Utility Week

18 | 17TH - 23RD JANUARY 2020 | UTILITY WEEK Operations & Assets Event Utility Week Health & Safety and Wellbeing Conference A s the challenges rain down thick and fast in the sector, increased pressure on employees can lead to unwelcome side effects. That makes it more important than ever for firms to consider employee health and wellbeing holistically, including their mental health. But unless they tackle the issue from the top, with good manage- ment and backing from the board, they could be wasting their time. This was the key message at the recent Utility Week confer- ence held in Birmingham. The conference kicked off with a focus on what utility companies could be doing to improve wellbeing and mental health. Keynote speaker Dame Carol Black, an expert on the relationship between work and health and author of three key government reviews on the subject, said: "Traditionally, workplace health and safety has been sepa- rated from the concept of health promotion and wellbeing." She advised companies that taking it seri- ously involved more than "putting in the Zumba classes or fresh fruit on the table, they are just sticking plasters. "This is about embedding health and wellbeing as part of a company culture," she said. Dame Carol is an adviser to the NHS and Public Health England, and she pointed to a dearth of empirical analytics on health and safety initiatives, which can make it hard to differentiate good intentions from effective action. She said that, fundamentally, stress at work came from the "absence of 'good work'". She defined this as "not how much you earn but how much control you have at work, how much you trust your employer". She added: "If that's not there, we oŠen respond with symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, and musculoskeletal pain. GPs have to medicalise what they write on the note of absence even though it's oŠen not the truth; they never write "can't get on with line manager". "So oŠen, back pain is really not so severe, it's the mental health problems that the person doesn't want written down and shown to their employer." Dame Carol said that tackling mental health issues means engaging senior manag- ers and the board to help line managers to understand mental health problems. "Most businesses will know that they have some degree of mental health challenge in their workplace. Companies usually want to do the right thing. But they don't attend to these essential enablers." Dame Carol highlighted the results of the 2018 Britain's Healthiest Workplace survey, developed by Vitality Health, the Financial Times and Cambridge University and others, which showed that 36.5 days on average are lost each year because of absence and presenteeism. "Essentially, what that mean is you might as well not go to work until the middle of February." The survey showed the biggest cause of productivity loss was stress (see graphs, right). Dame Carol urged utility companies to take a scientific and data-led approach to implementing change, which would enable them to see where best to channel resources. Workplace experience She was joined for a wide-ranging discus- sion on the topic by health and safety prac- titioners from utilities and construction who answered questions from the audience. Joe Murphy, head of health, safety, security and wellbeing at Southern Water, observed that companies still had a lot to learn: "As a society, we're starting to unpack slightly around mental health, and peo- ple who for many years have had time off because they've got a rash, or headaches or something, are starting to find out that it's a mental health issue that's linked to a physi- cal reaction. "We need to start joining the dots, work- ing together, pushing on this issue, very quickly. Because there's a whole group of potential employees coming through that won't work for us, they'll go and work for someone that does provide for their men- tal health and wellbeing, and their physi- cal health, and thinks about it as a system, rather than individual silos, or individual pots of budget if you like." Judith Grant, director of health and well- Why good management equals good mental health Stress and anxiety lead to major losses in productivity. With 1 in 4 people experiencing mental issues at some point in their life, how can employers help? Denise Chevin reports.

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