Preventing workplace mental harm begins by asking questions
What percentage of your workforce is at risk of workplace mental harm?
Before answering this question, you must understand mental harm. Workplace mental harm may not be permanent but could impact an employee’s judgment or behaviour. It can be likened to an injured ankle that is sprained, not broken, but still impairs walking. The person can continue walking with treatment and support while the ankle heals.
Employers must understand that an employee feeling overwhelmed by unrealistic expectations can lead to psychological injury, which prevents them from performing their daily functions and compromises their effectiveness. At that point, they will benefit from seeing a mental health professional who can assess their impairment and disability.
How much stress do your employees experience daily?
An estimated 57 per cent of American and Canadian workers feel stressed. When I discuss workplace mental health with a CEO, we talk about how psychological safety can support and drive productivity, protect tacit knowledge, reduce lost time and promote organizational resiliency and sustainability. The conversation eventually gets to employees’ experience, but I have found focusing on the outcomes and tangible financial benefits of investing in workplace mental health is helpful.
Employers who are genuinely concerned about employee burnout and job stress can ensure support programs are in place for employees’ mental health. However, such programs tend to focus on the employees, not the root causes of their stress.
Micheal Leiter and Christina Maslach, two leading global experts in workplace burnout, report burnout is a response to chronic job stress. They suggest burnout is akin to the proverbial canary in the coal mine, meaning that when employees experience burnout, it is prudent to look beyond the individuals to their environments and the root causes of their stress.
Providing employees with a resiliency or mental fitness program, a resiliency mental health app, or access to an employee assistance program can be helpful when implemented with a thoughtful workplace mental health program. Unfortunately, employers too often focus on tactics and fail to address the root cause, which may be how work is organized and managed.
For example, employees who work in a command-and-control culture and live in fear will likely never feel comfortable and constantly experience stress. This mental state increases their risk of mental harm and injury.
How employers can protect employees from mental harm and psychological injury
My advice to employers is that impact requires a system approach. I often use a fish tank analogy to make the point that maintaining a clean tank is critical to the fish’s health.
A guiding principle for mitigating employees’ risk of mental harm, such as workplace stress and burnout, is promoting a two-way accountability approach where employees and employers create a workplace for employees to flourish.
The following four-step model begins by asking workers and leaders what they are experiencing. It is beneficial to understand current risks, factors contributing to risk, and the percentage of the workforce languishing and flourishing, as well as to search for evidence of programs doing what they should be doing. The critical lesson for anyone facilitating workplace mental health is that activity does not necessarily mean the outcome is being achieved. Buying a Stairmaster is of little value if it is not used regularly.
1. Obtain a workforce mental harm risk profile — Obtaining a baseline using a simple tool like the Q15 Mental Health Harm Risk Profile can help employees and employers understand the mental health harm risk based on employees’ experiences over the past 30 days. This risk profile asks employees how they are doing and provides them with feedback and recommendations. The higher the mental health harm risk profile, the higher the likelihood that employees may experience mental or psychological injuries that can increase workers’ compensation and other disability claims. This risk profile can help employers understand employees’ experiences that can increase their risk of burnout and other stress-related concerns like isolation, loneliness and maladaptive coping. It can take time to change a system, so it is prudent to encourage employees to engage in help-seeking behaviours to mitigate the risk of disability claims.
2. Discover what issues or factors create drains — Ask employees to share their workplace experiences to help reveal psychosocial factors that are chargers and drains. When choosing a workplace assessment, employers should be clear on what outputs they want to know about. Research shows that it is helpful to understand psychosocial factors and hazards and how psychologically safe leaders and teams are. OHS risks such as bullying and harassment, the value of existing programs, and how employees perceive that they are resilient and flourishing should also be discerned. Using evidence-based, anonymous workplace assessments can help employers determine what may be protecting workers from mental harm or putting them at risk. The challenge with many workplaces is not what they are doing. How they are doing it often creates strain and stress.
3. Inquire about what can be done and how it can support employees’ experience — Asking employees this question helps employers understand through a workforce lens what they think could improve the employee experience. Though workplace mental health committees can provide input, they often are limited to a few voices. Employers can take a qualitative approach by arranging focus groups where employees feel safe sharing ideas and opinions. These groups dig into employees’ experiences and seek solutions. For example, if question one found that many employees are at risk of mental harm and question two confirmed workload is a significant drain, leveraging a work redesign would look for what could be done to reduce workload stress, perhaps by eliminating useless meetings or allowing more flexibility for employees to work from home. Focus groups encourage listening, asking open-ended questions and engaging employees in conversations to create solutions and ideas that may not otherwise have been considered. Based on the data collected from all three questions, this step aims to determine what actions can be taken to prevent mental harm, ensure mental health supports are accessible and in place, and guide operational decisions that can influence the employee experience regarding what is being done and how. For example, the data collected may highlight the benefits of challenging a policy or red tape that can free up mental energy.
4. Build and launch a workplace mental health game plan — The first three steps increase awareness and accountability. This step moves from ideas and discussion to action. Regardless of the plan, provide for resistance and build a workplace mental health scorecard to measure output via a Plan-Do-Check-Act approach. Workplace mental health game plans promote accountability, learning and habits. I use what I learned from my dad: a stove has four burners, so you can only have so many pots cooking at once. I have taken this into my consulting and coach employers that less is more. It is better to do a few things well and achieve impact. One challenge often not considered in implementing workplace mental health game plans is they are designed to work in an organization that likely already has many things going on. Hence, creating space for impact requires being realistic and accepting that changing habits is a process, not an event.
Dr. Bill Howatt is the Ottawa-based president of Howatt HR Consulting.
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