Support System
USING THE STANDARD: A NEW
STUDY REPORTS WHAT WORKS,
WHAT DOESN’T AND WHAT WE
CAN LEARN ABOUT SUPPORTING
PSYCHOLOGICAL HEALTH AND SAFETY
IN THE WORKPLACE
By Melissa Campeau
As Canadian workplace priorities go,
psychological health ranks high: This
country’s Deputy Ministers are now
assessed on the health and well-being
of their departments. That means a
portion of their performance pay is direct-ly
tied to how well they build a respectful
and psychologically healthy workplace.
Helping responsible employers support
workers’ mental health was the impetus
behind the National Standard of Canada
for Psychological Health and Safety in the
Workplace (the Standard), a set of resourc-es
and guidelines – the first of its kind in
the world – published by the Mental Health
Commission of Canada (MHCC) in 2013.
Now, a new study reports back on how the
Standard is being applied in Canadian workplac-es.
The just-released Case Study Research Project
(CSRP), led by MHCC, followed more than 40
Canadian organizations as they worked to implement the
guidelines, detailing best practices and lessons learned along
the way.
SHIFTING PARADIGMS
“One of the most surprising findings of the study is that organiza-tions
chose to adopt the Standard simply because they felt it was
the right thing to do,” said Louise Bradley, president and CEO of
MHCC. In fact, a full 90 per cent of organizations indicated their
primary motivator for implementing the Standard was to “protect
the psychological health of employees.”
“I suppose the skeptical side of me found that surprising be-cause
I really thought it would be looked at as a way of trying to
achieve a better bottom line,” said Bradley.
Those employers represent a major shift in how organizations
view employee psychological health, and how they perceive their
responsibility to support it. Although, it’s not hard to understand
24 ❚ APRIL 2017 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL