Consider your unique organization
Psychological health and safety does not look the same among organizations. You first need to look at the unique circumstances and characteristics of your organization that impact your workplace and employees including:
- Sector or industry
- Region or jurisdiction
- Regulatory and compliance requirements
- Number of employees
- Staffing levels
- Public, private, for-profit, or not-for-profit
- Physical, cognitive, or emotional labour
- Exposure to trauma, conflict, or the public
- Leadership style and efficacy
- Organizational stability or maturity
- Remote, hybrid, or on-site work
- Shift work or irregular hours
- Level of safety sensitivity
- Demographics of those served
- Demographics of employees
- Unionized or non-unionized
- Past and current work issues
- Full-time, part-time, contract, or gig workers
- Workload demands
There are tools to help you begin a dialogue to consider where you are now:
- 20 questions for employers can help focus the conversation on where the organization is now and the potential exposure to legal and reputational risk.
- Organizational review is a deeper dive that supports leaders to examine each of the psychosocial factors named in Guarding Minds at Work.
Consider organizational readiness for change
- Internal or external factors may enhance or impede action. For example, a pending merger or major reorganization.
- If there are current labour disputes this may not be the ideal time to begin this process. This is because management and the union are expected to work together on psychological health and safety.
- If your organization is facing major changes – such as shutdowns, layoffs, terminations or deployments – you should focus on limiting the risk related to the potential impact.
- Remaining employees may face heavier workloads, making it harder for them to participate in developing new processes. Still, it’s important to assess the psychological health and safety impacts, including challenges related to change management, grief over the loss of co-workers who are let go or moved, or increased workload pressures.
Choose your approach
Ask and act
This is the most agile approach. It is best used in a situation where you have no budget, a small team, no critical or legal concerns and an existing level of trust between employees and management.
- Ask employees what gets in the way of them doing their best work each day. Provide both open and anonymous opportunities to share their answers.
- Choose the issue with the most potential for harm and brainstorm solutions with your employees that are relevant and practical.
- Make the change and watch to see if it has addressed the issue. If it did, consider making it policy. If it did not, try another approach.
- Repeat on a regular basis for a continual improvement process.
Relevant resources
- On the agenda workshop series can be used toto facilitate productive conversations with your team about each of the psychosocial factors named in Guarding Minds at Work.
Assess and address
This is a more formal process that allows for an evidence-based and systematic approach. It would be necessary in larger organizations or when trust between management and employees is not universal.
- Engage employees through surveys, focus groups and opportunities to provide anonymous feedback.
- Supplement this with data from workforce metrics such as turnover, absenteeism, grievances or complaints, productivity, injuries, near misses, etc.
- Analyze the results to identify potential psychosocial hazards.
- Collaborate with employees on potential strategies or solutions to eliminate or reduce the risk from the identified hazards.
- Implement change and monitor to see if it achieved the intended outcomes. If it did, consider making it policy. If it did not, try another approach.
- Document and repeat on a regular basis for a continual improvement process.
Relevant resources
- Guarding Minds at Work is an employee survey tool that can help with this process.
- Using Guarding Minds more effectively provides tips and strategies beyond the survey itself.
- Psychological health and safety surveys and tools highlights assessments and templates you can leverage.
Implement a standard
This voluntary approach uses a standard framework like CSA z1003 or ISO 45003 to create a comprehensive psychological health and safety management system. The intention is to have a formal and documented process that includes hazard identification and risks mitigation that mirrors existing occupational health and safety frameworks.
This approach supports compliance with OHS regulations and is especially useful for large, complex and unionized workplaces as it is intended to be integrated with existing processes.
Relevant resources
- Implementing the standards provides guidelines and resources to help support your success in implementing the standards.
Get buy-in
After considering your organization’s dynamics and choosing your approach, it’s important to get buy-in from your senior leaders, to avoid delays that may be caused if leaders aren’t clear on both risks and benefits.
Each of the following points can help you prepare to respond to senior leaders’ questions and concerns.
- Sustaining an engaged workforce and a healthy bottom line are among the economic and social benefits. For help in establishing costs see Psychological health and safety cost benefits.
- A SWOT (strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis can help support decision-making. You and your team may want to either conduct this in advance of your presentation to senior leadership or in collaboration with them. In either case, articulating the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats often highlights the need for action to protect psychological health and safety of employees.
- Leverage Evidence-based actions for psychological health and safety to build your case. This helps respond to concerns that your organization or department believe they don’t have enough time or resources to invest in psychological health and safety (PHS). The free tools, resources and strategies allow for action without significant cost.
- Something as simple as starting a conversation about psychological health and safety may bring positive changes. You don’t always need larger initiatives and programs. For example, asking if the question, “How might [this] impact the psychological health and safety of our employees?” could become a regular follow-up to discussions related to planning, change management, new projects or changes in policy or processes.
