Working Minds - Webinar: what every business in Scotland needs to know

Hello everyone. Good afternoon and welcome to this Working Minds campaign event You're very welcome has been very pleased at the level of interest in today's s event and thank you for joining if you were originally going to join on the date that it was set for last month. Today we are going to look at the working mines campaign itself and also to hear from one of our partners on the working mines campaign in Lifeline Scotland I I think there was a great deal of interest in this event, partly because work related stress s and mental health at work is in danger of becoming a bit of a crisis for businesses and mental health issues and the number one reason. Given for sickness absence levels in Scotland and in the UK, and I think there are three main reasons employers should be looking at mental health in the workplace and supporting good mental health and firstly that's because it's the law under the health and safety at at Work act and legislation. Second, because it's good for business, and third because it's the right thing to do.

Houses Rob Mcgreal will say a little bit more later on about the sheer scale of the problem and explain what the Working Minds campaign is all about in a bit more detail. House, as the regulator, is calling for a culture change across all workplaces to ensure that psychological risks are taken as seriously as physical risks in the workplace and that they are tackled as well as part of the risk assessment system. The campaign aims to give employers a clear understanding of their legal duties while championing championing a reduction in work related stress and promoting good mental health at work working ng mines provides employers and workers with easy to implement advice, including simple steps in n its five hours to reach out, recognize, respond, reflect and to make it routine. Now our campaign, the Working mines campaign is complemented by a new online platform developed by partners in Scotland, including the Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland and a range of other organizations interested in mental health that platforms called supporting a mentally healthy workplace and nd it's hosted on the healthy Working Lives website I'm sure many people in Scotland will be familiar with healthy working lives.

As the regulator, HC can't do all of this alone, and so we've partnered with a number of organizations to highlight the triggers of stress, the legal duties and how employers can manage the risks. And today is to tell you a bit more about the campaign and the resources that are available to you And it's about asking for your help too, by becoming a partner or by becoming a champion. I'm hoping there'll be a short time for questions so please type them in the Q&A and I'll try to direct them to the most relevant panel member later on. The event is being recorded, so those of you who would like to see it again, or those of people who can't make it today, will be able to ee it. But first I'm very pleased d indeed that one of our working mines partners, Jill Morton from Lifeline, Scotland, is here to share. Their experience and to tell us a bit more about her involvement in the working mines campaign, very welcome, Jill and thanks very much.

Thanks, Sarah, and good afternoon, everybody It's really great to be here to tell you about the work the Lifeline Scotland project is doing, which is about supporting the health and the well being of the emergency service community in Scotland. And I know, I think we maybe have some colleagues from the blue light services with us today, but I hope that what I talk about for the next 10 minutes we'll have some relevance e for all of you, whatever your work k context. And I'm a clinician at the river Center for traumatic. Stress and NHS Lothian and as well as our work with the general public for the last 20 years we have supported people whose work role exposes them to potentially y traumatic stresses and that includes, obviously, the mergency services, but also health and social care workforce nd staff working for the Scottish courts and Tribunal service, just for example.

And what we do at the river center is we provide evidence based treatments for people who've been psychologically injured at work and over the last 20 days, 20 years we have ve learned a lot about what increases or reduces the risk of being injured. And what helps people recover? And we're really passionate about this and that's why we've been so delighted to partner with the health and Safety executive on this working mines campaign to kind of share what t we've learned to try and think about how we can address psychological hazards at work. Just going to share my slides now, so bear with me and I'll do that quickly and we have. And. We've sort of used our clinical experience over over this this time to kind of set up two national projects to support the being of the workforce, this one and the national well being which was set up in 2020 0 to support the being of the health and social care workforce and including unpaid carers during the pandemic and then Lifeline Scotland, which is the one I'm going to talk about with you this afternoon.

So life lines is funded by the Scottish Government as part of Action 36 of the mental health strategy that commitment to work with employers to. Improve mental health and we're also funded by police, ambulance, fire services and by the firefighters charity and we work in partnership with all of those interested in supporting the well being of Scotland's emergency service community. So that includes the charities, the unions, all of the staff bodies. At the river centre we have seen how recovery from psychological injury is complicated if f we feel confused about why it's happened, or ashamed that it's happened and or if we feel let down by our employers so So what life lines is an attempt to kind of address these issues for individuals and for colleagues, managers and organizations to share that clinical knowledge and what we know from the research to try and do a better job of helping people stay well at work. But I'm going to do now is show you just a little film. That could captures what our sort of 10 key messages really that at the heart of the Lifeline Project. There he goes. We all have mental health and responders are not invincible.

Emergency responders. Our risk of psychological injury? It's an occupational hazard. Health and safety assessments should include psychological risk. Get some psychologically injured doesn't mean you're weak or a failure.

Psychological injury is not inevitable. Most responders, most of the time, will cope well. Psychological injuries can heal. Stigma stops people getting help. What place? This is a bigger threat to respond our being is trauma exposure. Good management and leadership protects responders. Support from colleagues family y and friends keeps responders well.

