It is good to see that increased openness about mental health issues is leading employers to become more accommodating towards people who have such issues. However, there is one policy issue which needs more consideration, and that is the question of how we prevent working conditions and management practices which cause mental health issues in the first place.
Stress and anxiety are some of the most common triggers of mental health problems: the demands of many jobs and detrimental management practices, sometimes combined with an unhealthy work-life (im-)balance, are often a trigger for such problems. What always amazes me is that we can have health and safety regimes concerning physical health which have now gone so far that people joke about them – (but which really have made the world of work much safer), while many employers still seem to take little notice of working conditions which have a detrimental impact on workers’ mental wellbeing.
If a machine occasionally hacks off the finger of an employee, how long does it take till the design is changed, safety measures introduced, and so on? If a manager’s methods, or perhaps a working environment which allows bullies to thrive, cause several people to go off sick due to stress – who scrutinises those management practices and changes them? Chances are that the manager just assumes that the employees were too fragile to cope. There is much that remains to be done here.
Just as looking after the physical health of employees makes sense for employers, one would have thought that giving some thought to the mental wellbeing of one’s workers would be equally sensible. Stress, anxiety or depression compromise a person’s creative faculties, their energy and productivity long before they become so ill that they have to take sick leave. You’d have thought that any business worth its salt would find every way possible to be proactive in protecting its workers’ mental health, just in order to get the best out of them! Yet, there seems to be very little of this thinking about: where are mental health risk assessments for working practices, working environments or even some types of software application?
We need to arrive at a point where mental health is treated equally to physical illnesses not just when it is already a problem – but we ought to be much more proactive in prevention as well. A proper definition of a healthy working environment should include the expectation that the employer has thought carefully about conditions which cause stress or anxiety, and is actively working towards creating a working environment and working community which is conducive to everybody’s mental wellbeing.
We should be expecting a lot more from employers in this respect – in the end, taking mental health (and safety) seriously will mean a healthier, more productive workforce, and that surely has to be worth some effort.
* Maria Pretzler is a Lecturer in Greek History at Swansea University. She blogs at Working Memories , where ancient Greekery and Libdemmery can happily coexist.