Following Mental Health Awareness Week in May and the launch of Pascal®, our online stress audit tool, we are pleased to have been part of Health and Safety at Work’s roundtable discussion on mental health and wellbeing, alongside nine other experts.
With an evidence-based and practice-fresh viewpoint on what works and what doesn’t, the roundtable discussion covered the Health and Safety at Work Act and the regulatory safety net, and whether the UK needs new legislation with a tighter mesh.
It also looked at what drives organisational change, and whether compliance and legislation or the business and productivity case are most likely to drive this. Discussing this further, the roundtable group went on to discuss the BSI’s new PAS 3002 Code of practice and how this could provide the answer to improving health and wellbeing within organisations.
The discussion then turned to innovative approaches to health and wellbeing. Amongst these were Queen Mary University of London’s campaign to eliminate non-value added work for employees to reduce demand and workload; construction company Barhale’s 10 strategy – Be Healthy, Be Safe, which asks staff difficult questions for feedback on what the organisation should do, and our very own Pascal® stress tool.
Discussing our new stress tool, Pascal®, Andrew Harris, Client Wellbeing Manager described how it works and how it gets to the cause of stresses in the workplace by looking at both work and home life, something that other products in the market fail to do.
Beyond this, the group agreed that wellbeing initiatives which focus on the behaviour of the individual are addressing symptoms, not root causes, and that wellbeing should be managed more like safety, as the workplace can create psychosocial hazards in addition to physical ones.
To read more here is a full report of the discussion: Health and Safety at Work – Mental health and well being: agenda for change