In the first ever episode of the Psych Health and Safety podcast we introduce a mystery guest (could it be the co-host of the show??) and define psychological health and safety. Learn about the current approach to workplace mental health, what needs to change and why. We also get to briefly introduce key standards from the UK, Canada and Australia and talk about the upcoming ISO 45003 Psychological Health and Safety at Work standard.
In this episode:
1:00 Meet your co-hosts
14:00 Why a psychologically healthy and safe workplace is different to a mentally healthy workplace
17:30 The current approach to workplace mental health is backwards
22:00 Why are EAPs used in place of psychological injury prevention?
24:00 How fatigue risk management and psychological health and safety are very similar
25:30 SNAPS versus PERMA for mental health promotion
36:00 Why are physical injury rates going down but psychological injury rates trending up?
42:30 Why it’s important to treat employees as humans not machines
J45:30 Psychosocial hazard identification: the importance of employee consultation
48:30 Psychological risk management.
51:30 The latest workplace stress and psychological injury statistics.
59:00 Will the stick work better than the carrot to improve employee mental health?
1:04:00 Why does workplace mental health now fall under the HSE portfolio?
107:30 How psych health and safety will deliver more opportunities for people and safety professionals
Resources:
National Standard of Canada for psychological health and safety in the workplace
SafeWork NSW: Draft NSW Code of Practice Managing the risks to psychological health
UK: Labour Force Survey - Self-reported work-related ill health and workplace injuries
SafeWork Australia: Australian Workers’ Compensation Statistics 2018-19
SafeWork NSW: Psychological Injury Claims
Intro: From FlourishDx, this is the Psych Health and Safety Podcast. With workplace mental health becoming a safety prerogative, this is the source of information on psychological injury prevention and health promotion.
Jason: Welcome to episode one of the Psych Health and Safety Podcast. My name is Jason van Schie, and I'll be your host for today. I'm super excited to finally record this thing that we've been planning for months to get much-needed information out into the world. The goal of this podcast is to rapidly advance the practice of psychological health and safety in companies worldwide. Each episode will feature a conversation with professionals who know their stuff and are leading the way in relation to psychological injury prevention and mental health promotion. We'll be speaking to health and safety practitioners, academics, and psychologists from all over the way. For those interested, we'll be videoing each episode, so you'll be able to view it later on YouTube if you like. We'll also be cutting highlights and sharing these through the FlourishDx LinkedIn page if you want to follow that.
The format for the show will be pretty simple. We'll have a chance to meet our guests and find out a bit more about them personally and professionally. Then we'll sink our teeth into a core topic related to psych health and safety. As today is episode one, and we'll have many people new to this area, we're going to start with the basics. The topic today is what is a psychologically healthy and safe workplace. Now, ordinarily, at this point in time, we would introduce our guest, but maybe because it's episode one, I should introduce myself to you first.
So I'm a psychologist, and I've been working in the field of psychology and risk management for about 10 years now, after studying a master's in occupational psychology. I was really interested in around about 2007, 2008 with fatigue risk management and fitness for duty. And I worked in a role as a contractor to a large psychology consulting business. And the focus really was on going around Australia talking to companies in resources and mining, particularly around how can we keep people safe from unseen things whether they be alcohol and drugs, whether they be fatigue, whether they be mental health. In 2013, I founded People Diagnostix, with more of an emphasis on health promotion. So I was interested in looking at things like sleep health, but more from a health promotion perspective, as opposed to purely risk management. In 2014, I was introduced to the field of positive psychology. We had a local school who had been to Geelong Grammar and had learned all about positive psychology and how to implement it for student wellbeing and had a need to measure whether what they were doing was actually effective. And knowing about some of the things that we've done in that space around measurement and mental health and wellbeing, they approached us to develop a tool which we now have known as Flourishing at School.
About the same point in time, we were working on things like fatigue risk management training and mental health training for a large multinational mining client. We also then started to look at, “Well, if we're going to do this, how are we going to do it at scale? How are we going to keep people well? How are we going to optimize wellbeing?” And I was really encouraged, and shout out here to Olly Bridge, who has previously worked at Medibank, who really encouraged me strongly to think about scale. And the issues that we're talking about, whether it's mental health, whether it's fatigue and sleep, they are not just Australian issues, they are not just Perth issues, they are global issues. And so he really encouraged me to think about, “How are you going to do this at scale, Jason?” And that's when I guess in 2017, 18, we actually made the leap into becoming a technology business. And from that point, I guess, we really started working hard on a product we call FlourishDx. And its goal is to keep people well and optimize mental wellbeing using more of a health and safety approach to psychological injury prevention, if you like. And I guess what I'm doing now, as part of the podcast is to really try and disseminate the knowledge around psychological health and safety.
What I've definitely noticed from consulting to businesses over the last 10, 15 years is there's a real focus on the individual when it comes to mental health, how can they keep themselves well and manage their stress and resilience? How do they be more mindful? But what there's been a dearth of information on is how do we as an organization create a healthy and safe working environment so people go to work and they don't get sick, they don't become stressed and ill and need to take time off work or make workers compensation claims. So I'm really interested in marrying the two together like how can we do health and safety well, in terms of risk management in relation to people's mental health and wellbeing, but then how do we take someone from zero to positive 10 and really optimize their level of wellbeing as well?
Now, today, and I did mention this early on that we do have a very, very special guest today. This person I've been wanting to work with for a while, and I'm pleased to announce, as of the first of February, she is now an employee of People Diagnostix and we're going to be working very closely together. So normally we would have another guest on but this time, I'm going to introduce my co-host and we'll be doing this episode together. So what I'd like to do is to introduce you to Joelle Mitchell.
Joelle: Hello.
Jason: Glad to have you here.
Joelle: No pressure.
Jason: No pressure at all. No, like I said, I'm really stoked to have Joelle on. We're going to get her to introduce herself in a second. She is an organizational psychologist, has really good experience in the human factors area. And we will be co-hosting this podcast moving forward.
Joelle: Thank you. I am excited to be here. This is my first time doing a podcast, so we'll see how it goes, I guess, won’t we?
Jason: Yeah, we will. So Joelle, maybe you can tell us a little bit about yourself personally first. So do you have a family?
Joelle: Yes. So I'm married and I've got a seven-year-old son who, over the Christmas holidays just got his first two wobbly teeth, which is a very exciting moment for a child. So yeah, that's my personal life, I guess.
Jason: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, beautiful. Now, I've got a five-year-old who just lost their first tooth, so clearly, your kids are eating healthier than mine. Mine are losing their teeth two years earlier than yours.
Joelle: He was a bit worried why it hadn't happened yet. So he's feeling relieved now.
Jason: Yeah, great. And professionally, tell us a bit about, I guess, where you started and how you made your way to People Diagnostix.
