In honor of Mental Health Awareness Month, MoLo had the chance to sit down with Chris Henrichs, Co-Founder and Head of Partnerships at Boon Health, which supports businesses by connecting their employees directly with highly accredited coaches to create a confidential one-on-one relationship for exploring personal growth and professional development while destigmatizing conversations around mental health in the workplace.
At MoLo, we know that in order to provide a top-notch experience for our customers and carriers, we need to create the best environment for our team. That’s why we’ve partnered with Boon to offer Boon sessions at no cost to our employees as part of our benefits package.
Although 80% of workplaces use employee assistance programs (EAPs) for crisis management, these programs historically have extremely low usage rates, with the average utilization hovering around 1-3%. With that statistic in mind, Boon’s founders created a stand-alone benefit working alongside traditional EAPs, offering employees personalized one-on-one virtual sessions with ICF-accredited coaches and Master’s level therapists.
Roughly half of the employees who utilize Boon have no prior experience with coaching or therapy. “We want Boon to be a benefit that feels approachable and attainable, which is why we use a coaching model and why most of the companies we partner with offer Boon at no cost to their employees,” Chris Henrichs explained. “Whether you’re working through daily stressors, burnout, work/life balance, or something more professional development-related, our coaches are trained to support you through all of the different aspects of your life.”
Boon measures success in a few traditional ways—engagement, retention rate, and customer satisfaction—but they also focus on the resilience of each of the employees they work with. “There are decades of research that show that more resilient individuals are going to have better self-worth as well as higher rates of employee satisfaction and productivity—those are all deeply interconnected,” said Chris.
“As we work to destigmatize mental health here at Boon, we’ve also found that using resilience as a key metric aligns well with the businesses we’re supporting. We know that in the last year, work and life have become integrated, and it’s hard to separate the two now. As we’ve all navigated that shift, it’s been more important than ever for us to ensure that employees are well taken care of, personally and professionally.”
When Boon was founded in 2019, the team couldn’t possibly have predicted how important their services would be in a year like 2020. Now, Boon has over 100 coaches and therapists in their network who have conducted over 4,000 confidential coaching sessions with employees across the country. When offered as a benefit, Boon has been a game-changer for employees:
“As we commemorate Mental Health Awareness Month, I want to remind everyone that you don’t have to be in the midst of a crisis in order to take care of your mental health and wellbeing. There are so many different things we’re all working on and talking to someone about our everyday challenges—whether they’re personal or professional—is a key component of overall wellness,” Chris concluded.
According to Mental Health America, the number of people looking for help with anxiety and depression has skyrocketed in the last 12 months. No matter what you’re going through, you are not alone. The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), the largest grassroots mental health organization in the nation, is available for free, confidential care 24/7. Visit NAMI.org to learn more about free programs and services near you. You can also call the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI or text NAMI to 741741.
If you’d like to learn more about Boon Health, you can visit their website here. Linked below is Chris Henrichs’ recent segment on What The Truck, where he discusses Boon’s findings on mental health in the logistics industry as a whole.