Men’s Health Week: How to move from awareness to action

Men are now more likely to turn to AI than humans for wellbeing support, with loneliness, stress and delayed healthcare undermining men’s health.

According to our latest Health at Work Report, one in three men are now worried about their mental health on a daily basis, with loneliness and suicide rates continuing to rise.

Substance misuse remains a major issue and many men still delay seeking medical advice until symptoms worsen into more serious conditions or life-threatening disease. At the same time, modern pressures to more equally share caring duties are creating new challenges.

Historic pressure to ‘man up’ and ‘be strong’ means men are more likely to seek anonymous support via AI than mental health counselling (26% compared to 9%), with men significantly more comfortable discussing workload challenges, than personal relationship issues.

Employers and managers have a valuable opportunity to better connect men with support, but the challenge is shifting the focus from awareness alone towards practical action.

Men’s Health: Driving action through practical support

1. Accept how men want to seek help

For years, the conversation around men’s health has centred on getting men to open up, but the reality is often more nuanced than that.

Many men are far more comfortable discussing practical problems than emotional ones. They will talk about work stress before anxiety. Financial pressures before depression. Sleep problems before burnout. They will seek advice before they seek counselling.

For generations, many boys have grown up around the same messages: man up, boys don’t cry, get on with it. Even now, many men still associate vulnerability with failure. Emotional openness does not come naturally when you have spent years learning to minimise pain, suppress emotion and carry on regardless.

So instead of leading with mental health support, it can be more effective to lead with practical support. For example, encouraging men to call the Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) for practical advice, on everything from money worries to eldercare concerns, where they can then also be offered wrap-around support for the emotional toll this is taking.

2. Increase the social connection

AI has now become the most utilised wellbeing tool amongst men. On one level, it is positive men are reaching out for something. On another, it’s deeply concerning they feel more comfortable confiding in a chatbot than another human being. As this is doing nothing to stem increasing rates of loneliness, suicide and drug and alcohol abuse.

Instead of trying to drive direct face-to-face conversations between men and others, increase the opportunities for conversation to occur more naturally during activities such as walking, shared hobbies or after sports clubs, where there is less pressure to talk about emotions.

This approach is proving so effective that many charities and clinicians are now using ‘social prescribing’ to encourage men to get involved in community groups to address stress and anxiety, before prescribing medication.

They remove the intensity and stigma that can still surround traditional mental health support, while reducing isolation and encouraging earlier engagement before problems escalate.

3. Get managers to hold wellbeing check-ins

Managers have a vital role to play when it comes to spotting when a male colleague is beginning to struggle before they reach crisis point. However, they are twice as likely to refer female employees into occupational health than male employees, highlighting the need for more proactive support.

By getting to really know their employees, in terms of their usual behaviours and appearance, managers are much more likely to notice when someone suddenly becomes out of sorts. Perhaps they become more forgetful, dishevelled or aggressive or less reliable or confident. These small behavioural changes are often visible long before an employee asks for help.

Noticing these changes and conducting a wellbeing check-in, enables managers to go beyond just talking about workload and deliverables, to asking the employee how they’re feeling so they can be proactively signposted into appropriate support before they go absent.

The ALEC model in our guide to conducting a wellbeing conversation sets out the principles of ‘asking’ the employee why they’re not themselves right now, really ‘listening’ instead of trying to fix the situation, ‘encouraging’ action and ‘checking-in.’

4. Communicate the risks

Many men know certain habits are unhealthy. What they often do not realise is how quickly risk accumulates quietly in the background. They need to be helped to clearly understand the risks and told how they are putting themselves in the way of danger.

High blood pressure, poor sleep, smoking, alcohol misuse and inactivity rarely feel urgent in the moment. Until suddenly they lead to largely preventable diseases, such as diabetes, cancer, stroke and coronary heart disease. These have little or no symptoms, often requiring blood testing. However, many men delay asking for this until they become noticeably sick.

Instead of allowing them to slide into ill health, and costly private medical insurance or absence claims, offering voluntary blood pressure tests and triaging those showing signs of hypertension into occupational health can encourage lifestyle change to prevent disease.

An occupational health advisor can then spend the time GPs simply don’t have, to translate the health findings into personally meaningful feedback, such as “According to your results and medical history, there’s a significant risk you’ll have a heart attack within 10 years,” and provide the support needed to drive genuine behaviour change to prevent disease.

5. Focus on prevention

Even once men are motivated to make positive changes to their lifestyle, they may still need support to develop the opportunity and skill needed to do so.

EKBF for example, decided to support its mostly male infrastructure workers, by bringing us on site to support a ‘one small change initiative’. As well as encouraging employees to have voluntary health checks, this also involved overcoming barriers to healthy eating, such as the perception that this required cooking from scratch every evening.

By combining batch cooking education, with community cooking classes and know-your-neighbour events, the company was able to give people the practical skills needed to easily cook and reheat healthier food and better support one another. (Read the full case study).

As the head of occupational health observed, these types of occupational health interventions can proactively help people stay in work. With Health at Work data finding that 70% of men given proactive wellbeing support from their employer are less likely to want to work elsewhere and 80% are more likely to feel very or extremely productive.

Dr Bernard Yew is Chief Medical Officer for PAM Group

How can PAM Group help?

Our proactive approach to managing absence prevented two-thirds of employees referred into our occupational health services from going absent, according to our latest data analysis. 91% were expected to be in work a month later, compared to just 53% of those referred after a month of absence.

Don’t wait until your people go off sick. Find out how proactively supporting people to stay in work can help you reduce absence and boost wellbeing. Find out more

EAP: Our Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) supports over 1.5m employees across the UK and can be marketed as a practical advice line, while also offering effective wrap-around emotional support – find out more

Occupational Health: Manager referrals allow managers to sign-post employees into occupational health for more detailed support for those who are struggling, to help prevent sickness and absence at the earliest stage – find out more

Voluntary Health Checks: Blood pressure checks can be offered in isolation, or as part of our wellbeing checks to help you identify health risks and support employees to make lifestyle changes before hypertension can turn into more serious disease

Arrange a free call-back with one of our consultants, to discuss your needs. Contact us