Mental Health and Wellbeing Matters
Mental Health and Wellbeing are important for all of us as individuals, but also for companies and organisations.
If our wellbeing suffers, so does our physical health and moods. It can affect our friends, family, and energy levels. For work, it will affect output, safety, quality, and engagement. That will lead to a drop in profits through increase of costs as well as productivity drops.
While some companies have wellbeing programmes, Mental Health First Aiders (MHFA), and engagement programmes, many do not. Even amongst those that do, their effectiveness is not always as expected or desired, as shown by media reports, surveys and polling.
There are a large number of charities and organisations in place to look after Mental Health, with a number of celebrities also supporting better mental health conversations. There is a great support network to pick up the pieces. But what if, as companies, we could intervene and perhaps improve mental health before it gets there?
What can you do about it?
Poor Mental Health is attributable to many causes, including financial pressures, family pressures, but so often due to work related stress and anxiety. The latter is increasing rapidly as a cause for being off work, and is costing the UK economy 16 million working days a year. Replacing a worker averaging £25000 salary a year can cost up to £30000, when you include lost productivity, recruiting, and training.
Implementing MHFA, occupational health teams and wellbeing initiatives are all positive steps to improving the wellbeing of your teams, but it is not that simple.
Staff look for a positive work culture, trust in their leadership, psychological safety to raise issues, belief that action will be taken. Many programmes put support in place, but do you have the culture, attitude and behaviours to lead an effective culture?
Tackling Mental Health together
I am an experienced leader and manager. I have implemented and run an award-winning wellbeing programme for a large team of engineers and supply chain professionals. The results improved retention and absenteeism, mental health and wellbeing of the teams.
Starting with a review of your data and understanding your needs (the discovery phase), we can run anything from stand-alone workshops to facilitated events to long-term programmes. These tackle topics around mental health and wellbeing.
Doing this will go beyond helping your staff. It will tackle safety, inclusion, allyship and improve your bottom line.
The best long-term outcome is to bring mental health and safety into your physical health and safety system. This takes courage and leadership, and will deliver the greatest impact for the long term.
The Bigger Picture – “Connections”
iunctura means “connections” and I work on Safety Systems and Culture, Mental Health and Wellbeing, and Allyship and Inclusion. I suggest these three separate topics are actually connected together, and are not different things run by different teams.
What if Health and Safety includes mental health and psychological safety?
What if improved mental health leads to better engagement and productivity?
What if improved wellbeing leads to improved inclusion and allyship?
What if Safety Culture just meant the total safety of your team and products?
This is a different way, it moves beyond the standard business models of operators/engineers vs safety professionals vs human resources professionals. It takes different thinking, different ways of working, different leadership and culture. It won’t change overnight, but if you’re going to improve your Safety Culture, ask yourself if, together, we could achieve so much more?
