MEASURES TO IMPROVE MENTAL HEALTH IN THE WORKPLACE

Ileft that job for health reasons. They were sick of me, and I was sick of them.

That old joke doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Not when mental illness has taken a serious toll on both workers and managers through two exhausting years of Covid lockdowns.

Now that we have work-at-home and hybrid workplaces, the mental health issues—still unaddressed in most businesses—loom even larger.

Mental health in the workplace was the subject of a seminar at the Retail Council of Canada’s Human Resources Conference, held recently in Toronto.

The presenter was Kristy Cork, a workplace mental health consultant based in

St. Thomas, Ont. Her seminar focused on “steps retailers can take today to improve psychological health and safety in existing safety programs.”

Traditionally, those safety programs were about preventing physical accidents. Physical worker safety has properly been the first training that new shop-floor employees receive. A case in point: Home Depot

Canada spends about a third of its roughly 20 hours of “Before the Apron” new-hire training focused on physical safety. This includes hazardous materials, working at heights, equipment safety, and customer safety protocols.

Culture Of Carelessness

But what about the mental health aspects of today’s workplace? Abusive or difficult customers, the urgency and stress created by digital media, relentless demands from well-meaning (or not) managers looking for ever-increasing productivity… It’s no wonder that Cork is so busy as a specialist focusing on the mental health part of HR.

“I like to talk about a culture of carelessness,” Cork said. “I’m sure you have physical safety provisions. It should be that way with mental health, too. Because workplaces cause harm.”

Cork said that everywhere employees are struggling—and some of yours are, too.

“There are employees parking their cars in the morning and they can’t come into the workplace before they sit there and give themselves a pep talk.” slide that listed some of them: increased turnover, litigation, absenteeism, short- and long-term disability claims, incidents, and conflicts.

Absenteeism is costly but “presenteeism” is just as expensive. That relatively new HR term, Cork explained, is where the employees show up at work but are unwell. They that said: RETENTION IS THE NEW COOL.

The alternative, if your employees don’t outright quit, is “Quiet Quitting.” Cork defined this as an attitude in which the worker says, “I’m not going to work for the equivalent of 65 hours a week anymore. I’m only going to do what’s in my job description.”

Obviously, there is a problem here— one which is described by CSA National Standard 21003: Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace.

It reads, simply: “Psychological safety is a state in which workers are free from exposure to reasonably foreseeable, significant risks to their mental health arising from the acts and omissions of other people in the workplace so that there is a low risk of mental injury.”

The costs of ignoring this little-known standard are real, Cork said. She put up a can even be in physical pain from their mental unwellness.

Stress Is Only Part Of It

And it’s not all about “stress,” Cork said. “Work is never going to be stress-free. So, if we focus only on stress, we are missing a big part of the issue.”

One upside of having mental health policies is that employee retention goes up. The previous week, Cork had given a seminar at a restaurant association gathering. There, she saw rubber bracelets being distributed

How to improve your workers’ mental health? “You cannot, in any workplace, prevent mental harm if you don’t know what your hazards are,” Cork said. “You have to do an assessment. You have to talk to people. You don’t start throwing darts at the wall hoping you’ll hit the problem. The best way to begin this process is through an employee survey. Cork has tracked her clients’ results and found out that, on average, only about 30 percent of employees answer “yes” to the question: “Does your employer promote a healthy work environment?”

Cork listed ten major causes of workrelated stress: heavy workload, changes within organizations, job insecurity, lack of autonomy, over-supervision, lack of proper resources, lack of equipment, few opportunities to be promoted, insufficient training, and long hours.

DAVID CHESTNUT, VICE-PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER