Managing Mental Health in the Workplace: A Guide for Employers
Effectively managing mental health at work is more than just a ‘nice to have’.
Employers have the following legal duties:
- To undertake risk assessments in relation to health and safety risks
- To review these whenever there is a reason to suspect they are no longer valid or there has been a significant change
- To provide comprehensible information to employees about the risks to their health and safety identified by the assessment, and the measures that will be implemented as a result.
Breaches of these duties can constitute a criminal offence.
Employees with poor mental health may also be less productive, and more likely to quit or be absent from work. Even if only one person in a team is affected this way, it can have a dramatic impact on the morale of the remaining individuals.
In this article, I discuss how to conduct your legal risk assessment when it comes to mental health, and I give ideas for what to do once you have the results of that. My approach is heavily influenced by that of the Health and Safety Executive.
How do you define the scope of a mental health risk assessment?
There are six primary root causes of stress at work:
- Demands
- Control
- Support
- Relationships
- Role
- Change
Most of these are self-explanatory. “Demands” relates to the workload, or the environment. “Role” relates to whether people understand their role and feel certain within it.
Your risk assessment should focus on these areas. Doing so will help you tease apart what stress felt by your employees is likely caused by work, vs caused by the employee’s home life but brought into the workplace.
How can you assess risk against these areas?
Use your existing data to start with. This could be data relating to sickness absence, or it could be from return-to-work meetings, appraisals or exit interviews. Talking to, and listening to, your staff should be the norm. Can you identify particular areas of the business which seem to have more of a problem?
You could then think about using staff surveys such as the HSE Management Standards Indicator Tool. The results of this can be fed into the HSE Management Standards Analysis Tool which will you a score on the above six areas so that you can pinpoint what is causing particular risks for you.
What do we do next?
Once you have a clear idea of the problem, it is much easier to understand an appropriate solution. If you need inspiration, I will set out below some possible things to implement in respect of each of the six areas.
Demands
- Ensure sufficient resources are available for staff to do their jobs
- Provide training for staff on time management and difficult customers
- Allow regular breaks
- Set realistic deadlines
- Make ‘workloads’ a topic of regular team meetings
- Have informal chats between managers and team members
- Respect when someone is at full capacity
Control
- Provide opportunities for discussion and input
- Encourage individuals to use their own skills
- Allow autonomy over style of work if possible
Support
- Hold informal chats, appraisals and team meetings – have an ‘open door’ policy
- Provide training as needed
- Signpost to mental health champions or external sources of help
- Agree to flexible work requests where possible
- Create a career development pathway
- Discuss your commitment to promoting mental well-being and how staff can improve and maintain their own
Relationships
- Deal effectively with grievances and disciplinaries and keep them confidential as far as possible
- Train managers in conflict resolution and emotional intelligence
- Provide team bonding exercises and opportunities for social interaction
- Celebrate success and give recognition
Role
- Have clear job descriptions and person specifications
- Be transparent around team and organisational goals
- Create strong recruitment and induction processes
Change
- Communicate frequently
- Consult where appropriate
- Provide reassurance to whose who raise concerns
- Don’t underestimate the effects of even small changes
Be aware that your risk assessment process may have shed light on specific concerns from individuals in which case you will need to consider whether these are grievances. A complaint doesn’t need to say ‘grievance’ at the top in order to be a grievance!
Here at Barker Gotelee, we run Manager Development Training which recognises that managers must understand, for example, the laws on discrimination, but also that such training will be useless unless they can transfer that knowledge back to their day-to-day workplace. Our training is therefore 50% the law around people management and 50% conflict resolution skills. It is also adapted to your bespoke requirements each and every time.
To discuss anything above, including our Manager Development Training please call Grace Smyth on 01473 611211, email [email protected] or fill out our enquiry form below.
Grace Smyth is a Solicitor in the Employment Team at Barker Gotelee Solicitors.
