​As the pandemic continues to disrupt the labor market and employees struggle with COVID-19-related stress, anxiety and depression, Kimberly Miller is turning to a mental wellness tool that she says helps many of her company’s 4,000 employees improve their mental well-being.Miller is global chief experience officer at Initiative, a communications agency headquartered in New York, N.Y., with 90 offices worldwide. During the last 18 months, Miller has spent her time protecting employees’ jobs while trying to create a better experience in a remote-work environment.  “The lines between life and work have blurred and that caused an extra layer of stress on top of everything else that was happening. People really felt like they have lost control of their lives,” Miller said. She added that in 2020, Initiative made efforts to protect jobs and avoid layoffs, and turnover was low compared with previous years. That changed in the summer of 2021 when the job market opened up and the demand to find talent significantly increased across several industries such as travel, retail and hospitality. This situation led to several employees resigning either to take a new job or to pursue opportunities that give them more purpose. “We were seeing signs of burnout and signs of disillusionment. We knew we needed to do something,” Miller said.To help employees manage stress, Miller engaged Wellness Coach, a Miami Beach, Fla., company that offers a digital wellness platform where employees can receive mental, physical, emotional, financial and social well-being. Employees can personalize private one-on-one sessions and live interactive classes, or company teams can participate in wellness challenges.Initiative added Wellness Coach to their existing mental wellness program in June once it became clear that the COVID-19 delta variant extended the pandemic well into 2021.  In the first phase of its rollout, Initiative offered 1,500 employees in Brazil, the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Australia the Wellness Coach tools that are hosted on Amazon Web Services’ cloud platforms. Employees can take advantage of biometrics tracking tools, education and health content, and Tableau Software’s artificial intelligence tools to analyze data on their participation over time. In addition to using their desktops, employees can also log on to the Wellness Coach platform by downloading an app for their mobile phones, laptops or tablets. They can also access their sessions online through Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Slack. Since the pandemic struck, apps from companies such as Santa Monica, Calif.-based software provider Headspace, San Francisco-based Calm, Philadelphia-based NeuroFlow, and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada-based TryCycle Data Systems Inc. are improving their products and expanding their reach.  Carolina Valencia, an analyst at advisory firm Gartner, said the stress caused by the pandemic as well as the improvements in features and resources have increased the adoption of on-demand digital wellness and mental health apps.  “Because things are so dire people started experimenting with these apps in ways that they never would have before the pandemic,” Valencia said. “Employers were making these apps accessible to their employees, and the employees were not using them, but now …