Joelle: Yeah. So that's a little bit of a twisting tale. So I started with an undergraduate degree in psychology, I did honors, and then wasn't really sure where I wanted to go with it. I knew that clinical psychology wasn't really the path for me. My thesis was in the area of community psychology. I was looking at the importance of country to the Aboriginal worldview. Graduated, done a lot of work for people with an interest in community psychology, shockingly, with an undergraduate degree. So I ended up just getting a job doing document control with a company that was an APCM for a petroleum production company. So I was there for five years, not doing document control for the five years. I've sort of worked in a few different roles within the company and ended up in a safety team as a behavioral safety advisor. And when I joined the safety team, I also started the master’s of organizational psychology. So I was doing that part-time while I was working there.
Then there was a global financial crisis, and I had a redundancy experience, which gave me an opportunity to do my second placement with my degree, which was actually at an outplacement provider, somewhat ironically, and then I moved on to a consulting group from there. So I was doing consulting, in sort of the safety psychology area, mostly onshore mining and construction in the Pilbara. So I would travel up there probably once a fortnight and spend a few days in the dirt out in the field, doing some supervision coaching, and we would do safety leadership training with the frontline leaders out there. We also got into some safety culture assessment and some sort of bullying policy development and a range of other things in that type of area. But it was, yeah, a lot of really frontline safety communication and effective safety leadership training was really the focus of what we were doing there.
Then in 2012, I joined NOPSEMA as a human factors specialist, which was a new role for NOPSEMA, the acronym, it’s a long one - the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, which is a long way of saying “the regulator for the offshore petroleum industry in Australia”. And I've been there for nine years. So it was a good innings there but now I've come across two People Diagnostix and I'm very excited to be here.
Jason: So when you were at NOPSEMA in your human factors role, to what degree did you work in the psych health and safety kind of area?
Joelle: I think It's an emerging issue now for industry and I think it's something that I had sort of been nudging at within the agency, and something that we've been aware of. We’ve sort of had bullying issues that we had dealt with in the past, but I think that the COVID pandemic has really brought the issue of workplace mental health to a head. And so it was something that the agency started to prioritize. So certainly, in the last 12 months, I've done quite a bit of work in that area. We've done a few inspections of operators in relation to their psychosocial risk management tools and systems that they have in place. We've done some more in-depth investigations into bullying and sort of the associated systems around preventing and responding to that. And as of leaving, there’s a draft guidance note on psychosocial risk management in the pipelines that will be coming out for public comment at some point.
Jason: And I was very thrilled when you said that you would come and work with us, so why did you? And I haven't actually asked you this question. So why did you choose to get out of the regulator and come join a mental health startup?
Joelle: So people talk about having a five-year plan, and I don't really do that. I suppose I think about what kind of work I want to be doing and what kind of impact I want to be having. And I think looking at the business model that you have in place here and the product that you've developed and the way that that product can be accessed, the opportunity for reach and impact, I think, is really, really significant. And the opportunity to be able to contribute to that and to be able to be working with a tool that's really strongly based in the evidence and the science underpinning it, I think about the potential to impact the lives of so many people in so many organizations in a positive way. And I've seen what happens when organizations don't manage mental health risk well, and the impact that can have not just on the individual themselves, but their immediate family, their workgroup, and sort of the longer-lasting effects that that can have over a period of years beyond the initial illness and recovery process. So I guess having seen that firsthand it’s really highlighted to me the challenges that businesses still have in really grappling with this concept of how to appropriately manage psychosocial risk in their workplaces. And I'm really looking forward to the opportunity to help them understand what that looks like and take a comprehensive risk management approach to the way that they look at it.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. I love that idea of the reach that we can have, using technology as kind of that backing instrument to allow us to reach scale. I remember delivering training programs to 20 or 30 people at a time and I was thrilled when people would come up and say, “Oh, that was awesome.” And will come up a few days later [inaudible 13:26] and say, “Hey, look, I tried that thing that you suggested regarding my sleep, and I haven't slept better ever.” And it would just be so great. But what we're hoping now to do is to impact on the lives of 10s hundreds, millions of people. And really, it's working again, in that preventative space. We know how much of a toll it can take on people when they have poor mental health. And it's not just the individual but their families, the communities, the workplace. And yeah, so if we can keep people well, to start with, I think that's going to be amazing.
Joelle: Absolutely.
Jason: Great. Well, I'm sure as we go through the podcast episodes, a little bit more of our backgrounds and worldviews are going to come out. And so I probably should leave it there and probably start talking about the topic for today…
Joelle: That’s probably a good idea.
Jason: …Which is, what is psychological health and safety. So for a podcast that's all about it, we should probably define it to start with. But where I thought would be useful to start with was defining the term mental health first, okay. Because many times in workshops, I've asked groups the question, “When you hear the term mental health, what's the first thing that comes to mind?” And you can imagine that most people will automatically think depression, stress anxiety. Some groups have even said things like psychosis or schizophrenia, which is interesting because they are actually very serious forms of mental illness. And it's particularly interesting I find because if I use the term physical health, they don't automatically think about diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So I think there are these connotations with mental health or at least many people treat mental health as a synonym for mental illness. Which then if we extend that to the definition of a mentally healthy workplace, then most people if they're thinking about mental health being about illness, it's about then well stigma reduction, like how do we get people comfortable talking about it if they've got a mental illness? How do we get people having peer-to-peer conversations if they are concerned that someone is not right? And I find those things, whilst useful, are very much in the reactive end. What we want to do is to be more preventative like how to actually prevent someone from getting ill in the first place?
And that's why I guess I've been drawn more to this field of psychological health and safety and definitions around that term. And you'll probably hear us use that term, “a psychologically healthy and safe workplace” more so than a “mentally healthy workplace” because of the reasons I just explained. But I really like the definition from the Canadian standard about a psychologically healthy and safe workplace. It's one that promotes workers’ psychological wellbeing and actively works to prevent harm to worker psychological health, including in negligent, reckless, or intentional ways. So basically, what it's saying is we need to have things that promote the positive, like how do we improve worker wellbeing, but also how do we prevent harm, which then brings into play things like risk management, identifying and mitigating hazards?
Now, if you want the formal definition of mental health from the World Health Organization, it's, “A state of wellbeing in which every individual realizes his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to his or her community.” So not a single bit in there about illness. It's more focused on the wellbeing. And the National Standard of Canada does focus on more the positive aspects as well, and harm prevention and wellbeing promotion.
Joelle: Yep.
Jason: And again, the other thing I really like about this is, if you think about mentally healthy workplaces, one that's purely there to accept people who have a mental illness and reduce stigma, it doesn't actually make a high bar for employees to cross. If all you have to do is accept people with a mental illness, I think most organizations can do that. But if you actually need to have a documented process on how you're going to identify and mitigate hazards, and then monitor those over time, and then use a continuous improvement approach, obviously, this actually requires a fair bit more of employees. And maybe today, maybe that's why we haven't seen so much of employees actually doing that of their own volition.
Joelle: Yeah, I think certainly what I've seen is a lot of emphasis on having AIP in place, and we'll provide resilience training, or we'll have some Mental Health First Aid training. And that's all good stuff but if you think about it, what it really does is put all of the onus on each individual worker to take responsibility for managing that risk themselves. And you're not actually reducing people's exposure to those hazards that are present in the workplace that are contributing to that stress and strain and psychological discomfort, I suppose. So if you think about it from a physical safety perspective, essentially, that's like providing people with earplugs and not looking to reduce the source of the noise that's causing the hazard in the first place. So we really need to take a step back, look at the entire system and look at what are those hazards that are present in the workplace that are presenting a risk to people's psychological health? And what can we do as an employer to try to reduce the impact of those hazards on the individuals?
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's one of the common, I guess, complaints or criticisms of the current approach to workplace mental health is that it is very much focused on the individual - “be more resilient, be more mindful.” It's not the employer going, “Well, actually, it's the way we've designed the workplace that is causing you to become ill.” I mean, again, if we use a physical health analogy, it's kind of telling people if they've got to do a lot of manual handling in their role, “Go to the gym and get stronger.”
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: “Let's not give you lifting aids or think about how we handle things physically.
Joelle: Yeah, “We won't reduce the size of the boxes we're giving you to shift around. We'll just tell you to build your muscles up instead.”
Jason: Yeah, that's right. So I think when we talk about it like that, I think people could see, particularly health and safety professionals in the audience, they can see how backwards the current approach to mental health is.
Joelle: Absolutely, yeah.
Jason: Yeah. So do you have anything else to say on that around making it clear what we're talking about on this? I did mention in the trailer, we're really not talking about fruit bowls and yoga here, that's very much focused on the individual, not on the workplace systems, I guess, that contribute to psychological health and wellbeing.
Joelle: Yeah. So for me, I think this is very much about us helping employers and other responsible parties to really understand psychological health and safety within a risk management context.
Jason: Yep. And I remember, actually, just recently on LinkedIn, we had a bit of a discussion around this idea of psychological safety versus psychological health and safety. And you said, “Well, why not call psychological health and safety, just psychological risk management to avoid the confusion?” And that's really, I guess, the main lens that we'll be looking at this through looking at risk management.
Joelle: Yeah, I think the benefit of talking about health and safety rather than just risk management is that it does also provide that opportunity to talk about the positive side of psychology and move into that sort of Flourishing at Work elements, which you don't really look at when you're talking about risk management because that's really just preventing the damage and it's not about improving the outcomes on the other side.
Jason: That's right. And again, that's why I like the Standard of Canada's definition so much as well, because it's not just about the prevention of harm, it's also about the promotion of wellbeing.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: Yeah, great. So let's then think about how that might fit in what we're talking about with the integrated model of workplace mental health. So this idea of the integrated model, I guess that term became popular because of Professor Tony - now I’ve got to say his name right - LaMontagne I believe it is, from Deakin University. I've seen him present now at a couple of conferences in the last couple of years about this model. It’s very similar to the public health model, if you like, in that you've got three levels of intervention that you can make. But if we think about mental health being a continuum ranging from illness to wellness to flourishing, basically, in a large enough organization, we need to have a range of different interventions or activities that we're doing to meet people where they're at, in relation to their mental health or ill health. And so if we think about primary prevention, Tony would refer to that as promoting thriving or flourishing. Then we've got secondary prevention, which would be about prevention of harm. And then we've got tertiary prevention, which would be about mitigating illness.
Now, I think we’ve both seen, Joelle, that the majority of organizations… and again, this might be because they're looking at mental health through the worldview that it's about illness rather than wellbeing, that the focus is on the reactive. So most interventions in workplaces tend to be tertiary or around mitigating illness, so EAPs, Mental Health First Aid, return to work programs, that sort of thing.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. It's all about how they are responding once somebody is already experiencing that psychological distress, and there's very little in there around preventing that distress in the first place.
Jason: Yeah. And look, to the audience, we're not against these approaches. I think they're very much needed.
Joelle: Absolutely. They're a really important part of it - important, but not sufficient.
Jason: Yep. That's right. So those are the things that are all really good employer of choice kind of considerations. Interestingly, and you can back me up here, Joelle, none of these are actually a compliance activity. There is nothing in the Workplace Health and Safety Act that says you need to have an EAP in place.
Joelle: No, that's correct.
Jason: Yeah. So it's funny that employers are doing that; not doing the risk management stuff, which is actually tied to legislation.
Joelle: Yeah.
Jason: Okay. All right. But the other thing that we are starting to see a bit of as well is the-- So we've talked about mitigating illness and kind of the main activities underneath that banner. Promoting flourishing, we are starting to see more organizations do. So these things might be work design, and Professor Sharon Parker is someone who's really big in this area, from the Future of Work Institute at Curtin University. And maybe we'll have her on at some stage to talk about her model of smart work design. But the idea behind that is if you can design work from the outset that we know is actually going to be good for people's mental health, then you're going to have higher levels of productivity, engagement, and less psychological injuries. Yeah. So it's like engineering, I guess, your physical work environments, understanding that there are common hazards, so let's control them from the outset. I know you've got a bit of experience in the fatigue space as well. And I really like the comparisons we can make between fatigue risk management and psychological health and safety or psychological risk management in that both are unseen. We still can't measure fatigue very well, so fatigue measurement is an issue. And it's hard to, I guess, get an objective measurement of how mentally healthy or ill someone is, as well. We rely a lot on self-report for both.
Joelle: Yeah, very much so.
Jason: And really when it comes to fatigue risk management, we focus on things like biomathematical models of sleep, wake, and that sort of thing to try and determine what is safe for the majority of people, right?
Joelle: Yep.
Jason: And so work design is very much going, “Well, we know things like having autonomy in someone's role, having a sense of mastery, using your strengths, having positive relationships in the work environment, they're all good for mental health. So let's design jobs that have those things in them to begin with.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. Autonomy, the right level of challenge, not too much is the Goldilocks zone of workload, and all of those types of things we know are beneficial, so they are actually protective of mental health.
