More and more employers are recognising their moral responsibility to look after staff as they face up to stark statistics about poor mental health in the workplace
“I used my training a few times,” says Jason Hamon of his time as a mental health first-aider at wealth manager and employee benefits company Utmost Worldwide. He didn’t wear a hi-vis jacket or carry a box of medical kit, but the help he gave colleagues was as important as dressing any physical wound. “I might have seen somebody who didn’t quite look themselves and asked how they’re doing,” he says.
It might sound simple, but Hamon, now Assistant Director, Risk and Financial Stability at the Guernsey Financial Services Commission, believes genuine concern and a 10-minute chat led to a couple of colleagues opening up about their struggle with family illness or bereavement.
“They felt better because they were able to express how they felt and they knew somebody genuinely cared. In other cases, I was able to signpost people to an organisation or charity that might be able to support them,” he says.
Climbing the agenda
Mental health in the workplace has been climbing the corporate agenda, and first-aiders such as Hamon are in the front line of support that some enlightened employers are giving their staff.
They have good reason for concern. The figures on mental health in financial services – a key Channel Islands sector – look distinctly unhealthy. Employers are recognising they have a commercial impetus – and a moral duty – to look after their staff and are taking steps to tackle it.
A survey of more than 3,500 financial services professionals by the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, for example, identified off-the-scale workloads and out-of-touch senior management as key causes of stress and mental ill health. Nearly a third of respondents said they would not be confident speaking to their manager about a mental health issue.
Meanwhile, a 2017 survey for HR consultancy AdviserPlus reckoned a third of absences in the financial services sector were due to mental ill health. Another survey the same year, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Guernsey Mind, found 44% of respondents had experienced mental health problems in the workplace on the island, compared with 31% in the UK.
Richard Sheldon, a Partner at Appleby, led the research in his former voluntary role as Policy Adviser for CIPD Guernsey. He explains that the worrying gap between Guernsey and the UK could be attributed to the “obvious differential” between the island and the mainland – the majority of respondents work in financial services. With global clients, this makes for a high-pressure, always-on culture.
“This inevitably leads to difficulties,” he says. “Not getting away from your desk, not separating home and work, contributes to poor mental health. In financial services, there’s continuous stress and pressure. It’s unremitting. There is a price to pay for putting your people in that environment.”
Hamon raises the spectre of redundancy as another stress factor for financial services workers. “People are expected to work longer hours and some feel they have to stand out from their colleagues to show they work hard,” he says. “There is a lot of pressure on people. They have less time to look after themselves and less time to look after each other. People are so focused on getting the job done, and doing a good job, that they don’t always notice somebody next to them who may be struggling.”
The CIPD/Guernsey Mind survey found that 17% of respondents who said they suffered from poor mental health solely blamed problems at work (7% for the UK), while 49% attributed it to a combination of personal and work problems (54% for the UK).
Owning the problem
Employers are starting to take ownership of the problem. “This has become a topic of interest to most employers as they realise having happy and mentally healthy employees means better productivity,” explains Sally Rochester, a Director at Deloitte Guernsey, who also sits on the board of Mind on the island.
“Definitely within our firm there is a desire for our staff to perform at a very high level because we want to deliver the best service to our clients,” she explains. “But there is also a very strong message now that you are responsible for managing that workload. And if it’s becoming too much, we expect you to say no.”
It’s not just beneficial in terms of productivity for businesses to have mentally healthy staff, it’s also a good way to attract and retain them. “The reality is that in the Channel Islands there’s a very small talent pool and if you lose a good person because you’ve put them under undue pressure, it’s going to be hard to replace them,” says Sheldon.
What’s more, if an employer earns a reputation as the sort of company that allows this to happen, then people will vote with their feet.
Shifting attitudes
Stephen Pereira, a psychiatrist who treats City workers, believes that many corporates are becoming more proactive in talking about mental health. “Back in the late 1990s, people didn’t even have a properly defined mental health policy at work and there was very poor training in human resources or employee relations in this space,” Pereira told the Financial Times in May.
Today, firms are keen to promote their mental health policies and encourage senior leaders to talk about their own problems. This shift is borne out by the formation in 2013 of the City Mental Health Alliance, a group of legal firms and financial companies that shares best practice on how to tackle mental ill health in the workplace.
Deloitte’s Rochester points to a number of initiatives taken by her firm: training a quarter of its partners and directors to become mental health contact points; creating 12 mental health first-aiders; running campaigns where colleagues have spoken openly about their mental health issues; and giving employees the tools to manage their own stress levels, look after their own mental wellbeing, and spot the warning signs in themselves and others.
Deloitte also offers staff an employee assistance service through which they can access free counselling sessions.
Open culture
It’s not just about making employers and staff more aware, says Rochester. “Having an open culture about mental health and wellbeing is the most important thing for me,” she says. “Everyone should be able to put up their hand and say: ‘This is all getting a bit too much. Here are the things I’m going to do and I would like you to support me in that.’”
This might be something as simple as a mental health first-aider helping a colleague to put together a short-term plan to make sure they leave on time or have lunch hours free to go to the gym. It can also mean making workload adjustments and supporting colleagues in speaking to their manager (or even on their behalf, if they so wish) about unmanageable levels of work.
These discussions are always confidential and possible courses of action are always decided by the individual.
At Jersey-based trust services firm Fairway Group, the mental health strategy for the company comprises two parts: education and support. First, line managers have been trained to recognise signs of poor mental health and to be aware of what support is on offer.
Second, mental health first-aiders, trained by Mind Jersey, offer practical support and can recognise different types of poor mental health, from depression and anxiety to psychotic episodes. They are backed up by an employee assistance programme and private medical insurance that includes provision for professional help.
“More generally with the education work we’ve done, we’ve started to create a culture that’s a bit more honest and open,” says Matt Ebbrell, Fairway Group’s HR Director. “People are realising that it’s okay to not be okay and it’s okay to talk about it. The more you educate people, the more you realise the issues that are out there and can then start to talk about them.”
Creating the right workplace culture can be difficult, however. Having a culture of openness with no stigma around mental health issues, or to have workers feel confident to ask for help without fear of repercussion, is still some way off. “In most workplaces this is still a hard thing to do,” Rochester says. “We have come a long way in Deloitte, but we have a way to go.”
Hamon says managers need to be more aware of what’s going on with their teams and better at recognising signs of mental ill health. And the prevailing culture of presenteeism needs to go.
“Organisations need to put less emphasis on the amount of hours people work and more on what they are producing,” he declares. “Some people think that if they are being seen at their desk for 15 hours, then that’s a good thing. It’s a culture for some organisations that needs to be changed.”
Ebbrell says he’s been in situations in previous organisations where people have been pushed beyond their limits. “It’s not good and it’s not right,” he says.
Management challenge
Part of the solution is to educate people to be good managers and encourage their teams to work effectively and efficiently, and to be able to have challenging conversations when the time is right.
Ebbrell also believes that mental health in the workplace needs to be discussed at all levels of an organisation, including at board level. “It’s about getting procedures in place that work together to support staff,” he says. “There’s no point in telling managers to be alert to this issue if you’re not going to talk to other staff about their mental health. Equally, there’s no point in training staff to spot the signs of mental ill health and not speaking to managers about it.”
He continues: “For me, it’s about engaging the right decision-makers, but also having frameworks in place that complement each other.”
It may sound idealistic, admits Ebbrell, but it’s not unachievable. The real challenge is in having “an open and inclusive environment where people don’t feel afraid of failure or admitting a shortcoming”. When it comes down to it, prevention is always better than cure.