Effectiveness of the Working Mind for Managers Program With People Leaders in a Transportation Organization

Workplace mental health challenges are prevalent in high-demand, male-dominated industries such as transportation, where job design, safety risk, and cultural norms may discourage help-seeking behaviors. However, limited evidence exists on whether workplace mental health training leads to sustained outcomes in real-world organizational settings. Leadership-focused mental health training has demonstrated improvements in stigma reduction and resilience, yet few studies examine whether these effects are sustained beyond the immediate post-training period. This evaluation examined the 6-month outcomes of The Working Mind for Managers, a manager-focused mental health training program, within a large Canadian transportation company. Data were collected between June 2022 and August 2024. Using a repeated-measures design, matched pre-training and 6-month follow-up survey data were analyzed to assess mental health stigma, resilience, confidence to address workplace mental health issues, and self-care practices. Results indicated sustained reductions in mental health stigma, with the strongest changes observed in workplace-relevant domains, including work-related beliefs/competency and perceptions of responsibility. Managers demonstrated significant improvements in resilience and confidence, along with modest increases in self-care practices. Findings are interpreted within social cognitive and adult learning frameworks, alongside organizational and implementation perspectives, highlighting the role of leadership capacity in sustaining workplace mental health training. These results contribute to the limited evidence on long-term outcomes and provide practice-relevant insights for implementing and sustaining manager-focused mental health training in real-world workplace settings.