So those are designed for the blue light community, but I'm sure you can see how some of those principles would apply in your work setting too. What we've done is we've created a range of resources including this website which ch I would encourage you to have a look at. It has lots of information and advice on there for individuals and it's broken down into the headings why I'm OK most of the time when I might need d some help and information for family, friends and other supporters and that t might include. You this is the way it's set out. Sorry I forgot to click that on and, but it also might include you if you're someone who employs somebody who o volunteers as an emergency responder, whether that's an ncore firefighter, community first responder, special l constable, somebody who's within mountain rescue. Yeah, lot we know lots of

organisations do these things. And the website also has lots of information. It's the kind of one stop shop for people who might need to find help. And that's the

individuals themselves or their families, and these are both national Scottish providers but also service specific resources and some across the UK. And it hosts this kind of thing on the right hand side. It's a staying, well road trip, which you're very welcome to take. It's free and it's on the website and it takes about 30 minutes where you have a little think about what it is that might keep you well at work and what the threats to that well being might be.

We're working with the blue light services to deliver training on staying well, supporting colleagues being a good line e manager, post trauma support and was crucially working with their internal training teams because what we want to do is weave this content into the core curriculum so it's across people's careers from induction to pre retirement t as they go into a promoted role, perhaps as they work in a specialist post. And we're also providing consultation and advice to the services on how they can look at their policies and procedures and their mental health strategies to weave an understanding of resilience and well being into these. So that includes looking at the health and safety risk assessments, but also things like absence management procedures. Same with the 10 essentials again. OK, so we know

and you remember one of the characters in our, one of the Ian and our little film focused on the fact that workplace stress s #8 is as big a threat to well being as trauma exposure It's not all about the difficult jobs that our emergency service colleagues attend, and in some ways this is really good news, isn't it Because we can't prevent our blue light colleagues having g exposure to potentially traumatic material, but if workplace stress is an is an is an influential factor, then there are things we can do about that. And. To make sure that we do the, we address the things we can and that #3 about health and safety assessments, including psychological risk. Again, it's why we're so

passionate about work, working with the health and safety executive. And I would ask you just as I'm as we're thinking about this, just to reflect in your workplace. How do these 10 essentials fit for you, and specifically, whether your health and safety assessments include psychological risk? You what are the emotional and psychological hazards, hazards faced by your people at work and d do you work in a setting where people, the public, may sometimes be angry or potentially abusive to your staff are re your staff dealing with people when they're very distressed you ther that's I think of a colleague I worked once at Scottish Power who found it very difficult taking calls from people who were very frightened they were going to have their heating cut off. Yeah, just what are the hazards? With staff and. Face at work and as if we can understand what the hazards are, then we can think about what we can do to mitigate those. That's the key thing. Because resilience is always a balancing act, yeah how are doing is always going to depend on one of the demands that we're facing. What are the threats to our

being, and what are the resources available to us that we can draw on? What are the things that protect us? And I would encourage you to also think about, as well as thinking about the hazards. Think about what are the things that keep your staff at work. We thought about this a lot Haven't we joined the pandemic when we've had to adapt to things like homeworking and miss s some of that kind of important social interaction? What are the things that keep your people? While in the workplace and if what they are, you can keep p doing those. So just here's what the science tells us about what keeps people what human beings need. We sort of think of it as social capital, and you'll see it begins with the basics needing g to be safe, having somewhere to live, having enough money to feed ourselves and our loved ones, having access to healthcare the importance of social support, which is at the heart of everything really for human beings.

And then these other more advanced kind of ideas I guess about needing this to be a sense of fairness and justice. But this one Christian, doesn't it? Occupation and a sense of purpose. And it's that idea of good work is good for us and we want to tell a good news story about how we can keep people in the workplace. Rob after me is going to go on and talk about some of the things in the workplace that can contribute to work related stress if they're not managed d. So I'll let him cover those, but we've done it.

Life lines as we've taken this idea about what people keeps people well a little bit further so for our emergency ency service colleagues, many of whom will think when I don't know why, I'm OK, you know e'll say, well, it's not an accident that you're OK. There are things that are operating that protect you when you're in your workplace and you're dealing with h difficult stuff, and this is what they are, a sense of professional l identity. So we have a job to do. We've got a purpose clear kind of structure and a reason why we're we're exposed and involved in something difficult. And what that does is allow us to distance ourselves. Little bit. So we're not only having a personal response, we're in

professional role also that it's what we've signed up for you s not an accident if you're in the ambulance service that you find yourself dealing with somebody who's seriously injured or very ill. So there's that expectation of readiness and also the value of preparation and training. And again these are cross sector, I'm talking about them here in the blue lights but I know they will apply and then it helps if we feel competent to have e a sense of control and agency. Again, social support and it's valuable as individuals were willing to talk about. How we're doing, we're willing to get some support and we know ourselves s well enough to recognize if we're not OK. So it's not only

ur family members who are picking up people more crabbit who tell us that things aren't OK. So o those are some of the individual things that work. Then we know that protective teams and these ones they look out for each other, they have each other's backs, they've got a shared sense of purpose. There's respect and trust. There's role clarity and confidence that we're all in this together. And I know what you're doing and you can trust what I'm doing that we have e the resources and the training.

