Utility Week

40 | FEBRUARY 2021 | UTILITY WEEK Operational Excellence What works: how utilities are tackling mental health Energy and water companies told the conference about a variety of strategies for improving staff wellbeing Making it part of the conversation at Hinkley Point C Gavin Campbell, EDF con- tinuous improvement and learning manager at Hin- kley Point C, said that the approach to tackling men- tal issues on site at the new power station was to almost normalise it and get people talking about it. He said it was particularly hard in con- struction, and especially on a site where 90 per cent of the 5,000 workforce were male, to overcome the stigma of mental illness. Doing so required leadership commitment, he said. Hinkley employs 370 mental health first aiders, one for every 15 people on site. He described a "watershed moment" where at the end of a briefing for a group of workers one of the mental health first aid- ers, a steel fixer by trade, "stood up in front of 126 of his peers and said 'if you're having a rubbish day, if anything's on your mind, come talk to me. I will make time for you'. "So if you can normalise mental health challenges into a conversation that reso- nates with the audience, then you really are on the journey to breaking that taboo." Campbell described a number of other initiatives around wellbeing, including setting up clubs and discussion groups, because many site workers live away from home in accommodation provided. "And that's an important point, because when you're trying to make mental health a part of the conversation, you don't ask your people to come to you for that conversation. It's important to enable teams to have those conversations among themselves." Treat mental health with the same priority as asset failure Susan Gee, group occupa- tional health and wellbe- ing manager at Yorkshire Water, said senior leaders should treat mental health issues among their work- forces with the same urgency they would do for problems with their physi- cal assets. "We personally have a mandated day-one referral to occupational health for mental health and stress issues. And that's not to say that people are seen on day one, that is to acknowledge it as day one. "The way I sold this to my then CEO was that I said 'if we've got 221 reservoirs, and quite a significant number were breached, or leaking, or going to fail, you definitely Event Mind your business The pandemic has made wellbeing and mental health an even tougher ask, found Utility Week's recent Heath Safety & Wellbeing Conference. Denise Chevin reports. O ver the past few years, businesses of all sizes in the UK and globally, both private and public, have acknowl- edged the importance of mental health and wellbeing. But the pandemic has taken this issue to a whole new level, as workforces have found themselves working remotely, juggling with home schooling, or being fur- loughed, not knowing if they will have a role to return to. At Utility Week's Health, Safety & Wellbeing Conference held in December, a number of speakers pointed to an accelera- tion in those seeking help for mental health problems in the wake of Covid-19. And 94 per cent of the audience said that workers' stress levels had risen during the pandemic. Setting the scene for the debate was the eminent expert and governmental depart- ment adviser on the relationship between work and mental health, Dame Carol Black. She stated at the outset: "It's crucial CEOs and other senior executives make it clear to employees that they care about and under- stand mental health, that it's good to talk about it, and that you shouldn't be embar- rassed if you have to say that you're feeling under the weather, or you're depressed." Black said many studies had revealed the dire effect that the pandemic was having on people's mental health, including a report from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showing that the population's mental health was at the lowest level since records began. Black added that many organisations had been addressing the challenges of men- tal health. "I think they were trying to put things in place to combat these [issues]. But no-one could quite have known what it was going to be like. People have had to be very active on their feet, adapt and go with the flow, and put in things that they believe need to be there to support mental health. "So I think mental health, for quite a time, will have a higher priority, because we've got to support and enable people to come back to work and not feel unduly stressed and anxious." Gavin Campbell, EDF's continuous improvement and learning manager at Hin- kley Point C, the nuclear power station under construction in Somerset, said that the pan-

• Cover