Episode 173 - Mental Health and Safety

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French explores mental health as a workplace issue, sparked by a Professional Safety Journal article on mental health and suicide in construction. He emphasizes that while work doesn’t necessarily cause mental health struggles, it can be a significant stressor, with leadership, culture, and supervision playing key roles in employee well-being.

A major insight is that direct supervisors can influence employees’ mental health as much as their family members. Poor leadership can create a toxic environment, while supportive leadership can foster well-being. The episode challenges the common “blame-the-worker” approach to safety incidents, arguing that mental health issues often contribute to distraction and errors.

Access to mental health resources remains a challenge, with employees facing stigma, unresponsive EAP programs, and difficulty finding suitable providers. However, survey findings from the construction industry were not as negative as expected, indicating some progress in workplace mental health initiatives.

Dr. French expresses optimism about increasing employer investment in mental health resources, as seen at HR and safety conferences. He calls for varied, adaptable approaches to mental health support, ensuring employees feel safe discussing their struggles. Ultimately, fostering a strong workplace culture that prioritizes mental health alongside physical safety is essential for employee well-being and overall organizational success.

Transcript

Unknown: 0:01

This week on the podcast, we're talking about mental health in the workplace. It's a leadership issue, it's a safety issue, it's a people issue, and it's huge, and has always been part of what we need to work on and where we can improve. This week on the podcast, you Music. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Mark's passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety. Nothing is more important than protecting your people safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. You music. Hello and welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. Thank you for joining me. I'm excited that I can be part of your podcast playlist. So thank you for joining me this week. We're gonna touch on a subject again, and I think we've probably talked about this a little bit before, mental health in the workplace. It's something that's very near and dear to my heart. It's something that's very real, and it's something that it's uncomfortable to talk about. Sometimes it's hard to analyze, it's hard to figure out how to handle it, and there's just a lot there. So let's see if we can unpack it in the short amount of time we have together this week, at least get a high level and talk about it and hopefully begin better conversations about how we address mental health in our workplace. So what triggered this, for me is there is a fantastic article that was part of the ASSP journals, professional safety journal, now known as PSJ. It's the January 2025, edition, and there is a peer review journal in there, and it's called a silent hazard, a regional survey on mental health and suicide in construction. Very interesting survey, very interesting data that they came with from the construction industry, which I think is a really tough industry. There's a lot of stigma, there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff there that can prevent mental health from really taking root. And that's not being judgmental, that's not being anything other than just saying it's hard to be able to talk about mental health, and in some settings, it's even harder that there's some places that is more accepted to talk about it than in other places, and in some places there's more resources than in other places. Seeing that we're addressing it and looking at it and evaluating it in the construction industry is really interesting. Now I want to begin by taking a step back and going mental health is a work issue, not saying that that work causes it. It can. Work can be a stressor. It can be a big stressor. And a lot of that, interestingly, is linked to company culture, values and supervision, leadership that you're those leaders can actually have more influence or equal importance as family members when it comes to overall happiness. So do we influence it as leaders in the workplace? Yes. Does it also come with us as part of our potentially genetic makeup, part of what we bring in as what we are exposed to an environment and also what our life situation is, yeah, super complex, but that's people. We are complex, and so many times it's unfortunate, but there's the blame the worker scenario when there we overuse the statistic and we overuse this statement that and take your percentage in the 90s, high 90s, low 90s, I'm going to pick the mid 90s. The 95% of all industrial accidents are because of a behavior, okay? And so if we're. Going to focus on behaviors, don't we have to go a little bit deeper, because this goes back to the whole like, blame, shame, retrain terrible mentality of when it comes to disciplinary action or helping with safety. But if we take it that, yeah, we there are behaviors that can lead to that we need to go one step deeper and ask why, what, how, and really deep dive that aspect of human nature. And if we look at it, we can see that mental health, mental wellness, mental acuity, mental readiness, is a big piece of it. And if we're saying that the work culture or a supervisor is causing