Being a union representative often requires balancing between strong advocacy, deep compassion and the ability to protect your own mental health.
Some of the tasks we can help with include:
- Protecting psychological safety of all workers
- Supporting workers who may be struggling with work, personal or family issues
- Advocating for effective accommodations
- Improving cooperation from management
- Policies, programs and prevention strategies
We have free evidence-based resources to help you with all of this.
Union representatives protect the rights and safety of their members. These resources are designed to help meet these demands in a psychologically safe way.
Protecting psychological safety
The union has a critical role to play in protecting the psychological health and safety of workers. Implementing the entire National Standard of Canada on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace is an ideal approach, but there are many other starting points available.
Implementing the Standard will take you step-by-step through a framework to improve psychological health and safety.
Guarding Minds at Work is a suite of tools including an employee survey that assesses psychosocial factors that are within the influence and responsibility of the employer. This assessment does not require workers to disclose personal health information. The results can help you consider changes to policies and procedures in terms of the impact they can have on psychological health and safety.
Resources to share with workers
Workplace Strategies has many resources to support well-being for workers and their families. There are resources available to:
- Help employees address workplace issues. Find an array of approaches for conflict, bullying, accommodation and well-being.
- Help those who may be struggling with health or caregiver issues. We searched for credible and practical resources on a wide variety of health concerns.
- Support resilience, emotional intelligence and well-being. These free tools and approaches can help workers reduce stress and improve their mental health.
Referring employees to resources suggests tactful words to use when referring workers to resources for a variety of reasons. You can adapt these words for any resource.
Supporting accommodation
There are many ways a union representative can help support successful accommodation or return to work. When a worker is also experiencing mental health concerns, this support can be critical to ongoing well-being.
Union support for accommodation offers strategies to help workers with mental or physical disabilities.
Cooperation from management
Union and management cooperation offers psychologically safe strategies for collective bargaining, accommodation and organizational initiatives.
Policies, programs and prevention strategies
Advocating for policies, programs, and prevention strategies that protect your members can be challenging. These resources can be helpful:
- Addressing domestic violence
- Accommodation and return to work policies
- Bereavement leave policy
- Discrimination prevention and inclusion
- Emotional intelligence in organizations
- Employee assistance programs and mental health issues
- Employee stress prevention process
- Harassment and bullying prevention
- Impairment policy
- Indigenous engagement planning
- Legal duty to accommodate
- Organizational culture
- Peer support programs
- Protecting the mental health of isolated workers
- Psychological health and safety policy recommendations
- Stigma reduction plan
- Suicide prevention
- Termination and layoff planning
- Trauma in organizations
- Union and management cooperation
- Violence prevention
- Wellness awareness program calendar
Additional resources
Approaches for people leaders includes strategies to address employee concerns, develop leadership skills and support team building.
Organizational strategies are for decision-makers who are responsible for policies, programs and prevention strategies or to support workplace mental health and psychological health and safety for all.
There are also many free assessments, tools and workshop materials that include slide presentations, facilitator guides and participant handouts.