Mean Business
Workplace wellbeing: the low hanging fruit
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This week is National Psychology Week, and as part of awareness activities that are going on, psychologist Simon Brown-Greaves wrote an article for hrdaily titled “Empower managers to boost employee wellbeing“. I can’t directly link to hrdaily here, but it is free to subscribe.
One of Brown-Greaves’ ideas that attracted me concerned the idea that staff wellbeing is a straightforward physical affair:
People think that putting a bowl of fruit in the tea room is a wellbeing initiative. They make it too simple, and think that it’s all about eating, drinking and breathing right, when in fact that stuff really is not going to cut it as a wellbeing program.
He goes on to outline some of the initiatives that organisations should be focusing on for wellbeing, including better feedback, communication and consultation, role clarity, support, and acknowledging good work. In other words, all the psychological stuff. Well, who would have thought..!
Workplace wellbeing has become a bit of a buzz issue of late, and it tends to be operationalised, as Brown-greaves notes, with physical wellness: exercise and fitness programs, sports days/lunch competitions, yoga and pilates classes, provision of fresh and healthy snacks and drinks. Of course it should be obvious that wellbeing is a far wider concept than that. Psychological wellbeing is at least equally affected by the way work is organised (through stress, bullying, overwork, fatigue, motivation, rewards, comittment, achievement.. the list goes on) as physical health is affected by the way work is organised (posture, shift times, food availability, lighting ventilation etc). “Psychological issues” as they are sometimes called are often only dealt with by outsourced counselling through an employee assistance program (EAP). EAPs are important and very necessary in some circumstances. But some issues can be solved without counselling of individuals (as in the issues raised above), and this is where the organisational psych’s need to be acting. In essence here I’m arguing that our notion of what is “psychological” needs to be wider – it’s not just mental health, it is relevant in every part of our lives. (I’m still an enthused young psych student at heart!)
Physical wellness/wellbeing is the low hanging fruit, and its an easy way to put a positive spin on some potentially negative consequences of work.
It’s sad that we still don’t understand that our assumed distinction between what’s “physiological” and what’s “psychological” is a bit silly: they are just labels for different levels of focus. Everything psychological has a physical base. So it’s real. It has real consequences.
Solving such issues is not as easy as buying a fruit bowl or subsidising gym membership, because it involves subtle changes to how we work. But it’s totally worth the challenge.
I’d love to hear examples of any organisations developing truly comprehensive wellness/wellbeing programs.
I think I’ve now flown the flag for National Psychology Week.
The relative problem of bullying
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I was reminded a couple of weeks ago while talking to a group of business leaders of an idea I have often used in my teaching, about the exposure of different workers to different hazards. Bullying is now firmly seen as a health and safety issue in Australia – numerous reports, inquiries and articles support that, as does the guidance material that now exists across all Australian states and territories. I imagine this will also be supported by the new National Code of Practice on workplace bullying, which should be available for public comment soon (watch this space!).
With many workplace hazards, we can develop a “profile” of the kinds of workers who may be most exposed tho them. For example, the hazards that are particular to firefighters (eg. exposure to carcinogens at fires) have been highlighted recently, at a senate inquiry (see an article on this here).
When we think about bullying and psychological hazards in general, all workers have the potential to be exposed to these hazards, simply because they are humans in workplaces. Psychological hazards do not depend on the task you do, the equipment you use, or the physical environmental factors (like the fire and carcinogens for fire fighters) that surround your job. This is why it’s important for all workplaces to have good preventative systems.
But the relative exposure may well be different in different jobs. Contrasting blue collar and white collar workers is a somewhat crude distinction, but let’s use it for the sake of argument. Both blue and white collar workers can be exposed to psychological hazards. Let’s imagine the total sum of hazards to which blue and white collar workers can potentially be exposed to as a two pies. White collar workers are not exposed to that many different hazards, and certainly not as many highly serious ones as blue collar workers. As a proportion of their hazard profile (or pie), psychological hazards would make up a larger relative proportion of that pie, than for blue collar workers.
