Mental health: moving from talk to action
It’s September, and New Zealand’s Mental Health Awareness Week is coming up. It’s an important event on the annual calendar, but one that we believe warrants a little less “just talk” and a lot more action, particularly for workplaces in Aotearoa.
The issue of mental health has come out of the shadows in recent years, and that’s great progress. It’s being discussed, and not just in the last week of September. Companies are recognising that it’s a crucial part of human resources policy to support the mental wellbeing of their employees as well as looking for their physical safety.
ISO45003 is a recently introduced international standard that is all about managing psychosocial health and safety at work. This proves mental health in the workplace is being addressed globally.
So how do we move from acknowledging and talking about promoting good mental health to doing something proactive about it? To knowing how to respond and manage it in practice?
Here’s the Emendas perspective, and some advice on where to start when it comes to effectively supporting the mental wellbeing of all employees.
Use your existing systems
Mental health policy and practices should not be separated or differentiated from the rest of your human resources or health and safety frameworks. There are several reasons for this:
- Mental health policy and practices should not be separated or differentiated from the rest of your HR or H&S practice. There are several reasons for this:If you simply weave your mental wellbeing policy into the already-existing systems in place, you’re greatly reducing the amount of work involved. We love efficiency, and adding to what you’ve already got is much more economical time-wise than creating something entirely new. It eliminates the need to duplicate and recreate already document-heavy systems, and also makes adoption easier. Less paperwork? We like that, and we bet you do too!
- Creating entirely new and distinct systems for that aspect of health and safety is not achieving the ultimate goal of removing the stigma from mental health issues. It’s better to treat it as exactly what it is—just one facet of health and safety in the workplace.
We are big on systems thinking, and it applies here. The ways in which your organisation encourages and nurtures mental wellbeing are not a standalone element. It should be woven into and interact with all areas of your business governance.
And how can you work mental health considerations into your systems? Here are a few of the key concepts.
Risk assessment
Risk assessment in your workplace is very much standard fare. Particularly for those in heavy industry or manufacturing, assessing risk is a constant task and an important one.
So how do you include mental health risk as part of your regular risk assessment? You should consider the high-load tasks for any role and include anything that’s a high mental load as well as a physical one. What are employees spending a lot of time, attention, and energy on? What is their frequency, intensity, and duration? Is there a deadline? If we think of employees as we would an athlete - are we expecting them to complete high load training at the same time as competing?
Someone on the phone taking complaints for long amounts of time, for example, may experience compounding stress. How are successive events identified and monitored? Someone operating heavy machinery solo may be experiencing a lot of pressure to ensure that it runs smoothly, or a Manager responding to complex tenders may be at risk of focus-fatigue. These broader cognitive and sensory considerations should be a part of the risk assessment process for any role right from the start.
Look for gaps, and not only in physical safety precautions. Crucially, to truly understand where psychosocial stressors and pain points lie for your people, you need to talk to them.
Risk management
Time to put cones around it! Equipped with the knowledge taken from the risk assessment process, you can weave precautions and adaptations into your current risk management systems. Systems thinking is important again in this context. Risk mitigation practices, whether for physical or psychosocial safety, should be integrated into all aspects of how ‘work is done’.
Mental health is connected to safety which is connected to culture which is connected to productivity…which is connected to profit.
Risk management protocols might include, for example, ensuring that employees with high mental loads can switch to an easier or different task at periodic intervals. Roles with high psychosocial risk, such as call-taking for emergency lines, often have counselling/supervision services in place and participation monitored.
Big projects and hard deadlines are a common source of stress, and to manage those risks it can help again to compare workers to athletes. There’s no avoiding a high load during the big event, but the effects can be eased with subsequent training beforehand and a recovery phase afterward.
Te ao Maori principles from models such as Te Whare Tapa Wha help us to understand that risk management is multi-faceted, and to adequately address our psychosocial safety culture we need to recognise our workplace eco-systems. What internal and external factors interweave to affect the individual, the position, the team and the wider workforce?
Workplace design
Adding and adjusting systems or practices to address mental health pain points is fantastic, and something we want to see much more of in workplaces. However, in the future we would also like to see this aspect of health and safety included right from the very beginning as part of workplace design.
How can you design position descriptions and roles to make them psychosocially safe? How can you take the controls used in your risk management and make them foundational to your culture and workplace? Systems thinking should have you keeping mental health and safety in mind right from the start. Health and safety doesn't start with documentation; its focus should always be on the people.
He aha te mea nui o te ao
What is the most important thing in the world?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata
It is the people, it is the people, it is the people
Start with your people, and work outwards from there.
Getting started
If you’re making mental health a priority in your workplace, here are some ways you might get the ball rolling.
- Look at your values. How do your work practices—and your employees’ actual experiences—reflect them? If teamwork is one of them, can you apply it to help reduce the load on those who are stressed? How can teamwork be evidenced in how day-to-day work is planned and managed?
- Allow mechanisms for communication, but ensure there's a feedback loop. As we mentioned earlier, psychosocial risk assessment requires listening to people, so strengthening channels of communication is a great starting point. How often do we hear that meetings are ‘a waste of time’? Often this is a sign that the feedback loop that would create outcomes from the meeting is broken.
- Ensure tasks and parameters are clear. If variation is needed, the mechanism should also be clear. When there’s a change on site, people should know whether they have the authority to adapt their methods—and if not, what is the chain of command?
- Make sure that employees know when they can say no and allow them to express difficulties with no pushback. Inform them of any back up or escalation support that’s in place for them.
- Treat any mental illness events or struggles the same as physical injuries. This may mean recovery periods, light duties, return-to-work plans, deloading, and any other necessary measures. For a back injury, we may see a doctor, routinely attend physio and limit our manual handling for a period of time. For psychological situations, we may see a doctor, routinely attend supervision, and limit intense focus or external stressor tasks while we recover to full duties.
Prioritising mental health in the workplace requires not only talk, but also action. Let’s keep the momentum beyond the month of September—and if you need help incorporating psychosocial safety practices into your frameworks, get in touch with the Emendas team.