That we need. And then again, these softer skills about we know each other. This is our work family and we accept and tolerate different personalities and sort of coping styles and that we e have good communication and the protective organizations have all l of these things, respected leadership, they're coming up randomly Sorry, it's adequate resourcing, shared sense of purpose ood communication, hard work is recognized and and appreciated. And as well as feeling valued, there is an acceptance and this is the e value of making sure your health and safety assessments include psychological risk that we're not. Constantly talking about mental health as this slightly abstract thing, but we think about how our workplace affects our psychological well being that we just make that conversation matter of fact and if we're working in a role where there is a potential of psychological injury y that we are pragmatic about that do what we can to prevent it. But

also if people do get injured, we make it easy for them to get the support they need if they do. So. We became a kind of working mines partner because we want you to think about health and safety and this inclusive way, you know cal and psychological health and physical and psychological safety so o I'm just going to finish up now, but in the spirit of partnership because you may be aware of some of these resources or you may not but Scotland has a wealth of things that are happening so So service already referred to the healthy Working Lives platform and this ew web resource which is about supporting them mentally healthy workplace and d there is also the opportunity for your.

Have to train as a mental health first, aiders and the Public Health Scotland site has gotten that was paused during the pandemic but those courses are now running again and d you may want to learn more about how to support somebody at risk of suicide. The Scottish Government has a huge campaign to try and address the suicide statistics for Scotland, so there are these brilliant we films that you can see over in the kind of bottom left of your screen that are kind of awareness raising just quick we minute 4 minute animated films. The brilliant or you can sign up to the united Prevent Suicide Campaign Scotland d has always also made a commitment to being a trauma informed nation so our colleagues at NHS Education for r Scotland are rolling out a national trauma training program. Again, there are online resources here. There are free courses being delivered. And what we've done on the life Lines website is because there's an awful lot of stuff going on, we have collated all of these mostly free courses that are available that are delivered either by Public Health Scotland or by NHS Education for Scotland into what we call our learning toolkit So please have a look at that. There's a ton of resources out there if you and your teams want to kind of get some more information about this and in n addition to that, there are these other brilliant resources.

NHS Inform has recently launched this mind to mind site which is aimed at the public and so what it has is people sharing their experiences of having difficulties with anxiety or depression or struggling with grief f and what helped them. So it's very much kind of messages from people who've been there, been through this, come out the other side So again, it's a brilliant resource. I would encourage you to se and you may know about this but if if you're a small company with kind of less than 250. Some employees you can also find information about working health Services Scotland again on the NHS inform website and they provide free and confidential occupational health support really to small organisations so you can n find out about all of these resources and the advice and support I was talking about on the website. Again, you may not be a blue light service but I think there'll be lots of it that's relevant and it's open access and we've recently published an evaluation of some me of the work we've been doing so you can access that evaluation. Report if you're interested in having a look at that and yeah, so u. It's been great being part of this event today and I'll

look forward to answering any questions that you have after the next presentation and I'm gonna hand over now to to Rob who's going to talk to you a bit more about the HSE campaign. Thanks. Hi, thanks jill. I'm man, my name's Robert Mcgrail and as Jill said, I'm going to be talking a bit more e about the what stress is, what, the level of impact and and a little bit about the campaign and what the campaigns designed to do and how we can we using it to help get our messages to the organ audiences that we probably bably couldn't have done before.

So I'll just share share my screen so you can see the slides. And I'm using a new computer, so it might take a couple of seconds. Apologies. There you go. So first of all, what do we mean by stress? What do we mean by mental health issues and what do we mean n by anxiety, depression and all the things that we're the psychological l risks that people around are likely to be exposed to that way? The definition we use for stress and maybe talk about stress we're generally talking about stress, anxiety, and depression as a Stress is all about the adverse reaction a person has to excessive pressures and other types of demands placed on them. So the definition actually draws a different differentiation between what is stress and what is pressure. Pressure is when you've got a target to do and you got to get it done by a certain date.

He puts that little bit of impetus in it, puts a little bit of pressure on you makes you more motivated to do the work. And when you got one of those tasks when you're doing g one task where you've got to have it done by the end of the week. At the end of that week, if you've had a little bit of pressure, you got the opportunity to recover from it.

Stress is when you've got. A pressure after a pressure after a pressure and you don't get that recovery time. You don't get the opportunity to actually. Take that breath, lean back and say right. OK, that's that the wrong John. Done

e. What's next? And that kind of pressure builds up and it can lead to all kinds of conditions. It can lead to physical and mental health conditions. So when we talk about stress, anxiety and depression. Data and it's a progression so you can go from having stress to being anxious and having depression, but t you can also have severe conditions that are physical conditions. So work related stress has been linked to things like art conditions, it's been linked to things like diabetes, to digestive problems and all those kind of things.

But in the introduction and we were talking, Sarah was talking about why we're doing this, why we're looking at this kind of thing. Why should you tackle work related stress? It's somebody else's problem, isn't it? Actually it isn't because you have a a legal duty as an employer to look after your employees. Section 2 of the Health and Safety Work Act requires it, so you've got to do something if you recognize that your people are stressed or having problems, or if you should recognize that your people are e having problems, then you really need to do something about it.