Jason: Yeah. So we don't have to wait for people to start getting ill at work before we start intervening. We can design work - and this is at a systems level - to keep people healthy. The other thing we can do, I think, promoting flourishing level is to think about how do we optimize people's wellbeing. Now, what I like to talk about here is in the physical realm, we focus on the SNAP acronym, so Smoking cessation, Nutrition, Alcohol in moderation, and Physical activity. If we add sleep in there as well, if we do all five of those, we're less susceptible to illness. And if we do them really well, we'll reach a higher level of physical wellbeing. But when we talk about health promotion in workplaces and mental health promotion, a lot of them then go, “Oh, yeah, we're doing exercise, we're doing diet, we've got end-of-trip facilities, we've got healthy vending machines, we have running clubs, step challenges, that sort of thing. So they're very much focused on the SNAP stuff for mental health. Now, we were talking before the podcast show that we know from the research that there is a link between what we eat or how much activity we do and the type of activity and our mental health. But I find it interesting that people or organizations don't think, “Well, if we want to have a positive impact on mental health, why not use a positive mental health intervention, rather than relying on the physical ones?”
Joelle: And I think that that's a lot to do with marketing, probably, that a lot of those physically healthy programs have been very well marketed to businesses, so they know that they're there. And I suppose that's part of what we're doing now as well is letting businesses know how they can actually approach this positive psychological health in the workplace. So that's, I guess, addressing some of that gap in the information that's out there.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess one of the models that companies can look at rather than using the SNAPS acronym for mental health interventions or positive mental health interventions, is to think about the PERMA model. So the PERMA model is from the field of positive psychology. It was made, or I guess it was kind of coined by the psychologist Martin Seligman, who was the president of the American Psychological Association from 1998. And when he came into that role, he had said, “Well, look, the focus of psychology traditionally, has always been on illness. So how do we identify it? How do we treat people? How do we bring people back to normal?” There wasn't as much of a focus, or a very small percentage if you think about all of the literature in the field of psychology at that point, that was focused on “How do we take someone who's actually well already, or doesn't have depression, and bring them to a level where they're flourishing, so having an optimal level of wellbeing?” And so the model PERMA is an acronym that stands for the five pillars of good mental health. So that includes having Positive emotions regularly, like joy or love, gratitude, hope, all those nice things. Having a level of Engagement in what you do is the “E”. And when we talk about engagement, we're not talking about the annual employee engagement survey that you might do in your company, but we're talking about the concept of flow. So how absorbed are people in their activities to the point that time passes really quickly, and they become really just immersed in what they're doing. Hopefully, you experience flow every now and again.
Joelle: I do. Yes. Depends how many people want to interrupt me.
Jason: That's right. So avoiding interruptions, leveraging your strengths, doing something that you're good at, getting that right level of challenge for your skill level, those sorts of things are all important for people who want to get more flow.
Joelle: Absolutely.
Jason: For the “R” in PERMA, we're talking about positive Relationships, particularly those that focus on trust and mutual respect, and enjoyment. Having a sense of Meaning or purpose is the “M”. I would argue from what I read in some of our own research that we've done internally, that having a sense of meaning or purpose is actually the most important thing if you want to experience a level of flourishing.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. I think everybody wants to feel like what they're doing is important and useful and meaningful. Yeah, it’s pretty sad if you don't have that sense that what you're doing is contributing to something or that it's important to somebody else.
Jason: Yeah. I think that's where people like Simon Sinek are becoming really popular. Because he's got the book Start with Why and that's all about purpose and start with talking about why we're doing something rather than how or what we're doing, it's why. And aligning people to a shared vision or goal is so powerful for human motivation.
Joelle: Yeah. And you get that intrinsic motivation as well that comes along with that, when you feel like you're doing something that has meaning and that's aligned with your own values and what you feel is important, then there's a lot of intrinsic reward that comes with the work that you're doing. So that's an added bonus, I suppose, on top of the compensation and other elements that you get from your job, if you've got that internal reward that happens every day that you're doing the work that you're doing. And that's a positive reinforcement loop.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. Yep. And then the “A” in PERMA is for Accomplishment. So feeling satisfied that we're doing, again, meaningful things day to day, ticking things off our to-do list, and having larger accomplishments in life as well.
Joelle: A sense that you're competent at what you do is really important to that sense of self.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. So the better we do in these five areas, like our SNAPS areas, the less susceptible we are to mental illness, and the more likely we are to reach a higher level of flourishing or wellbeing. So I'm really interested in that area of flourishing and using the PERMA model. And we might even have some people from the positive psychology realm at some point. But really, this is a health and safety podcast first, so we will be having guests on initially that are really more focused on the systemic approaches to employee mental health that focus on work design, risk management versus the health promotion stuff.
Joelle: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. So let's then think about the other part of the integrated model. So we talked about promoting flourishing, we talked about mitigate illness. This is the area I think that many organizations aren't doing so well and that's the prevention of harm.
Joelle: Yes.
Jason: And so really, if we think about physical risk management, so we know what our main hazards are in a workplace that we have to identify. So there are four steps to the process; you identify your hazards, you assess the level of risk, you put in controls, and you monitor over time, and it's a loop so you continuously improve.
Joelle: Yes, the basic risk management cycle. Yep
Jason: That's right. And let's not forget we have to consult with staff through the process as well.
Joelle: Absolutely.
Jason: Yeah. So if we think about identifying hazards, we know the common hazards within most workplaces - electrical hazards, manual handling, working at height.
Joelle: Explosions.
Jason: Yeah, depends what industry you're in. Confined spaces, chemical exposures, dust, that sort of thing. So we know what the main hazards are. And they're fairly easy to identify most of the physical hazards because we can observe them directly.
Joelle: Yes, we know what they are, we know how they occur, we know what we need to do to prevent them from causing damage.
Jason: Yeah. So we can generally identify those hazards by just observing the work environment, looking around. Okay, the next thing we need to do is to assess the level of risk, so the likelihood and consequence that if someone is exposed to this hazard, that they're going to have an injury or something not great happen to them. Yeah. So within a workplace, if we're going to assess the risk, generally, there's some good research or case studies around the place that help us understand if people are exposed to silica dust, this is kind of the exposure that leads to ill health.
Joelle: Yes. Varying levels of evidence for different outcomes, I suppose. And yeah, I think the risk assessment process is probably a little bit more qualitative than people probably like to admit, a little bit more finger in the air, feeling the wind kind of thing, but it’s still an important step.
Jason: Yeah, I remember an interesting discussion where we were facilitating an organization as they were reviewing their fatigue risks and strategies that they had in place. And this one company had about a half-hour, 45-minute drive from where most people were located in town out to their facility, and they were running 12-hour rosters which are common. So working from 6 am until 6 pm and they would do that for seven days straight kind of thing, which is very common up in the Pilbara in particular in Western Australia. But they were all driving themselves, these people, and they had three cases in I think about six months where people had fallen asleep at the wheel, driven off the side of the road. And if there had been a tree there or something, they probably would have killed themselves. But luckily, there was no fatalities but that were very high incident potential near misses. But when we were doing the risk assessment going, “Okay, what is the risk?”, they were very much saying, “Oh, it's not a catastrophic risk. We haven't [had] any fatalities.” And I had three high potential near misses, and they didn't want to pull-- Like you're saying, it's more qualitative rather than quantitative. They’re like, “How can we get it down so it's maybe more of a moderate risk or a three on our category of five rather than-- Because then we don't have to do anything about it.”
