The Key to Talking About Mental Health: ‘Make Sure People Feel Comfortable’

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.

The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Question: 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. 

To read the rest of the story from our sister publication, Construction Dive, click here.