Again, a service side it's the proper thing to o do. Nobody goes into work to be injured and I'm fairly sure most employees don't take on staff to do those to injure them. It's a cooperation. It's a partnership.

We do what we need to do to get money in to support our family. As Jill was saying it, it's one of the hierarchy of needs you start off with being comfortable e at your family, being comfortable having somewhere to live and somewhere there's something to eat. So it's the right thing to do that morally. But the primary reason that employees should be doing something about it is it's good for the business.

If you think about the costs that are incurred by sickness absence due to work related stress. That the figures are quite high. You'll see in the next slide that it's significant numbers, it's more than half of the working days lost to sickness are due to work related stress, anxiety and depression. So. These are savings that you as an employer can me if your people are not going to say you're not having to pay those costs if they're not going off sick, you don't have to pay overtime for people to cover if they're not going ing off sick, you don't have to worry about them not coming back and you having to recruit new people. So there's there are good reasons why it's a business need to do it.

So what are the numbers? Well, as I've just said, mental health is the number one reason for work related illness in the UK and is on the rise. Sorry about that. So in Scotland 68,000 workers has suffered from work related stress anxiety and depression.

In the UK as a whole, it was eight 00 people took time off work due to work related stress. That is a significant number of people. That is a significant cost to the UK it's been in a recent t report by Deloitte, it was estimated that mental health issues so the anxiety and depression and that element of the problem m caused up to £56 billion worth of costs s, the British industry and the government. So it is a significant amount

of money. It sounds like a lot of people, 822,000 across the UK and Scotland percentage of it was only 68,000 but we actually break it down to how many people per 100,000. Scotland was two 0 people per 100,000 workers took time off. The whole of the UK was 2430.

So you can see it's a similar problem even though the size of its s hands ultimately different. So the other thing is recently impacted on us is the pandemic and it's probably too early to say what kind of an impact the pandemics are going to have on business as a whole. People are now returning to work. There's at some level of normality retaining, but mind I did some research and they've they've assessed 2 in every five employees have had worsened mental health due to the pandemic.

No, we don't know necessarily know what that was and mental health is there's s some argument to say that being in work is stressful. People don't the commute. People don't like the people they work with. They don't like the office they have to work in. But then if you're working from home, you've got the loneliness element, you've got the isolation element, you've got the lack of support from your manager because you've got that distance you've got t that separation. So being in work has got

t problems. Being working from home has got problems. So we haven't yet got to the point where we can say whether the pandemic has been a positive, been a really negative and getting people back into work places would be positive or whether. Being people, being working from home has been more positive or whether it's as it probably will be it it depends on individual person involved. So this event is talking about the campaign, so the campaign as we've e said before, HSC cannot do all of this by itself. We've we've did did a major piece of work back in 2000 and produced a tool called the management standards since e then we've been trying to get people to use the management standards or to do something about work related stress. Quickly to stress, as we've discussed it is a major issue, but t there's still a lot of people who don't understand that they have a responsibility or duty to do something.

We did an exercise around the covid where we were doing some what we were doing spot checks, which was effectively phoning up and small employees and saying. Are you working through the pandemic? Yes you are. What are you doing around covid? Have you got hand clean and provisions have e you got additional PPE? Are you doing keeping socially distanced? All kind of things? Became clear that SME's the smaller medium sized enterprises. So those are the 2:50 and below and particularly the smaller ones, the 50 and below.

When we contacted them, most of them didn't understand that they had duties of care either under Covid or in or when we had the questions about work related stress, about work related stress either. So we within the exercise we were getting most failures from people's responses were due to the failure to actually do a risk assessment because they didn't understand they had to. Once we directed them to the website and once we directed them to the resources that were available to them, and once we directed them to the idea that t they should be doing something. They picked it up and ran with it the website as almost doubled, some on some of the pages we directed them to.

So we know the people were following up and looking at it, and part of the campaign exercise is to do is to work on that figure, to work on that good work and to look at getting to these other audiences, so working in partnership and you can see on this slide that's on, there are a lot of sectors covered that a lot of organizations that are some government departments like Acas. He can't do a lot of work around bullying and harassment and the kind of stresses that causes, but they also do an awful lot of work around work related stress. They also do an awful lot of work around the other psychologist psychosocial things issues about where you're employing somebody who has pre existing mental health condition n for example. We're talking about work related stress and psychological risks, but it's not just the work related element of it that can be an impact. You might be employing someone who has a mental health condition. That they bring in with them and there is an element for the employer to need to know what to do if that person has an episode. How to prevent that person from having an episode? It's

s not just about work related causality, it's also about work related aggravation. So where can aggravate a pre-existing condition? Again, you can see that we're working with a fair few sectors but t we're also working with the third sector. We're also working with make UK who are manufacturing because currently they when you break down it just starts that we get from the Owens, it's showing that the same sectors have significantly higher figures year in year out. And they've been the same for the last about 20 years. But what we've noticed is that behind those figures. Lots of other sectors, construction sector ng sector, the farming sector, the agricultural sector are e all now starting to build up and to match those figures they get closer and closer each year and the growth in the number of work related stress reports is actually not coming from the ones that you u would expect, like the NHS and education, because they already had higher levels. It's come up from the other sectors

