How Plum is encouraging corporates to address mental health of employees

Plum is an employee health insurance platform that provides health benefits to corporations. The company is on a mission to accelerate the adoption of health insurance in India by making employee health insurance accessible, affordable, and usable for employees. It is re-imagining the health insurance stack and accelerating the penetration of health insurance in India to 100%. Plum aims to reach a milestone of 10 million lives insured by 2025.

Today, mental health has become a universal issue pertaining to the workforce, especially those who are under 30. These young employees of various organisations are today seeking support for various issues including burnout, anxiety, anger and severe work pressure. To provide valuable advice and healthy comfort, Plum, as part of their mental wellbeing program, has created a series where they are addressing employees of various organisations and educating them on mental wellness and how to face some of those challenges that one faces in a fast paced and stress bearing life especially post the pandemic.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Saurabh Arora, Co-Founder-CTO, Head of Healthcare, Plum, speaks about the company’s initiative to address mental health of employees at workplaces, its proprietary series – ‘Mending’, associating with mental health storyteller Tanmoy Goswami, and more.

Tell us more about the digital series – ‘Mending’. What’s the objective of such an undertaking?

Mental health is a universal issue especially pertaining to the workforce under 30, who are seeking support for various issues including burnout/ anxiety, anger management and relationship dynamics. Being built on a premise of care, we at Plum consider mental health as a crucial part of employee wellness and as a commitment to it we have created a series of nuanced conversations questioning the status quo of mental health in the workplace; moderated by me and articulated by a ‘lived experience expert’ Tanmoy Goswami, Founding Editor, Sanity by Tanmoy.

Mending is a proprietary series by Plum, where we address workplace mental health issues like hiring therapists, mental health leave, and language at work, amongst other topics. Our objective is to encourage HR leaders to give a fresh thought to decisions, policies, and practices in their organisations related to mental wellness. It is intended to help our target audience understand that workplace policies around mental health require a dialogue with employees.

What will be your approach to conduct this series and how do you plan to execute it?

‘Mending’ is a series of one-on-one conversations between me and Tanmoy, wherein multiple relevant and real-life topics related to workplace mental health are discussed. The video series will be released over several weeks on one of Plum’s digital properties.

We at Plum aim to spread awareness amongst corporations and employees that mental health issues should be better acknowledged and supported. It not only wishes to encourage corporates to cultivate care for their employees, but also equip them to do so. Our ‘Mending by Plum’ will encompass key themes such as – rethinking workplace policies, contesting popular beliefs, and taking more human-centric approaches to workplace wellbeing.

Who will be conducting these videos?

In our videos for ‘Mending’, I will be interviewingTanmoy. These video discussions will serve as an insightful repository of information on topics related to workplace mental health. They are meant to create dialogue between leaders of companies and their teams to enable effective support mechanisms related to workplace wellbeing.

How do you plan to measure the effectiveness?

Our objective through ‘Mending’ is to create awareness among corporates about mental health challenges and encourage them to have dialogues with their employees on such topics.

We want people leaders across organisations to recognise that re-evaluating internal practices is the first step to appreciate the nuances of mental health. Leaders should introspect from the dual lenses of people and policies.

Even within Plum, we are walking the talk and have initiated conversations with our employees to better understand factors influencing their mental health and how we can co-create practices with them to enhance workplace wellbeing for everyone.