Houston expert shares 3 ways to stay on top of employee mental health

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Companies that intentionally focus on their employees’ mental well-being will reap the benefits of a happier, healthier workforce. Photo via Getty Images

Conversations surrounding mental health have come to the forefront of business and is an imperative aspect that cannot be ignored by business leaders.

Approximately 20 percent of Americans, which is 50 million people (about twice the population of Texas), are experiencing a mental illness, 15 percent of Americans had a substance use disorder in the past year and nearly 5 percent, over 12.1 million adults, reported serious thoughts of suicide (Mental Health America). Notably, certain professions, such as construction, exhibit higher suicide rates, (CDC). With these staggering numbers, the foundation of workplace safety extends beyond physical well-being to encompass psychological health.

The landscape has undergone a transformation, stemming from the pandemic, and the stigma of mental health concerns and seeking help has loosened. Recognizing that September is Suicide Prevention Month, below are three ways businesses of every size can actively support the mental well-being of their employees.

Be Open

Long hours, physical strain and financial pressures can take a toll on employees. Many people are apprehensive to talk about mental health issues and feel it may show a sign of weakness.

Helping employees move mental health topics into everyday conversation begins with open communication. When leadership and managers listen to employees, they create an outlet for them to freely discuss their experiences and act if needed. Leadership sets the tone, and when leaders openly discuss mental health, it creates a ripple effect that encourages employees to feel more comfortable sharing their own experiences. By taking the lead in breaking the silence, leaders play a crucial role in dismantling the stigma surrounding mental health issues, fostering a workplace culture where open conversations and support are not just welcomed but embraced.

At Skanska in Houston and North Texas, we have gone as far as providing mental health first aid courses, which we call our “green sticker” program. Those who are willing to go through the training on how to talk with colleagues who may need to discuss challenges are given a green sticker to wear on their hard hat. This signifies to everyone on a job site that they are trained to discuss mental health issues and life’s challenges. In turn, these first aiders can direct them to the right resources for more in-depth assistance. Doing a simple thing like this helps break the silence and promotes mental well-being on the job site and in the workplace.

Provide Support

Shifting the workplace culture to include more open discussions has an incredible impact on employees. There are also policies companies can establish to make mental health and well-being more actionable. Employers can offer rotating mental health days or offer flexibility, which makes it easier for workers to ask for time off for a doctor’s visit or therapy session.

Also providing benefits like an employee assistance program (EAP), which is an anonymous way employees can seek mental health services or other resources for the root of the problem, such as financial and legal counseling, shows support. Employer-sponsored health screenings promote overall employee wellness, but it is another avenue where employees can address their own mental health and wellbeing in a private setting.

Stay Focused

Mental health and wellbeing concerns are much harder to spot than physical ailments, but they can have dire consequences if they are not addressed. Once the conversations start and the support is in place, it is not a time to become complacent. Leadership and managers need to continue to have regular conversations with their staff, which can help pinpoint when someone is struggling. Regular training for staff, even if they are not a mental health first aider, will help everyone stay vigilant in taking care of their own and watching out for their colleagues’ mental health.

There are numerous stressors in the workplace and when they are coupled with personal stressors, workers can be stretched thin. Companies that intentionally focus on their employees’ mental well-being will reap the benefits of a happier, healthier workforce.

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Dennis Yung is executive vice president and general manager at Skanska, one of the world's leading project development and construction groups, where he oversees building operations for Houston and North Texas.
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In a world of driver-less cars and artificial intelligence, companies have an increased need to focus on safety in the workplace. Getty Images

How to mitigate increasing tech-related risks in the workplace, according to this Houston expert

Play it safe

New technologies — driverless vehicles, delivery drones, and AI — are making an accelerated push into operational excellence across industries, and are generating a lot of attention. Hype notwithstanding, we need to also think also about safety and risk and how to prevent safety incidents before they occur so that safety operates in partnership with new technologies and innovation.

Today, safety as process that is wrapped into ones' organizational culture requiring companies to look beyond intended performance and innovation breakthroughs, to their own assumptions about safety. And how it works and does not work, despite best efforts, financial investments and operations programs that are intended to create a culture that is incident free in the workplace.

When firmly in place, an effective safety culture instills an environment where employees differentiate between events which, while detrimental to performance, have low probability of generating an incident, and those with seemingly minimal impact on performance, yet high probability of escalation into full-blown safety incidents, accidents and sometimes deaths.

Six safety principles

Creating safety in the workplace requires a new and different mindset which incorporates six sustainable safety behaviors:

  1. Leadership consistently practice positive regard and good intent to articulate, demonstrate and reinforce employee behaviors that exemplify a commitment to safety.
  2. Leadership clearly communicate safety objectives and provide employees information to enable and empower employees to make value-based decisions and set priorities consistent with their levels of accountability and roles in the organization.
  3. Leadership supports employees identifying real and perceived barriers to a safe environment in compliance with policies, regulations and risks.
  4. Leadership practice positive employee regard to encourage, and assume good intent to accept, constructive challenges to policies and practices that have little or no value.
  5. Leadership support and create an environment in which commitment to identify risks during the course of one's work activities and take action, when first seen, creates a mindset that will genuinely transform the organization.
  6. Leaders are visible and consistently viewed by employees as champions of safety every day.