Be prepared to respond to any concerns
There may be concerns that addressing psychological health and safety will uncover issues that they weren’t previously aware of. If this is the case, share these facts:
- Avoiding or denying psychological health and safety issues at work might mean that problems worsen and become a crisis.
- Considering psychological health and safety issues can help prevent time-consuming and morale-dampening situations.
- The National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace provides an evidence-based framework to support our efforts.
Address employee privacy concerns
Employees should understand:
- Participation in this data collection project is voluntary.
- The choice not to take part will have no adverse effects on employment.
- They’ll have anonymity when completing and returning their submission.
- You won't gather any personal or identifying information. Ask survey respondents about their experiences and perceptions only from the perspective of their current position.
- Any information obtained during this data collection project should be kept strictly confidential.
Estimate the time and effort required to:
- do a baseline assessment
- analyze the results
- implement improvements
- evaluate impact and use this for continual improvement.
Note that the size and scope of your plan will depend on the complexity of your organization and the initiatives you choose to put in place. Some organizations may take a few weeks to go through the process, while others may need several months.
As much as you can, choose improvements that also support the goals and objectives of the organization or team.
Estimate the time your organization may need to complete the following tasks:
- Develop the business case, including baseline measurements.
- Secure senior leadership commitment from labour and management.
- Create a communication plan addressing potential questions or concerns.
- Set up the assessment process, choosing what will be measured, and how.
- Conduct an assessment such as Guarding Minds at Work. (This may be the easiest part.)
- Analyze the results of any assessment.
- Communicate results, celebrate successes and identify areas for improvement.
- Engage the workforce in developing and implementing action plans. This participation is critical to success.
- Measure outcomes against goals.
- Take corrective action, including additional plans or modifications if necessary.
- Establish a process of continual improvement. Consider re-administering the assessment every couple of years to keep psychological health and safety on the agenda.
Consider competing demands and priorities
Psychological health and safety (PHS) should be treated as one of the mechanisms that supports performance and productivity in a sustainable way. Instead of treating it like an add-on program or initiative, using this approach as the basis for organizational excellence and success helps to reduce the competition for time and effort as you align your PHS efforts with existing strategic goals and priorities.
This means weaving your efforts into existing policies, programs and daily routines. PHS is also an effective cost-managing approach by reducing absenteeism, turnover, conflict and other expenses.
If this is a new approach in your organization, you may wish to consider the following, which are foundational:
- How the employment lifecycle impacts employee PHS.
- How meetings and events are scheduled, who gets to attend and how they’re conducted.
- How performance is managed.
- The impact of clients or other external providers or vendors on your employees.
- How work is designed and assigned.
- How leaders are trained, resourced and assessed.
- Start with only looking at one issue, factor or hazard at a time.
- Develop and communicate the plan.
- Identify one or more champions in senior leadership to bring resources and encourage commitment.
- Show that PHS is a priority to the organization by obtaining a written commitment from senior leadership (labour and management), which should show support for addressing psychological health and safety.
- Establish a psychological health and safety working group. This group should include key stakeholders who will help drive the process.
- These stakeholders should come from all levels of management. It should also include employees and employee representatives.
- If possible, involve someone from each department. For example, human resources, occupational health and safety or finance.
- Include someone with communication skills in the working group.
- Include someone with authority to access organizational data to help inform decisions.
- The mandate of the working group is to plan the assessment, analysis and communication of the process. They would help steer the planning, implementation, evaluation and continual improvement stages.
- Decide on a timeframe and budget for the planning, implementation and evaluation of the initiative.
- Involve key stakeholders in discussion about the working group’s approach. Get critical feedback from employees, union and management before communicating the plan to the rest of the workforce.
- Clearly communicate your plan. Explicitly state potential concerns and explain how your approach will address these. For messaging ideas, see Commitment, leadership and participation for psychological health and safety. Getting everyone on the same page in this way helps support the process even before taking any other actions.
- Determine who needs to receive the communication and how best to deliver it.
- Ensure you communicate with all workplace stakeholders including all levels of management, union representatives, occupational health and safety representatives, human resources, employees and others who play a key role in the workplace.
- Provide written communication to those without access to a computer.
- Consider holding meetings to discuss the process in person. You could also instruct each department or team leader to hold a discussion after being briefed.
- Consider any other challenges or limitations. This may include employees who are working offsite, on vacation, on leave, or who have impairments.
Review the results
There are many considerations that can help you decide where to start taking action. When reviewing the results, immediately identify any pressing safety concerns. For example, issues like bullying, harassment, violence or discrimination.
The next step may be to identify whether there are any issues relating to human rights, health or safety. You could also start by identifying psychosocial factors as potential areas of strength. This can allow you to build on good work already done in those areas. Enhancing the protective nature of psychosocial factors can help even in the face of other unavoidable work stressors.
Engage external experts, if appropriate. Assessments such as Guarding Minds at Work are free, self-serve resources. Some organizations prefer the support of an external consultant to administer and analyze the assessment.