The gap workplaces can no longer afford to overlook

Alison Butler
Jul 8
3 min read

Updated: 4 days ago

Ask yourself honestly: how many times in the past year has someone on your team needed CPR? For most workplaces, the answer is zero.

Now ask a different question: how many times has an employee shown up anxious, overwhelmed, grieving, or in crisis?

How many times has a customer or client unraveled on a call or in a meeting, not because of your product or service, but because they're barely holding it together in their own life?

For nearly every organization, that answer isn't zero. It's constant.

This is the gap workplaces can no longer afford to overlook. Mental health challenges aren't a rare emergency scenario, they're a daily operational reality.

Your employees are navigating them internally, and your customer-facing teams are absorbing them externally, often with no training, no framework, and no confidence in how to respond.

When a team member doesn't know how to recognize a colleague in distress, or a frontline employee has no tools to de-escalate someone in crisis, the cost isn't hypothetical. It shows up in turnover, burnout, absenteeism, damaged customer relationships, and sometimes in outcomes far more serious.

This isn't a call to abandon physical first aid and CPR training, those skills save lives, and they belong in every workplace. It's a call to stop treating Mental Health First Aid as optional or secondary.

If your organization requires CPR certification because "you never know when you'll need it," that same logic, arguably a far stronger version of it, applies to Mental Health First Aid.

Workplaces who close this gap aren't just checking a compliance box. They're building teams that are measurably more resilient, more trusted by customers, and better equipped to retain talent in a workplace culture that actually supports the humans doing the work.

The organizations that get ahead of this won't just be safer. They'll be the ones people want to work for, and the ones customers trust in their hardest moments. Training your team in Mental Health First Aid isn't an HR nice-to-have, it's a leadership decision with a direct line to your bottom line, your culture, and your people's wellbeing.

What is Mental Health First Aid?

Everyone has mental health. We all have good days and bad days. Mental Health First Aid is the support provided to a person who may be experiencing a decline in their mental well-being or a mental health crisis.

I always think of Mental Health First Aid as a foundation skill. It's baseline training so that everyone on the team has the same mental health knowledge, awareness, support skills, and language. It doesn't teach you to become a therapist or counselor, and it doesn't ask you to "fix it." You'll leave feeling more comfortable understanding mental health challenges, starting and having conversations about mental health, and encouraging others to seek the right next steps for support. - Alison Butler, Experienced MHFA Facilitator

Mental Health First Aid is available across Canada and can be delivered both virutally and in person.

Who takes Mental Health First Aid?

This course is designed for everyone. As a facilitator, when talking to workplace clients I highly recommend the following starting points as top priority for training. This will vary slightly depending on industry or workplace.

All managers and supervisors, human resources team members, OHS team members.
Customer service or frontline employees working with the public
Health and safety committee members, mental health committee members, emergency response team members, security or first response team members where applicable.
The people within your organization who employees naturally talk to or go to for support. These are often administrative professionals, office managers or others who have a caring and supportive personality.