
Mental Health Matters: How Mentally Healthy Employees Make The Workplace Safer
Many workplaces provide safeguards for the physical well-being of their employees. Many companies fail to cater to protect the mental health of their staff.
According to the Canadian Centre of Occupational Health & Safety, the overall wellbeing of any workplace should include the psychosocial and physical health of employees. Creating an enabling environment to support the safe workplace mental health of employees is crucial for business growth.
Employers may find it hard to maintain workers’ mental health, as there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. This article provides a clear template to help employers build a strong scheme to protect their workers’ mental health. Taking cues from this post makes it easy to build and sustain a working mental health program for your employees.
How Do Mentally Healthy Employees Make the Workplace Safer?
Here are a few ways that good mental health among employees leads to a safe workplace:
Prevents Human Error
Lack of concentration could be a major side effect of the prolonged mental breakdown of employees. One mistake of an employee suffering from poor mental health could put others in danger and result in accidents that could have been avoided.
Mentally healthy employees are less likely to make mistakes on the job, reducing the chances of accidents at work.
Avoids Unfortunate Events
Some workers that have had to deal with mental abuse for long periods end up being disgruntled. In select cases, these workers could resort to acts of force as retaliation against fellow staff or supervisors.
Employers can avert violence in the workplace by providing timely, effective provisions for workers’ mental wellbeing.
What Can Employers Do to Support the Mental Health of Their Staff?
Providing support for the mental health of your employees is a smart way to improve business productivity. Here’s what employers can do to support your workers’ mental health:
- By supporting the active participation of employees in relevant mental health programs
- Through clearly defining workers’ roles and responsibilities in the workplace
- By promoting a healthy work-life balance among employees to prevent burnout
- Through maintaining a zero-tolerance policy for disrespectful, demeaning, and derogatory behaviour in the workplace
- By providing adequate support for employees to effectively manage their workload
- Through the provision of continuous learning aids for employees to reduce stress from work
- By creating and updating a conflict resolution system in the workplace
- Through recognition of employees’ valid contributions and providing a reward system for excellence
- Consider the psychological impact of some tasks on employees before scheduling them
- Through a continuous assessment of the psychological safety of employees in the workplace
- By including mental health safety in your company’s H & S mandates
- Through developing policies that checkmate bullying, violence against employees, and workplace harassment from supervisors
- Through hosting mental health awareness for managers, supervisors, and employees, these programs can help staff recognize the dangers of psychologically harmful work conditions.
Consulting an experienced safety consultancy will make it easy for employers to create and sustain a strong mental health program. That way, employers can avoid losing many man-hours to mental health issues and boost their business’ productivity.
Advanced Consulting & Training – Management Development
Safeguarding workplace mental health is an integral factor to protect employees in your business. Employers must do all they can to guarantee everyone’s mental wellbeing is always catered to. That way, employees develop a sense of inclusiveness in the entire process, and everyone gets protection against physical or mental harm.
At Advanced Consulting & Training, we are just as committed to mental health as we are to physical health. We offer an assortment of management development specialty training courses. From learning the dimensions of effective leadership to coping with stress, we offer courses that provide employers with the tools they need to build a safe workplace with employee mental health.
Ready to start working towards building mental health resources for your employees? Get in touch with Advanced Consulting & Training.