Addressing psychosocial hazards reduces workplace costs

Case

The Melbourne Magistrate’s Court recently fined Court Services Victoria nearly $380,000 as a result of a toxic workplace culture that it considered had contributed to a Coroner’s Court lawyer’s suicide.

Issues

The psychosocial hazards generally arose out of exposure to traumatic materials, role conflict, high workloads, excessive work demands, poor workplace relationships and inappropriate workplace behaviours including bullying, verbal abuse, derogatory comments, intimidation, invasions of privacy and threats to future progression.

The warning signs for the workplace were relatively well known including workers reporting feelings of anxiety, traumatic stress, fear and humiliation, and taking long periods of sick leave.

Our thoughts

Unfortunately, like many cases of this nature, some managers wrongly attributed the deceased employee’s symptoms to personal issues (rather than work issues), and accordingly made no material changes to address, amongst other things, her excessive workload which was a particularly contributory factor. Whilst we understand that many managers may be reluctant to discuss mental health issues they think may be personal, given the risks of inaction, WHS actions should always ‘trump’ privacy.

Action Items

• Conduct appropriate risk assessments to specifically address psychosocial hazards – talk to your staff and get their input as to “what keeps them awake at night”. This is more likely to drive meaningful change;

• Implement genuine control measures based on those assessments – massage vouchers and fruit bowls are nice but are unlikely to ‘cut it’ when your staff just want a decent break from their work or time with their families and friends;

• Have ‘real’ position descriptions – position descriptions should not be a ‘marketing exercise’. This means ‘owning’ the more challenging aspects of your workplace and the work you do;

• Make leave count – Every athlete knows high performance needs recovery. Work is the same. Don’t allow employees to accumulate long periods of leave (or worse ‘pat them on the back’ for not taking leave). Take proper measures to ensure that employees who are sick or on other leave don’t ‘feel the need’ to keep on working and are not inadvertently disturbed with work requests;

• Use technology – whilst phones and computers are often blamed as the source of work stress they also have a great range of ‘hacks’ to provide a genuine break. Look to use and celebrate “Do not disturb”, “Out of Office” and calendar ‘blackouts’ to name a few;

• Remove any stigma – develop a culture, role modelled by leaders, where mental health is discussed without stigma; and

• Train and practice civility – Your grandmother was right – treat people nicely! Your grandmother also knew what Harvard researchers later proved – ie workers who are subject to uncivil behaviour are less productive (or worse more likely to leave) and uncivil behaviour also materially affects those who observe such behaviour.

Our retainer clients can access our template generic risk assessment tool.

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