Leading Workforce Mental Health Transformation: How HR Leaders Get Buy-In for Systemic Change

November 14, 2025

This playbook will provide you with a clear, actionable, 5-step process to help spearhead a new kind of mental health conversation—and transformation, within your organization.

Bookmark it. Reference it in conversation. Share it out with like-minded HR and benefits leaders. Most importantly, use these guidelines as an entry point to start to build the community of support you need to make lasting change.

For Dr. Joe Grasso “transformation” is deeply meaningful. As a Clinical Psychologist by training, he’s seen the impact when companies prioritize and invest in comprehensive mental health resources for their employees.

Lives change. Work gets better. Performance thrives. 

As VP of Workforce Transformation and Customer Marketing at Lyra, Dr. Grasso partners directly with HR and benefits leaders at professional services and tech companies to advocate for systemic change over ad hoc wellness benefits.

But implementing that change isn’t always easy. 

Overcoming resistance to systemic mental health initiatives

Workforce transformation requires an investment of time and energy that doesn’t always align with how many executives view the business critical goals of their organization.

They’re often only willing to “okay” individual wellness interventions and one-off benefits. Can’t we just add another mental-health day? Reimburse for yoga? Encourage everyone to meditate?

“Once we get into things like changing culture, policy, or ways of working,” says Dr. Grasso, “they’ll say: we don’t want a well-being culture. We want a performance culture.”

The irony is: this isn’t an “either or” choice. A wellness culture is a performance culture. But we don’t need to tell you that…

The five-step approach to leading the conversation around mental health workforce transformation

As an HR or benefits leader, you’re probably already a change-maker in your organization (we see you). But you’re also often caught between two (all consuming) responsibilities: the needs of individual employees vs. the organization-wide changes needed to build a culture of safety. In most cases, one can help shape the other. 

When you spend so much time putting out fires, there’s little fuel left to make organizational change. Our five-step approach is designed to help you start the conversation, soften potential resistance from leadership, and take small but powerful steps forward. 

Step 1: Identify the right entry point

As an HR or benefits leader, finding the right entry point — when leadership is most receptive to thinking in a new way about employee well-being — can be a doorway to change. These moments often occur in the wake of a crisis: 

• A safety issue or other well-publicized reputational risk can often force leadership to look inward and consider large-scale change. For example: an employee death connected to overwork and bullying could spark instant, org-wide change. 
• High turnover or low-morale combined with the right data can also inspire introspection. A customer service call center was struggling with a high turnover rate, discontent among teams, and low employee morale. The problem was acute, but they didn’t call in the Lyra team until they saw their dismal employee engagement scores. 

But it’s not just “when.” In his work with Lyra clients, Dr. Grasso has learned that how we talk about change matters… a lot. So when you’re starting the conversation, be intentional with your evidence. 

Does leadership care most about customer retention? Or customer acquisition? You can draw a clear line between employee well-being and any business goal your exec team cares about.

Are they concerned about human impact? Make sure you’ve spoken to employees, gotten feedback, and can paint a clear picture of the risk to their people. 

Are they motivated by competitive advantage? Show them the performance and reputational gains happening in companies that prioritize employee well-being and the risk to their own position if they continue to delay action. 

“It’s about speaking the language of what the company cares about,” says Dr. Grasso. In the case of high turnover, you might frame the problem this way: 

This is a team that will continue to be at high risk of turnover, and it’s costing us $[X] unless we solve the problem at the root. 

“It’s as much about storytelling as it is about data,” says Dr. Grasso.

Step 2: Identify internal champions (you’re going to need them)

It can be tempting to go straight up the chain for implementation approval, and in certain cases that’s enough, but Dr. Grasso also recommends a lateral approach:

Identify and recruit allies from across your organization. Whether that’s executives with decision-making power or cross-functional teams who will need to help put your plan to action (or even those who will feel the change most dramatically), you want people engaged with your objectives so that you can:

1. Make a compelling case when it comes time to get approval
2. And hit the ground running once you get it 

To build internal champions you’ll need to:

Focus on the right champions. For example: if your plan includes embedding mental health training as part of your learning and development (L&D) and safety programs: you’ll need the leads on each of these initiatives to help you with implementation. 

Engage necessary stakeholders, early. If you want to avoid friction and unnecessary defensiveness from colleagues who feel blindsided by change—what is this plan and why are we doing it, anyhow? —you’ll want to get champions on your side. Ideally, before implementation even begins.

Create a compelling narrative that’s tied to data. The narrative should tie your wellness objectives to concrete business goals, and the supporting data should speak to the goals of the individual you’re addressing. 

If an executive cares about retention, share data that ties your initiative to retention goals—show them the clear connection between employees who feel happy in the workplace and how it has a direct impact on retaining customers. 

If a health and safety colleague cares about the psychological safety of employees, show them how embedding the right training into their courses will help managers play an active role in well-being and preventing employee crises. 

Step 3: Gather compelling data that connects mental health to business outcomes

Next, you’ll need to go below the surface to get targeted, qualitative insights.

