Supporting Employee Mental Health While Reopening the Workplace

As Saskatchewan continues to lift restrictions, more and more employees are beginning to return to the workplace. With the new world we are operating in, it is important to continually stay up to date on health and safety. The workplace can play an essential part in supporting positive psychological health. Creating and maintaining a workplace that is psychologically healthy and safe makes good business sense – for employers and employees alike.

The National Standard of Canada on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace provides the framework to help employers navigate the areas to reduce the risk of a psychological injury and improve overall health and safety in their workplaces. There are many reasons and factors to consider introducing psychological health and safety into your organization, besides managing costs and risks, a healthy and safe workplace is also foundational to an engaged workforce, which supports organizational performance excellence.

What is a psychologically healthy and safe workplace?

The National Standard defines a psychologically healthy and safe workplace as one that promotes workers’ psychological well-being and actively works to prevent harm to workers’ psychological health in negligent, reckless, or intentional ways.

As an employer, consider the following questions:

• Is employee psychological health and safety a stated priority in our organizational policy statement?

• Do people in our organization have a common understanding of a psychologically safe workplace?

• Is our management team familiar with the legal and regulatory requirements and expectations related to workplace mental health and psychological safety?

• Is there a system in place to measure the rates of both absenteeism and presenteeism (being unproductive while present at work) in our organization and what percentage of these may be related to psychological health and safety issues?

• Is there a process in place to encourage frontline managers to provide a psychologically safe workplace through such measures as performance indicators and evaluation methods?

• Does our organization have a policy on work-life balance?

The above questions are just a sample of the types of questions you should be asking yourself as an employer. Service Hospitality has many resources for an organization to begin the steps in integrating psychological health & safety into your safety management system. For a great introduction of the employer’s responsibilities, start off with our feature video:

Compare what you have in place with the CSA Standard through Service Hospitality’s Complimentary Psychological Health & Safety Audit. Audits result in an individualized action plan with clearly outlined “next steps” for your business. Contact us today!