CLIENT CASE STUDY:
Teaching Employees How to Talk About Mental Health at Work
Client snapshot
Client: Progressive Insurance
Industry: Insurance
Duration: 2025
Company Size: 70,000+ employees
Audience: 900 people
Program Type: Virtual fireside chat with c-suite executives
Engagement Type: Virtual delivery to a large audience.
Topics: How to talk about mental health at work, mental health at work skills.
Results: Real-time, unprompted behavioral shifts reported. Zero attrition during the live event.
lessons on workplace mental health conversations
Most organizations know that mental health at work matters. Fewer have a clear, consistent approach for how to actually address it — with the right language, the right format, and the right expertise to make it land at scale.
The gap Phil Klein saw at Progressive isn't unique to Progressive. It shows up in organizations of every size, across every industry. And the research confirms it: despite high awareness of the topic, the practical conversational skills to navigate mental health at work are still largely absent from most workplaces.
Here's what this engagement can teach any organization thinking about how to bridge that gap.
the challenge
Through his work as Disability ERG Executive Board Events Chair, Phil Klein kept seeing the same frustration surface, from both individual contributors and leaders alike: people didn't know how to talk about mental health at work.
Not whether to talk about it. How.
That distinction mattered. This wasn't an awareness problem. It was a skills gap. Employees wanted to have productive conversations about mental health at work, but felt unprepared to navigate them with the right language, tone, and boundaries.
According to the NAMI/Ipsos Workplace Mental Health Poll (2026), three in four American workers say it is appropriate to discuss mental health at work. Yet nearly half still worry they would be judged for doing so. That gap between knowing it's okay and actually feeling safe to do it is exactly the skills and psychological safety gap that Phil was seeing inside Progressive.
The stakes were real. With 70,000+ employees across a large, diverse workforce, the need for a consistent, credible approach to mental health conversations wasn't just a wellness priority. It was an organizational one.
The Search For Help
Phil set out to find a speaker who specialized in how to talk about mental health at work, not just why it matters.
He was looking for someone who could:
Go beyond awareness and address the practical skills of having mental health conversations at work.
Teach the nuances of effective communication, including how to approach these conversations thoughtfully.
Bring the right expertise and tone to a sensitive workplace topic.
Finding the right speaker
Phil searched extensively through speaker bureau websites, but found almost no one addressing the topic with that level of specificity.
Melissa was the exception.
Her profile addressed exactly the gap Phil had identified. Phil said: "To this day I have never seen any other speaker described as tackling this topic."
The Work
Melissa was engaged to facilitate a fireside interview at Progressive Insurance, joining two of the company's top executives, CIO Bauer and CMO Teng, for a live conversation on mental health at work.
The format required more than a prepared presentation. It required real-time facilitation of a high-stakes, high-visibility conversation — holding the thread of the dialogue while creating space for honesty, navigating the complexity of a 70,000-person organization, and keeping the conversation grounded and skill-focused rather than performative.
Working with a company of this scale also meant navigating multiple approval layers, vendor coordination requirements, and the particular care required when addressing mental health across a large, diverse workforce.
From the initial briefing to final delivery, Melissa managed every layer of that complexity without losing focus on what mattered: equipping people to have better conversations the next time they need to.
Fireside facilitation format:
Rather than a traditional keynote or presentation, the session was structured as a live conversation. Melissa guided the dialogue alongside executive leaders, modeling the kind of open, grounded discussion she was teaching — not just describing it.
C-suite co-presentation:
The involvement of CIO Bauer and CMO Teng wasn't incidental. It was strategic. When senior leaders show up for conversations about mental health at work, they send a signal to the rest of the organization: this is a topic leadership takes seriously. That signal matters at every level of the company.
Large-scale virtual delivery:
The session was held virtually, reaching 900 employees simultaneously across the organization. Virtual delivery at this scale requires a different skill set than in-person facilitation — the ability to hold energy, create presence, and keep an audience engaged without the organic momentum of a physical room.
Language, tone, and boundaries as the core focus:
The session wasn't built around awareness. It was built around skill. Attendees left with concrete language they could use, a clearer sense of appropriate tone, and a better understanding of how to hold mental health conversations at work — without overstepping, without under-responding, and without making it awkward.
The Results
The feedback from attendees was overwhelmingly positive.
Without formal survey data, the most honest signal of impact came from attendees themselves — in real time, as the was still unfolding.
The response was unprompted, specific, and emotionally resonant. That's the signal that mattered.
Employees named specific behavioral changes they planned to make.