starting to catch up with them. So as Sarah and Julia both said, we're looking to make a culture change in the British way of places. We've said before, we can't do all this by ourselves. We need employees to get involved. We're trying to use those networks those partner organizations that we've got to work down to those other levels. We're trying to use the campaign website, which is designed specifically for small to medium sized enterprises, although the information n is relevant to every employer. We're trying to talk to people in a slightly different way making it easier to understand and easier to work the way through. We've tried to cover all the information

that relates to Smes in particular in one place and so that we can direct them to the one site that they need to. The HSC's work related stress and mental health website. Is a really useful tool. But by the nature of the beast, it's got quite cater for all people, so it starts off looking at a huge e great big organization that will use the management standards and a whole way. So people who were at the small end of

f the scale feel that they're not getting what they need. So the campaign is has been designed to try to meet that need. So as I say the employees and not necessarily aware of f their legal duties and one of the things we're stressing is that. Even if you don't do nothing else, you need to risk assess. You need to look at whether your people are in

being injured by their workplace. And your risk assessment might be as simple as going out and having a word with the five people you employ and saying how are things are re you OK? You know, we're we're causing any problems The 20 minute conversation might be all you want. Your risk assessment is. Then you just write down you've had that conversation. Nobody got a

problem. You don't need to do anything else apart from Saturday for the next review. It's not rocket science. It's not complicated. It's not necessarily very expensive. So. The risk risk assessment needs to be proportionate to the size of your organization. You then need to consider going on to do some treatment if you're actually identify your risk. So if people say there's a problem, what is that problem and how do we get around it? So the campaign is an approach for.

Finding out that information and working with that information. So the most important thing you can do with your employees is have a conversation. Conversations about work related stress and anxiety and mental health and psychological risks is useful not only because it gets you the data you need, but it shows you've got an interest. It shows that your business is interested in its employees yees are feeling.

It shows that there is an interest in improving the workplace, but the other thing it does is it normalizes the conversations it t means that other people are talking about these things. It gives people the confidence that if they're having an issue they know that they can speak up. A lot of the issues that we get is that there is stigma around it. The macho industries that the likes of construction where people are less likely to talk to talk about things not only because they're in a macho environment, but because they're away from the support networks. So if if you imagine a construction worker who's working on HS2 is coming down from Glasgow.

They loosened the support network of their home and environment, but in a strange place. They're in. They're talking the only people who got to talk to, or other people who are possibly in the same situation. And it's not something you do. You go out and you go. You have a drink, you go out and you. Haven't mailed you don't. You go home and that's it. You don't you don't talk about t how you feel.

Unless somebody starts talking to you. Unless somebody starts that and initiates that thing. So one of the partners we're working with is an organization called mates in mind and that's a lot of the work they do. It's around prevention. It's around having those conversations and getting people to talk about it.

So the first element of the where command campaign is to reach out. So the thing to remember is that anybody in the organization can suffer from work related stress or poor mental health. It's not just. The people at the on the way in the work front or it's not people who are necessarily lower paid or sort of? Seem to be more busy. It's also the directors It's also the company owner.

It's anybody within the organization can be stressed because stress, stress is a is a kind of a difference hazard in the workplace because it's not just the workplace stress the cause of the problem. If you're stressed and work, you can generally cope with it because when you go home. It's a better environment. You have that recovery time that I've

spoke about before, but if you're experiencing stress at home as well. Then that cumulative effect can make you ill more quickly, so you're not getting the respite and away from a bad d home life, you're not gonna. Good as respite at home from a bad workplace so the accumulation effect is one of the problems that people don't seem to understand.

And when we talk about an employees being. Flexible and helping people. There is no legal duty for you for an employer to help you with. Non work related stressors. But if you don't. If you if you're an employer and you don't

tell people who are experiencing problems outside where. What's gonna happen? Nobody walks away from the home life. Everybody walks away from work. Everybody takes time off sick. So the impact is on the bank business so flexibility in talking about things and maybe being a little bit flexible about start and finish times can help people. With home problems that can impact on the workplace by making a happier employee a happier workplace, and happier workplaces and employees are more productive and more stable.

So again, is it going for the employer? So reaching out is about starting the conversation. It's an. It's a very important first step. Open till that point. It might have been a taboo subject up until that point. People might be suffering up until that point. So one of your

employees might be suicidal. This is the opportunity and it should be taken at every opportunity to have a conversation and start to face those things. You will have already have in most workplaces a system where you will talk to your staff, so you might do an annual review. You might do weekly catch up or team

meetings. You might do monthly meetings, you might have training days you might have. There will be all kinds of opportunities where you can put this on the agenda where you can speak about it t doesn't necessarily be in it to be an in depth conversation It can be a quick 5 minutes, right? We've had a bit of a busy time the last few weeks. How is everybody? Just asking the question could could help find out whether there's a problem. So start my conversation is essential step. Sorry about this, as I said, I'm using a new computer so.