Safety mindset threats

Many current safety efforts occur after the incident takes place. In other words, after an injury happens — someone falls off a lift, for example — actions are taken to prevent similar injuries in the future. This is known as reactive safety and is not an ideal solution. If we can determine the why of an accident, safety can become proactive.

An effective safety program trains everyone, and encourages safety precautions, as well as strives to understand and reduce risk, rather than waiting for an accident to occur.

With an effective safety program in place your focus is always on preventing injuries before they occur and targeting 80 to 90 percent of the risk. Through utilization of this kind of process worker-controlled program, precautions can prevent injuries, reinforces these behaviors, identifies and removes systems, conditions and obstacles that make it difficult or impossible to take the right precautions.

In addition, employees may be practicing vicious compliance, in contrast to authentic commitment to process safety, in which they follow management's policies, procedures and other mandates "to the letter", even in situations where other choices would make more sense.

The workforce may act unilaterally based on their own assumptions, for example:

  • "They talk a good game about process safety, but I know it's really about getting the work done. I'll operate to get the desired production rate, even if this pushes the equipment to its limit." Indeed, the oft-ignored employee assumption and resulting belief is that production trumps process safety.
  • Employees' reliance upon personal experience to evaluate risk of low-frequency events: "As an employee, my experience teaches me that I've worn my personal protective equipment 100 times and there has never been an incident. So, if I don't wear it this one time, especially since I am so busy, it seems to me that the associated risk of an incident is quite low. So, why does management constantly 'get on me' about wearing it? Aren't there more important issues facing us?"

Routine behavior often includes silence or compliance, but with little challenge of issues or conversation about what could or might happen. As a result, management may perceive that all is well when in fact employees have significant concerns and issues.

To avoid major safety incidents, both known and unknown, an organization can take process safety to the next level by:

  • Exploring and challenging deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions by examining the underlying antecedents of process safety behaviors and utilizing new technology systems that shut down operation when a safety situation is first detected before an incident occurs.
  • Achieving the desired operational discipline, including paperless documentation, setting expectations, defining critical cyber secure procedures, and linking executive bonuses to achieving safety goals.
  • Focus on practicing a leveraged safety program that delivers results in the most effective and efficient mean possible by frequently focusing on decreasing threats, risks and increasing attention and communications to prevention, detection and correction.

The ultimate effective safety process and program relies upon effective use of new technologies in the workplace self- and organizational awareness, and the constant, never-ending focus on safety everyday and minute that we spend in the workplace.

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Mark Hordes is principal at Houston-based Mark Hordes Management Consultants LLC, an organizational consulting advisory.

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New 'living pharmacy' biotech company launches out of Rice venture studio

fighting cancer

Rice University’s biotech venture studio RBL LLC has launched a new “living pharmacy” company, Duracyte, designed to make cancer treatment easier on patients.

Backed by an up to $45 million Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) award, Duracyte aims to commercialize implantable biohybrid pharmacy devices that are designed to produce therapeutic proteins inside the human body around the clock, replacing the need for regular injections and infusions for some cancer patients.

The company’s main platform is its Hybrid Advanced Molecular Manufacturing Regulator (HAMMR), a rechargeable, implantable device that can sense biological signals, monitor tumor environments and adjust therapeutic output in real time. HAMMR has wireless communication capabilities, which allow patients and clinicians to remotely monitor results through an app every five minutes and make changes to treatment plans without a hosptial visit. Additionally, the device can generate its own oxygen supply, which is key for the therapeutic cells’ survival.

“Biologic medicines such as monoclonal antibodies, cytokines and metabolic regulators already account for a significant share of modern therapeutics, but the way we deliver them today often requires frequent injections or infusions that can be demanding for patients and lead to inconsistent drug levels,” Daniel Anderson, MIT professor and co-founder of Duracyte, said in a news release. “Our vision is to enable a continuous, stable therapy by producing these medicines directly inside the body, which could improve treatment consistency, reduce side effects and ultimately transform how biologic therapies are delivered across many diseases.”

Duracyte’s first clinical trial is slated to begin by the end of 2026 and will focus on recurrent ovarian cancer. The Phase I study will build upon existing work on encapsulated cytokine pharmacy technology, and the company hopes that within a few years this treatment can reach clinical application.

The development of Duracyte is supported by ARPA-H's Targeted Hybrid Oncotherapeutic Regulation (THOR) project, which supports a multidisciplinary research consortium co-led by Omid Veiseh, a professor of bioengineering at Rice. The consortium also includes others at Rice, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University and the University of Houston, plus industry collaborators like Chicago-based CellTrans.

“What we are building is the culmination of years of progress in cell engineering, biomaterials and implantable device technology,” Veiseh added in the release. “By combining these advances with real-time sensing and adaptive drug delivery, we are working with the support of RBL to create a true ‘living pharmacy’ that can deliver continuous, precisely controlled biologic therapies and fundamentally change how these treatments reach patients.”

RBL launched in 2024 and is based out of Houston’s Texas Medical Center Helix Park. Duracyte is the third company launched by RBL, including Sentinel BioTherapeutics, a clinical-stage immunotherapy company developing localized cytokine therapies for solid tumors, and SteerBio, a regenerative medicine company targeting lymphedema.

“Duracyte exemplifies the kind of breakthrough that Houston’s ecosystem is built to produce,” Paul Wotton, managing partner of RBL LLC and co-founder of Duracyte, added in the release. “With world-class clinical infrastructure, exceptional engineering talent and initiatives like the Texas Biotech Task Force driving alignment across industry, investment and talent, this region is uniquely positioned to move the most ambitious ideas in medicine from concept to patient, faster than anywhere else.”

Houston energy hub opens new fundraising cohort to fuel startups

Apply Now

EnergyTech Cypher has opened applications for its second Liftoff fundraising program.

Applications close May 20 for the 10-week virtual fundraising sprint. The program is geared toward energy and climatech founders preparing to raise their first institutional round. It will cover fundraising requisites, like pitch materials, term sheet negotiation and round closing, according to a release from EnergyTech Cypher.

The program kicks off June 1 and runs every Monday from 1-3 p.m. CST. It will conclude with an in-person capstone simulation in Houston on August 3, where founders will work to close a mock round.

Jason Ethier, EnergyTech Cypher founder and CEO, will lead the program with Payal Patel, an EnergyTech fellow and entrepreneur in residence.

The program is available through Cephyron, EnergyTech Cypher's new investor relationship management platform, built specifically for energy and climatech founders. Users must have a Cephyron Boost membership to participate in the Liftoff program.

The Cephyron IRM app recently went live and is available to founders at any point in their fundraising process, according to the news release. The platform aggregates investor data, tracks market signals and delivers curated weekly recommendations.

EnergyTech Cypher launched Liftoff last year. The inaugural cohort included 19 startups, including Houston-based AtmoSpark Technologies, The Woodlands-based Resollant and others. Each participant closed at least one fundraising deal, according to EnergyTech Cypher.

EnergyTech Cypher rebranded from EnergyTech Nexus earlier this year. It also launched its CoPilot accelerator in 2025. The inaugural group presented its first showcase during CERAWeek last month.

EnergyTech Cypher's annual Pilotathon Pilot Pitch and Showcase applications also opened this month. Find more information here.

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCaptialHTX.com.

Cancer diagnostics startup wins top prize at annual Rice competition​

winner, winners

Rice University student-founded companies took home a total of $115,000 in equity-free funding at the annual Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship's H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge last week.

2025 Rice Innovation Fellow Alexandria Carter won the top prize and $50,000 for her startup Bionostic. The startup offers personalized diagnostics for cancer patients by using 3D culturing through its Advanced Tumor Landscape Analysis System (ATLAS) platform.

Carter is working toward her PhD in bioengineering in Professor Michael King's laboratory. She recently completed the Rice Innovation Fellows program and plans to commercialize ATLAS, according to a news release from Rice.

Actile Technologies, founded by another former Rice Innovation Fellow, Barclay Jumet, won second place and $25,000. The company is developing and commercializing textile-integrated technologies. InnovationMap first covered Jumet's wearable technology back in 2023.

Kairos took home the third-place prize and $15,000, plus the $2,000 audience choice award and the $5,000 undergraduate business award. Founded last year by Sanjana Kavula and Adhira Tippur, Kairos is an AI-powered patient intake platform built specifically for independent dental practices.

The NRLC features top startups founded by undergraduate, graduate and MBA students at Rice each year. The top three finishers were named among a group of five finalists earlier this year, which also included HAAST Autonomous and Project Kestrel.

HAAST is developing an unmanned aircraft for organ transport, while Kestrel uses machine learning to organize bird photographers’ photo collections.

Teams presented multiple five-minute pitches throughout the application process over Zoom and in-person before the five finalists presented at the NRLC Championships April 21 at the Rice Memorial Center. Each finalist walked away with an equity-free investment.


Other awards went to:

UnitCode

  • $5,000 MBA Venture Award

HAAST Autonomous

  • $2,500 Chan-Kang Family Prize for Bold Ambition
  • $1,000 Healthcare Innovations Prize

Telstar Networks

  • $2,500 Outstanding Undergraduate Startup Award

Multiplay

  • $1,500 Frank Liu Jr. Prize for Creative Innovation in Music, Fashion, & the Arts

Butterfly Books

  • $1,500 Social Impact Award

SOOZ

  • $1,000 Interdisciplinary Innovation Prize sponsored by OURI

Dooly

  • $1,000 Consumer Goods Prize

Project Kestrel

  • $1,000 AI Prize

Veloci Running won the NRLC last year for its naturally shaped running shoe. Founder and CEO Tyler Strothman recently told InnovationMap that the company has gone on to sell roughly 10,000 pairs of its flagship Ascent shoe, designed to relieve lower leg tightness and absorb impact. Read more here.

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