Mental Health Matters

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Do you remember the feelings you had as a child when you returned to school after summer vacation? Were there flutters of anxiety, nerves, or maybe even a sleepless night or two? Many of us still experience these feelings as adults when we think about having to return to work from any extended time away. Now think about these feelings being escalated by additional levels of fear, as employees begin to be called back to work with the ease of current COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

As noted in this article in OHS Canada magazine, the mental health of workers must be a priority when welcoming back employees, who have to return to work in some kind of physical capacity during the pandemic. The employer continues to have a heightened duty of care that comes with ensuring the placement of proper health and safety protocols, especially those that centre on the assessment and responses required for reducing psychosocial hazards. The mental health stressors on employees resulting from the COVID-19 crisis must be recognized for the hazards they are, and appropriate remedies must be put in place to reduce the risk of deteriorating mental health for all workers.

Embedded in the article is a podcast worth listening to. It features an interview with Emma Ashurst, manager of inquiries and technical services with the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. The content of the podcast focuses specifically on the employers’ responsibilities when implementing sound mental health strategies for managing the workplace during the pandemic. The starting point is always to check in on employees and to ask how they are coping. Many workers are overwhelmed as a result of pandemic-related increases in workload, forced isolation, and the lack of human or social contact.

During this time, the risk of increases in depression and anxiety is significant. As Ashurst states, it is imperative that managers look for signs of changes in an employee’s behaviour that may be an indicator of increased levels of burnout, stressors, and fears. She goes on to describe the employer’s duty to ensure that employees’ fears about returning to work be met with proactive support instead of a punitive reaction. The employer can do this through clear communication about cleaning protocols, ergonomic set-ups, and regular and routine communications that all assist in the management of fear. Employees cannot work if they are afraid. When an employer can alleviate fears by providing a safe physical work environment, this allows for a safe mental health environment as well.

It is also incumbent upon the employer to ensure that they are following protocols, rules, and regulations driven by jurisprudence. The employer should do this not only to show compliance with legal requirements, but also because the adherence to and communication of the ‘rules’ helps most people find comfort in structure during what continues to be a chaotic time.

Finally, as part of the most important message that Ashurst reiterates, now is the time to treat each other with grace, kindness, compassion, and connection.

Discussion Questions:

  1. As a Health and Safety professional, what steps would you put into place to help workers overcome pandemic-related fears as part of a return-to-work strategy?
  2. In your opinion, what impact does ongoing isolation have on employees who must continue to work from home, even as the pandemic-related restrictions begin to ease?
  3. As you think about your own return to work or to in-class learning, what are areas of potential anxiety for you? How will you manage your own personal concerns? What supports are in place for you from either your employer or your post-secondary institution?

Treatments for the Toxic Workplace

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As we have learned from our studies, the three steps of sound health and safety practices are hazard awareness, risk assessment, and the application of controls. When dealing with physical agents in the workplace such as toxic chemicals, the steps are applied in order to recognize and identify the chemical hazards; assess the risk of harm to employees in the workplace resulting from exposure to the chemical hazards; and finally, to apply controls to the chemical hazards in order to reduce or eliminate the risk of injury or harm to employees.

These same steps must be applied when dealing with psycho-social hazards in the workplace, which include a poisoned or toxic workplace culture. In the same way that toxic chemicals can cause irreparable physical harm, a toxic workplace can cause severe psychological harm resulting in devastating consequences to employee mental health and physical well-being.

Unlike physical agents, psychological hazards are sometimes more difficult to identify and to assess. A recent publication from HRD On-line provides a summary of toxic workplace hazards from the book ‘Culling Culturitis’.

Click here to read the article.

As noted by the book’s author, many organizations leave the development of organizational culture to chance. From a health and safety perspective, this is a high risk strategy. As with any organic culture once an infection begins, if it is not stopped, the disease spreads throughout entire organism. When dealing with toxic workplace culture, it is imperative that the third step of controls is applied in order to stop the spread of workplace infection and it may require the elimination of the root cause at the source.

While there are some remedies provided in the article, there are numerous resources available which provide additional practical solutions for toxic workplace problems, including those provided by the federal government and a leadership blog provided on-line by Inc.

Click here to access the Government of Canada’s workplace mental health link.

Click here to access the Inc. blog.

Health and Safety applies to all workplaces. Mental health and safety applies to everyone within them.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Have you worked in a toxic environment? What was the impact on you and/or your colleagues?
  2. Why do you think employees stay in a toxic work environment even though it is detrimental to their own mental health?
  3. What advice would you give to the CEO of a toxic workplace culture in order to make a constructive change?

 

Tools for Mental Health Assessment

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It is an emerging fact that one in five Canadians struggles with mental health issues on a daily basis.

This individual struggle has an impact in the workplace. It may show itself through high absenteeism rates, inter-personal conflicts and communication breakdowns. While we have seen an increase in social media campaigns such as the Bell ‘Let’s Talk’ initiative, matters related to mental health are not dealt with well, or at all, in many Canadian workplaces.

Many employers do not know where to start or what tools to use in order to focus on improving employee mental health initiatives.

In response to this need, SunLife Financial, a Canadian insurance and group health benefits provider, has developed a digital mental-health assessment tool for use in Canadian workplaces.

Click here to read the SunLife announcement about their new mental health assessment tool.

Click here to read about how the tool is being implemented in the City of Mississauga.

It is interesting to note that the City of Mississauga launched the tool as part of an organizational mental health strategy. It appears that this strategy includes or follows the steps of hazard recognition (first responders deal with high stress situations every day); risk assessment (implementation of mental health assessment tool); and implementation of controls (training methodologies and supports put into place to reduce mental health risks for workers).

From a health and safety perspective, most workplaces already have an understanding of the steps needed to reduce or eliminate physical workplace hazards. This new type of assessment tool, as provided by SunLife Financial, perhaps will help make the transition a little bit easier to establishing an equal emphasis on reducing and preventing psycho-social hazards that impact employee mental health.

Discussion Questions:

  1. Why do you think employers in Canada do not have workplace mental health strategies in place?
  2. How could a mental health assessment tool assist employees in your current workplace?
  3. What types of strategies do you think could be implemented to assist employees who are coping with mental health issues in the workplace?