So the next step is how would you go about recognizing that there's a problem? As I mentioned before, the HSC has developed a tool called the management standards and the management standards is a series of factors that if not properly managed. Are likely to lead to work later. Stress and those are the six on the right hand side. Demand, control, support, relationships are all

and change. And if you think about it logically demands if you've got too much work to do or or ironically, if you've got too little work to do, it can become stressful. If you got little control over your work. So if you come into work and it gets dumped on you and dumped on you and dumped on you and you're a collector to do o it, you start to feel stressed if you haven't got support from your line manager or from your colleagues. It becomes isolation, it becomes an US and them situation it becomes s stressful.

If you haven't got good relationships in the way place, so if everybody's at each other's throats, it's stressful if you don't understand how you fit into the role, if you don't understand what your job is or how your job fits into the overall organization. It becomes stressful. And particularly with change if things are being done to you. It becomes stressful. Things are done with you

So this is about recognizing how people react to things. So you'll have all kinds of different reactions you'll l have mood swings. People will become more withdrawn. You might notice people being more emotional, being tearful

being aggressive. Just not being themselves. You might see people being twitchy. You might see them being nervous. You

might see them not wanting to do a specific task because they think it's. They're not gonna be able to do it. So I mean for example. I don't like doing these kind of events because. It's pressure for me. But when I finish this event, I'll go back to my desk and do something that will be less stressful and I'll have that time to recover. But if people are being asked to do things that are stressful to them, repeatedly and they don't have the ability to control it, and you don't have the ability to say I'll ll do one today, 1:00 tomorrow, but I can't do two in a row, they start to be stressed about it.

I mean, it's not just with individuals that you'll notice these things. It'll also be in the teams. Jill Properties lied about all the good things about teams, unfortunately the way he just see looks at work related stress because e it looks at the damage it can cause. We look at the things that are negative about people what can.

Be an example of how a person will behave what t a team will behave if they aren't working well, so you'll see a lot of complaints and disputes and arguments within the team. Not usual, you'll say in lots of f teams, but if you start noticing increased amounts of, they start getting more aggressive if people start becoming more emotional about the reaction to them. Or if there's more sickness absence, or if the product productivity starts to drop off, or people start complaining. And if you're a

customer facing organization. And suddenly your customers started complaining about the way somebody spoken to them on the phone. It becomes an important issue, but it's not just an issue of the temperament of that individual. It might be an

indicative, an indication that there's a problem within that team. So the next thing to do after you've done these elements s of talking to people and checking that people are OK, it's responding to what they've said. So you'll go into work most days and you'll say, how are you doing? How often you actually listen to what people how often do you if somebody says they will not too good to o be honest, what do you do next? So if somebody says to, I'm not not feeling good if you pick it up in a conversation or if you feel that somebody isn't behaving as they would normally.

Have a conversation. And listen to the conversation and then do something about what you hear. So you'll when the HSC about risk assessment, we talk about organizational risk assessment, so it's how can you get the organization to behave in a way that will minimize the impact on the individual workers.

But within that, you've also got to accept that there will be times when people will be stressed, so there will be an individual impact that you need to do and a lot of people use in n individual risk assessments, so we have a tool on our website which we call the return to work interview, but it's the kind of questions that we would ask k on the management standards and you can use that to have a conversation with an individual and say, look, I've noticed you've been a little bit off or r you've been a little bit aggressive or you've been a little bit more to you than than usual. Is there a problem? Can we have a discussion about it? Is there anything work related? You could use that tool to go through and identify any work related stressors. Again, just having that conversation will make them feel better. If they tell you it, it's a bit gone through, a bit of a health problem, but it's nothing to worry about. Then again, it release, it relieves your stress because there's a line manager going through all these conversations and going through all these issues is a stressful on you as it is on the individual.

So you need to be looking after the Land Management structure as well. So as part of the response, you need to look at what can what can you do to deal with what's been identified. So if you develop a series of action points, if it's with a team, negotiate it t with the team. Got agreement across the team as to what you should be doing they might not work all the time, but if you're trying to implement a change, it's much h easier to do it when a team has been agreed, have been involved and agree with the much more likely to accept what happens next. And the next stage is to reflect, so reflect is the. Looking at what you've done, has it worked? If it's worked, brilliant. If it hasn't, do you need

to look at it again and have another go? So you might put in place an intervention, close the cures most of the problem, but there's still niggling little bits around the edges, so do you need to do something slightly different? Consider whether you need to do something wholly different if you're going through a piece of change before you do the change. Do a risk assessment. What are gonna be the impact of this change on this team? So if it's if f it's one particular team, you can say, right, well we're going to be changing these particular roles and that's going to have a knock on effect for these e three people. What kind of impact is it gonna have? Is it going to make their job easier? Great. Is it going to make their jobs more complicated? Do we need to do more training? Do we need to have them mentored? Is it something that's going to cause a problem? Do we need more staff? Do we need to get a new computer system? Do we need to get a new computer packages? That'll make it easier to do if you're planning g it out before you actually make the change, then what you're actually doing is planning out any injury that could have caused to your staff. And that's definitely a positive.