Your leadership wants data. But you don’t have to be an analytics expert to gather it. Start by:

• Administering a survey or assessment to get a broad swath of feelings, opinions, and feedback from employees about interpersonal, environmental, and work design elements of work. Even a few additional questions on your engagement survey can provide valuable insight. 
• Talking to individuals, especially those within high-risk teams.
• Engaging managers to get a sense of larger problem areas and soliciting their honest feedback on where change is needed. 

You should also feel empowered to survey more than once. Executives fear “survey fatigue,” but, “people don’t have survey fatigue from surveys,” says Dr. Grasso. “They have it from lack of follow-up.”

If you survey and then take action, employees will be happy to answer your surveys again. 

When Dr. Grasso and his team work with clients, they use Lyra’s Organizational Health Assessment to gather data to predict potential outcomes related to employee wellbeing and performance. The assessment helps HR and benefits leaders get a deep understanding of individual risk and surface answers to questions like: 

• What aspects of work and the work-environment are impacting well-being and posing the highest risk of harm? 
• If that risk goes unabated, what are the potential downstream effects? 
• What’s the human cost coupled with the organizational cost? Which teams are at the highest risk from the root causes? 

Following the assessment, the employer receives a dynamic heat map to help them visualize these problem areas. 

“On the heat map, we can tell the whole story of risk,” says Dr. Grasso. An example of Lyra’s Organizational Health Assessment is pictured below. 

Step 4: Implement a small change with high visibility

When it comes to workforce transformation, it’s OK to start small. By simply opening the doors to a new kind of conversation around issues like burnout—a problem that plagues employees and destroys productivity—you can start to turn things in the right direction. 

“The norm is: most companies don’t talk about burnout,” says Dr. Grasso. “Or when they do, they talk about how people can cope more effectively, not the organization’s responsibility to mitigate it.”

To start small, identify just one risk area to address. This could be anything from an internal event impacting one or more employees or a specific team that’s showing signs of burnout. Once you’ve worked to resolve the issue, expand the conversation to other parts of the organization. 

Dr. Grasso shared that one HR leader discovered an issue with role clarity that was impacting employees on a specific team. It was showing up in several critical ways:

• Employees were spending time on low-value tasks.
• Managers were frustrated by their employees’ focus on non-business-critical work.
• People in other departments were feeling territorial about work that they considered “theirs”.

HR’s solution? They asked each team member to write their own job description, then had every manager also write a job description for each of their direct reports. At the end, they compared the two descriptions to align on role responsibilities. 

This was a powerful intervention that addressed a small but frustrating company-wide problem, cost zero dollars to implement, and had an immediate impact on the team:

• The employees felt seen in their roles, and clearer on their individual responsibilities. 
• Their trust in leadership improved and friction between teams decreased. 
• Managers were able to give direct reports more autonomy while focusing on higher value problems. 

That trifecta: big problem, simple solution, visible impact–will go a long way toward making a case for larger systemic change. When employees see you take action toward solving their challenges, rather than just “survey and split,” their trust—and performance—improves. 

Step 5: Reassess and use results to expand the conversation

Congratulations! You’ve successfully implemented a new mental health initiative! Job done, right? 

Not so fast. 

After implementation, you’ll need to reassess by:

• Completing additional assessments or surveys. (Remember: survey fatigue is a myth.)
• Asking individual employees for their feedback on implementation thus far.
• Putting that feedback into action. Were there inefficiencies or frustrations with the process? Did the timeline for writing those job descriptions feel unclear? Small changes reap big rewards.

Don’t stop at the first positive result. Circle back. Ask people how they’re feeling about the change: what’s working and what’s not. Then adjust or course-correct as necessary. 

Putting transformation in motion: gains for employees, companies, and your future

When you implement thoughtful, targeted interventions, you create compelling evidence that helps you secure the buy-in and budget needed for organization-wide mental health changes.

And even small changes can reduce employee risk and improve trust. 

• By addressing bullying and harassment head-on, a tech company created a culture of safety and prevention instead of fear and blame. Productivity soared because of it.
• By focusing on improving morale, employees at a call center weren’t just happier: they worked smarter, stayed longer, and moved out of high-risk categories for good.
• By giving employees and their managers a stake in the solution, teams at one company led productive and meaningful conversations around role responsibilities, lessening friction between teams, managers, and their direct reports. 

These results aren’t limited to the employees and teams around you. As a mental health champion, you can also positively impact your own future. Following the successful launch of some key mental health initiatives with the help of Lyra, one HR leader was able to boost her visibility among the leadership team and make the case for her professional advancement. 

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With Lyra, you have a partner and a champion of your own. 

We’ll be with you through every step of the process — together we’ll find an entry point, gain needed buy-in, collect data with our Organizational Health Assessment, then implement and reassess that change to make sure it’s working. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how Lyra can help you transform the mental health culture of your organization—and change the lives of your people for the better—start a conversation with our team today.