Mental health and safety
If you work in the UK, you’ll know that when someone slips and bruises themselves on the office stairs, there is a form to fill in and a whole process to follow. When someone jumps in front of the train that would take them to the office, however, all we do is give a sad shake of the head and hope it won’t make us late.
The way we view psychological health at work is wrong. It should be treated with the same concern as physical health. Organisations have a duty of care to the mind as much as to the body. We need to make workplaces psychologically safe.
Many workplaces used to be physically dangerous, with noxious chemicals, unguarded machines — and regular accidents. Over time, this situation has been transformed to the point that industrial accidents are now rare. The moral imperative has driven this change, of course; but also the realisation that injuring your workforce just isn’t good business. This progress, however, has yet to be made in workplace psychology.
Mental health is physical health. People with mental health conditions such as anxiety can suffer from chronic pain, digesitve problems and a suppressed immune system. All of these can both worsen work performance and lead to significant time off. This is a huge cost for an organisation to absorb over an avoidable issue.
As more and more bushiness are reliant on the ability of their staff to think in inventive, fresh, abstract ways, success increasingly depends on maintaining and developing people’s capacity to accomplish this. It is not possible to do your most creative work when you’re coming from a place of anxiety as anxiety narrows down your perceptive spotlight until you can only see a handful of limited options.
If an organisation fails to look after the feelings of its staff, it can systematically distort the whole way it goes about its business. These distortions are felt by your customers both directly, via interpersonal interactions with your staff, and/or indirectly, through the use of your products. If your end goal is to emotionally connect with your customers — and it should be — then you need a workforce able to make that connection and, moreover, to do so in a positive way. Developing a culture which empowers your staff to inhabit this mindset will naturally improve your customer experiences.
By making a workforce psychologically safe, you not only improve the performance of existing employees, you also extend your available talent pool to reach uniquely skilled individuals who are out of the reach of lesser organisations. Many people do low value work — or no work at all — because they cannot trust a workplace not exacerbate a condition that they live with. By missing out on the unique perspectives and abilities of these people, workplaces are missing out on people who could be among their best performers.
There are some enormous benefits to making your workplace psychologically safe, which makes it strange that so few are. Organisations don’t change this way without practical action. Addressing such things is often seen as a leadership issue — something that only applies to senior staff — but everyone in the organisation has a role in this kind of change. The first, and most fundamental shift is to start challenging the stigma around mental health.
Many workplaces have formal non-discrimination policies which go beyond statutory requirements. On their own, however, policies are not enough. Many people justifiably feel that they will be discriminated against in more subtle ways for mentioning mental health issues, fearing they will appear weak and incapable of dealing with the work environment.
The most important way for an organisation to address this is through training, particularly for those who supervise or manage others. Include mental health alongside basic training across the organisation and develop that training at the management and leadership level. Make sure that this training is based on sound evidence and is supported by a mental health organisation; poor quality training in this area is not only cringe-worthy for those affected, it can make the situation worse. You want to reach a point where staff feel that they can share distress with their coworkers safely, without fear of negative consequences.
Alongside those addressed by staff behavioural change, though, there are some more subtle risks to mental health in the workplace. Many organisations inadvertently create dangerous situations by putting staff under unnecessary pressure or failing to allow them the freedom to solve the problem they are tasked with. These stressors can both contribute to mental health issues in existing staff and prevent talented people from joining the organisation.
By redesigning business process, choosing appropriate tools and responding to problems raised buy frontline staff, it is possible to dramatically reduce risks to mental health, even for jobs in high-pressure fields. There are likely to be other benefits, too, as Shell Oil found: shifting from a traditionally masculine culture to a more supportive, emotionally aware one contributed to an 84% decline in accident rates on their deep sea drilling platforms.
As the pace of automation accelerates, new challenges continue to emerge. This automation necessitates increased formalisation of business process. This can be hugely liberating, freeing staff from dull, repetitive work, but it can also trap them in a joyless grind, significantly impacting their state of mind. This is akin to the damage that can occur from running with poor posture. Each individual step doesn’t hurt but over time the damage can build into something very serious. Designing IT systems for the psychological health people that use them is therefore vitally important.
We all have a role to play in making workplaces psychologically safe. Contributions range from supporting your colleagues without judgement, training staff, all the way to designing business systems which accommodate human nature. Please join me in making a commitment to do what you can. It’s not just the right thing to do for your colleagues, it is the right thing to do for the business itself. Happy people working together can do great things.
If you’d like to learn more about how organisations can change to support the psychological health of their staff, allowing people to thrive whilst increasing the bottom line, then please follow Meaningbit on Medium. We publish articles of news, discussion and techniques about the ways new technology can be used to build more human workplaces.
