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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7 can't miss Houston business and innovation events for July

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Editor's note: While many Houstonians are flocking to vacation destinations, there are still plenty of opportunities to network and learn at tech and business events for those sticking close to home this month. From an inaugural biotech summit to the 12th edition of a local pitch showcase, here are the Houston business and innovation events you can't miss in July and how to register. Please note: this article might be updated to add more events.

July 10 - Out in Tech Mixer 

Out in Tech Houston provides an inclusive networking space for LGBTQ+ people and allies working in tech. Check out this relaxed, social-mixer event, hosted on the second Thursday of every month.

This event is Thursday, July 10, from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at Second Draught. Register here.

July 14 – Latinas in Tech Coworking Day 

Connect with fellow Latinas in the industry at Sesh Coworking. Network or work alongside peers, board members and community leaders in a shared office environment.

This event is Monday, July 14, from 9-11:30 a.m. at Sesh Coworking. Find more information here.

July 17 – UTMB Innovation VentureX Summit

Attend the inaugural UTMB Innovation VentureX Summit, where innovators, entrepreneurs, researchers and investors will dive into the future of biotech. Expect panel discussions, fireside chats, a technology showcase and networking opportunities.

This event is Thursday, July 17, from 7:30 a.m.-4 p.m. at The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Find more information here.

July 17 – Open Project Night 

Collaborate on solutions for some of Houston’s most pressing issues at this month’s Open Project Night at Impact Hub Houston. Hear from guest speakers and listen to open mic pitches. July’s theme is Decent Work & Economic Growth.

This event is Thursday, July 17, from 5:30-7:30 p.m at Impact Hub Houston. Register here.

July 24 – NASA Tech Talks

Every fourth Thursday of the month, NASA experts, including longtime engineer Montgomery Goforth, present on technology development challenges NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the larger aerospace community are facing and how they can be leveraged by Houston’s innovation community. Stick around after for drinks and networking at Second Draught.

This event is Thursday, July 24, from 6-7 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

July 30 – Ion Bike Club

Join Bike Houston at the Ion for a 45-minute guided cruise through the Ion District and Midtown. Afterward, enjoy a complimentary beer and network with like-minded riders at Second Draught.

This event is Wednesday, July 30, from 5:30-7:30 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

July 31 – Bayou Startup Showcase

Hear pitches from startups and small businesses from Rice University’s OwlSpark and the University of Houston’s RED Labs accelerators at the 12th annual Bayou Startup Showcase. Read more about this year’s teams here.

This event is Thursday, July 31, from 3:30-7 p.m. at the Ion. Register here.

Houston researchers: Here's what it takes to spot a great new idea

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Having a “promotion focus” really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Key findings:

  • New ideas can be crucially important to businesses, driving innovation and preventing stagnation.
  • Recognizing those ideas, though, isn’t always easy.
  • Nurturing what is known as “promotion focus” can help managers spot fresh ideas.

Whenever the late surgeon Michael DeBakey opened a human chest, he drew on a lifetime of resources: the conviction that heart surgery could and should be vastly improved, the skill to venture beyond medicine’s known horizons and the vision to recognize new ideas in everyone around him, no matter how little formal training they had.

Appreciating new ideas is the heartbeat of business as well as medicine. But innovation is surprisingly hard to recognize. In a pioneering 2017 article, Rice Business Professor Jing Zhou and her colleagues published their findings on the first-ever study of the traits and environments that allow leaders to recognize new ideas.

Recent decades have produced a surge of research looking at how and when employees generate fresh ideas. But almost nothing has been written on another crucial part of workplace creativity: a leader’s ability to appreciate new thinking when she sees it.

Novelty, after all, is what drives company differentiation and competitiveness. Work that springs from new concepts sparks more investigation than work based on worn, already established thought. Companies invest millions to recruit and pay star creatives.

Yet not every leader can spot a fresh idea, and not every workplace brings out that kind of discernment. In four separate studies, Zhou and her coauthors examined exactly what it takes to see a glittering new idea wherever it appears. Their work sets the stage for an entirely new field of future research.

First, though, the team had to define their key terms. “Novelty recognition” is the ability to spot a new idea when someone else presents it. “Promotion focus,” previous research has shown, is a comfort level with new experiences that evokes feelings of adventure and excitement. “Prevention focus” is the opposite trait: the tendency to associate new ideas with danger, and respond to them with caution.

