It is good to see that increased openness about mental health issues is leading employers to become more accommodating towards people who have such issues. However, there is one policy issue which needs more consideration, and that is the question of how we prevent working conditions and management practices which cause mental health issues in the first place.
Stress and anxiety are some of the most common triggers of mental health problems: the demands of many jobs and detrimental management practices, sometimes combined with an unhealthy work-life (im-)balance, are often a trigger for such problems. What always amazes me is that we can have health and safety regimes concerning physical health which have now gone so far that people joke about them – (but which really have made the world of work much safer), while many employers still seem to take little notice of working conditions which have a detrimental impact on workers’ mental wellbeing.
If a machine occasionally hacks off the finger of an employee, how long does it take till the design is changed, safety measures introduced, and so on? If a manager’s methods, or perhaps a working environment which allows bullies to thrive, cause several people to go off sick due to stress – who scrutinises those management practices and changes them? Chances are that the manager just assumes that the employees were too fragile to cope. There is much that remains to be done here.
Just as looking after the physical health of employees makes sense for employers, one would have thought that giving some thought to the mental wellbeing of one’s workers would be equally sensible. Stress, anxiety or depression compromise a person’s creative faculties, their energy and productivity long before they become so ill that they have to take sick leave. You’d have thought that any business worth its salt would find every way possible to be proactive in protecting its workers’ mental health, just in order to get the best out of them! Yet, there seems to be very little of this thinking about: where are mental health risk assessments for working practices, working environments or even some types of software application?
We need to arrive at a point where mental health is treated equally to physical illnesses not just when it is already a problem – but we ought to be much more proactive in prevention as well. A proper definition of a healthy working environment should include the expectation that the employer has thought carefully about conditions which cause stress or anxiety, and is actively working towards creating a working environment and working community which is conducive to everybody’s mental wellbeing.
We should be expecting a lot more from employers in this respect – in the end, taking mental health (and safety) seriously will mean a healthier, more productive workforce, and that surely has to be worth some effort.
* Maria Pretzler is a Lecturer in Greek History at Swansea University. She blogs at Working Memories , where ancient Greekery and Libdemmery can happily coexist.
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8 Comments
Good idea Maria, we do need an emphasis on mental health and safety in the workplace, rather than just physical. We also need to look after the self-employed. Taking some time of work and having understanding clients really helped me.
Good point about self-employed people, Eddie. What would you do to protect them better and to achive the outcomes you suggest?
Well, I hope a little paragraph along those lines has made it into our latest Welsh policy paper – but this is something that we should be pushing quite hard. Here is a policy suggestion which wouldn’t be overly onerous on employers and could make quite a difference….
I agree with this entirely. Frustration and stress was why I left a job at the start of this year, only to be told “oh well, your job burns people out” by a director like it wasn’t a problem. At a former company over half my team left due to one manager, who went on to a cushy directorial position.
The problem seems to be particularly acute in the tech sector where I work. Partly because many managers are geeks promoted to the point of incompetence (having moved from engineering into management myself, I’m aware how different the skillset is; fortunately my Lib Dem activism has helped hone my management skills), and partly because of a competitive culture which encourages long days.
Hi Maria, I agree a bit of regulation on employee mental health wouldn’t be too onerous for employers. When it comes to the self-employed I think general public awareness is fine for now. The more the public are aware the more customers, suppliers and employees will be able to understand if a director is struggling and how best to help them. It is very much a situation of looking out for each other.
Regards
Dave, I have seen similar things happening elsewhere.
And I think that a lot of this really isn’t necessary.
If managers were forced to be aware of mental health hazards as they are of physical health hazards, a lot of this could be avoided. But I am particularly incensed to see that some employers come up with big top-down changes of working practices or workloads, and when you ask them: ‘have you checked whether this increases the risk to cause stress?’ the best you get is some annoyed response dismissing the question as valid.
And it’s the employers themselves who lose a lot of productivity and, in extreme cases, experienced employees. In the long run, I’d assume, it would actually pay off to look after employees’ mental health.
Great article Maria.
Do you know of any group or organisation that has actually looked into workplace wellbeing and developed some ideas for “best practice” by management?
Hi Daniel, you might want to have a look at the Good Day at Work website: http://www.robertsoncooper.com/gooddayatwork that ha a raft of information, guidance and strategies about employee engagement, resilience and wellbeing – all of which have huge impact on how employees cope. This is specifically important in these days of the 24/7 accessibility culture that is being driven.
This is absolutely true and the frustrating thing is that the mechanisms to deal with it have already been in place in the public sector at least but are not used properly: I mean equality impact assessments. What will be the mental health impact of moving from two person offices to open plan, from open plan to “flexible working” with no personal base where someone can feel secure, can individualise their space? What will be the impact of providing or eliminating spaces where people can have informal chats? Of an individual performance assessment system which concentrates on giving grades to people’s performance (maybe by a system in which someone in the team has to be failing) rather than on a two-sided consideration of how someone is doing? These issues are rarely even thought of.