and can cause that much issue in the workplace, why are we not addressing it? Now, this is a soap box, and I'm going to move on past this, but I have to say it, because we can't. We can't, on one hand, say, Oh yeah, the worker was distracted. Let's retrain them. Let's say it's behavior related, and then not look at ourselves and say, what did we do to enable that behavior, or did we encourage that behavior? Was there a decision that encouraged that behavior? And I'll definitely say if you look at some of the current research coming out of the Kraus Bell group, especially looking at safety decision making and seeing how decisions really do, long term, affect the safety at the moment and the choices and behavior in the moment of an accident. So I feel that we we have to hold accountable both sides. And now let's go back and look at the root of mental health in the workplace and so many times outside of work, we even blame mental health on a lot of things, and what really infuriates me is the lack of resources that are there. It's not easy to get mental health help for a lot of reasons. One, sometimes it's hard to ask for help because there is still the stigma that you can't see it, you can't touch it, you can't do a clinical test and say, Oh yeah, it's mental health. You can't do those. So is it real? It's real, and yet there's still the stigma behind it that is hard to say those things and to think about those things. So when we look at that, and we take that just a little bit deeper, and say, well, now I feel like I can finally say something. I feel empowered. I've seen the resources. I've seen what. And that takes a lot of effort for an organization, for a person, there's a lot of energy that gets pushed into that, for someone to go, Okay, I'm aware that there's help, and maybe I do need that help, and when they reach out, is someone available. I have heard horror stories in the HR world of people calling and calling for help on an EAP number and being hung up on having like no one answering, being referred to someone who then actually isn't available. Taking an absurdly a long time to get a referral. By that point, you begin to second guess yourself and go, Oh my this is too much work. This is too much hassle. I don't think I'll do it. And that also is some interesting excuses for a lot of health things. It's inconvenient, it's expensive, it's all those things. So therefore I won't do it and put myself at risk. Mental health is the same, and I think, even more neglected than some other items. Secondly, it's really hard to find matching help, because just like finding a good doctor, you want someone who really understands, someone who can help with what you're looking for and tailored to you. So it's hard, it's hard to find the right person. That's where having resources available as a company is so important, having a good resource available, having leadership that recognizes not to pry in people's lives, but to recognize that someone may be in distress, and then offer it and keep putting it in front of them to go, Hey, we have resources. We beer. This is that I've heard good story. I've heard this about it. I Anything, anything that would help someone feel more comfortable about getting the help that they may need at that time, we have to have it available. It has to be good, and it has to match up with hopefully more and more. I remember years ago where it was hard, really hard, to find an insurance that paid for a level of mental health. Help, and then finding a person that would actually take that insurance for that it that was really tough back in the day, and it has gotten easier, and it's getting better. We're getting more awareness, so hopefully the the read, the baseline resources and the understanding are there for how we can affect and improve mental health in the workplace. Let's actually talk about the article and some of the findings there, and how I'm actually a little bit optimistic by the findings in this research on the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast. You are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French, dsda Consulting, learn you lead others. The Myers, Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at tsda consulting.com Welcome back to the second half of our leading and learning through safety podcast. So this week, we're talking about mental health in the workplace and using a really great article in the professional safety journal from the ASSP january 2025, edition. And I was pleasantly surprised by some of the findings. I expected it to be much worse. I expected the state of mental health in the construction industry from this relatively small but powerful survey and research to be worse. But let me talk a little bit about what some other findings were one when they talked about the question like, where is your stress coming from? It? It reaffirms some other previous research from other areas that say that the supervisor manager are equal to in most cases, or even slightly behind, but mostly equal to a spouse or partner, that a manager, you have that much power to make someone's life poor. As a life partner, that's a powerful thing. It's the negative side that by acting as a leader that doesn't care, but acting as a leader who isn't really a leader. Not even going to say that if you're doing these things to make people miserable, you're not a leader. Don't, don't even bother calling yourself. That you can be, you can change, but you have so much power to make someone's life miserable. I don't it's