The Covid-19 pandemic compelled people to prioritize their physical health during its earliest stages. People took remarkable steps: they attached masks to their faces, distanced from one another, and worked from home to avoid contracting the potentially fatal virus.

But as the pandemic continued and evolved, the mental toll that such radical life changes inflicted on just about everyone emerged. When employees who committed themselves to working through a pandemic found that their companies were not sufficiently supporting their mental wellness, many of them quit.

“In 2020, mental health support went from a nice-to-have to a true business imperative,” Kelly Greenwood and Julia Anas wrote in the Harvard Business Review last year. “Fast forward to 2021, and the stakes have been raised even higher thanks to a greater awareness of the workplace factors that can contribute to poor mental health.”

Evidence suggests that business leaders have come around to this conclusion as well. A 2021 survey by The Hartford insurance company, described by its CEO as a “wake-up call” for employers, found that 70% of them across the U.S. recognized mental health as a “significant workplace issue.”

While there might yet be a silver lining wrought from the pandemic, if corporations begin to make the mental wellness of employees a core value, this response has only come in response to a cataclysmic global event at the cost of millions of lives. But what if much of the justifiable mental health struggles workers have endured the past two years could have been avoided with a more proactive approach from people leaders?

This is a proposition Erin Eatough, PhD, an occupational health psychologist and senior insights manager at BetterUp, a digital coaching platform, raised during a thought leadership spotlight at From Day One’s May virtual conference on “New, Active Approaches to Employee Coaching and Recognition.” Eatough posited that companies would get the most out of their employees–helping them show up to work as “the best version of themselves”–through building up their “mental fitness.”

“We’re all affected by our circumstances, environments, work, stressors, but we are ultimately free to learn how to respond to our circumstances in a way that protects our mental health,” said Eatough. “So essentially, if we’re mentally fit, and we know how to respond to life, we can prevent mental problems in the face of really any struggle.”

A solution is mental-fitness coaching, which differs from traditional workplace coaching, says Eatough, because it focuses on internal work—“building the foundational mental skills, the capabilities that we need to be able to navigate through all of life’s challenges”—as opposed to making external alterations, like changing jobs or getting a promotion. With the help of mental-fitness coaching, employees can “unlock performance and potential both in and out of work,” Eatough said.

In addition to taking a reactive approach to mental health struggles, Eatough said many company benefits focus too strictly on clinical needs. They often are not easily accessible, either, and “not sticky enough to build real behavioral change,” she said. The majority of the workforce, ultimately, is not getting the support it requires.

“We need now more than ever to really take an approach that’s capable of building mental strength to manage challenges, to enable our peak performance, to build productive working relationships, and create organizations that employees seek out where they want to remain,” Eatough said. “And BetterUp believes that this approach needs to be preventative, it needs to be proactive, capable of implementing employee needs across the spectrum of mental health and well-being, from languishing to flourishing and on a very broad range of topics, using both real human support combined with digital support.”

The platform has seen some very encouraging results from its programming and partnerships with organizations. Presenting what Eatough described as “a case vignette” of results from four months of working with a large global tech company that wanted to address employees’ pandemic-related mental health hardships, BetterUp reports the organization saw a 35% improvement in well-being for those who initially scored “low” in that area. Overall, there was a 17% improvement in well-being. There was also an 18% improvement in coping skills and a 25% improvement in adaptability, both of which are key to maintaining well-being. More workers reported that they were “thriving,” and fewer said they were “languishing” at the end of the four-month program.

“Compared to those who are ‘low,’ employees with the highest levels of mental fitness have fewer missed days of work for health reasons,” Eatough said, citing additional BetterUp research. “They have higher engagement, higher protein productivity, and they’re much more likely to be a top performer by five times.”

It seems the secret to better productivity in the face of mental health hardship is out: Treat it–before it crops up–with mental-fitness coaching.

Michael Stahl is a New York City-based freelance journalist, writer, and editor. You can read more of his work at MichaelStahlWrites.com, follow him on Twitter @MichaelRStahl, and order his first book, the autobiography of Major League Baseball pitcher Bartolo Colón, at Abrams Books.