Tomorrow, Dr Hillary Bennett, director of Leading Safety, will give a presentation to the Institute of Directors on what boards and chief executives need to know and do to support a mentally healthy workplace that protects people and prevents mental harm.
A registered psychologist, she developed the Business Leaders’ Health and Safety Forum’s CEO Guide to Mental Health and Wellbeing at Work.
That framework has since been used extensively by both government agencies and private organisations. She also developed the forum’s Protecting Mental Wellbeing at Work guide, which outlines the importance of both psychosocial risk assessment and of incorporating proactive aspects of mental wellbeing through work redesign.
Dr Bennett said her work now was predominantly helping organisations understand their obligations around mental health in the workplace and the opportunities that meeting those obligations could create. Done right, people would thrive in the workplace, which was a huge advantage, she said.
It was not always understood that to "fix" the people, the work might need to be changed. If some of the causes that affected mental wellbeing were not reduced, then there would not be long-term change.
There was much more awareness around the topic now, Dr Bennett said. New Zealand was having conversations — they were not quite as advanced as in some European countries but they were more advanced than in the United States, where the initial perspective was still very much around wellnesss programmes and doing things like subsidising gym memberships.
The Pike River mining tragedy was New Zealand’s "wake-up call", particularly at governance and director level.
Much work had been done identifying the risks in sectors such as health, forestry and agriculture, and safety was not just a compliance matter now.
Covid-19 had pushed mental wellbeing to centre stage because of what people thought was required, but the likes of connection calls or Covid care packages did not address the work itself, Dr Bennett said.
Her biggest message was that "it’s not an ‘either-or’, it’s an ‘and"’; it was about proactively supporting staff.
With hybrid working models now being adopted by some businesses, interesting conversations were being held about what the "new" workplace looked like.
There was a huge volume of work to be done, given the number of people to do it. This was from prior to the pandemic, and it had been a relentless go from one project to another without people being given time to recover.
There needed to be a "deep dive" at workplaces; people spent a lot of time at work. Continuing to put people under pressure, with no time to recover, meant the businesses were not making gains.
Large amounts of money being spent on "what sounds like wellbeing" might be better used to employ more staff, relieve some stress or get a computer fixed.
Making the change sounded like a simple answer, but it was not. Considerable work would have been done to identify physical risks in the workplace and it was time to equally consider a piece of work around mental health.
Governors needed to know the specific risks around mental health. Mental health stresses their toll over time and there was a host of medical outcomes that could come from a mental health imbalance, she said.
Mental health was not the same as mental illness; everyone had mental health, exactly the same as they had physical health, she said.
