A Commentary on Thomas et al. (2024): Zooming In and Out to Enhance Employee Well-being

Thomas et al. (2024) address a crucial and timely objective in today’s workplace: the growing and unprecedented need for employees to have access to, and to use, mental health resources. Their goal with creating a taxonomy of mental health offerings was to “increase the chances these offerings make impacts in people’s lives” (p. 3). We argue, however, that to truly impact employees’ lives, we must do what Kanter (2011) suggested leaders do in order to make effective strategic decisions, namely, to zoom in and to zoom out. First, we need to zoom out. Rather than focus exclusively on mental health, we must expand the focus to reflect a broader view of health. Second, we must zoom in. We need to focus on a very important benefit that individuals both want and need – flexible sick/wellness leave. In our commentary, we expand on Thomas et al.’s (2024) suggestions on how to improve the (mental health) needs of employees by zooming out and zooming in. To make our case, we focus on the experience of grief. Grief illustrates the complexities associated with health needs of employees and highlights (a) challenges associated with focusing exclusively on mental health (to the exclusion of physical health) and (b) the importance of flexible leave time in addressing employee health needs.