Psychological health and safety starts with a few factors

Where do you start with psychological health and safety at work?

Start with one or a few psychosocial hazards, not all of them. CCOHS says a workplace can address every hazard its assessments find at the same time, or focus on one or a few and address more later, and it notes that actions aimed at one hazard can also improve other psychosocial factors.

Canada has a national standard for this field, CSA Z1003. The Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) describes it as a set of voluntary guidelines for organizations of all sizes, in all sectors.

If your organization already runs an occupational health and safety program, CCOHS suggests adding psychosocial hazard prevention to its policy, programs, training, and hazard identification and risk assessment tools. In its words, that shows these hazards carry the same importance as physical ones and can be addressed with the same methods.

Who needs to be on board in the first month?

The people who will give the work time, budget and attention, and a named team that reports to one place. Among the steps CCOHS lists for a comprehensive workplace health and safety program that supports mental health, the first is to obtain management support at every level of the organization. The second is to consider creating a team for each element of the program, reporting to the same entity, such as a manager or the overall health and safety committee, and to get staff involved.

CCOHS also describes what that support looks like: leaders allocating time, budget or people to preventing psychosocial hazards, in amounts that vary with an organization's needs and ability. For an HR lead, the first month comes down to three decisions: who sponsors the work, who owns it from day to day, and which one or few factors you will look at first. Write them down before you design anything.

How do you find out what is weighing on people?

Ask the people doing the work, and look at the data you already hold. CCOHS describes three common ways to assess psychological health and safety: reviewing internal data such as complaint reports, absenteeism and turnover rates, and use of support resources; auditing what exists, from policies and management practices to training programs and job descriptions; and gathering feedback through conversations, observation, group discussions, anonymous forms and surveys. Our post on how to spot psychosocial hazards in a team's week shows what to look for in a calendar, a decision and a hand-off.

Most organizations will need more than one method. CCOHS gives the example of well-designed survey questions for a general reading of the factors, followed by discussion groups to learn more about the areas of concern, and notes that mixing methods can help prevent survey fatigue. The assessment can cover every factor or target one or a few, as long as all of them are assessed on a regular basis. In the second month, that gives you a plan: a survey or a set of conversations on your chosen factors, a pass through the data you already hold, and a date by which you will share the overall findings, keeping the people consulted confidential.

Include your managers. CCOHS lists supporting the leaders in the middle as a control measure, which means equipping managers and supervisors with skills to communicate clearly and flexibly. It also asks leaders, in regular check-ins, to listen to difficulties not to pass judgement but to work out what support might help. The World Health Organization (WHO) says manager training helps managers recognize and respond to staff experiencing emotional distress. In OHA's framework, the pressure of absorbing other people's uncertainty, conflict and distress on behalf of a team is the emotional load, one of theFive Loads. The check below takes about a minute. It uses five of the ten statements in OHA's capacity self-portrait, one for each load, and starts from the emotional load.

What do you change first, and how do you know it worked?

Change the work before you change the person, and start where the hazard starts. CCOHS says control measures should follow the same hierarchy as traditional health and safety, where interventions addressing the source of the hazard come first, and that measures affecting the whole organization come before measures individuals take alone. The WHO likewise recommends organizational interventions that assess workplace risks to mental health and then mitigate, modify or remove them.

CCOHS's examples include improving work planning, with tasks planned around an employee's other responsibilities and room left for the unexpected; weighing how a decision affects employees' mental health and work before it is made; and consistently asking workers for input in job design, which it says can protect everyone against low job control.

CCOHS also separates prevention, which addresses the sources of mental injury or distress in the work environment, from promotion, which works at the individual level to reduce stress and foster resilience, and says a psychologically healthy and safe workplace combines the two. A team wellbeing session is a promotion measure in these terms: it sits beside changes to the work, not in place of them.

Whatever you choose, CCOHS asks for specifics: who is responsible for designing and carrying out the measure, and a timeline of milestones for each part. Tell people the purpose, how it will be put in place and how it will be monitored and evaluated, because people are more likely to take part in initiatives they understand. Evaluating is itself a step on CCOHS's list, followed by continuous improvement. In a first 90 days, that could mean the third month ends with one change under way, one owner and the same measurement scheduled again; what a capacity diagnostic measures explains how OHA reads that measurement.