Measure how your workplace ‘Protects’
Measuring how your workplace ‘Protects’ mental health can be part of meeting work health and safety obligations. To do this, you need to understand how your context and organisational practices may affect the mental health of people working for or interacting with your workplace.
Part of the Measure what matters module.
There are legal obligations related psychological health and safety
Employers large or small have duties and obligations under the work health and safety laws to provide a safe workplace, which includes both physical and psychological safety. All organisations have obligations to do what is reasonably practicable to eliminate or minimise work related risk to psychological health and safety.
As part of meeting these obligations, you need data to:
- understand your internal and external context and identify hazards or risks to psychological health.
- develop controls to eliminate hazards (where practical) or minimise them
- check in regularly to confirm your strategies and actions are still effective.
Collecting data via worker consultation is also an important part of meeting these legal obligations.
Useful data about how well your organisation ‘protects’ mental health includes number and type of hazards, staff turnover rate, number of workers compensation claims and average weekly hours worked.
How data can help
Data can help identify barriers to, and enablers of, a mentally healthy workplace and help answer questions such as:
- Are managers trained and supported to create and maintain mentally healthy workplaces?
- Is adequate notice provided to meet task deadlines?
- Do workers have the skills, competencies and other resources needed for mentally healthy workplaces?
- Are workers meeting key quality and delivery goals?
- How much ‘busy work’ are workers engaging in?
- Are workers able to take leave when due?
- Are patterns of complaints, disputes, staff turnover etc. changing? Are they trending up or down?
- Are patterns of manager behaviour fair and appropriate?
- Are workers affected by vicarious trauma at work?
- Are workers encouraged to take mental health days as needed?
- Are workers able to voice concerns with confidence and without fear of repercussion?
Some example measures
Your organisation must choose the measures that it needs. Here are some examples of potential measures:
- number, type, frequency and impact of hazardous exposures
- rate of staff turnover
- number of workers compensation claims for mental health
- number of claimants returning to work
- length of absence from work
- cost to the organisation of work-related mental health injury or illness
- unplanned leave costs
- number of position descriptions reviewed against good work design goals
- average weekly hours worked
- number of tasks or outputs per worker
- number of workers accessing flexible work arrangements
- number of incentive schemes that support mentally healthy work
- number, type and frequency of consultations with workers about mental health
- attendance and completion of training programs related to psychological health and safety.
You may choose to collect this information via a validated survey of common psychosocial hazards.