbeing) for organizations to best evaluate their options for offerings, logically choose which programs to offer, and strategically communicate these offerings to employees while evaluating the effectiveness of these benefits. Employees can use this framework to better navigate the utilization of these benefits and the recognition and evaluation of resources like these in job search and enrollment decisions.
Join us online to see this great paper and many more March 31 – April 2, 2022. For registration information visit www.samnational.org/conference.