Transcript

MSc Business and Organisational Psychology/Work and Wellbeing/Mental Health and

Stress: The Business Case/Expert interview 2

HLST189/7004PY/sc4/step2.12

Expert interview 2
Q. How can organisations support employees living with mental health
issues?

At ACAS, we've recently developed a new framework around mental

health and positive wellbeing in the workplace. And we see it as a
tripartite relationship between employers, managers and individuals.
Everyone has a responsibility to managing mental health in the
workplace. Employers particularly have a responsibility. Senior leaders
need to take it seriously. They need to have this on their agenda. They
need to promote it and encourage it as a conversation, have effective
strategies around it. So, developing a policy or having a mental health at
work strategy. They need to think about how they can tackle the causes
of work-related stress as I said there is a legal component to that. So,
they need to make sure that they address issues around stress. They
need to emulate best practice. They need to take lunch breaks. They need
to show that actually working at weekends, working on your holiday, or
not taking a holiday entitlement, that's not something we want in the
culture of our organisation. They really need to lead from the top and
show that they take this seriously. Often you see them talking the talk,
but not walking the walk. And they really need to take it on board and
realise the benefits to everybody if they see the best practice from their
leadership team.

Q. What encourages employees to speak out and ask for help?

So, in order for employees to feel encouraged and feel able to talk about
it, they have to have a relationship with somebody that they can trust
and they can confide in. We see that as part of the general management
competency. So, stress and mental wellbeing should not just sit over
there.

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Transcript
Stress and mental wellbeing and how an employee performs should be
part of those general conversations that employee and a manager have
on a regular basis. We need to have opportunities for managers to meet
with their staff on a regular basis, build that rapport so when the
manager needs to ask those more difficult questions about how you're
feeling, how are things going and they may have recognised that person
has been behaving differently, they are more equipped to do so. There
are more high level approaches that organisations can take. So, they can
sign things like the ‘time to change’ pledge, where they are
acknowledging that they take mental health and stress seriously in their
workplace. They can sign up to campaigns like ‘This is Me’ where
employees in the organisation talk about how they've experienced stress
and mental health. So, there are a wide range of interventions that can
happen but essentially it's about building the capability between
managers and employees to have those difficult conversations but see it
as part of their business as usual.

Q. Possible interventions for managing stress at work

There are essentially sort of three routes you can take to managing
mental health and stress at work. So, in terms of stress particularly, you
can either do an organisational approach and you can recognise actually
we need to do something quite root and branch here and the Health and
Safety Executive have some really good guidance on how you would do
this. So, you may do a survey of your staff and that way you're
understanding what are the sources of stress. You may then need to look
at things quite significantly around job design, around flexible working, i
the environment that people work in suitable and conducive to good
mental health and wellbeing?

So, look at how the workplace operates. This isn't a quick fix or a quick
win, but it is very successful in the long term. If employees talk about
stress, we would always recommend that you do a stress risk assessment
with them which sounds more technical than it is. It's having a
conversation, understanding what is causing the stress and doing what
you can to mitigate or reduce it. And then it's having things around an
Employee Assistance Programme or having quick routes so people
understand that they can, you know, GPs or the NHS service, how they
can access external support for their, you know, they may have something
© Coventry University.
Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0)
Transcript
that happened in their personal life like a bereavement so how can they
make sure that person gets some quite immediate hands-on support if
they need it and if they want it. So, essentially your comms around this,
how you communicate the different support that's available, is really
important.

© Coventry University.
Licenced under the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0)