Joelle: Well, that's right. So there is all of that statistical manipulation that can go on in the back end when you're talking about risk assessments. So yeah, I tend to take any of those types of assessments with a bit of a grain of salt when I'm looking at them.
Jason: Yeah. And companies are getting very good at understanding and controlling the physical risks. I mean, if we talk about the [injury free courtesy 36:09] rates and that sort of thing, they have been coming down historically as the safety profession gets better and better understanding roles and understanding in managing risks.
Joelle: Yes.
Jason: But if we talk about the psychological risks, we're not doing as well. So what we're seeing is, and we'll talk to some statistics in a moment that shows this, but we're seeing that we're actually getting more psychological injuries occurring year on year, across the world, not less.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. And whether that's partly due to people feeling more comfortable coming forward. But also, I think workplaces are becoming more stressful. Economic drivers are becoming more significant. Job insecurity is increasing. You’ve got this increasingly sort of casual and gig-based economy. So all of those things are compounding, and then you've got the pandemic sitting on top of all of that that's just--
Jason: I was hoping not to talk too much about COVID today. It’s 2021.
Joelle: If only it was that simple, just flicking a switch, it’s a new year. No more pandemic.
Jason: Yeah, we're very fortunate, I should say, we're recording out of Perth, Western Australia, and we haven't had any community transmission for more than nine months, so we are kind of blessed.
Joelle: Absolutely. We’re living a relatively normal existence compared to the rest of the world.
Jason: Yeah, one of the benefits in being in one of the most isolated capital cities in the world.
Joelle: Absolutely. Should we do a knock on wood while we’re saying that?
Jason: Do that for sure. So let's think then about the common psychosocial hazards. So a psychosocial hazard is anything in the design or management of work that causes work-related stress. Now, we know that not all stress is bad, so we need some stress to motivate us. I mean, if we didn't have any stress in our lives, if it was really cold and raining outside, why would you get out of bed?
Joelle: I wouldn't.
Jason: I've got three kids. If they are still asleep, I would still be in bed.
Joelle: Absolutely.
Jason: So we need some stress. But I guess when stress is continuous without a respite, or if we're talking about very high levels of traumatic stress, like being exposed to bullying and harassment or occupational violence, then people are more likely to have a negative stress reaction and maybe suffer a psychological injury and require time off work.
Joelle: Yes, absolutely.
Jason: Yep. So what are some of the key psychosocial hazards?
Joelle: So you can talk about the job demands-resources model, which is essentially that different people have different capacity for workload and for job demands. So this is really what your employer is asking you to do, and what the requirements are for you to be able to do your job successfully, and do what you need to do to keep your job and to do it well. So we've only got a finite capacity for taking on job demands and a lot of that has to do with the resources that are available to us to be able to meet those demands. So the resources can be personal factors like intelligence, personality, tolerance for stress, and that type of thing. But then we've also got resources that can be provided by the organization and that's to do with the volume of people who are around to do the workload, it's got to do with the quality of leadership and interpersonal relationships that you have. It's got to do with things like the broad company policy around economic factors, and what is it that actually drives us at this company, and what's most important to us? So, when we get an imbalance between the job demands and the job resources, then that's when we start to experience psychological distress.
Jason: Yeah. And I guess depending where in the world you are, there's more of a focus on some psychosocial hazards than others.
Joelle: Yeah, and what type of work you do as well, I suppose. So, psychosocial hazards for a first responder will be very different to psychosocial hazards for an engineer.
Jason: Yeah, or a school teacher. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if we think to the UK, they have their stress management standard and they've got six hazards that they refer to, things like control and workload and clarity and that sort of thing. In Canada, they've got 13, including things like civility and respect, which probably requires its own episode of the show, growth and development, things like that. And then in Australia, I think there are about eight that we generally refer to, including things like job demands, and autonomy or control, and relationships, and organizational justice, even, so perceived fairness in how decisions are made.
Joelle: Absolutely, yeah.
Jason: Yeah. So when we talk about psychological health and safety and risk management, it's not about trying to identify if people are ill, that's very much an individual focus. What we're trying to look at is controllable workplace conditions that are usually tied to the design of work that can make people ill if not done correctly.
Joelle: Yeah. So what can we do as an organization, as an employer, to put people in that Goldilocks zone for job demands, where they're challenged enough, but not to the point of being overwhelmed, and creating a work environment that people feel comfortable and happy in and where they're able to form those meaningful relationships and do the work that they feel is important to them?
Jason: Yeah. So I guess that the next step after you've identified those assets-- And sometimes we just know these are the things that we should focus on. Sometimes we should be consulting with staff as well and asking their perspective. Obviously, they know their job better than most, particularly senior management. The person that's on the floor will actually know what they're doing more so. And so there are many ways you can do that, so talking with people, focus groups, surveys, however you do it, it's just about how do we identify these. And then the next step would be assessing the level of risk. And kind of like with fatigue, it's not a one size fits all - the level of risks. We can all be exposed to different levels of stress, and it will have different varying effects on us, right?
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. We've all got different tolerances. And I suppose the other thing is that we've all got different things going on outside of work that also impact our level of tolerance for what goes on at work. So if our brain is a cup, once it's full, that's when we get overloaded, and we start to experience that distress. So factors outside of work contribute to the cup just as much as factors inside of work. And we can only compartmentalize so much.
Jason: Yeah. It's interesting, that sometimes comes up when I'm talking with organizations, and they'll say, “Well look, mental health, that's the individual’s problem. If they are doing something stressful outside of work because they've got relationship issues or a child with problems or something like that and they're bringing that to work, that's not our responsibility.” But then I would counter that with, “Well, what happens if someone had frail bones or an existing muscle issue? Would you just go, ‘Oh, that's your problem so we're not going to actually try and help you out at work by designing work that isn't going to exacerbate the issue that you already got?’”
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely. And if I think about my own experiences when I've had things happen outside of work, and fairly significant traumatic issues outside of work, the response that my employer has had has been, “Well take whatever time off you need. Come back when you're ready.” And even once I'm back at work, the workload has been adjusted for me to be able to do what I can, and recognizing that when I've got the capacity, I'm going to build back up and probably be more committed and more loyal to that organization because they've been there, and they've been supportive and responsive to what was going on outside of work. So it really does make a big difference, I think. If I had been working somewhere that didn't respond the way that they did, then I would have absolutely developed depression, no doubt about that, burn out. I probably would have become unemployed, all sorts of things. So it really does make a huge difference.
