Celebrating Mental Health Awareness Month in October 2023

Mental health is just as important as looking after our physical health. Learn why you should make time to invest in you and your team’s self-care this Mental Health Awareness Month.

Mental Health Awareness Month provides us with a reminder to prioritise our mental health and ensuring the workplace is mentally healthy, so that your employees stay mentally “fit”. Perks People Solutions provides some practical ways you can focus on your mental fitness and support your employees to do the same.

Promoting good mental health practices in the workplace

Promoting and supporting a variety of mental health practices amongst staff is a positive action that employers can take to improve productivity and assist in managing their Work Health and Safety (WHS) obligations. Employers can start by consulting with staff about what activities they might enjoy – whether they be physical (e.g., exercise of any sort, participating in outdoor activities such as riding a bike) or mental (e.g., socialising, mindfulness, mediation, practicing gratefulness, having a hobby). Identify what sort of information you could promote in your workplace about why making time for these physical and mental activities are important for their wellbeing. If you want to develop something greater, create a workplace environment over time where information is given regularly. Create opportunities for staff to explore regular wellbeing activities in the workplace, and/or identify any staff “Wellbeing Champions” in the workplace to spread the word.

Creating a mentally healthy workplace

Employers have a responsibility to mitigate hazards to employee’s mental health as far as reasonably practicable. With the introduction of a national Code of Practice for managing psychosocial hazards at work, proactive steps to ensure your workplace is mentally safe and healthy for employees is now more important than ever. As well as taking reasonable steps to protect employees from bullying, harassment, and discrimination, ensuring employees’ workloads are reasonable, they have clarity about their job and are encouraged and supported to ask for help when needed will contribute to creating a mentally healthy workplace.

Benefits of a mentally healthy workplace

As well as complying with WHS requirements and mitigating risks to the business, within a mentally healthy workplace employees interact with each other respectfully and take responsibility for contributing to a mentally healthy work environment. A mentally healthy workplace also has lower rates of absenteeism and turnover, high productivity, and high job satisfaction.

What resources can help?

Policies and procedures which address bullying, harassment, sexual harassment, and discrimination are very important first steps. Secondly, proactively providing training and resources to your employees to demonstrate your investment in their mental health and safety at work goes beyond just compliance. Perks People Solutions can assist in developing and providing policies, procedures and training. Perks People Solutions has also recently developed a Mental Health and Wellbeing Guidelines template, which can be amended to suit any business. The guidelines will help you to demonstrate to your team that you are committed to improving and maintaining employees’ wellbeing.

Cecilia White( Director, HR Consulting )

With a background in legal practice, Cecilia has developed strong technical expertise in all matters relating to workplace law, including awards, contracts, disciplinary matters, investigations, equal opportunity and HR policy development. Her legal background is combined with her expertise across all areas of HR management and strategy, as well as significant experience in delivering workplace training.

Cecilia is also an experienced and nationally accredited mediator, specialising in workplace mediation.

With a proven ability to provide advice that is both technically sound and commercially pragmatic, Cecilia’s focus is to develop strong partnerships with clients and work with them to manage risk and liability, ensure compliance, optimise performance and achieve positive outcomes for their organisation, however large or small. She strongly believes that prevention is better than the cure and that strong policies and contracts, early intervention and excellent communication are critical to ensuring effective people management.