We want to keep our workforce as healthy as possible. Physical health tends to be easier to focus on – with discounted gym memberships and ‘wellbeing weeks’ encouraging bringing healthy food into the office. But mental health is a tougher nut to crack. Yet we know that the impact of mental health is increasingly felt, and increasingly recognised.
As life generally becomes more stressful, work can be part of the remedy for this. Good work is associated with positive mental health outcomes, but work can also be part of the problem too.
In Year One we put a greater focus on training for when issues arise but through the lifetime of this Strategy we will also be working together at a preventative level. Doing one without the other is not sustainable or meaningful and can result in stigmatising an individual instead of dealing with root causes.
Conversations are key. Underpinning everything for all organisations prioritising mental health is the requirement to ensure there are regular, confidential and two-way one to one conversations. This includes feedback about performance that may not always be easy to give. We will encourage and support our managers to have early conversations about any concerns that they may have. This is essential in an environment that relies on small, highly integrated teams of people. Although our sympathy may initially go to somebody most obviously showing distress or presenting a problem, we have to face the fact that if we do not address difficult behaviours or performance concerns, other people suffer too. It also denies any opportunity for a ‘problem’ individual (that everybody talks about) to tell us for themselves what is really going on.
Honest, open, two-way, sensitive, confidential, sometimes challenging, discussions contribute to wellbeing and our duty of care. Pretending there isn’t a problem, or avoiding a conversation about it, is a direct threat to wellbeing.
To support wellbeing we succeeded in securing a small amount of funding for Year One of the Strategy to progress identified actions in the area of mental health. This included running workshops for all our staff on team and self-care and suicide awareness for service users, training all line managers on management aspects, and setting up a cohort of Mental Health First Aiders.
As a result of training, 98% of Line Managers said they understood mental health at work better and would intervene earlier as a result of what they learnt.
There continues to be a focus on mental health particularly to support periods where many of us have had to work at home or in different ways due to the Coronavirus. See the Coronavirus maintaining good mental health pages for more details.
Mental Health First Aiders also contribute to material promoted every week through Wellbeing Wednesdays.
This priority is not necessarily exclusive to mental health, but as it is endemically under invested in society as a whole, mental health is the area we have put more focus on.