This doesn’t mean that white collar workers are more likely to get a psychological injury.
It doesn’t mean that blue collar workers are less likely to get a psychological injury, nor that psychological injury is any less important in those sectors.
It just means that when thinking about the total hazards to which a worker could be exposed, psych hazards make up a greater proportion of the hazards for white collar workers than for blue collar workers. The blue collar pie is made up of a range of other things like being hit by/caught in/cut by equipment, falling from heights, exposure to chemicals or other harmful materials etc; while the white collar pie has a more restricted range (manual handling and ergonomic issues being a major example).
The implication of this idea is that though all industries have the potential for psychological hazards, some industries have even greater reason to pay attention to psych hazards, because they constitute a greater share of workplace health and safety problems.
Stress and work absences
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It’s been known for some time that stress claims accounted for around 7% of all workplace compensation claims, and around 27% of all compensation costs (see Comcare, originally published in 2007). Some new data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (4102.0 – Australian Social Trends, Jun 2011, article on work and Health) and Safe Work Australia has indicated that workplace stress is associated with the longest time off work, compared to other mechanisms of workplace injury.
Number of claims for injuries where mental disorders are the mechanism (this includes issues such as stress, work pressure, bullying and harassment, in the formal classification codes employed) decreased when comparing 2000-1 to 2007-8 reporting periods. Reduced number of claims may be associated with several issues, including reduced incidence of injury, and/or reducing reporting of injuries or lodging of claims. One must be careful when interpreting these data, and its always best to go to the original source. (Further commentary is available here in a news article from The Age 31 July 2011). For example, I can’t determine from the ABS report exactly how stress was identified (it was probably as a subcategory of “mental disorders” which are a mechanism of occupational disease). Always good to try to chase down the specifics.
Nonetheless, the finding that workplace stress accounts for the most days off work, relative to other injury mechanisms, further highlights the importance of psychological hazards in workplace health and safety prevention.
The cost of workplace bullying
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Bullying has recently been in the news here in Sydney regarding the costs that it can have through compensation payouts.
In the education sector, about $2.5million has been paid in compensation for workplace bullying over the last three years. You can read the full article, from The Daily Telegraph, Feb 1, 2011, here.
The article demonstrates how not preventing workplace bulling, (that is, not doing something about it before it gets to a point where someone has a case for compensation) can be extremely costly. What the article doesn’t show is the costs that these kinds of behaviours have on the targets involved. However, sometimes cold hard dollar costs are necessary to provoke action.
The good thing to note from the article is that the education department is talking about bullying as a psychological hazard, and in terms of their risk management system. Not so long ago the problem would never have been discussed within this approach. So it’s a positive step forward for proactive, systemic and documented systems. But it’s implicit in the whole notion of a risk management framework that the system is continually improved, audited, and evaluated.
A few cautions spring to mind also. Now that we have data on the costs of bullying in Education, it is tempting to think that Education is a bit of a “hot-spot” for these kinds of behaviours. That may in fact be the case. But we shouldn’t only focus on education: bullying might be perceived to be a major problem in education because its one of the (few) places that we’ve looked at in depth. Other examples would be emergency services and health. The reality is that bullying can occur anywhere that people work together.
Secondly, these kinds of figures can lead to some mis-interpretations about prevalence. Data on compensation costs are not indicators of how wide-spread a problem is. Compensation data is just compensation data: the number of successful claims within a particular time period. So for every compensated case, there may be several other cases that do not meet the criteria for compensation; fail to proceed to a compensation claim; or are never reported, for whatever reason. There may be cases that are less severe in nature (but still “true” cases), or cases where the target simply leaves the organisation. I’m not interested in inflating measures of the prevalence of bullying, but we need to remember that compensation data, when used as an index of prevalence, underestimates it. So it probably shouldn’t be used to index prevalence at all.
Author
CarloPreventing Workplace Bullying; Caponecchia & Wyatt (2011)
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