Mental Health Week (13-19 May 2024) is a good opportunity to focus on the pressing issues of mental health and wellbeing at work, which are a growing concern for many employers and a key priority for HR professionals. Research shows that better working environments are associated with better mental health and wellbeing.
The "wellbeing industry" that has developed to support organisations offers a wide range of interventions, but an evidence-based approach is needed to identify what works in practice.
Employers' responsibilities
Employers have legal obligations for their workforce's health and wellbeing. They have a legal duty to ensure that the work environment is safe, to carry out proper risk assessments, to make reasonable adjustments where required and to appoint competent people to have oversight of the process.
In complying with those legal responsibilities, organisations need to treat mental health and physical health as equally important.
Individual-focused and systematic approach
Typically, organisations tend to approach mental health and wellbeing by focusing primarily on the individual. This translates to practices that predominantly aim to support the individual to improve their levels of self-care, to better manage their working environment and to mitigate the effect of poor working conditions. Employers may also tend to focus on individual 'restoration' practices, which seek to reduce or minimise the negative health effects associate with exposure to psychological risk and to enable the return to normal functioning.
However, a new policy paper recently published by the Society of Occupational Health and CIPD (the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development), highlights that improving mental health outcomes for workers requires a systematic, holistic approach to address the main health risks, accompanied by the implementation of evidence-based interventions, to create a better working environment.
The role of Occupational Health ("OH") and Human Resources ("HR") coordination
OH and HR practitioners have different areas of responsibility. OH's primary focus lies in the protection and promotion of staff’s health (physical and mental). HR's emphasis is in managing an organisation’s workforce, from recruitment to exit.
As both focus on people, OH and HR play a pivotal role in creating an inclusive and high performing workplace and in supporting worker mental health and wellbeing. A strong collaboration between the two is needed to achieve a more strategic and preventative approach to employee mental health and wellbeing.
Focussing on prevention, OH identify potential workplace risks and monitor occurrences of ill-health. This then needs to be translated by HR into the development of policies and procedures that are clear and fair and appropriately manage potential sources of stress and distress for workers (workload, conflict, work-life balance, etc.). In practice this may require collecting information through pulse surveys, changing the language of communications, improving transparency on decision-making, thus improving accountability and trust.
In terms of support for individuals, OH and HR should work together to review, support and implement the necessary changes where adjustments are required due to an illness or disability. At organisation level they can cooperate in identifying risk levels, raising awareness, supporting managers to recognise signs of mental health concerns and developing types of mitigating interventions. This may mean training and the development of resources, such as training content, digital tools or online platforms.
In supporting employees when they return to work, OH's role is particularly important for understanding why an individual went off sick, and whether information needs to be passed back to the organisation on ways to address possible underlying issues. With that information, HR will be able to support individuals and their line managers within the return-to-work process.
The cooperation between OH and HR can shape the manner in which an organisation addresses mental health and wellbeing concerns and how effective its interventions will be.
What employers can do
Organisations need to take a more systematic and proactive approach to support worker mental health and wellbeing. To do so they need to ensure that OH and HR are working in synergy.
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