What can you do to facilitate and support good mental health at work?

Look for warning signs

There are often early warning signs that an employee is experiencing mental health issues. These can become apparent in a number of different ways, including psychological symptoms (such as mood changes, indecision or confusion), behavioural symptoms (e.g. withdrawal from office life, irritability, and uncharacteristic errors), and even physical symptoms (such as fatigue and appetite changes). Sometimes colleagues or clients comment on an individual acting out of character.

Paying attention to these early signs and taking steps to investigate any issues – even if it’s simply asking whether the individual is feeling OK – can help to identify a problem before it develops further. Use return to work interviews after any related absences, to discuss what support and help you may be able to offer.

Promote wellbeing

There are a number of practical steps that companies can take to create an effective strategy for promoting wellbeing, and this starts with carrying out a risk assessment of potential work-related causes of mental health issues. Once potential risks have been identified, you should consider how to feed dealing with this into your business plan, and ensure that the strategy has management buy-in.

Support employees

Implementing initiatives to support employees experiencing mental health challenges could involve small and inexpensive measures, such as introducing and clearly communicating a flexible working hours policy and social activities to help your employees achieve a better work-life balance, or more wide-ranging schemes, such as buddy systems and financial support for counselling.

There’s something out there to fit every business and these initiatives really do work. It’s also worth speaking to the experts: organisations such as Mind, a mental health charity, can provide guidance and advice on where to start.

Why?

Quite apart from the caring aspect, employers simply cannot afford to ignore wellbeing in the workplace. Statistics show that 1 in 6 British workers experiences depression, anxiety or stress at some time in their life and, in England alone, 16 million sick days per year are attributed to mental ill-health, costing billions of pounds in lost working days and making it one of the leading causes of sickness absence.

Conclusion

The single most effective thing every business can do to help those suffering from mental illnesses such as depression, is to facilitate a culture where employees feel comfortable speaking up if they are struggling.

As Mind emphasises: “open and supportive workplaces benefit everyone – employees, employers and the bottom line”.

 

 

Su Allen HR helps employers by providing a range of HR support that includes advice on how to handle difficult situations, writing clear policies which ensure fairness and consistency in all aspects of managing employees, and providing coaching and training where required. Contact us on 01582 883299 if you’d like to hear more.

 

Helen Skepper

Su Allen HR