Hi everyone. I need some help. Off the back of the success of the book some companies have started to ask me to help them with their workplace culture and how they talk about mental health with their staff. This is something I take very seriously and am passionate about helping with.
Hey Sam, great piece of work! my organisation have 'mental health first aiders'. The idea is that much like a normal first aider, these people are trained in how to handle mental health discussions and are aware of the resources available to them. If anyone needs to speak to someone they just need to approach a mental health first aider. Since introduced it's certainly raised a lot of awareness. Good luck with the project!
Great to hear. Having trained mental health first-aiders throughout the business - they’re more approachable and able to empathise, having some knowledge of the work environment.
The main thing is the demands of the job itself. As a former school teacher, senior leaders would make noises about addressing mental health concerns whilst refusing to acknowledge that the job itself is not conducive to stable mental health. I think this happens a lot. Management will make the right noises with out acknowledging that the job itself and it’s demands and unreasonable.
I think there seems to be a fundamental lack of acknowledgement in companies that poor mental health is at least in part triggered by the work place. I lost my job pre covid as the pressure to do achieve more with less people time and equipment became irreconcilable for me. I wanted to do the job to the best of my ability but the company put limits on what I could achieve and then blamed me for the shortfall. There seems to be an idea that it’s other things outside of work that cause the crisis when often it’s the constant pressure at work that causes issues. I would like to see a system where companies treat stress as a real threat and not just an annual risk assessment
I use to work for a big company that had all the flashy programmes and buzzwords flying about the place but the point of contact for it all (in my case the main manager on site) didn’t have a clue how to deal with it.
If you’re going to have a person responsible for at site level for it all then it helps to have them trained to not make the person who’s having trouble feel like a complete mental case. Like mentioned by others workplaces also need to accept that they can be the cause/contributor to mental health issues.
I don’t need to talk about my mental health in my new occupation but towards the end of my time in my last job I ended up just being honest with anyone who asked. It made me feel less crap about it all if anything.
Sorry I emailed this rather than commenting here, so here goes:
I was involved in helping my current company setup its approach to mental health, then other people really got the ball rolling and the company really followed through with it.
So there was a senior member of staff who was made a 'Welfare Officer', so I think having someone leading on this from HR and a specific point of contact is very important.
We also set up staff 'networks', one of which was on 'mental health and wellbeing' and the leader of that network hosts Teams meetings in which various aspects of mental health are discussed among staff, and occasionally guests were brought in. All sorts of subjects have been covered, it has been an enormous success.
Management received training around mental health too, recognising signs and how to handle it, talk about it etc and then they trained some volunteers to be sort of “mental health first aiders”
Alright Sam. My thoughts, and personal experience, on this are pretty long and complex. I'm gonna take a bit of time to write something up later (being careful to not incriminate anyone!) if that's okay as I think it's interesting, probably eye opening and I suspect a common situation.
TL:DR... Bosses are almost always deceitful, self-serving heartless cunts
Doctors can’t even get it right. Why should corporate workplaces be expected to?HR today is all about fear of liability and compliance. Just like several commenters have mentioned, most workplaces hang the proper signs and promote the resources, but don’t “talk” about it openly.
Hey Sam, great piece of work! my organisation have 'mental health first aiders'. The idea is that much like a normal first aider, these people are trained in how to handle mental health discussions and are aware of the resources available to them. If anyone needs to speak to someone they just need to approach a mental health first aider. Since introduced it's certainly raised a lot of awareness. Good luck with the project!
Great to hear. Having trained mental health first-aiders throughout the business - they’re more approachable and able to empathise, having some knowledge of the work environment.
The main thing is the demands of the job itself. As a former school teacher, senior leaders would make noises about addressing mental health concerns whilst refusing to acknowledge that the job itself is not conducive to stable mental health. I think this happens a lot. Management will make the right noises with out acknowledging that the job itself and it’s demands and unreasonable.
I think there seems to be a fundamental lack of acknowledgement in companies that poor mental health is at least in part triggered by the work place. I lost my job pre covid as the pressure to do achieve more with less people time and equipment became irreconcilable for me. I wanted to do the job to the best of my ability but the company put limits on what I could achieve and then blamed me for the shortfall. There seems to be an idea that it’s other things outside of work that cause the crisis when often it’s the constant pressure at work that causes issues. I would like to see a system where companies treat stress as a real threat and not just an annual risk assessment
I use to work for a big company that had all the flashy programmes and buzzwords flying about the place but the point of contact for it all (in my case the main manager on site) didn’t have a clue how to deal with it.
If you’re going to have a person responsible for at site level for it all then it helps to have them trained to not make the person who’s having trouble feel like a complete mental case. Like mentioned by others workplaces also need to accept that they can be the cause/contributor to mental health issues.
I don’t need to talk about my mental health in my new occupation but towards the end of my time in my last job I ended up just being honest with anyone who asked. It made me feel less crap about it all if anything.
Sorry I emailed this rather than commenting here, so here goes:
I was involved in helping my current company setup its approach to mental health, then other people really got the ball rolling and the company really followed through with it.
So there was a senior member of staff who was made a 'Welfare Officer', so I think having someone leading on this from HR and a specific point of contact is very important.
We also set up staff 'networks', one of which was on 'mental health and wellbeing' and the leader of that network hosts Teams meetings in which various aspects of mental health are discussed among staff, and occasionally guests were brought in. All sorts of subjects have been covered, it has been an enormous success.
Management received training around mental health too, recognising signs and how to handle it, talk about it etc and then they trained some volunteers to be sort of “mental health first aiders”
Alright Sam. My thoughts, and personal experience, on this are pretty long and complex. I'm gonna take a bit of time to write something up later (being careful to not incriminate anyone!) if that's okay as I think it's interesting, probably eye opening and I suspect a common situation.
TL:DR... Bosses are almost always deceitful, self-serving heartless cunts
Doctors can’t even get it right. Why should corporate workplaces be expected to?HR today is all about fear of liability and compliance. Just like several commenters have mentioned, most workplaces hang the proper signs and promote the resources, but don’t “talk” about it openly.