Developing A Mental Health Strategy - Practical Guidance Series - Part 2

How developing a Mental Health Strategy fits within a broader change management approach.

Let’s start with a quick refresher…

 Why it’s important to take a purposeful approach and develop a mental health strategy

I think we’d all agree that we want to create a mentally healthy workplace. But what does it look like?

A mentally healthy workplace promotes mental health and wellbeing for the whole workforce, develops strategies to reduce the risks of mental or psychological harm, and ensures that staff who do develop mental illness are supported in a way that promotes recovery where possible.

To effectively create a mentally healthy workplace we need to take an integrated, holistic approach, one that cultivates the conditions for all employees to protect and strengthen their mental health, regardless of whether they have an identified mental illness or not. A well-designed Mental Health Strategy will help to apply that approach and bring it to life across your organisation.

What are some of the benefits you can expect?

• Decrease in absenteeism and turnover
• Increase in productivity, engagement, motivation and job satisfaction
• Support for workers to thrive and perform at their best

 A Change Management Approach – where the development of your Mental Health Strategy fits

We need to understand how the development and implementation of a new (or strengthened) mental health strategy with its various interventions and projects, fits in to a broader cultural change process. When we overlay a change management lens on to the goal of growing a mentally healthy workplace it provides a real-world, practical framework for the essential cultural change.

The four phases of a cultural change program

Critical Elements for Successful Cultural Change

In our 20 years of designing and delivering safety, health and wellbeing culture change programs across many different workplaces settings, we’ve found that the most successful psychological health and wellbeing change programs typically include these key components -

1. Senior leadership commitment, engagement and ownership
2. Co-creation and co-ownership of change framework and mental health strategy
3. Accountability and resourcing for autonomy-supportive leadership at all levels
4. Interventions are -
   a. Targeted
   b. Based on robust situational analysis of need
   c. Organisational, team and individual-level 
5. Psychological safety
6. High level of employee involvement/engagement
7. Psychological health and the promotion thereof is understood to be more than just mental illness

Taking into account all of these components, SafetyWorks has developed a Workplace Psychological Health & Wellbeing: Framework for Change to provide a systematic process for designing and implementing a holistic and sustainable change program for an organisation.

The Framework for Change is underpinned by an organisational commitment to continuous improvement, and rests on the premise that its ownership and creation is embraced as a collective employee responsibility that spans and includes the whole workforce.

Download your free copy of the Framework for Change here.