And then make it routine. So don't talk about work related stress once a year. It's your annual review. We're not going to talk to you again for another 12 months, but how are you doing this with this today? How has it been for you today? Have a conversation. We're regularly, especially if you got people who are working from home.

We put a system called KIT which is keep in touch and if people aren't aren't seeing each other. How else are you gonna be able to find out how they're doing? So you have the conversation? You can use computers. You can use telephone you can arrange. I mean people aren't working the in the office not necessarily because. Of any risk from COVID anymore? But because it's become more accepted, so you might want to have an actual social event where everybody gets together. You might want to have one to ones that are, say, every three Every third one is a face to face in a coffee shop just around the corner.

There are ways and means by which you can make it easier for them and easier for yourself. And as I say, part of the problem is with managers is that if you have a team of 12 people, this is an awful lot of meetings, so you need to be more supportive of your management teams and your management structures. So here's a list of tips I'm not going to go through all of f them, but as we've said before, this is being recorded, so you can come in and have a look again. Briefly focuses on start the conversation and HSE has got talking toolkit, another talking toolkit is a series of conversations that you can have which may be be awkward to start off with because it's going to be talking about ental health issues. It's going to be talking about work related stress anxiety

y, depression, and some other psychosocial risks. But the conversations are important and it gives them some structure So the structure of it is that you have a conversation about. In the first conversation will be about, say, demands so the broken down by the six factors we spoke about earlier. And it's a structure of questions, so with ask questions, so the people got the opportunity to feedback on what's going on and the bottom line of it is what are we going to do about it.

Though it's important that you have that factor at the envy. OK, you've just had 20 minutes telling me why we're all the problems are with work, but what are we gonna do about it? And that's important to get there then involved in that what's going, what we're gonna do about it again, if you've got somebody y who's been who's stressed because of the amount of work, they don't and you impose se something on it, you're not really helping, you're not really relieving hat stress because they will see that as an imposition and we'll see that as another So negotiate what you're gonna do. Second one understand the signs and d recognize them we've already spoken about. We haven't spoken so much about the impact on the individual. We've spoken about the kind of health conditions that you can have. But though these conditions are, can be.

And really. Chronic conditions, so things like IBS can be developed from a, as I said before, diabetes and heart problems, obesity can be result of work related stress and coping mechanisms for work related stress can be as damaging. So things like e overuse or use of illegal drugs. Overuse of alcohol? Smoking too much all those kind of things that people sort of run off to when they're stressed can be as damaging as the stress. So think about those kind of things.

A point I haven't really mentioned. Is that you? There are duties under other legislation apart from health and safety legislation. So as an employee you might have a duty to somebody who has a disability. Under the Equalities Act to make reasonable adjustments for them, so that might be as simple as and getting them a chair that allows them to sit in a comfortable position if they go and back problems it might be is if somebody has visual impairment it can be something like getting a computer system that can read.

The text to them. But there are other things that you can do around mental health. You can make. You can possibly adjust

the workload. You can make it for people who've got dyslexia or dyspraxia. There are tools you can get for computers that make it easier for people who've got mental health issues you can have e an agreement with them that you understand what their mental health condition is, you understand how it impacts on them, and you can do things that will help support them, but also that has information about what an episode of their mental health condition could look like.

The impact on them would be and what the impact on business could be what you as a manager or you as an employer should be doing to help support them. So if somebody has epilepsy for example e, it's not all epilepsy can include absences. So what do you do if suddenly has one of those absences? I used to work in jobs in job clubs on nd one of the guys who was on our job club. Had absences and he worked as a builder. And he was about to walk off the scaffold and at 27 floors up. Thankfully, one of his colleagues spotted him and stopped him before he did.

But that ended his career as a builder. But is that all the things that can be done or the tasks he could have been doing? So you need to sort of understand it's not just around health and safety at work, it's also about equality. It's also about things around bullying, harassment behaviors. It's also around stigma

And all these things are things that you can do something about. If you got a take away from this advanced what I would d say is work related stress is a workplace hazard it t can be damaging, but it can be managed. It can be tackled and it can be prevented. And our goal of trying to get a sea change in the way that people think about where greater stress s, anxiety, depression and psychosocial risks is to get people to understand that and to do things at an early stage so that they actually prevent their people from being injured. And it's easier and quicker and cheaper to solve the problem. So what are HSC results Resources? As I say, there's the work right campaign and emails are there sort of the URL as there re, but we also have an HTC mobile app which is.

Unfortunately, Costa, because when we developed it, we had to ost it for it to go onto Google and onto Apple. But it it's there and it's available, we have the talking toolkits which are based d around generic one. We've got education ones we've got health service ones, including one that was negotiated and worked on with an NHS board up in Scotland when we were doing some pilot work. We got risk assessment templates and examples these e are for particularly smaller organizations and there's some good examples.

