Mentally Healthy Workplace

Each year around 10,000 people will have a serious work-related mental stress claim. Over 3.6 million Australians are affected by mental illness each year. 

According to SafeWork NSW's Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial hazards at work, the most common causes of Psychological injury include:

• Overload or underloading of work responsibilities 
• Exposure to a traumatic event, including workplace violence 
• Role conflict, lack of role clarity or Low job control
• Conflict or poor workplace relationships
• Poor support from Supervisors and managers, or co-workers
• Bullying and Harassment (including sexual harassment)
• Inadequate reward and recognition
• Frequent remote or isolated working
• Poor procedural fairness
• Poor consultation through role or organisational change

All these factors are significant for all levels of your venue, from CEO to general workers

Current statistic in Hospitality Employers Mutual for Psychological Injury claims is:

Only 5% of notifed claims are psychological or mental health in nature, however these claims account for 24% of our overall claim's costs.  

In addition to your Workers Compensation premium, other financial impacts for the venue with a poor safety and mental health culture are:

• Increased absenteeism 
• Loss of productivity
• High turnover
• Paying overtime or casuals
• Additional duties covered by existing staff may cause increased work pressure and stress
• Increased customer dissatisfaction because of poor customer service
• Legal costs (dependent on the seriousness of the injury and the impact to the injured person, the industry and the community)

Having a Mentally Healthy Workplace will assist you to reduce the risk of injury and improve productivity.

What is a Mentally Healthy Workplace

A Mentally Healthy Workplace will:

• Have an engaging, open, and positive work environment
• Encourage positive and healthy choices from their workers
• Provide the relevant resources, tools, and people to effectively manage mental health issues
• Quickly, confidentially, effectively, and respectfully address any Mental Health issues raised or identified
• Hold people accountable for their role in achieving a Mentally Healthy Workplace

To achieve a mentally healthy workplace requires proactive workplace culture and practices, and effective reactive incident and injury management processes. HiiSafe is here to support you; we have developed new support systems via our HiiSafe WHS management tool - Mentally Healthy Workplace Module.

The Mentally Healthy Workplace module is a questionnaire style tool aimed at highlighting some of the suggested activities, strategies and processes employers could have in place to support healthy behaviours and culture in the workplace. The tool then produces a report to provide employers further direction and guidance to build positive strategies, or further refine strategies for good mental health for your workers. This module was designed based on the SafeWork NSW Code of Practice: Managing Psychosocial Hazards at Work. This tool is simple to use, easy to follow and only takes a few minutes to support your workplace.

Training is another easy resource you can offer your supervisors and managers.  This gives your trusted leaders the right direction and knowledge to have engaging and positive conservations and interactions with their workers.  It also allows them the skills to start to identify workers that may need more help and support.  For more information on FREE training options, please contact HiiSafe.