tough in an organization. Your organizational culture sustains that or or creates it, or gets rid of it. It has a choice, but you have to do it. And I really encourage a lot of organizations to focus on and I've heard Simon Sinek even talk about this, finally, a hole. That's the everybody will know who that is. If you say, Hey, who's that? Who's that person in our organization, they'll point to them. They'll know who they are. And that's a really funny story. When he talks about it's his story about the Navy SEALs, how they find their next leader. And it's about trust and it's about performance, but it's more about trust. They'd rather have high trust in average performance than super high performance and low trust, because that the morale, the mental well being of the team is a loss because of that. So some of the other interesting items is, like effort, like employee perspective, my my organization, could do more to improve mental health. A lot of just neutral, like I expected to be, to be very overwhelmingly negative, and it was actually mostly neutral. There was some agrees, but that's of course, we could do more. I don't think you could ever do enough, but it's sometimes hard to find the right resources. And I'm being perfectly honest and open that you can get a you can evaluate your employee assistance program. You can make sure it works, make sure it's strong and has. There's some really specialty organizations that can help with just mental health, but it's still hard. It's not easy, to keep finding new resources, new ways, and it takes a lot of effort to do that. And then some of the other questions is worker discomfort in discussing mental health, and it goes from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and it's almost like a 20% split all the way around. Again, I expected that to be a lot more negative. I didn't. Expect there to be such a strong agree and significantly agree that that they're willing to talk about it, that we're willing to put it out there and actually have conversations or at least address it so that we can do something about it. Because, again, we say and we that behavior is part of the injuries that happen. This isn't just a psychological safety. This turns into physical safety quickly, because if we're distracted by other things, the mental health issues that are there, we're not the performer that we need to be, and that's when we need extra support. We need those extra times to an extra effort and extra everything. That's when there has to be that support system in place to help people perform to the best of their ability. Again, the research, when I briefly read through it and say about looking at responsibility, looking at resources. It's better. It could be improved. Of course, it can be improved, but overall, it felt very positive. It felt like we're improving compared to where I would have said a few years ago or longer, that it's getting better, and that's good, because I am seeing a lot more effort when I go and again, I always look for, where is the money flowing? Like if you go to a an HR safety trade show, like an educational conference, and you look at, what are the vendors selling? Follow the money. If they're coming up with new and inventive things, there's a market for it, and there's a reason for it, and I'm seeing more and more resources for mental health, for employee education, on those things, employee life, skill, style, items. More and more we're seeing these markets pop up. Why? Because there's a need, and someone sees the need and fills it with a product or service. That's great. It's good to see this. The more that I'm seeing that come up, it means that more and more companies are wanting it. More and more organizations are demanding that this type of help, like they're saying, This isn't our wheelhouse. We can't do this. We need help doing this thing with mental health. And again, mental health is is tangible and yet intangible, because it affects everyone so differently. There's categories like any diagnosis, but it affects us all subtly. It cannot be subtle. It can have very different effects on very different people. And so their approach to addressing it has to be varied. It's definitely not one of those approaches where you can do one approach and it's going to work for everyone. There has to be varied approaches, even if it's subtly varied, there has to be at least some variation help people, just like a good safety program, you have to be able to motivate and train and educate and lead with a varied approach, because not one style is ever going to work 100% of the time you can, you can shoot for the average, but a lot of times you still have to vary it up to make that work fit who's around you, who you're working with, and what you're doing. And that's why safety, the core function of just people, physical safety expands so fast when you think about behaviors and actions and different engineering, it really focuses so broadly on what we do all the time, and it's about leadership and figuring out how we motivate people to be able to be their best when they come to work, or at least know that when they can't be their best, we have a strong culture that can have their back. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast as always. Thank you for making me part of your playlist until next time we chat, stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot tsda consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice. You. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.