Chris Hopper said his leadership in mental health education began in 2018, when a colleague gave a moving speech at an event about losing his father to suicide. 

Knowing that the construction industry has a high rate of suicide, Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee for Skanska USA, partnered with the Lindner Center of Hope. The Ohio-based mental health facility helped Hopper implement the Start the Conversation program, in an attempt to remove the stigma from sensitive topics on the jobsite.

Hopper then launched Start the Conversation in Nashville, Tennessee, before also trying out the Green Sticker program, a method of identifying leaders on the jobsite who are trained in providing emotional support via an indicator on their headgear, which Skanska piloted in the United Kingdom.

Here, Hopper talks with Construction Dive about the efficacy of those programs, real-life instances of success and how the industry’s view of the topic has evolved.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: Have you seen progress around mental health in the culture on the jobsite? 

Chris Hopper: Yeah, I would say so. The Start the Conversation Program was the first thing for us. That was mainly educating our folks to talk to your family, learn if there's any family history with mental illness and what those family members did to treat that or overcome it. 

That was really where we started to just de-stigmatize it, right? Make people comfortable talking about it. I think there's a statistic where a large majority of folks aren't comfortable, still. Something like 70% of employees responded to a survey saying they wouldn't speak up about mental health concerns to coworkers because of the shame and stigma. Internally we wanted to make it so people felt comfortable doing that. 

It wasn't just about affecting Skanska people. A lot of our work is done via subcontractors, and so we started posting signage around the jobsites with phone numbers and websites where people could get help for substance abuse or stress or whatever it may be. We do orientations for all of the workers coming on our projects, and so we put in the slide deck some statistics and educated our subcontractors so they could start feeling free to talk about it. 

And the Green Sticker program — we've had a specific instance in Nashville where one of the masons on one of our projects approached one of our assistant superintendents that he was having struggles with his mental health. He needed help. And because our assistant superintendent had been trained in the Green Sticker, he was able to get that person help. And the person received that help and then came back to the project a few weeks later and really was appreciative to him.

I think what we're doing is making a difference, and I am seeing improvement on our jobs and hopefully within the industry overall. 

Are younger workers more open about these issues?

I mean, we hope so, right? That was the intent of our programs, so that people felt more comfortable around it. And really, I think it's the language that we're using. It used to be people just talked about “mental illness.” But then the phrase “mental health” came about. “Mental illness” sounds like a negative thing. “Mental health” is obviously a positive thing. 

Simple things like that, having the right phrases and ways people can talk about it more freely, I think that's helpful. And if you see people in leadership positions opening up about it and talking about it, I think that that lets the new folks that are coming in feel comfortable sharing their own stories. 

I think that's all we can do: Just make sure that people feel comfortable. 

What has the feedback been like from industry partners?

There’s one really good example: When we started posting the jobsite signage and putting the orientation slides in, an owner of one of our general trades contractors came forward and shared a story with me about how his son had attempted suicide. Luckily, he was not successful and he's healthy today, but he was like, “How can we partner on this? How can we help you guys with this?” 

And so, that’s rewarding for me, to know that our subcontractor partners want to dive in here with us and help us and talk to their workforce about the same things.

How would you encourage other contractors, especially at smaller firms, to think about mental health on the job?

Well, it’s EHS, right? Environmental, health and safety. Everybody focuses really hard on the safety part, because you have to. There's OSHA requirements, everybody has to train their employees. But I think the environmental health piece of EHS sometimes gets lost. 

Those smaller contractors are still responsible for training their employees on safety. No matter what size your business is, you have to train your employees. So if you weave health into safety, I think they’re symbiotic, and they can play in the same conversation. If you’re training somebody about scaffold safety or fall protection or whatever else, you can include the mental health piece at the same time, at the same training

There’s a phrase I heard recently that I've been sharing: “If you don't make time for your wellness, you'll be forced to make time for your illness.” And that really resonated with me, so I've been trying to use that kind of to encourage folks to take time for mental health breaks and whatever those folks need to stay healthy.