Managing Mental Health Injuries in the Workplace

About 45% of all Australians between the ages of 16 and 85 will experience mental illness during their lives, and as a manager, there’s a very great chance that at some point, you will be supervising an employee who is living with a mental illness.

The magnitude of the problem

Work-related mental health injuries affect one in five Australians and can have a significant impact on both employees and employers.

An estimated six million working days per year are lost by Australian workplaces due to mental illness, and around 7,200 Australians annually receive compensation for work-related mental health conditions. That’s a total of about $543 million paid out in compensation each year. 

The work environment

Employees may already be living with mental illness prior to joining an organisation, or may develop one during the course of their employment. A majority will be able to effectively manage their illness with no impact on their work. Others will need a short time of support. Only a minority will require an ongoing program to assist them to continue in employment.

Most people assume that mental illness develops outside of work. That’s not necessarily so. An unhealthy workplace or a specific workplace event can place an employee under significant stress and be instrumental to the development of such an illness, or increase its severity.

In fact, work stress and other psychosocial dangers are now leading causes of occupational injury and illness, and a significant and rising component of their burden.

Mental health injuries are covered by various state legislations. There is however, much that organisations should be doing to improve the identification and support of workers experiencing mental ill health or workplace stress, or both.

Business across Australia forfeits, in effect, over $6.5 billion each year by neglecting to extend early intervention or treatment to employees with mental illness.

Badly-managed mental health injuries further impact the mental health of the individual, and may lead them to reducing their participation in work, or removing themselves from the workplace altogether. Their organisation too, is impacted by:

• More unplanned absences
• More overall workdays lost
• Higher employee turnover
• Greater costs, as mental injuries cost more than other injuries

Organisations that implement programs to support and protect worker mental health are doing right by their workers, and right for the business.

Before mental injury happens

system such as HSI Donesafe. You’ll be better equipped to track and monitor psychological risks in the workplace, and work towards reducing them, and their impacts on your employees.

Manage psychological risk in your workplace by using an effective health and safety management

Our clients use the intuitive, easy-to-learn Donesafe platform to assist their safety and quality teams to intelligently assess worker mental health and manage corrective actions to reduce hazardous behaviour and risk. With Donesafe, you can:

• Lower exposure to risk by defining mental health standards and assessing individuals, in order to promote productivity and lower incident risk. Let Donesafe calculate results and make recommendations across all business lines. 
• Automate corrective actions by automatically assigning mandatory training based on worker roles, and on trigger actions based on mental health assessment scores. Schedule follow-ups without even clicking a button.
• Perform complete wellness management by managing mental health through its entire life cycle, using the one integrated platform.
• Access a clear, up-to-moment, snapshot of mental health management with Donesafe’s one-page dashboard, which shows all upcoming scheduled training, overdue assessments, actions, sign-offs, and much more. Then use Donesafe to conduct filtered searches to drill into your records. 

If a mental injury occurs

Our clients use the Solv platform to more effectively manage workers with mental health injuries. An online injury and claims management system helps managers spend less time on arduous tasks, and more on the employee. This can reduce the amount of time the employee is absent from the workplace, and deliver better return-to-work outcomes. With Solv, you can easily:

• Manage early intervention
• Upload and track medical certificates
• Create your custom return-to-work plan in the system
• Ensure the confidentiality of mental health injuries in the system
• Record notes and communications for easy reference later on
• Take advantage of reporting functionality to obtain an overview of injury and claim trends, including across injury types such as mental health

Why the focus now

The generational shift has been a key driver of improved mental health management. Millennials and GenZs now comprise the majority of workforces, and these generational groups have emerged as those most affected by mental health issues. Now they demand action. 

Organisations that monitor their workplaces to prevent mental injury, and effectively manage worker mental health, reap the quantifiable financial benefits of retaining employees and helping them remain integral and effective. And, for highly selective new generations of job seekers, these organisations also establish themselves as employers of choice.