Related legislation and ethical considerations

Your legal obligations

Your organisation must comply with legal obligations related to creating a mentally healthy workplace. These obligations also reflect core processes for building a mentally healthy workplace, so any business case or strategy should clearly reference and comply with these legal requirements.

They include complying with legislation relating to:

• work health and safety legislation and codes of practice
• workers compensation legislation
• anti-discrimination legislation (including disability discrimination)
• privacy legislation
• workplace relations legislation and industrial agreements (including awards and agreements).

Identifying your organisation’s legal responsibilities to provide a mentally healthy workplace is a good start when developing a business case for action. But you can bolster your case by identifying the ethical and social benefits of creating a mentally healthy workplace. 

Governance, ethics and social responsibility

Mentally healthy workplaces are increasingly important for corporate governance and business ethics. Just as impacts on the environment are recognised in corporate social responsibility strategies and ‘triple bottom line’ accounting methods, preventing adverse impacts of work, and your business, on worker and customer health is equally important.

A mentally healthy workplace reduces workplace stress, which in turn improves the health and quality of life of individuals and their families, reduces pressure on the health system, and improves workforce capacity by reducing early retirement or disability.

Environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)

This is an approach to evaluating the extent to which a corporation has social goals that go beyond maximising profit for shareholders. ESG screening is sometimes used to guide investment decisions.

Social criteria include focus areas that are also central in mentally healthy workplaces:

• human capital development
• health and safety
• ethical supply chain and sourcing
• human rights
• privacy and data security
• community engagement, including a focus on First Nations peoples.

Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations General Assembly are designed to be a "blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all". One of these goals, Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG8), includes employment creation, social protection, rights at work and social dialogue.

‘Decent work’ refers to employment that respects the fundamental rights of the human person as well as the rights of workers. It includes respecting workers’ physical and mental integrity at work.

Diversity and inclusion

Diversity and inclusion strategies increasingly recognise the rights of people experiencing mental ill-health to employment.

Successful businesses and leaders recognise the contributions made by a diverse workforce, including workers with mental illness and neurodiversity. Neurodiversity encompasses a wide range of mental orientations, including but not limited to autism, dyslexia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). With 1 in 4 Australians experiencing a mental health condition in their lifetime, all workers will likely have experienced or are living with mental ill-health. Further, many people successfully live with, and manage, mental ill-health and are productive at work and succeed in their chosen fields.  

Diverse skills, abilities and creativity benefit organisations by providing new and innovative ways of addressing challenges and meeting the needs of a similarly diverse customer population. Mentally healthy workplace strategies ideally include consultation or co-design with people who have lived experience of mental ill-health, as well as gender and cultural representation.