As a globally recognized mental health expert, Dr. Kathleen Pike joined One Mind as president and CEO of One Mind at Work in 2023 and became CEO of One Mind in 2024. Prior to joining One Mind, she founded and directed the Columbia University World Health Organization Center for Global Mental Health and led the Center’s Mental Health + Work Design Lab, where she provided thought leadership, content expertise, scientific research, and strategic guidance on advancing mental health at work. Dr. Pike holds a faculty appointment at Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry and School of Public Health and continues to direct the Center’s Mental Health + Work Design Lab. Dr. Pike has received multiple awards for her work advancing mental health including the 2021 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to the International Advancement of Psychology. A passionate beekeeper and cyclist, when not at work, she can be found tending her apiary and cycling in beautiful places around the world.

One Mind is a leading global nonprofit dedicated to improving mental health outcomes for individuals, families, and society, bringing more than 30 years of leadership to closing critical gaps between discovery and real-world impact. Radicle Science was selected in 2026 to be part of the One Mind Accelerator, which backs early-stage mental health startups. The organization is also known for its One Mind at Work program, which equips leaders globally to integrate proven mental health practices into the workplace. The Mental Health at Work Index — developed collaboratively with Columbia University's Mental Health + Work Design Lab and Ethisphere — landed One Mind on Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies list and won the World Changing Ideas award in the workplace category.

It's critically important, because if it is an essential component of a workplace strategy, it needs to be measured and it needs to demonstrate impact, just as any other area of business requires reporting. If we don’t hold workplace mental health to a similar standard, it will always be something that's nice to do when we have time, but will never be seen as an integral piece of business performance. But, in fact, the mental health and well-being of the workforce has a huge impact on overall organizational performance. By building in the measurement, leaders can have data to show that by doing certain things within their workplace, they're having a positive impact on critical metrics that are relevant not only to the individual employee or worker, but to the overall team and organization. Our goal was really simple. Give leaders a way to see where they actually stand and where the next dollar will do the most good.

That point is really important. Decades ago, I spent a lot of time convincing business leaders that mental health mattered. We don't have to convince people anymore. But the leaders don't have the data they need to integrate workplace mental health into their overall organizational strategy. So it largely gets relegated to resources and benefits. And while having good resources and benefits is critically important and we need to make it easier for people to access good quality care, the greatest untapped potential in workplaces is upstream. It's in the protection and promotion of people's mental health and well being. That's where there is so much latent value that organizations are leaving on the table.

Previously, when I went in to workplaces and would talk about workplace mental health, most leaders thought about resources and benefits. It was an “a ha” experience for them to think that the upstream activities, programs, policies, practices were actually part of an unwritten strategy that had a major impact on mental health. I didn't appreciate how siloed mental health and well-being was for many leaders as they thought about it in their workplace. There was also this disconnect between appreciation for workplace mental health and good intentions. There was no strategic approach or measurement plan, which wouldn't be allowed in other areas of a business. You wouldn't just put out an advertising campaign and not measure its impact. You wouldn't launch a new product and not have meaningful metrics. That worried me, because it meant that leaders didn't yet see workplace mental health as a core pillar to their overall success. That's where we see the opportunity.

Leaders had gotten to the point of intention and putting things out there, and thought that was good enough. But it's not good enough, and we know it's not good enough. Unfortunately, we also know when there are pressures on an organization to cut expenses, if you can't demonstrate that what you're doing is having an impact on the core business, that budget line is going to be vulnerable. And in the early stage of organizations measuring something related to their workforce mental health efforts, it is very rarely real outcomes. It would be something along the lines of participating in a psychological first aid training, and receiving a short survey the next day asking about my experience. While that is a step in the direct right direction, but we really need to know what was the aim of that training program, and how do we operationalize that intent, so we can measure whether we've had the impact. Yogi Berra said, “If we don't know where we're going, we can't know if we're lost.” As we think about the work we need to do for workplace mental health, we need to know what we're trying to achieve, and be able to show it.

The field is definitely moving. Mental health has gone from being in the margins to much more mainstream. And I don't take that for granted. Most leaders today see mental health and well-being as an important priority in their workforce and in their workplace. But there's a multi-layered gap that still concerns me. It's not easy for leaders to measure the impact of their efforts and many of these are complex systems. When you improve communications, when you create programs that prevent experiences that negatively impact people's mental health, the impact can take time, and it requires some sophistication in terms of measuring real output. That gap is something we're very much focused on. We’re trying to help leaders measure not only what they're doing, but linking that to the outcomes they're trying to achieve, so they have the data they need to say: We absolutely need to continue this program, because when we do this program, we have higher team engagement or we have lower absenteeism. Those are huge factors in terms that impact productivity. The flip side is we also need to use the data to prune, to stop doing things that don't have a return. Because there's only so much time, so much energy, so many people, so many dollars to spend. There's a psychology of problem-solving in our human nature that tends to add to solve problems. We always want to add something to bring a solution. It's much harder to make the case that the best strategy is to remove something, but that’s really critical. We have a lot of well-intended efforts that take time, resources, energy and bandwidth, and they are not producing outcomes. We should remove those from the list of activities.

The accelerator is an extremely important component to the whole story, and a major catalyst for good. The index gives us the measurement needed to identify the gaps and help prioritize what we should focus on. But then we need innovation and solution. That's where the accelerator comes in. Most people get their health care through their workplace, so employers are among the biggest buyers of mental health solutions. There are excellent providers of mental health services today. However, there are also huge gaps in the solutions, and huge gaps in terms of quality and access. The accelerator is critically important in terms of bringing innovation with real solutions to establish a more consistent high bar in terms of access, in terms of quality, and in terms of outcomes.

To date, the One Mind Accelerator has enrolled 51 companies; the first 37 that have completed the program have raised over $1 billion to date and have impacted more than a million people with lived experiences. We also have the benefit of working with early-stage founders; when they join the One Mind Accelerator, they can build companies that live the mission. In the way they do their work, they are modelling what all workplaces can look like to promote mental health and well-being, even as they build solutions for mental health and well-being.

I would ask you to hold the workplace mental health strategies to the same standards as other priorities in the workplace. Consider workplace mental health a core pillar of success for your organization, and commit to measuring outcomes. When we work mental health and well-being into the core strategy of an organization, and we measure carefully, the outcomes are there. We know that companies that are following best practice are experiencing higher performance and measures like net promoter score goes up, presenteeism goes down, absenteeism goes down, engagement goes up, accidents and injuries go down. These are huge factors that have very real, tangible meaning for overall organizational success. Make mental health and well-being of your workforce a pillar of performance, and ensure you're measuring the outcomes, so you can demonstrate how workplace mental health impacts success, and enhances the organization's overall performance.