Last updated on July 18th, 2024 at 05:45 pm
We explain what a mentally healthy workplace is and provide resources to help you establish this in your organisation.
Health is not merely the absence of disease or infirmity but a positive state of complete physical, mental and social well-being. A healthy working environment is one in which there is not only an absence of harmful conditions but an abundance of health-promoting ones.
– The World Health Organisation
What makes a workplace mentally healthy?
Mentally healthy workplaces aim to enrich the working lives of their employees and, most importantly, do not contribute to or cause psychological harm.
Many factors influence a person’s mental health. While employers cannot directly influence their employee’s private lives, past experiences or family backgrounds, they can influence the culture their employees work in. By fostering an understanding of mental health conditions and including mental health in their policies and plans, employers can make employees feel comfortable at work.
Recommendations from the resources you’ll find below include, but are not limited to:
- Offering flexible working hours
- Providing Mental Health First Aid training (https://mhfa.com.au and https://artswellbeingcollective.com.au/)
- Encouraging open discussion of mental health
- Displaying information for mental health services in the workplace
- Assessing risks to mental health when designing and making changes to roles
- Including mental health in policy making
- Supporting employees to stay in the workforce, and developing return to work programs for those who have taken a leave of absence.
What about stigma?
We know that 1 in 5 Australians will experience mental health issues at some point in their lifetime. We also know that 1 in 5 employees have taken time away from work in the past 12 months due to feeling mentally unwell. Despite this rate of occurrence, a recent Australian study found that 1 in 3 people have reservations about working with someone experiencing anxiety or depression.
These reservations come from the stigma attached to mental health. Words like lazy, unreliable, weak, incompetent, crazy and others are used to describe various mental health conditions. Employees often do not disclose their specific condition because of this stigma. In the wider culture, people with mental health issues are considered unable or unwilling to function.
However, most people with mental health conditions are only affected some of the time, or at levels that do not interfere with their ability to work. Workplaces that are literate in mental health and provide support when needed can help break down this stigma and promote the importance of maintaining mental health into the public and private sphere. They are also more likely to have better service delivery, stronger financial performance and increased employee productivity. It’s better for employees and for business.