Jason: Yeah. So really, a lot of it comes down to treating other people as we want to be treated ourselves, right, as another human rather than a piece of machinery. And yeah, hopefully, more employers start to take that perspective moving forward, understanding. And that's, again, one of the goals of the podcast, to kind of disseminate this information and change people's mindsets around some of these things.
Joelle: Absolutely. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. So assessing the risk can be difficult. We're very interested, I guess, in building up big data sets where we can start to look at predictively if people are responding this way to a survey, for instance, what is the likelihood of someone becoming ill or having a workers’ compensation claim or something like that?
Joelle: Yeah. And having that robust data source will really, really help in that risk assessment stage.
Jason: Yep. Then we have to control the risks. So this is where work design comes in, or work redesign. So once we've identified someone is working 10 hours a day when they really should only be spending eight hours a day at work, or they're having to come in on weekends to get stuff done because the work requirements are just too much, then we need to look at why that's happening. And a lot of companies I've seen, they will jump to conclusions and they will think, “Well, either this person is not suitable for the job they are slacking off when we're not watching them.” And it's probably a little bit of that concern happening with people working from home when employers can't see them directly. But what we need to do is consult with staff and go, “We've felt from a number of employees--” And again, this is something to specify as well, I guess, at this point is that when we're looking at psychological health and safety or risk management, it's not about one person's experience, we're looking at when multiple people are having a shared experience, if you like, then that's a signal that the design of work is not great.
Joelle: Yeah, that's correct.
Jason: So when we consult with workers, then we have a better idea. “Okay, workload is high. You’re having to work heaps of extra hours. Why is that the case?” And then you find out things like, “Oh, well, if I look at my calendar, I spent eight hours Monday and Tuesday in meetings. So I have a job that I've got to do as well on top of that, and I can't really get to my job because I'm having to attend all these meetings.”
Joelle: Especially during isolation, I would say, there was an exponential increase in the number of meetings that were going on versus time to do productive work.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. It might even be things like people just getting bombarded with emails. I'm very fortunate that I've got a manageable inbox. And I try and protect the employees that work for me from not getting excess emails, and one of the ways I do that is not getting customers to contact them directly. That helps a lot. But when you break it down, then often the control, which is that next step, becomes more relevant. Well, we don't have a workload issue, we've got a meeting issue. So maybe we need to think about who we're inviting to meetings, how long meetings are going for, having requirements that we have an agenda and stick to it within a meeting, even have things like stand-up meetings so that people are motivated to actually get it down and get out, rather than wasting time.
Joelle: Yeah, that's a really good example.
Jason: Yeah. And then the next thing we have to do is just monitor that over time. We put our controls, or we develop an action plan. “Okay, we've identified what our hazards are, we know what the largest risks are, we've got some really great feedback from employees about what we can do to manage that risk. We've developed a plan with action steps and who's responsible. How are we going to monitor it? And when are we going to review this again?” And then we do that, we follow the action plan, and we monitor it at the particular time points, and we say, “Have we actually improved? Have we actually reduced this risk?” At the end of a period of time, then you look at it and go, “Well, have we actually addressed it? If we have, what's the next biggest thing that we can attend to?” So when we talk about developing a psychologically healthy and safe workplace, we're not talking about a company following a risk management process once and then becoming the most mentally healthy workplace on the planet. It's about just biting off in chunks. What are the biggest things that we need to focus on for the upcoming period? Let's monitor that, see how we're going and then we'll review it and then tackle the next things. And over a number of years, you could see an organization becoming a much better place to work in reducing psychological injuries.
Joelle: Yeah, and for companies that do have higher rates of mental health claims, we would expect that there would be some fairly easy gains to just taking that structured approach to risk management. We'd be able to see some of those hazards that are really easy to address and hopefully intervene and have some success pretty quickly.
Jason: Yeah. We're not going to talk about it now because we've actually been talking for quite a while and there are a couple other things I wanted to finish with. Risk management process doesn't just sit on its own, you need to have this enshrined in policy, you need leadership commitment, you need employees and health and safety representatives on board and having buy into the process as well. So we're going to talk about a number of those issues and hopefully get some good experts on to talk about them as well.
Joelle: Yeah. And ideally, you just want all of these elements integrated into your normal safety management system and the various policies and procedures and requirements that sit within that. So the more that you can integrate mental health risk management into your regular risk management processes, the more likely it's going to be that it just becomes part of everyday business rather than something that we have to remember to do.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And there's probably a whole discussion there around having an individual psych health and safety management plan or policy or workplace mental health policy, versus just incorporating some of these things we're talking about into your existing health and safety policy.
Joelle: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. All right. So bearing in mind we have been talking for a while, and hopefully, we still have some listeners tuning in, so we were talking about the integrated model of workplace mental health, and I guess the three levels, so that's primary, secondary, tertiary prevention if we’re using Tony's model, the integrated model, it's mitigate illness, prevent, harm, and promote flourishing. What I wanted to talk about is maybe some statistics that are showing, I guess, the size of the issue worldwide. So I saw Peter Kelly, from the UK Health and Safety Executive, put some stuff up on LinkedIn recently. And Peter is going to be one of our guests, actually, in the first few episodes, really interested in getting him on board. But he posted the latest stats from 2019 this was, in the UK. They had 828,000 cases of workplace stress, which required time off, 17.8 million days lost. Worst year on record, apparently.
Joelle: Up until 2019.
Jason: Up until 2019.
Joelle: We're not talking about 2020.
Jason: That's right. So that was pre-COVID. Now, he has estimated that it could hit a million cases for 2020 thanks to the extra pressures that COVID has put on everyone.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: Yeah. So this is the worst year on record. Again, as we were talking about before, even though we're getting much better in how we manage physical health and safety, it seems like we're just getting more and more workplace stress claims and psychological injury claims.
Joelle: And certainly, the feedback that I was seeing coming through from facility operators with the regulator was that their EAP providers were really being overwhelmed with the volume of calls that they were getting for people who were really struggling to the point that they've sort of been really proactively recruiting and actually sending people so that they'll have a psych actually stationed at an offshore facility, which is a fairly new thing going on, but actually having somebody going out there regularly, going out to the mind sites as well, regularly. So people are definitely drawing on that EAP as a source of support. But I think what we want to do is get to people before they're at the point of needing the EAP
Jason: So that was from the UK. Safe Work Australia’s stats have just dropped on the 12th of January, so just in the last couple of weeks, the latest. And this isn't all of the claims because it doesn't include people like the WA Police, it doesn't include anyone working for the Defence Force or anything like that.
Joelle: Also, people who are self-employed, and probably companies who are self-insured wouldn't be included in those data sets either. So that's probably excluding quite a lot of really large companies.
