It is mental health awareness week so what should businesses be doing to manage risks to employees mental health. We’ll consider that.
To mark the week the Safety and Health Expo held its annual event at London’s ExCel with a host of seminars the pick of which was one on Wednesday by the HSE’s Phoebe Smith called ‘Stress – the law, workplace challenges and support available’. She told delegates how the stakes are high for both employee welfare and business productivity given the latest data. In 2021 and 2022 stress, depression and anxiety accounted for more than half of all cases of work-related illness in Great Britain, affecting 914,000 workers and accounting for 17 million lost working days. Her central message was that the success of mental health initiatives is undermined by an all-too-common failure to evaluate their impact. Quoted by SHP magazine which ran an article on this, she says: ‘Organisations rarely evaluate the impact of psychological health interventions. Organisations have this legal duty under the Health and Safety Work Act and management regs, but awareness is maybe not at the level that it needs to be.’
We agree and it’s a point we have been raising with clients for some time, especially since the pandemic. Zoe Betts is a health and safety specialist and earlier she joined me by video-link to discuss it.
Zoe Betts: “I think there is a little bit of myth and confusion about this and, as ever, with health and safety issues it really does come down to the fundamentals and it’s risk assessment and there's a lot of guidance on the HSE’s website that I could point organisations to, its’ very useful, it’s written in really helpful layman's terms. But it really is a start and end with a risk assessment, and this has to be a specific risk assessment to that particular organisation. What we're really expecting employers to look at is the work that they're asking their employees to do, the environment in which they do it, and the working practices. So, that's the starting point, really. We're not necessarily expecting people to risk assess individuals, or even individual job roles. I think this is more of an organisational risk assessment and the way that you identify the hazards is really to talk to the workforce. What are their concerns around stress in the workplace? What are the issues that they encounter on a fairly regular basis, that once the employer knows about them, is in a position to then control them? So, to put a bit of flesh on the bones, what I mean by that is things like, excessive workloads, and that can vary throughout the month, or throughout the year. There might be particular deadlines, for example, that are very stressful to hit, but then subsequently fall away. There could be issues to do with personalities in the workplace. There could be issues to do with lack of control over the economic climate, or job security. So, those are the sorts of hazards, or risks, that an employer should be aware of, and then the sorts of practical, realistic, reasonable, controls that they could implement would be things like better planning of work, perhaps getting additional resources in at those pinch points, certainly having better communication from the top down so that employees throughout the organisation know what's coming down the line for them and, of course, also a clear zero tolerance bullying policy. Those are all the reasonable things that I think an employee should be thinking about and factoring into their specific risk assessment to manage stress in the workplace.”
Joe Glavina: “What is the trigger for that sort of risk assessment, Zoe. Is it a case of waiting for an incident to happen and reacting to it, or is it an ongoing requirement?”
Zoe Betts: “Yes, there is a fundamental obligation to do the risk assessment from the outset. If you are an employer, if you are running a business, then it is a legal obligation to risk assess the activities and to determine what hazards you might be encountering, what risks are you running in your business, your best place to understand what those risks are, and then the controls that you should put in place. The risk assessment should then be reviewed. People often say annually, that's not what it says in the law but it's not a bad starting point, but you should review your risk assessments if you are then on notice that something's happened, either changing working practices, change in the workforce or, perhaps, an incident or an illness which brings to the employer’s attention something which might cause them to review that risk assessment because it might not be fit for purpose. So, fundamentally, you do have to do a risk assessment for safety issues, as well as health issues, including mental health, but that's not just a tick-box exercise, that you've done a risk assessment and you can put it on the shelf. It's a living document, it's got to live and breathe, and absolutely does need to be reviewed.”
Joe Glavina: “Final question, Zoe. There's a lot more focus now on mental health than there ever has been previously so is it the case that the nature of risk assessments is changing, or should be changing?”
Zoe Betts: “Yes, very much so. Safety is like anything, it's not a static concept, it moves with the times, evolves, and one of the phrases that we often use that I'll talk to my clients about, is that ‘we've been shouting about safety but whispering about health’, and that has to change. It's understandable and, of course, industry has come a long way in focusing on traditional safety risks and reducing incidents of fatality in the workplace or injuries. That's great and we can't take our eye off the ball and sectors and industries must continue to do that, but we absolutely have to acknowledge that health and safety is a dual concept and health has, perhaps, lagged behind in terms of focus and priorities, and health is not just physical health, it’s not just bodily health, it is mental health. We live in a society now where we are fully cognisant that being at work for eight hours a day is clearly going to have an impact on somebody's mental health and it would be wrong, morally and legally, to pretend that that wasn't the case, and bury our heads in the sand, and only focus on issues that could affect somebody's physical safety or health. So, we are moving with the times. Risk assessments I don't think we're ever really done, truth be told, on stress, anxiety and depression. HSE has made it a focus in their 10-year plan though, so this is definitely on the agenda, and I think it's actually just important to retaining your employees, keeping your talent, and having a happy workforce. It’s what people expect these days. So, it's definitely here to stay.”
As Zoe says, the HSE has made mental health a central plank of its 10-year strategy which they published last year, where they make it clear they will focus their resources on ensuring businesses meet their obligations on mental. Zoe and the team have written about that in some detail in an article for Out-Law. That’s ‘HSE expected to turn focus to mental health and building safety’ and we have put a link to it in the transcript of this programme.
LINKS
- Link to 'HSE expected to turn focus to mental health and building safety’
