Psychological Health and Safety (PHS) is about creating a work environment that actively prevents harm to employees’ health and well-being.
While we may think it’s senior leadership who’s ultimately responsible for PHS at work, in reality we all are. While leadership is legally responsible for protection of health and safety and human resources (HR) is responsible for formal frameworks, like policies, programs, processes and resources, PHS is built and maintained by the daily interactions of every single person in the organization.
As an employee, your role and responsibility when it comes to PHS includes to:
- Manage your own well-being so you can bring your best self to work each day.
- Strive to do no harm to others. This means being respectful and inclusive of everyone you interact with at work.
- Help protect the psychological health and safety of others by speaking up about concerns.
- Participate in initiatives aimed at improving or protecting psychological health and safety.
Below, we’ll look at each of these responsibilities and share resources and strategies that can support you.
Manage your own wellbeing
A psychologically healthy and safe work environment doesn’t mean a stress-free work environment. Stress is often a daily occurrence. As individuals, we want to ensure we’re supporting our well-being so that the stress we experience at home or at work doesn’t lead to chronic stress or illness.
Managing stress shares strategies that can help reduce the stress in your life and support your resilience.
Strive to do no harm to others
Each interaction we have at work, whether with colleagues or with the customers, clients, or patients we serve, can either protect the PHS of others or negatively impact it. But expecting employees to show up to work each day displaying unlimited joy also isn’t reasonable.
What’s reasonable is acknowledging that each of us will experience challenges at work, or at home that may take a toll and impact how we show up at work. During these times, it’s important we remain respectful when interacting with others and do no harm.
Although it takes most people a lifetime to develop the self-awareness to understand how what they say and do could unintentionally impact others, you can fast-track this by learning about emotional intelligence. One way to start is with our free Emotional intelligence self-assessment. It highlights four areas that allow us to learn about our own emotions and how we react when they are triggered. It also covers the impact our behaviour has on others and how they might respond.
Expand your awareness
Being a Mindful Employee: An orientation to psychological health and safety is a free program that can help you increase your ability to identify the psychosocial factors at work that impact psychological health and safety. This is to better support you to speak up if you see something that could cause harm.
This training program includes four modules. Each module includes a scenario to help development in these areas:
- Managing you – maintain balance and support growth and development at work
- Interacting with others – grow skills in inclusion, support, and psychological protection at work
- Dealing with work stressors – understand how competencies, clarity, and workload influence the work
- Contributing to a positive culture – cultivate civility, respect, and support of others
Participate in initiatives
Supporting psychological health and safety at work means ensuring all employees are given opportunities to be heard and to support positive change through organizational initiatives.
This can include:
- Completing organizational surveys
- Participating in training opportunities that support psychological health and safety
- Joining your organization’s health and safety committee or employee resource groups
Your responsibility for psychological health and safety is a microlearning module that shares what psychological health and safety is, and the important role the organization, its leaders, and its employees play.
Learn more about the important role of health and safety committees in organizations and ways you can support them to protect psychological health and safety.
Share this page with any employee, but especially with those interested in championing PHS at work.