Its Mental Health Awareness week, have you seen the six principles of prioritising positive Mental Health actions in the workplace?
Employee wellbeing is the key to providing a happy and productive environment. The CIPD follow six standards of practice when it comes to Mental Health in the workforce. We’ve summarised these below with a short round up of what’s involved:
Prioritise mental health in the workplace by developing and delivering a systematic programme of activity.
- Devising, implementing and communicating a mental health at work plan
- Showing senior level ownership and accountability with a clear reporting governance structure
- Regularly monitor employee mental health and wellbeing – utilising workplace surveys, happiness ratings etc.
- Gather employee feedback and make improvements based on feedback
Continuous improvement and advocacy from leadership team members around mental health can help to promote mental wellbeing in the workforce.
Proactively ensure work design and organisational culture drive positive mental health
outcomes.
- Ensuring employees have good physical workplace conditions
- Offering ways for employees to give feedback on how work design, culture and conditions contribute to poor mental health
- Reviewing the impact that activities like organisational design and redesign, job design, recruitment, working patterns, email, “always-on” culture, and work-related policies have on employees
- Working to ensure employees have good work-life balance and ability to work flexibly and in an agile manner.
- Looking to encourage openness throughout employment (including during recruitment) so that appropriate support can be put in place.
Flexible working policies have been evolving continuously post pandemic, you can read more on this from our previous blog post here.
Promote an open culture around mental health
- Increasing awareness and challenging stigma to change the way people think and act about mental health
- Supporting employees to champion mental health and positively role model good practice in the workplace
- Highlighting the support available to employees and encouraging open conversations about mental health
Promoting an open forum for discussion where employees can feel secure and heard, either openly or confidentially, provides individuals with trust that their wellbeing is considered.
Increase organisational confidence and capability
- Improving mental health literacy of all staff and offering ways for staff to learn how to manage their own mental health
- Making sure staff are able to have effective conversations about mental health and providing signposts to support
- Training managers to they are able to spot and support mental health issues in the workplace
- Ensuring managers have support to manage mental health in all areas of their role, including during staff inductions, one-to-one meetings, team meetings and return-to-work meetings.
Provide mental health tools and support
- Sharing resources and tools available to support mental health (including Mental Health at Work )
- Offering tailored in-house mental health support and signposting to clinical help (for example digital support, occupational health, employee assistance programmes, the NHS).
- Giving targeted support to tackle key causes of poor mental health, for example financial wellbeing.
Increase transparency and accountability through internal and external reporting
- Identifying and tracking key measures to use in internal and external reporting
You can read the full report and access all associated resources here.
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*IMAGE CREDIT @laurajaneillustrations – thank you for allowing us to feature this beautiful image from your campaign with Mind Charity.
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