One of the clearest signs that a session has moved past awareness and into skill-building is when attendees leave naming something concrete they're going to do differently. That happened here. "I know I am going to start with not saying 'I'm fine'!" is not a vague commitment to "do better." It's a specific behavioral shift — new language, new habit, ready to apply. That's the output of skills-based mental health training. Not inspiration. Action.The session addressed a felt need — not a hypothetical one.
Attendees described the conversation as something they "truly needed." That language is significant. It tells you the content met people where they actually were, not where a program designer assumed they might be. In a room of 900 people, landing that kind of resonance is not accidental. It's the result of a session designed around real gaps, real language, and real-world context.Attendees left with practical tools — and said so.
The live chat showed employees specifically calling out language, tone, and how to create empathic environments as concrete takeaways. That specificity is the difference between a meaningful session and an effective one. Effective sessions produce things employees can name, repeat, and use. The feedback from this session reflects that.Cross-level relevance was confirmed in real time.
Individual contributors and people leaders alike responded positively throughout the session. For a workforce of 70,000+ employees across diverse roles, levels, and contexts, that cross-level resonance is critical. Mental health at work isn't a front-line issue or a leadership issue. It's an everyone issue — and this session landed that way.
CLIENT TESTIMONIAL - THE IMPACT
What Progressive Teaches Us About talking about Mental Health at Work
Awareness and skill are not the same thing — and conflating them is expensive.
Most workplace mental health initiatives are built around awareness. And awareness matters. But it is not sufficient on its own.
Knowing that mental health at work is important doesn't tell an employee what to say when a colleague seems like they're struggling. It doesn't tell a manager how to respond when someone discloses a mental health condition. It doesn't give a leader the language to open a conversation without making it awkward.
That's a skills deficit — and skills deficits require skills-based responses. When organizations invest in building actual conversational competency around mental health at work, the outcomes shift from vague positive feeling to behavioral change. That's a meaningful difference.
Who is in the room matters as much as what is being said
The decision to structure this engagement as a fireside interview with CIO Bauer and CMO Teng was not a logistical one. It was a strategic one.
When C-suite leaders show up — not just to introduce a session, but to actually participate in a conversation about mental health at work — they change what's possible in the room. Employees take cues from leadership behavior. When leaders model openness about the topic, they signal to the rest of the organization that it is safe to engage with it.
An outside expert brings credibility and objectivity. Internal leadership brings trust and proximity. Together, they create conditions that neither can fully create alone.
The format should match the goal.
A traditional keynote is built around information transfer. A fireside interview is built around conversation. Those are different things — and for a session explicitly aimed at teaching people how to have conversations about mental health at work, the format itself was part of the message.
Melissa didn't just tell the audience how to have these conversations. She demonstrated what one looks like: grounded, direct, empathic, and clear about boundaries. The medium reinforced the content. That alignment is something organizations often overlook when choosing how to deliver workplace mental health programming.
Real-time feedback is a signal worth paying attention to.
The absence of formal survey data from this engagement doesn't mean the outcomes were unmeasurable. It means the measurement happened in real time, in the live chat, in the words employees chose to type when they didn't have to type anything.
Unprompted, specific, emotionally resonant feedback from 900 people mid-session is a high-quality signal. Organizations that wait for post-event survey scores sometimes miss the more honest data that shows up when people are still in the moment. What employees said during this session — not after, not on a form, but in the middle of it — is some of the most direct evidence available that the session worked.
One session can change what's considered possible in a conversation.
This engagement was a single session. Not an 18-month program. Not a recurring series. One well-designed, well-facilitated session with 900 people — and attendees left naming specific behavioral shifts they intended to make.
That's not the ceiling of what's possible. It's a proof of concept. What organizations do next with that proof is where the long-term impact lives.
key takeaways
■ Awareness is the starting point — not the destination.
Most organizations have addressed the "why" of mental health at work. The gap is in the "how." Skills-based programming is what bridges the two.
■ Leadership participation changes the dynamic.
When senior leaders co-facilitate or visibly engage with mental health conversations, they set the norm for the rest of the organization.
■ Format is a message.
A fireside interview doesn't just deliver content about how to have conversations — it models what one looks like. The structure of the session should reflect the goal.
■ Real-time attendee response is credible data.
Unprompted, specific feedback mid-session is one of the most honest signals that a program is working. Don't overlook it.
■ One session can shift what people believe is possible.
Even a single well-facilitated session can produce measurable behavioral intent. The question is what an organization builds on top of it.
