Making changes

‘How’ you change is important

You may identify various changes your workplace needs to make to become more mentally healthy. Regardless of whether these changes are small or large, considering how you will manage the change can maximise your chances of success.

An effective organisational change approach is essential to creating a mentally healthy workplace. In fact, poor change management is a well-known psychosocial hazard that can negatively impact employee mental health.

Research also highlights that ‘implementation failure’ or things not being rolled out as planned is often the reason for mental health and wellbeing initiatives not being effective in the workplace. Successfully embedding approaches or initiatives, to ensure their long-term sustainability, is also key.

Examples of potential changes

Integrating mental health and wellbeing considerations into ‘business as usual’ may involve implementing changes such as:

• introducing a new mental health, wellbeing and suicide prevention policy
• prioritising people management skills in recruitment, selection, training and advancement processes
• implementing reasonable accommodations for workers experiencing mental ill health
• introducing a psychosocial risk assessment and control system as part of a safety management function
• redesigning jobs to reduce psychosocial hazards
• redesigning jobs to promote wellbeing
• setting up a peer support network (where people with similar experiences or circumstances get together to support each other)
• providing early intervention programs for distressed employees
• including mental health in risk and governance processes and arrangements.

Core principles of change management

Regardless of whether your change is large or small, these principles may help in your approach.

Creating a mentally healthy workplace will involve changing how you do things. And change itself can be difficult to manage. So, make sure you know how to manage change.

Communicate ‘the why’

To the extent that any of these measures involve a major workplace change that is likely to have a significant effect on workers, or a change to their regular roster or ordinary hours of work, organisations will ordinarily have a legal requirement to consult with their workers. 

It is easier to secure resources, attention and commitment to change with a strong and well considered case for action (e.g. the financial, economic, social and individual benefits and alignment with your organisation’s objectives or values). For people to adopt a significant strategic change, they need to feel it is important, urgent and necessary. Communicating the why makes the change meaningful for others.

Know where people are at before you get started

You may need to consider how ‘ready’ your organisation is for a particular change and whether any preparatory work (consultation, needs assessment, education, new resourcing etc.) is needed before introducing the change.

Stakeholder consultation is a fundamental principle in change management. The active participation and collaboration of stakeholders who can mobilise resources and influence systems to change policies, programs and practices is critical to any change program. If the change may impact health or safety, you may have a legal obligation to consult workers and their representatives.

Without talking to people about changes that may affect them before implementing them, it is unlikely you will get the support and cooperation you need to be successful. There will always be different views to accommodate, however you can find points of common ground among the members of your organisation.

If it is a large and/or complex organisation, you may need to consider building ‘coalitions’ among stakeholders to drive key changes. How you set up a working group to assist with this should be an important consideration. You may need to consider the different roles your stakeholders can play such as influencers, champions, implementers and participants.

Know what might be challenging

Not everyone in your organisation will respond to change in the same way. Understand and address any potential barriers before and during change. Resistance to change can be individual or group based. Does anyone have anything to lose if this change is introduced?

Resistance can result from resource loss or competition, different sub-cultures in the organisation or a lack of strong and supportive leadership. Different groups will be at different stages of awareness about the need for change and at different stages of motivation to engage with it. It can also be influenced by personality. Research shows people have different levels of openness to change. 

You should expect some resistance when changes involve developing new ways of thinking, acquiring new skills and changing entrenched attitudes and behaviours. Well-established consultative processes will make it easier to identify barriers and sources of resistance and develop solutions as change is rolled out. Be prepared to be surprised and challenged, and respond with curiosity and respect.

Co-designing approaches with people with lived experience of mental ill-health can be a powerful tool in identifying challenges and overcoming them; they can become powerful champions of change in an organisation.

Support, sustain and reinforce

Once change is being implemented, look for ways it can be further embedded and reinforced via policy updates, ongoing resourcing, communication, training, changes to job descriptions, recruitment and selection criteria, and incentives and rewards for good practice.

We know from business research that in large organisations, there is often a disconnect between policy and practice. Line managers play a key role in how effectively policy is implemented and may need specific and dedicated support relating to mental health and wellbeing policy implementation. A key means of ensuring sustainability is making the change a core part of the organisation’s culture and ways of working.

Review, improve and learn

While you should try for some ‘quick wins’ to build momentum in the initial stages of implementing a change, remember creating and sustaining a mentally healthy workplace is a long game. Many organisations find it is better to ‘under-promise and over-deliver’; creating unrealistic expectations that initiatives will lead to quick fixes can set up harm or cynicism.

If your changes are small and incremental, make sure you have a way of monitoring and assessing how well things are going so you can tweak and improve on initial changes.

If your changes are more significant, your strategy or plan will need to be reviewed, updated and enhanced in maturity at the end of its first iteration (typically a 3–5 year renewal cycle). Evaluation activities should give you some indicators and information for improvement.

Identify ways to capture the learnings and insights from the change process to inform future activities. For example, were there challenges that you will approach differently the next time? Were some key audiences more influential than others? Were there new steps that you did not plan for?

Each time you complete a process of action and checking whether that change was effective, your organisation gains important insights or skills that can be used to inform future action.

Change and workplace relations

Some changes, such as restructuring or downsizing, have legislated requirements to follow processes or consultation steps.

Your workplace may also have designated processes for managing some types of changes in enterprise agreements, or through centralised processes. These change requirements are often in place because they need to be managed carefully and appropriately. Make sure you know whether you need to use these processes.