Are Mental Health Skills Essential for the Modern Workplace?
Mental health in the workplace. A fairly unspoken issue until recent years.
These days, many companies have support structures and dedicated points of contact within their teams.
At Orbis, some of our Mental Health qualifications include:
Mental Health First Aid,
Fostering Gender Inclusive Cultures,
Work and Mental health,
Psychological First aid,
Unconscious Bias Awareness - and more.
These tools help improve our wellbeing and performance.
For these we can thank our Diversity and Inclusion lead Joanna and the whole internal Mental Health Council, who work together on identifying areas where we can establish better support and bring valuable knowledge into the business through education.
The legal bit:
Although many professionals are choosing to enhance their knowledge and training in the field of mental health, it’s still not legally compulsory.
“In human and financial terms, psychological ill-health is the costliest area of occupational health and safety (OH&S) yet few organizations actually have any in-house expertise in this area.” – British Standards Institution.
It’s currently a recommendation, not a requirement for the workplace, with the First Aid (Mental Health) Bill having not yet progressed past its first reading, which took place on the 23rd of March 2021.
Are Mental Health qualifications essential for the Modern workplace?
If they have never been ‘essential’ before, why is our need greater today?
Additional stressors in life put us more at risk of burnout, mental health issues or crisis, so they are good reasons to get educated to look after ourselves and our colleagues.
What kind of stressors? Here are some examples you might recognise:
Lockdown Adjustment:
We won’t dwell on this one – it’s well-trodden ground – but the period of transition as we come out of lockdown is one challenge to our mental health. This means different things for everyone, but we should make sure the necessary support is in place.
MentalHealthAtWork.org offers some ways to manage this stress as well as guides on everything from supporting employees returning after long term sickness leave, to building wellbeing action plans here.
Modern life is overwhelming?
In 2021, drains on our energy are many.
A 2020 study in America found that people between 45 and 65 years old are more stressed than people their age were in the 1990s. Experts suggest that changes in technology, family, and financial hardship are some of the reasons.
We live faster, are more competitive workers, have too many options and not enough time. It’s easy to become overwhelmed without noticing. MH education and mindfulness at work can help us look out for each other and identify issues.
World events.
Ever heard of Vicarious traumatization? It’s when we’re impacted by crisis events second hand.
In the modern technological world, we’re exposed to tragedies from all over the globe. Studies have shown that people demonstrate an increase in both anxiety and sadness after as little as 14 minutes of watching the news.
We are prone to entering a vicious cycle:
Stress - frustration that we can’t help more - guilt about our privilege - frantic attempts to educate ourselves - becoming overwhelmed and emotionally exhausted.
Especially in times of crisis or conflict, MH awareness and first aiders at work can check in with the team for vicarious traumatization.
Chances are you already experience this, and refer to it as being ‘stressed about the state of the world’. We get it.
Diversity.
You’ll have noticed ‘fostering gender inclusive cultures’ and ‘unconscious bias awareness’ on our list. We include them because D&I awareness is also a way of looking after our community.
In increasingly diverse workplaces, which deserve to be celebrated, we must make sure MH support is equipped to deal with any MH issues which apply to a particular group.
For instance: A study found that anxiety and depression symptoms have more than tripled in Black and Latino communities this year in response to shocking scenes of racial inequality and violence worldwide.
To properly support diverse employees we need to be educated and in possession of the right tools to help.
The Bottom Line.
We spend at least a third of our lives at work, and our mental health comes with us to the office.
If we are committed to ‘bringing our whole selves to work’, we must acknowledge that issues like these are the business of employers.
Mental health conditions and crises can be exacerbated by work stress, or when we repress negative feelings in order to ‘get on’. No one performs their best with underlying issues left untreated.
Many courses and certifications across mental health, diversity and inclusion are available. Stay tuned for a follow up article in coming weeks with our roundup of MH courses to upskill your team!