We got to stress management standards, which is spoken about a couple of times, which are more developed for larger organizations and have a series of tools that takes you through the whole process includes survey tools and analysis tools s and all the kind of things large organizations would need. But one of the things that we do in the campaign is we're trying to build networks, we're trying to build the scope of who we can and do talk to get to those audiences that we've struggled to get to before. So you could become a working man's champion for us if you wanted to, if you have a look at the website. There's instructions about how you go about doing that and what the expectations are, both from us and what you can expect from us. So I hope that's been a quick run through and I hope you've had you've found it helpful.

Now moving over to the question and answer session. Thank you very much for Rob. Thank you very much indeed and thanks to Jill as well. There have been some questions in the Q&A bar and some of them we've answered I I hope Jenny Atkins has been posting links as to how you can become a champion. I just wanted to remind you about the five RRS recognize respond Reflect and make it routine and reach out to start with. Rob talked a lot about reaching out and having those initial conversations and d the recognize.

Reminder is very important because that's where link to the management standards and that's where you can be looking as an organization at demands control l, support, relationships, the role of the individual and how you manage change in the organization, but the five hours are esigned to simplify all of that. So thanks very much to to Rob and Jill, we've got a few minutes left and what I wanted to do s to come back to our partner. Jill at Lifeline Scotland and just ask k her if she could give us one example of how a psychological risk was identified How was it recognized and what did lifeline Scotland do to respond to it? We need to go live and.

Thanks. Do you really? What I'm struck by is we've been talking about this afternoon is and I've seen some of the questions s in the chat about how do we identify these and it's really picking up on what Rob is saying you need to sit down with h your colleagues or your teammates and have a a conversation about what is it that is stressful at work And I would also encourage you to think about one of the things that keep you at work, but let's just focus on the things that are stressful at work because some of the things that impact our psychological being are act our psychological well being are actually practical. Things, so I gave some examples earlier. Perhaps you've got staff who are subject to people being abusive or they're hearing stories and people who are in distress and having to cope with very distressed people and so, but it may be and one of the e examples and I was thinking of when and Sarah put that kind of question in the chat was. Working with colleagues who drive the neonatal ambulances, yeah, so transporting sick babies and d you know, we're chatting about what it is that is challenging for them and it wasn't dealing with distressed d parents and poorly babies. It was worrying that they weren't getting there in time, not stopping to go to the loo because they didn't want to waste time not having anything to eat. The kind of attitude they might have when they turned up buried in with different hospitals. So sometimes

s you can have a contact, you can actually find it something. Really specific that is that is causing stress and if you can do something about that, so with that one it may sound a bit faster, but we were basically saying OK, you do need to go to the loo. How w can you work that out? So you've got to shift when you get to the hospital, so someone gets a toilet break and what do you need to carry so that you've ve got food, so that someone gets something to eat. So you're ind of your blood sugars aren't dipping are the ones I can think of is maybe about shift t patterns and obviously shift patterns can be really good for some people. People might really like the flexibility of the shift pattern other r times people might be finding shift patterns difficult, disrupting their sleep routine. So I guess that what I would just really encourage is to have

a think about what is it that is causing your you or your work colleagues stress and then have a think is anything you can do about that now. And I saw one of you put in the kind of chat column about what about the cost of living crisis, these stressors that are out with our control. And all I would say is never underestimate the value. Of acknowledging that there are things that are causing stress that may be out with your control if you think about your own experience of somebody being supportive to you u, sometimes we don't necessarily. I mean, there may be things people will help us problem solve and that's why we need to do that if we can. But sometimes just.

Someone saying good, you're right. That's really tough just now. OK, so we e can't do anything about that, but is there something we can do about this? So maybe I'm being maybe that sounds a bit too vague, but so you could do specific things like make sure you've got welfare benefits, advice, and the people are aiming everything they can, or they know what discounts are available to them and their families or Or, you know, there may be very specific things you can do but sometimes it may be be having a conversation as an employer or as a manager that says look are difficult times for everybody. Is there anything you think we think we can do that? The help that could be about flexibility about home or office working, just having, making ure people know that they can claim an allowance for working at home in terms of their sort of tax and stuff. So I would just really encourage you to

take a very pragmatic approach, just really say sit down people and say what are the things that are doing our headset and is there anything we can do about those? And as I say, it can be anything from having food that people can get to thinking about shift patterns to. With the ambulance service, again it was making sure people had light had d kind of light, light clothing they could wear under the PE because actually s causing a lot of stress was they were they their kit wasn't geared to wearing PPE. So what are the things that are causing your people stress and is there anything you can do about that? And if not, just say thank you for still dealing with that. We can't sort it just now, but I really appreciate

that you are working in those conditions and we're going to do the best we can to address it as soon as we can. So that's helpful. It's very helpful. Thank you very much, Jill Well, that brings us almost to the end of our hour. Everybody. I'd like to thank you very much for joining us. Sorry we don't have more time for questions Jenny's kindly put a lot of the links in the Q and A but please do visit the work, right ampaign campaign working mines website and you'll find a a lot of the information that we've been talking about there. Please do sign up

p to become either a partner or to champion. The campaign we very much welcome more champions from within Scotland and thank you very much for joining us. Goodbye ev

2022-10-30 21:12

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