As the challenges rain down thick and fast in the sector, increased pressure on employees can lead to unwelcome side effects. That makes it more important than ever for firms to consider employee health and wellbeing holistically, including their mental health. But unless they tackle the issue from the top, with good management and backing from the board, they could be wasting their time. This was the key message at the recent Utility Week conference held in Birmingham.
The conference kicked off with a focus on what utility companies could be doing to improve wellbeing and mental health.
Keynote speaker Dame Carol Black, an expert on the relationship between work and health and author of three key government reviews on the subject, said: “Traditionally, workplace health and safety has been separated from the concept of health promotion and wellbeing.”
She advised companies that taking it seriously involved more than “putting in the Zumba classes or fresh fruit on the table, they are just sticking plasters.
“This is about embedding health and wellbeing as part of a company culture,” she said. Dame Carol is an adviser to the NHS and Public Health England, and she pointed to a dearth of empirical analytics on health and safety initiatives, which can make it hard to differentiate good intentions from effective action.
She said that, fundamentally, stress at work came from the “absence of ‘good work’”. She defined this as “not how much you earn but how much control you have at work, how much you trust your employer”.
She added: “If that’s not there, we often respond with symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, and musculoskeletal pain. GPs have to medicalise what they write on the note of absence even though it’s often not the truth; they never write “can’t get on with line manager”.
“So often, back pain is really not so severe, it’s the mental health problems that the person doesn’t want written down and shown to their employer.”
Dame Carol said that tackling mental health issues means engaging senior managers and the board to help line managers to understand mental health problems.
“Most businesses will know that they have some degree of mental health challenge in their workplace. Companies usually want to do the right thing. But they don’t attend to these essential enablers.”
Dame Carol highlighted the results of the 2018 Britain’s Healthiest Workplace survey, developed by Vitality Health, the Financial Times and Cambridge University and others, which showed that 36.5 days on average are lost each year because of absence and presenteeism. “Essentially, what that mean is you might as well not go to work until the middle of February.”
The survey showed the biggest cause of productivity loss was stress (see graphs, top).
Dame Carol urged utility companies to take a scientific and data-led approach to implementing change, which would enable them to see where best to channel resources.
Workplace experience
She was joined for a wide-ranging discussion on the topic by health and safety practitioners from utilities and construction who answered questions from the audience.
Joe Murphy, head of health, safety, security and wellbeing at Southern Water, observed that companies still had a lot to learn: “As a society, we’re starting to unpack slightly around mental health, and people who for many years have had time off because they’ve got a rash, or headaches or something, are starting to find out that it’s a mental health issue that’s linked to a physical reaction.
“We need to start joining the dots, working together, pushing on this issue, very quickly. Because there’s a whole group of potential employees coming through that won’t work for us, they’ll go and work for someone that does provide for their mental health and wellbeing, and their physical health, and thinks about it as a system, rather than individual silos, or individual pots of budget if you like.”
Judith Grant, director of health and wellbeing at Mace, picked up on Dame Carol’s message for the need to capture data, saying: “Having the evidence-based approach in organisations is the only way we’re going to get the board buy-in for this area.”
She said that Mace was halfway through a six-year research project looking at wellbeing, including the leading causes of poor wellbeing. By creating the evidence base, it would be possible to take the arguments and potential productivity gains of doing something about it to boards, and to the industry, and say that “this is what we need to do to change.”
Cause and effect
Another key theme that emerged was that companies could not necessarily choose to separate work-induced stress from other factors over which they had no control.
“If you’re trying to work out where the stress and anxiety starts, you’re wasting your time. If it’s affecting your productivity, then you should try to alleviate it,” advised Dame Carol. “I think you’ve just got to ask, ‘is this affecting this person’s ability to do their job?’ And trying to help probably relieves what’s going on elsewhere.”
Andrew Grant, head of safety and quality, Northern Gas Networks, urged managers to be more vigilant. “We’re all very well attuned to doing health surveillance for noise, vibration syndrome, skin conditions, all that kind of traditional health stuff. But we don’t do it particularly well for mental health. We wait until people are showing signs of falling down, and then we step in and do our localised intervention.
“One thing I do with my team is whenever I have a one to one, for the first 15 minutes we don’t mention work at all. We talk about their kids and their partner, and so on. And that level of trust and engagement helps you understand the bigger picture and what’s going on outside work.”
Panellists said managers needed training to equip them with the confidence to talk to staff about sensitive issues, rather than leave this to Occupational Health or HR.
It’s not enough to say “you’ve gone on a one-day course, now you’re an expert”, said Grant. “You’ve got to have that human conversation, and get your managers equipped to spot where the issues are, but also feel comfortable having a conversation with people.
“You’ve got to show people how to be a manager. Good management breeds good management, so if they’ve been fortunate enough to have a good manager, they’ll learn from that,” he concluded.