Jason: So keeping in mind that, out of all of the injury claims that were made, 8% of them were related to mental disorders, so stress-related conditions. That was 10,000 cases total. Now, we also have here the changes over time, and what we can see is from 2000, 2001, it has gone up 28%. So we're seeing a big increase over that period of time. Now, the thing is, when these occur, they generally are more complex than many physical injuries and illnesses and require longer times of work.
Joelle: I think probably the other thing to note here is that these are only the claims that were assessed as compensable. And that's taking on balance outside of work factors as well as the ability to prove what was going on at work contributed to the development of the disease or illness. So my suspicion is that this is a significant underreporting of what's actually happening.
Jason: Yeah, I think you're dead right. So if we have a look, yeah, so it's gone up 28%. And then if we look at the average time off work, we're looking at a median of over 20 weeks.
Joelle: And that's pretty significant.
Jason: Now, SafeWork New South Wales has drafted a code of practice for psychological health, which they published in September for comment. And they published some statistics along with that as well. Now, they're a little bit different to the Australian statistics. And I would be interested if we can get Ian Firth on from SafeWork New South Wales in the coming weeks to talk to these statistics. But when looking at the stats between 2019 back to 2015, they have tracked a 53% increase in psychological injury claims compared to three and a half percent increase in physical injury claims. So again, that gives credit to the health and safety profession in that we're actually managing physical safety risks pretty well. But there's a huge opportunity for health and safety to get involved in the management of psychological risk.
Joelle: Yeah, and it certainly suggests that strategies that are already in place are probably not very effective if we're seeing increases in the claims being made there.
Jason: Yep. And as you alluded to earlier, there could be a number of reasons why people might just be more comfortable talking about mental health, but that's quite a large increase. And then the cost. The average cost per claim they've got is $85,000, compared to $21,000 for a physical health claim. So it's not just employers that are feeling this. Obviously, the insurers will be feeling that cost obviously themselves.
Joelle: Yeah, I mean, it's a significant difference. And SafeWork New South Wales has had a $585 million gross incurred costs. So from an economic perspective for Australia, it's a big challenge for us to try to address.
Jason: Half a billion dollars from one state.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: Bearing in mind, for those people who aren't aware of the geography, New South Wales is one of the largest states, if not the largest by population.
Joelle: Yes, by population.
Jason: Yes. So WA, of course, is the largest by geographic spread. But what we're seeing is, year on year, the stats across countries like Australia, UK, Canada, even, we're seeing a higher and higher prevalence of psychological injuries and work injury claims due to mental health conditions.
Joelle: Yeah. And, as we have said, there's probably a number of reasons for that. Just increasing awareness of these issues, probably JPs recognizing when there's this sort of stuff going on, and identifying that it should be a compensable issue. So I think that that's definitely part of it. Possibly, also just the changing demographics of the workforce, where we've maybe got fewer people working directly in line of fire type jobs. So we've just got a change in the risk profile overall.
Jason: Now, obviously, we have been… I know, I definitely have been in this fear, being a mental health professional, where we've been trying to promote to employees all the benefits of if you intervene in mental health, or do these positive things for employee mental health, these are all the benefits you're going to get. You're going to get more engagement, you're going to get higher levels of productivity, this is your return on investment for every dollar that you put in. But it appears the carrot isn't working as well as we'd like.
Joelle: It would appear so yes. So absolutely, we can start talking about your workers’ compensation costs and your insurance premiums.
Jason: Yeah, that's right. And not to mention legal obligations.
Joelle: So as regulators get more interested in this and certainly with the upcoming standard that's coming out, they will be, I think, increasing expectation that this is something that employers need to pay attention to. It is a legal obligation for them. And as we become more literate in talking about psychological hazards, it's certainly something that regulators are going to be paying a lot more attention to.
Jason: Yeah. And I guess at the end of 2018, we saw the Boland review come out on the model Workplace Health and Safety Act. And out of 34 recommendations, recommendation number two was to incorporate psychological health and safety much more into the act.
Joelle: Yeah. And that's being done to varying degrees in the different states.
Jason: Interestingly, WA is going to be joining the Commonwealth following the Commonwealth WHS Act in the next year or so. And that's where we're expecting this to happen. And I guess what states are now doing, and regulators is getting on the front foot. And that's why we see New South Wales put out their draft code of practice, to help employees to take on the legislation changes when they come in.
Joelle: Yeah. And certainly, in WA, DMIRS has put out their code of practice for FIFO work. So for psychosocial risk in FIFO work, and that's obviously for a specific cohort. And there are unique, psychological hazards for FIFO and for offshore work, yet, it's something that all regulators are thinking about and starting to act on.
Jason: Yep. And I guess in most countries, this would actually come into legislation already, under duty of care for both employers and employees.
Joelle: Wherever you've got legislation that talks about general duties to protect the health and safety of your workforce, that inherently includes psychological health and safety. So even if it's not explicitly in your legislation, if you've got those general duties, then yes, you're responsible for reducing psychological risks to your workforce the same as you're responsible for reducing physical risks.
Jason: So things like the codes of practice, they are not legislation, but they are basically guidelines on how you can adopt, I guess, or meet the legislative requirements.
Joelle: And from a legal perspective, I think, if you find yourself being prosecuted, the codes of practice, in particular, are held up as the minimum standard to which you should be performing. And you will need to demonstrate that what you're doing is as good or better than those codes of practice if you find yourself in that prosecution situation.
Jason: Interestingly, from the New South Wales code of practice information they put out, they surveyed the workplaces in the state, and they found that only 9% of workplaces were dealing with psychological health and safety from a systemic perspective.
Joelle: I would imagine that would be explicitly addressing it rather than other things that also happen to look after psychological health and safety.
Jason: Correct. So it's like more of a systematic thing that might align with the code of practice, for instance, doing risk management, that sort of thing. But that means that more than 90% of companies are not doing this.
Joelle: Yeah. And that's not surprising.
Jason: But again, I see this as an opportunity for the health and safety profession, for psychologists. There's a lot of companies that need to do this and do it a lot better, and they're going to need a lot of hand-holding and guidance and support.
Joelle: Yeah. And certainly, in the safety profession, there's always talk about what's the next step change in safety? Well, here it is. It's mental health. That's your next step change.
Jason: So I guess locally here in Australia, we're having a bit happen in the next year. There'll be more drafts of codes of practice coming out. We are expecting the new legislation change to come out in the next year or so as well. But I guess in the next three to six months on a global perspective, we're expecting ISO 45003 psychological health and safety in the workplace.
Joelle: Yeah.
Jason: So this will be the first internationally agreed standard on how do we manage the risk of psychological health and safety or circuit psychological injury prevention. It very much draws upon the key standards from around the world, like the management standard from the UK, the National Standard of Canada, the Safe Work Australia guidelines as well. So some of the key ones in the countries that have been leading the way in this space. But what's really exciting for me, Joelle is that it fits under ISO 45001, which is the ISO standard for Occupational Health and Safety Management Systems.
