Why Supporting Your People is Essential to Your Business
When we are trying to mitigate risk for psychosocial injuries in our business, it is essential to know how your organisation supports your people. It is crucial to your
Category
The Trouble With Trauma
Wellbeing in the Workplace
It is important to have balance in our working lives to ensure that we can maintain a good level of wellbeing.
What is most important is making sure that organisations are able to support their staff to understand what wellbeing means and to ensure that we put systems in place to support it.
Part of my own wellbeing during the day is to go outside, take a breather and get away from the constant requirements of the work that I do with clients. It provides a way of breaking up the day and the constant feeling of pressure we often find in working environments.
Emotional Vibration and Micromanagement
In organisations where people feel that they are being micromanaged, not trusted or given autonomy over their work, the vibrational elements of their emotions tend to give off negative vibes. Similar to that feeling when you walk into a room and you could cut the air with a knife because two people have been arguing. You get this automatic feeling that you don’t want to be there.
Conservative Risk Assessments
One of the things that tends to happen when we work in frontline service organisations – in particular service organisations like fire, ambulance, police and defence, is that often a conservative risk assessment is applied if a member identifies that something they experienced in the course of their work, has affected them negatively.
Presenteeism vs Absenteeism
Many believe that the problem with staffing issues from a mental health perspective are about Absenteeism – employees staying at home, not coming to work. In reality, the biggest impact on our productivity is from Presenteeism – employees turning up to work but not functioning effectively.
Mental Health in the Resources Sector
The Australian minerals sector has maintained a vigilant focus on workplace health and safety...
Validation
One of the conversations I often have with organisations is about validating the experiences of their employee's. When conflict in the work environment leads to one person taking stress leave, it is important to validate the stressed person’s perspective, regardless of who or what has resulted in the conflict.
Mental Fitness
It has only been over the past decade that I have focussed more on my physical fitness, to assist with my health and wellbeing, and manage my injuries. Going to the gym multiple times a week helps me to gain and maintain strength and reduces my pain experience from injuries that I sustained over 15 years ago.
Sexual Assault
Over the last few weeks, there has been a lot of focus in the media about sexual assault, especially when women are waiting a significant period of time before making a report.
Self-Determination
In order to prevent staff from staying away for an extended period when on stress leave, and ultimately lodging a workers compensation claim, I recommend to organisations that we need to intervene early and contact them within the first 48 hours.