Health and well-being

Health and safety in the workplace

Work health and safety

All workplaces have a legal obligation to provide a safe and healthy workplace as set out by Work Health and Safety legislation. This is managed at a state level and involves the following acts:

STATE	WHS LEGISLATION
Australian Capital Territory	Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (ACT)
New South Wales	Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (NSW)
Northern Territory	Work Health and Safety (National Uniform Legislation) 2011 (NT)
Queensland	Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (QLD)
South Australia	Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (SA)
Tasmania	Work Health and Safety Act 2012 (TAS)
Victoria	Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004 (VIC)
Western Australia	Occupational Safety and Health Act 1984 (WA)

Employee Assistance Programs

While not mandatory, all government departments and most large organisations across Australia have adopted Employee Assistance Programs (EAP’s). These programs see employers sponsor access to confidential counselling services to employees to support any personal and/ or work-related issues that may impact their well-being, work performance, safety, individual and workplace morale, and psychological health.

This counselling is aimed at assisting employees to:

• understand and clarify issues that are directly concerning them, including any underlying issues.
• identify and explore options to address those issues.
• develop plans to approach the issues and find constructive solutions.

This service may also be extended to employee’s immediate family members.

Health and well-being

Looking beyond mandated health and safety in the workplace, health and well-being programs are on the rise with employers understanding that it makes good business sense to keep their workforce healthy and happy.

Benefits and risks

Benefits

There are a range of benefits to offering your employees a safe and healthy workplace focused on their health and well-being. These can include:

• Improved performance
• Increased job satisfaction
• Greater work participation
• Higher engagement ratings
• Increased social inclusion
• Increased individual, team, and organisational resilience
• Lower absenteeism rates
• Greater productivity
• Lower workers compensation premiums
• Faster return to work

Risks to health and well-being

One of the biggest risks impacting health and well-being in the workplace at the moment is workplace stress.

Workplace stress

Unfortunately workplace stress is also on the rise internationally affecting not only the health and well-being of employees but also their productivity. In fact, stress is now seen as the second biggest factor relating to workplace compensation claims in Australia with an estimated cost of over $10 billion per year to businesses. In addition to compensation costs, organisations lose productivity in absenteeism as a result of workplace stress.

In the short-term, pressure to meet a deadline or to respond to questions (internally or externally) may see you experience pressure and the anxiety that can go with it.

When work stress becomes chronic, however, it can be too overwhelming to cope with, leading to physical and emotional ill-health.

Heads Up explains that workplace stress can occur when there is a mismatch between the requirements of the role, your capabilities and the resources and supports available.

Work-related stress can be caused by a number of factors and comes down to the inability to cope with the demands of a job, resulting in someone feeling uneasy and uncomfortable in their workplace.

There are a number of factors that can cause this inability to cope;

Remote working

The shift by many businesses, temporarily or permanently, to offering remote working has also had a significant impact on employee’s mental health. While for some employees, this shift has been a blessing and had a positive impact on their work-life balance, others have felt stressed by the state of change, feeling isolated and generally overwhelmed.

VIDEO RESOURCE: Mentally Healthy Workplaces.

Watch this recording by SafeWork NSW on managing mental health while working at remotely.

Identifying health and well-being initiatives

Think beyond Casual Fridays, benefits like pool tables in the lunchroom and other superficial incentives. How can you make your organisation a place where employees thrive?

Mind, a mental health charity in the UK, suggests tackling workplace stress and well-being with three distinct approaches:

1. Promote well-being for all staff
2. Tackle the cause of work-related mental health problems
3. Support staff who experience mental health problems.

There are a number of ways to support these approaches, and all involve normalising mental health. This means regularly touching base with your employees to see how they are getting along and considering what might be causing them stress. Engagement is important, as is two-way communication regarding any issues. Importantly, organisations need to back up what they say, and actively support the mental well-being of their employees. People can very quickly see through incongruous statements that say they support well-being but without the action to back that up.

There are many initiatives that can be implemented in the workplace to encourage the health and well-being of your employees. You may find some are easily applied in your workplace, whereas others may be difficult to implement or not relevant to your workforce. Focusing on multiple aspects of physical and mental health is important and can help to establish great morale, low absenteeism and improved focus and commitment from your team members.

Consider the following aspects of health and some examples of how your workplace can implement improvements:

• Physical Activity—Encourage walking meetings, provide bike racks, showers and change room facilitates if space permits, promote the use of stairs as opposed to lifts, encourage walking groups in lunch breaks, promote walking or other physical challenges (e.g. 10,000 steps program)
• Healthy Eating—Ensure adequate fridge space for people to bring their lunches to work, provide a comfortable break out or lunchroom, replace the biscuit or lolly jar with fresh fruit, develop a workplace healthy eating policy to cover what is acceptable to have as options in vending machines, fundraising, etc.
• Smokefree—Create a smoke-free workplace policy including support for those people who want to quit, offering workplace quit programs, arrange peer support groups for those wanting to quit
• Reduce alcohol consumption—Follow responsible service of alcohol guidelines for all workplace functions, include some social events that do not include alcohol, offer Employee Assistance Programs to help employees reduce their alcohol intake
• Social and Emotional Well-being—Organise social events to encourage social networks, address bullying behaviour, conduct feedback surveys on staff satisfaction, establish an Employee Assistance Program to provide employees with access to confidential counselling, support a work environment that supports work-life balance including policies to accommodate for family leave and flexible schedules.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Managing mental health in your workplace

Refer to the NSW Governments website to learn more and access tools that will help you to create a mentally healthy workplace, understand the benefits of doing so, give and get support and the factors that impact people’s mental health.

