Courtesy of Katy Scharf
MINING MENTORS
Be patient, be kind and let passion lead Vale’s Katy Scharf offers advice to help businesses alleviate pandemic stresses for their employees By Carolyn Gruske
K
aty Scharf has had to adapt and be resilient. The human resources business partner lead at Vale Canada is carrying out her duties from the home she shares with her husband and two small children. Being in that kind of mixed working and home environment is a new situation for her, just as it is for many people who have undergone COVID19-related job changes. For Scharf, as the leader for Vale North Atlantic’s Mental Health Working Group (which is currently focused on COVID-19-related mental health issues), managing the challenge of work and life at this moment is the job description. Scharf is a passionate advocate for mental health. She is also one of the founding members of the five-year-old mental health working group for Vale’s Ontario operations. Scharf recognizes that Vale’s efforts to promote good mental health in the workplace have given the company an advantage when helping employees cope with COVID-19-related stresses.
exhaustion from that hypervigilance is contributing to higher stress levels. We take a dual lens approach. What we’ve really tried to do is take that step back and look at what can we do for them from an organizational risk-factor perspective: How can we give our employees access to factual, timely information? How do we give them that peace of mind that they can take time off if they need to? And in some circumstances that can be paid [time off] and in others it’s job-protected leave if they need to care for their children when there’s no schooling. We’re really putting those organizational factors in play, to bring some peace of mind and stability to the workplace, recognizing that for many people their home and social lives are still uprooted, or maybe they’re just finding a balance now. We also focus on personal risk factors and provide employees with access to employee and family assistance programs, mental health resources, tips and tricks, webinars, training, etc.
CIM: Have you seen an increased demand for mental health information due to the pandemic? Scharf: One data point that sticks out for me is that we held a
CIM: One of the first things the Ontario mental health working group did was conduct a survey asking employees about their mental health. Please tell us about the survey. Scharf: We conducted the survey in 2017, and partially into 2018
webinar recently called Building Resilience in the Face of COVID-19… During normal circumstances, we maybe get participation from 100 or maybe 200 employees. And during this event, we had over 500 employees participate in the conversation around building resilience. And the same thing happened with the communications we sent out to employees about different coping mechanisms and tips and tricks and access to support resources. We definitely have seen an uptick in that.
CIM: Why do you think people are looking for mental health support and resources right now? Scharf: I don’t think any of us expected the impact that the pandemic would have. What we’re trying to react to in our mental health work is recognize and give employees permission to pause and recognize this is unlike many other stressors, which might impact one area of our life, but [allow us to] still find stability and comfort in some of those things that aren’t changing. The pandemic really has uprooted everything. For most people, work is different and home is different, and their social interactions are different. We’re really seeing an extra level of hypervigilance against the coronavirus among our employees and the 22 | CIM Magazine | Vol. 15, No. 4
as well. And in that period of time, we were able to get over 50 per cent participation of our employees, which, for us is incredible. We usually get about 20 per cent participation in surveys. So the fact that we had over 50 per cent participation, recognizing the challenges we face: working in an underground environment where not all of our employees could do an online survey. It was all paper-based surveys that we administered in person. It usually took about an hour to do those surveys. And so the commitment from the organization was significant.
CIM: What were the results? Scharf: We came to understand that in many ways, our results for the mental health and well-being of our employees were consistent with the general population. Anxiety and depression were the leading mental health problems with our employees. We also came to understand that there were areas like sleep issues and fatigue and post-traumatic stress levels that seemed to be higher with our employees. Now, it wasn’t extremely more prevalent either – it was one or two per cent higher than what