But does having “promotion focus” as opposed to “prevention focus” color the ability to see novelty? To find out, Zhou’s team came up with an ingenious test, artificially inducing these two perspectives through a series of exercises. First, they told 92 undergraduate participants that they would be asked to perform a set of unrelated tasks. Then the subjects guided a fictional mouse through two pencil and paper maze exercises.

While one exercise showed a piece of cheese awaiting the mouse at the end of the maze (the promise of a reward), the other maze depicted a menacing owl nearby (motivation to flee).

Once the participants had traced their way through the mazes with pencils, they were asked to rate the novelty of 33 pictures — nine drawings of space aliens and 24 unrelated images. The students who were prepped to feel an adventurous promotion focus by seeking a reward were much better at spotting the new or different details among these images than the students who’d been cued to have a prevention focus by fleeing a threat.

The conclusion: a promotion focus really does create a mental lens through which new ideas are more visible.

Zhou’s team followed this study with three additional studies, including one that surveyed 44 human resource managers from a variety of companies. For this study, independent coders rated the mission statements of each firm, assessing their cultures as “innovative” or “not innovative.” The HR managers then evaluated a set of written practices — three that had been in use for years, and three new ones that relied on recent technology. The managers from the innovative companies were much better at rating the new HR practices for novelty and creativity. To recognize novelty, in other words, both interior and external environments make a difference.

The implications of the research are groundbreaking. The first ever done on this subject, it opens up a completely new research field with profound questions. Can promotion focus be created? How much of this trait is genetic, and how much based on natural temperament, culture, environment and life experience? Should promotion focus be cultivated in education? If so, what would be the impact? After all, there are important uses for prevention focus, such as corporate security and compliance. Meanwhile, how can workplaces be organized to bring out the best in both kinds of focus?

Leaders eager to put Zhou’s findings to use right away, meanwhile, might look to the real-world model of Michael DeBakey. Practice viewing new ideas as adventures, seek workplaces that actively push innovation and, above all, cultivate the view that every coworker, high or low, is a potential source of glittering new ideas.

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This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom.

Jing Zhou is the Mary Gibbs Jones Professor of Management and Psychology in Organizational Behavior at the Jones Graduate School of Business of Rice University. Zhou, J., Wang, X., Song, J., & Wu, J. (2017). "Is it new? Personal and contextual influences on perceptions of novelty and creativity." Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(2): 180-202.

5 Houston innovators who made headlines in June 2025

Featured Innovators

Editor's note: Houston innovators were in the spotlight in June, thanks to earning major accolades for their work on national — and global — levels. Here are five Houston innovators to know right now.

Tianshu Zhai, Chen-Yang Lin, Jing Zhang, HEXAspec co-founders 

HEXAspec has been awarded an NSF Partnership for Innovation grant. Photo courtesy of Rice

HEXAspec, a spinout from Rice University's Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, was recently awarded a $500,000 National Science Foundation Partnership for Innovation grant.

Founded by Tianshu Zhai and Chen-Yang Lin, who both participated in the Rice Innovation Fellows program, as well as Jing Zhang, HEXAspec has developed breakthrough inorganic fillers that allow graphic processing units (GPUs) to use less water and electricity and generate less heat. The company will use the funding to continue enhancing semiconductor chips’ thermal conductivity to boost computing power. Learn more.

Cole Woody, University of Houston student

Cole Woody has earned the Barry Goldwater Scholarship for his research on personalized cancer-fighting vaccines. Photo courtesy UH.

Cole Woody, a biology major in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics at the University of Houston, has been awarded a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, becoming the first sophomore in UH history to earn the prestigious prize for research in natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.

Woody was recognized for his research on developing potential cancer vaccines through chimeric RNAs. The work specifically investigates how a vaccine can more aggressively target cancers. Learn more.

Varshini Chouthri, developer of NOMAD

NOMAD aims to help hikers stay in the moment while still utilizing technology. Photo courtesy UH.

An AI-powered, screen-free hiking system developed by Varshini Chouthri, a recent industrial design graduate from the University of Houston, has received Red Dot’s “Best of the Best” award, which recognizes the top innovative designs around the world.

“NOMAD was truly a passion project, inspired by years of hiking growing up, where the outdoors became a place of peace, challenge, and reflection,” Chouthri said.Learn more.

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