What exactly do you know about Mental Health In The Workplace Initiatives? Well, feasibly after reading this feature, you'll comprehend a lot more.

In a study of 1.2 million people in the United States published in The Lancet Psychiatry, exercise was positively linked to better mental health. The study found that participants who exercised had 1.5 fewer days of poor mental health each month than people who didn't exercise. Employers are increasingly identifying mental health conditions within their workforce. Historically, action to improve the management of and support for employees with poor mental health was often only taken by employers following an internal or external trigger such as an employee’s mental health incident. Success at work is measured in many ways. Hitting productivity goals, achieving financial gains, completing projects on time—these are some of the ways a company knows it’s doing well. Employees are key to reaching these success measures, and the importance of their mental health can’t be ignored in the pursuit of success. Despite being neglected as a workplace issue (even RIDDOR, the regulations that govern reporting accidents at work, specifically exclude suicide), there are important reasons why suicide should be seen in the context of work. Poor workplaces are bad for our mental health. Precarious work, impossible targets, bullying and harassment can be major sources of stress. It is a normal response to be worried about an employee who is experiencing mental ill health. However your role is to recognise signs that they are not OK, to have a conversation and facilitate their access to support. Your role is not to diagnose their mental ill health or be a counsellor. While identifying work-related risks and taking preventative measures should help minimise stress for most staff, it may still affect some team members due to issues inside or outside of the workplace. Managers should be prepared to help and support a team member experiencing stress.



Employers play an important role in determining the conditions that impact a mental health-friendly workplace. While employers cannot realistically shape factors like urbanization or malnutrition, many characteristics are amenable to modification. Mental health is the area that has the most prevalent number of incidents reported and in a workforce of 50-100 people you will definitely have members of your team who would benefit from support. As a leader you need to get under the bonnet of what mental illness and what mental health is. You need to attend seminars and meetings and you need to get into it to understand it because how can you help somebody recover if you don’t give them the right support or understand it yourself? When leaders are open about their mental health, it creates an environment where others can be open too. Likewise, workload and unmanageable deadlines have a significant impact on employee stress, so it’s crucial to help instil boundaries, respect them, and be in constant communication about your teams’ capacity. Healthy Minds is the name of American Express’ mental health in the workplace program. Healthy Minds shows how psychology can improve an employee’s well-being and performance. The program provides part-time counselors at each employee clinic. They also have a professional clinical psychologist to provide support to employees. An opinion on workplace wellbeing support is undoubtebly to be had in every workplace in the country.
 

Employees Perform Better When They Feel Supported

Being inclusive not only helps you to avoid discrimination claims, it also helps everyone feel psychologically safe so they can be more productive, collaborative and innovative. Successfully implementing a workplace mental health and wellbeing improvement strategy requires employers to take responsibility for creating a culture of awareness and support of employee mental health. All employers can and should evelop mental health awareness among employees by making information, tools and support accessible. Striving for excellence is extremely useful, and at times vital. When this turns into persecutory perfectionism, however, it can be very unhelpful. Perfectionism is where you feel that whatever you do is never good enough, where you feel that unless you are perfect (which is impossible), you are useless or unacceptable and where you judge everything you do super-critically, blind to the good bits and only focussing on the (often imagined or unimportant) errors. Every organisation has an opportunity to support and develop a mentally healthy workforce and thankfully it doesn’t need to be complicated. Discussing ideas such as how to manage an employee with anxiety is good for the staff and the organisation as a whole.

While mental ill health is a sensitive and personal issue – like any health problem – most people prefer honest and open enquiries over reluctance to address the issue. Shying away from the subject can perpetuate fear of stigma and increase feelings of anxiety. Line managers have a crucial role to play in preventing and dealing with workplace stress. While employers increasingly expect line managers to look after people’s health and wellbeing, often employers don’t provide the necessary training and support. Not flagging a problem as soon as it's spotted can be because an employee is scared of speaking out. A lack of clear data around the impact of mental health on an organisation is a key challenge. Measuring workplace wellbeing and its impact on business performance is not easy. Due to the stigma associated with mental health, conditions and incidents tend to be under-reported and reasons for absence not given. One of the biggest challenges we face is the need to make conversations about mental health more common. A good starting point for this is to learn more about mental health, and particularly mental health problems. Thinking about concepts such as employers duty of care mental health is really helpful in a workplace environment.
 

Enhance Work-related Protective Factors

oo many employees leave the labour market unnecessarily due to ill mental health. This can affect the individual’s wellbeing, their family, their friends and the community. The workplace culture and systems of work are critical to supporting employees with mental health conditions - helping them to stay at work, or return to work quickly, and participate in meaningful and productive duties. The language that we use helps to shape the reality we all share. It helps to shape our attitudes in how we view the world, the meanings of what we say to others, and to ourselves. When thinking about how we should be talking about mental health at work, language is a big deal. More specifically, the words we assign to what we are thinking or feeling are important. Naming something brings it to life. Encourage employees to regularly get some headspace (like a short walk around the block, or it could be as simple as stepping away from their desk to make a cuppa). The demands of an employee’s role, as well as how much control or say they have about the way they do their work, affects their mental health and performance. If an employee has work or task demands outside of their abilities or coping strategies, and has little say or control in how they do their work, it can lead to mental ill health. Get your organization’s senior leadership on board and develop a policy statement around workplace psychological health and safety. Ensure your organization’s leadership has identified a champion who will take responsibility for moving forward with activities related to meeting the policy statement. Similarly to any change that happens within organizations, discussions around workplace wellbeing ideas need planning and implementing properly.

If you're worried about someone at work, asking them if they're okay, and showing you care, makes a huge difference. The workplace plays an essential part in maintaining positive mental health. Creating psychologically healthy and safe workplaces benefits workers and helps their families and communities. Creating a systematic and sustainable approach for psychological health and safety, similar in spirit to how physical health and safety is managed, is also becoming a business imperative. Your work culture, intentionally or not, determines the unsaid rules that we need to play by around the disclosures of mental health or mental illness at work. If mental health problems are suspected or disclosed at work, the first step is to establish honest, open communication with the employee, and this should be maintained if people take time off for sickness absence. If possible, the frequency of contact should be agreed before someone takes time off. Make it a priority to help employees develop good workplace mental health habits. You could offer incentives to employees who participate in wellness programs or possibly offer free gym memberships. Exercise, healthy eating, and participation in leisure activities are a few simple ways to build mental strength and improve mental health. Some organisations have wellness days where they organise small treats for their staff, such as massages or nail treatments during the workday. Subjects such as managing employees with mental health issues can be tackled by getting the appropriate support in place.
 

Using Organization-level Approaches

Potential workplace triggers for distress include job insecurity or poor change management, high-risk roles and lone working. Work-related stress, as defined by the WHO, is the response people may have when presented with demands and pressures that are not matched to their abilities, leading to an inability to cope, especially when employees feel they have little support from supervisors and little control over work processes. Supportive, responsive and inspiring managers who understand their employees and teams make an enormous difference to the mental health of their employees. People management practices throughout the employment life-cycle (from recruitment through to separation) help to create engaged, high performing teams that support employees’ mental health and wellbeing. Stumble upon further particulars relating to Mental Health In The Workplace Initiatives at this Health and Safety Executive article.
 

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