Joelle: Yeah. And I'm certain that that's been done very deliberately.
Jason: Yes. But what this does, ISO 45003 will become a child of the ISO 45001 standard. So basically, it's dealing with how do you deal with this directly, this particular issue in relation to health and safety?
Joelle: Yeah, and I think that what that also does is because it follows that same structure of the rest of the 45000 series, where I was talking earlier about actually integrating those mental health risk management approaches into your safety management system, the way that the ISO standard is structured really will facilitate that.
Jason: But what this really does signal is that workplace mental health is no longer just an HR issue, but the health and safety profession really does need to get involved.
Joelle: Yeah. The other thing that I wanted to talk about was that this isn't just about individual health. And while that's certainly important from a human factors perspective, when we talk about performance shaping factors, things that can impact the likelihood that somebody is going to perform their job reliably or potentially make a mistake that can contribute to an accident or a major event, mental health really fits in as a significant performance shaping factor there. So we know that if people are distressed, distracted by worrying thoughts, anxious ruminations, however you want to describe it, we know that things like their ability to detect system anomalies, for example, or detect hazards, is significantly reduced. Their ability to diagnose a problem when they're confronted with something and identify an appropriate solution, all of those things that are impacted by psychological distress. So we're not just talking about individual health, we're also talking about impact on accident causation more broadly.
Jason: And it's not just the psychological injury claims as well, but we know that if you are experiencing high levels of stress or distress then things like musculoskeletal issues can become a problem as well.
Joelle: Yeah, cardiovascular, all sorts of things. Yep.
Jason: Yep. So really interesting. And I'm not going to talk too much about ISO 45003 today, because we're going to have some experts from UK, Canada, and Australia on in the first couple of weeks of the pod. So we'll hear much more from the horse's mouth in relation to that. But I guess, one thing I wanted to finish on then is we have been talking about, I guess, defining what psychological health and safety is, talking about some of the key stats, we have been talking about some of the standards and legislation that exist currently, or is coming into place. Where are the opportunities for the listeners for this show?
Joelle: Oh, well, employment opportunities, Yeah. This is going to be a growing area that businesses are going to be grappling with and they're going to need people who are able to actually do this work. So organizational psychologists or psychologists who have completed organizational psychology master's degrees. We want to be completely accurate about it.
Jason: I should say Joelle is the only organizational psychologist here. I have a master's in occupational psychology, but it doesn't make me an organizational psychologist. We'll get into that with them maybe Heather Ikin on another episode.
Joelle: Yeah, probably. So yeah, for people working in the org psych area, I think we are very uniquely positioned to really work with organizational systems, where they interact with mental health. I think that we do have a really unique role in that space. But also, just from your OHS professionals, this is something that you need to start paying attention to and looking for opportunities to upskill, looking for opportunities to engage with people who do have the mental health competence. If you're not able to bring it in house, then seek that guidance and seek that expert input.
Jason: Yeah, I see some health and safety professionals freaking out a little bit, and they're like, “Oh, now I got to deal with mental health as well on top of everything else.” But really, if you think about it, when you're talking about controlling risks, the health and safety person doesn't necessarily do that. It's the role of engineers.
Joelle: So the health and safety person should be facilitating that process and making sure that they have got the right expertise feeding into the risk assessment and into the development of appropriate control measures.
Jason: Yeah. So rather than engineers in the case of psychological risk management, it's more so psychologists that would be the subject matter expert, if you like, or “How do we diagnose and alleviate the issue?”
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: So we've talked about HSE, we talked about organizational psychologists. HR is another one where I think there could be a real benefit from.
Joelle: Yeah, so I think if we had a Venn diagram, the mental health is really where we've got the crossover between the OHS and the HR professionals in the Venn diagram. So definitely, those two roles within an organization need to do a lot of collaboration in this area.
Jason: Yep. And I think the other benefit I see for the HR profession is a lot of them want to do stuff in the workplace mental health space. They want to, but it's hard to sell it to leadership because it's perceived as a nice-to-have, rather than a need-to-have. But I guess when it becomes more of a health and safety issue, health and safety generally have a higher priority when things come up in the organization, and they might have more budget as well, to be able to do these things properly. So yeah, if it becomes a need-to-have and there's more budget available, then HR might find that they're able to do more initiatives in this space.
Joelle: Yeah, absolutely.
Jason: And then regulators. Now, coming from a regulator yourself, can you see any benefits for regulators for having, I guess, these new standards in place and psychological health and safety becoming more to the fore?
Joelle: I think the benefit for regulators in having a standard to point to is that it sets out some, I guess, globally, agreed on expectations for what a good risk management approach looks like in relation to mental health. So anytime there's a standard, a regulator is going to be able to do their job more effectively, I suppose, so that's the big takeaway for regulators with this standard coming out, I would say.
Jason: It definitely makes it more enforceable. At least companies don't have anywhere to hide anymore. The regulator can say, “Look, it's very clear these are your obligations. And it's very clear that you're not fulfilling them.” So yeah. So look, I think there are benefits for many professionals, and so hopefully, those professionals that tune into the podcast will be able to up their skills and knowledge and get a lot out of it.
Joelle: That's the idea.
Jason: Yep. All right. Well, what we might do, because we've been running for a very, very long time. I'm not sure how long the rest of the episodes will go for. I did say to Joelle, “Look, we've got some really great people on and we could probably talk all day with a lot of them.” Some of them, we might end up talking all day. Hopefully, we keep it under a couple of hours, as we have done today. But people hopefully will be able to tune in and out as the information is relevant to them. So just in winding up, thanks, Joelle. Thank you so much for joining us at People Diagnostix and helping us with the FlourishDx product. Going to be really great to be working with you and co-hosting this show with you. Don't forget, listeners, that you can tune in on YouTube as well. It's not just a podcast, but we video it so you can see what Jason or--
Joelle: Just to add to the terror.
Jason: The bright lights and the video cameras.
Joelle: Very glamorous.
Jason: Yeah. So Jason and Joelle, if you want to see what we look like, then have a look on YouTube. And we will be sharing snippets from the podcast, interesting things from the guests that we have as well on LinkedIn. And you can follow either Joelle or myself.
Joelle: Or both.
Jason: Feel free to connect with us. We're both happy to. And also follow FlourishDx on LinkedIn for more information as we bring it to hand.
Joelle: Good stuff.
Jason: Awesome. Well, thanks again, and we look forward to talking to our next guest next episode.
Joelle: Very exciting times. Thank you.
Jason: Thank you all.
Outro: You've been listening to the Psych Health and Safety Podcast. To stay up to date with the latest on psychological injury prevention, follow FlourishDx on LinkedIn and subscribe to the Psych Health and Safety Podcast at www.psychhealthandsafety.com.