VIDEO RESOURCE: Why Wellness Sucks.

This TEDx Talk by Anna Greenwald shares her thoughts on how to extend the concept of workplace well-being to meet the needs of a new era of work and change the way we work.

Implementing health and well-being initiatives

Researching and finding health and well-being initiatives for your workplace is a meaningful start, but without good implementation, the effort is wasted.

In the publication ‘A Guide to Promoting Health & Well-being in the Workplace’, the ACT Government suggests the following formula to turn ideas into focused and well implemented health and well-being initiatives for your organisation:

1. Get commitment from Management
   1. Establish a workplace health and well-being policy
   2. Establish commitment with management support
2. Initial Planning
   1. Encourage involvement from both employees and management or employer
   2. Establish co-ordination mechanisms to ensure someone is responsible for the implementation
3. Needs Assessment
   1. Identify existing initiatives or organisational habits or policies that can be extended or drawn on
   2. Identify priority needs and the interests of employees
   3. Identify works specific to the workplace
4. Action planning
   1. Research initiates that you found to be relevant to your workplace
   2. Plan the implementation of initiatives
   3. Communicate and promote initiatives to keep everyone informed and motivated
5. Program Management
   1. Ensure there is regular communication and recordkeeping to establish if an initiative is being utilised
6. Evaluation and review against your action plan and communicate results.

Monitoring employee health and well-being

Monitoring and measuring

It can be difficult to measure employee well-being, but it is a worthwhile activity. REBA have identified the following five methods for monitoring employee well-being:

1. Employee surveys to measure sentiment

Employee satisfaction surveys are a really valuable tool when it comes to measuring well-being. At Simplyhealth we run a monthly Engagement survey through Chatterbox. Not only does this give us a regular pulse check on how our employees are feeling, but we also gain insight on specific issues like stress and anxiety, enabling us to respond to health and well-being issues in real time.

A lot of insight can also be gained by running a health and well-being survey. To help shape our new programme, ENERGISE YOU, we surveyed staff to understand their current well-being, well-being at work, and well-being priorities. This has proven a great data source, informing all of our colleague health and well-being initiatives.

It is also worth considering how changes in the current climate, i.e. COVID-19, could be impacting your employees. During the pandemic we’ve been running a ‘Ways of Working’ survey to help us understand more about how people are coping remotely.

2. Use HR data

Workplace metrics like number and frequency of absences, quality and quantity of work output, and levels of staff retention can be useful reference points when tracking changes in well-being. We use HR data alongside the results and scores from our employee surveys for a clearer indication of employee well-being within our own business.

It is worth noting, however, that mental health absence is often reported as physical illness by employees. A poll of 2,000 people, conducted by Censuswide and Slater and Gordon in 2019, found that as many as 55% of employees reported physical illness when they were in fact off for mental health reasons. And with 89% of organisations having observed presenteeism in the last 12 months, according to our latest Health and Well-being at Work report, it can be difficult to know how employees are really feeling by looking at data alone.

3. Create a culture of openness

Tracking well-being often requires disclosure, but employees are unlikely to feel comfortable doing so if the culture in your organisation is not right. A good place to start is to really try and normalise conversations around well-being. Encourage managers to set-up regular one-on-ones and highlight that the focus shouldn’t necessarily just be work, but a personal check-in to see how their team are doing. This does not need to be face-to-face either. A quick message via Teams, Slack or Skype is a great way to stay connected.

Or, why not run an informal coffee morning? Our team of mental health first aiders host a drop-in session every Wednesday for a cuppa and a chat – a great solution for supporting employees and helping them support their peers. Be sure to track any feedback resulting from these conversations to enhance your well-being strategy.

4. Management Information

Management Information (MI) is a powerful tool for employers striving to improve their understanding of their employees’ health and well-being challenges. With information about age demographics, gender splits, and claim trends, exploring this data can help inform and develop your health and well-being strategy, whilst providing your HR team with valuable insights.

Statistics from our own employee assistance programme data highlighted the benefit of offering counselling for those in need. Nearly half (46.3%) of our employees undergoing counselling who were out of work at the start of therapy were back in work at the end.

5. Risk areas and how to spot them

Risk areas are easy to spot when you’re implementing a combination of well-being measures. But consistently monitoring your well-being strategy is equally as important. Keep an eye out for changes in feedback and set benchmark figures for your HR and MI data. You can then take verbatim feedback collected from employee surveys to combine the data and identify trends.

If you are measuring employee well-being successfully, you will be able to look at key themes from your data to see how it might be affecting business performance. Our data has helped us identify mental health as a risk area, as well as highlighting sleep, energy and physical fitness as themes needing attention. We’ve since provided Mental Health Awareness training for all managers, launched the SimplyMe app helping users to take control of their physical and emotional health, and now publish a Well-being Weekly email full of articles and useful tips.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCE: Workplace Well-being Assessment

Refer to the NSW Governments website to access tools to assess how mentally healthy your business is.