What can employers do to support their employees with mental health issues?

As People Development Advisor with the leading care home group, Jamie Stewart offers his insights and advice on how employers should approach mental health and support their people in the workplace.

What can employers do to support their employees with mental health issues?

...having a designated on-site person that is available to have supportive conversations and signpost their colleagues towards appropriate help can have a lot of advantages.

Balhousie Care Group recently launched a Mental Health & Wellbeing Charter. As People Development Advisor with the leading care home group, Jamie Stewart offers his insights and advice on how employers should approach mental health and support their people in the workplace.

The effects of an employee struggling with a mental health problem can be difficult to appreciate. Their productivity can suffer, absence can be high, and they may not feel comfortable talking about it to their manager or colleagues in fear of being treated differently. Add into the mix that people in the care industry, the sector I work in, are hired to provide essential care and support to vulnerable adults. This is what we, at Balhousie Care Group, reflected on recently during Mental Health Awareness week and why we decided to take action.

The first thing an employer should do is recognise mental health the same way as we view physical health. Recognising this does not just happen overnight, it takes a significant amount of effort to raise awareness. Employers must create learning opportunities for their employees to make them aware of mental health issues and mental illnesses, to remove the stigmas that can be attached.

At Balhousie Care Group we have increased our learning and development interventions in this area so that staff all have a baseline awareness of mental health and can go on to attain a recognised certificate if they desire.

Line managers also need additional training to guide them in having supportive conversations. We have included workshops in this area as part of our ongoing Management Development programme.

This can lead to an employee opening up about issues which in turn leads to their manager putting in place practical interventions that can result in the employee performing better and attending more regularly. Once that benchmark has been reached, an employer needs to look at how it can create a workplace culture that provides support to its employees as par for the course. A good way to do this is by providing an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP). This is an external counselling service available to employees that can help employees during times of difficulty.

Moreover, having a designated on-site person that is available to have supportive conversations and signpost their colleagues towards appropriate help can have a lot of advantages. This can be in the form of accredited Mental Health First Aiders or internally trained Wellbeing Champions. We have started to invest in Mental Health First Aiders, and we are about to launch our in-house Wellbeing Champions programme so that we can make sure all our care homes have trained individuals to provide peer to peer support.

Beyond the above approaches, it is also worth considering what resources are available in the wider community. Help is available from organisations such as Mind, The Samaritan’s and a multitude of other places. This can help develop things like Wellbeing Action Plans, a tool that helps employees identify their triggers and develop practical steps to address them. Mental Health is high on the political agenda so there is no need to reinvent the wheel when there is so much guidance and help available.