Mind Your Head – and identify mental health risks in your workplace
LOOK OUT FOR MORE ON THIS CAMPAIGN IN THE UPCOMING EDITION OF THE POINT.
The Mind Your Head campaign is a joint initiative between unions and employers, supported by Employers Mutual Limited and WorkSafe, to give workplaces the resources they need to identify and address workplace mental health hazards.
It’s a checklist which can help locate the source of the problem when the following issues arise in your school: low morale, burn-out, poor workplace culture, or toxic behaviour.
These problems are the result of are psychosocial hazards, which are defined as “anything in the design or management of work that increases the risk of work-related stress and psychological injury”.
Psychosocial hazards include:
· The design or management of work
· The working environment or equipment
· Social factors at work.
Such mental health hazards may be one-off occurrences, a result of prolonged exposures or accumulative in nature.
(c) Mind Your Head
The Mind Your Head checklist covers 74 potential risks in ten categories: management commitment; job demands and resources; job control and recognition; bullying, harassment, and gendered violence; violent and traumatic events; organisational practices; role clarity and responsibilities; workplace relationships; environmental conditions; and WHS awareness.
The Mind Your Head guidance on psychosocial hazards states:
“Just like physical health and safety hazards, such as slippery surfaces, dangerous and unguarded machinery and badly set-up workstations, there are also workplace mental health hazards, like high and low job demands, isolated work and poor role clarity.
“These workplace mental health hazards injure thousands of workers each year, just like physical hazards but they often fly under the radar.
“Workplaces are experiencing a mental health emergency, with workplace mental injuries now the fastest growing type of workplace injury in Australia.
“Mental health hazards can have a major impact on individuals, but they also affect everyone in the workplace through high staff turnover, reduced productivity and of course, an increase in workers’ compensation claims.”
The Mind Your Head campaign aims to:
· Raise the priority of mental health and safety to sit equal to treatment of physical health and safety
· Educate and develop workers, HSRs, Managers and Leaders to understand work-related mental health risk factors and the relationship with WHS
· Design tools and resources for workplaces to create mentally safe systems of work
· Facilitate engagement with workers, HSRs, managers and leaders to work together to create mentally healthy work
· Review and analyse the interventions to determine best practice and create a community that learns from each other.
Employers have a responsibility to provide a safe working environment for employees – and this applies equally to both physical and psychological health.
You can learn more by visiting australianunions.org.au and searching for ‘Mind Your Head’.
Here’s the checklist:
OHS checklist for psychosocial hazards
And some addition info about psychosocial hazards: