Addressing Gaps in Workplace Mental Health Programmes with Emily Pearson
In this episode of The Work Well Podcast, we’re speaking with Workplace Mental Health Programme expert Emily Pearson. Emily is the co-founder of Our Minds Work, a company that provides consultancy, training, and education to companies looking to create a mentally healthy work environment.
Emily has a lot to say about existing workplace mental health programmes. In this episode, she challenges our understanding of mental health in the workplace and takes a closer look at the training some organisations offer their employees in this area (including Mental Health First Aid) and outlines the safeguards that should accompany these types of training programmes.
Emily Pearson and her journey in the mental health industry
Emily has over 20 years of experience in mental health and her journey starts with her personal experience dealing with mental illness. She opens up the episode by telling us about her own struggles with mental health and how she turned this experience into a career where she could help people first-hand.
Her work experience began with the pilot of the Blue Light Programme, which had a huge influence on her. Now the programme is available across England and continues to offer assistance to emergency personnel to increase their level of resilience and promote mental health even in the most stressful work environments.
Our Minds Work
Our Minds Work is an initiative that started with Emily’s belief that mental health first aid should be an important part of work culture in all industries. So she did what she has done best throughout her career: innovate the way in which mental health interventions are delivered.
“I saw a lot of money and time being invested in mental health first aid training, and I just saw a huge problem with that, a lot of risks that it could potentially create for organisations. So I wanted to do something very, very different that was based on safeguarding people and creating mentally healthy workplace cultures.”
Changing work culture to improve mental health in the workplace
Our Minds Work uses a social-ecological model instead of one-off initiatives based on the individual.
“Culture is created by communication”, says Emily when talking about the difficulties co-workers, employers, and people in general have found when communicating in the workplace while they struggle with their mental health or find themselves in uncertain and stressful situations, like the Covid pandemic.
Positive communication in the workplace is the cornerstone of all mental health first aid initiatives and the beginning of a psychologically healthier environment in which to work.
Gaps with Mental Health First Aid Programmes
The gaps in the recruitment practices of most mental health first aid initiatives make it difficult to implement solid processes and systems to protect and support volunteers and workers.
Emily comments that one of the first measurements to be taken when selecting candidates for mental health first aid positions should be Disclosure and Barring Service checks (this is a UK procedure that checks the background of someone applying for a role similar to ‘Garda vetting’ in Ireland) but this rarely happens. Another measurement gap is that employers put these mental health first aiders in place with little to no understanding of what employees actually need or what success of the programme would look like. If you can’t measure what you’re doing, how can you deem it succesful or otherwise?
Mental health first aiders take on the huge responsibility of designing and implementing services workers can rely on. However, it is something very new to most industries, so the recruitment process and onboarding procedures need to be very specific and highly efficient to ensure the right people are put forward for the role.
Improving recruitment practices for Mental Health First Aid initiatives
Our Minds Work have created a blueprint for mental health advocacy training and implementation to support and protect workers as well as mental health first aiders. This helps to prepare the latter to manage sensitive topics related to mental illnesses more efficiently.
Being a new area for most companies, it is important to create structures that promote mental health advocates within organisations with transparency, so people can understand how and where to access these services in case they need them. This will also allow companies to create safeguards that mental health first aiders themselves can lean on when they are faced with challenging situations.
Practical steps to take that significantly improve mental health first aiders’ impact in organisations are: completing a gap analysis, collecting data from employees and coworkers to identify where the gaps are and introducing policies, procedures, and infrastructure to correct them.
How to convince leaders who believe they have already ‘done’ mental health”?
How do you get the support you need from leaders in your organisation to start implementing changes towards a mentally healthier work environment?
Emily has created a cultural change progression model, that empowers people and encourages them to feel passionate about their jobs and to think differently about mental health in the workplace. In fact, mental health has to be seen as part of a bigger, larger, structure.
“We want people to think not about mental health, but organisational culture because everything that falls under mental health comes from creating a mentally healthy workplace culture.”
The future of Mental Health First Aid in the workplace
“If we want to think about the future of work, we can start off by looking at what happens when we don’t create a mentally healthy workplace culture.”
Emily uses the logistics industry, one she knows well thanks to her husband, to illustrate the need for more mentally healthy workplace cultures in different industries, and how, even though the world is moving towards creating these structures within organisations, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all way to do so.
The consequences of not creating mentally healthy environments are clear: a negative effect on a brand’s reputation and poor performance due to lack of motivation and trust. These are workplace cultures we are, hopefully, leaving behind.
If you’d prefer to watch our conversation, you can view it on YouTube through this link.
If you liked this episode and want to know more about Our Minds Work, you can visit Our Minds Work’s website and LinkedIn page.
You can also find Emily Pearson on LinkedIn to know more about her initiatives.
Our Partners
This episode is brought to you in partnership with AJ Products who are leading the way in Ergonomic and Active workplace furniture solutions at ajproducts.ie
About Your Host
Brian Crooke is a wellbeing educator, speaker and adviser, empowering organisations to promote and sustain wellbeing within their workplaces.
He is the founder of The Work Well Institute and the Work Well Community and is Course Director of the Postgraduate Certificate in Workplace Wellness at Tangent, Trinity College Dublin. He is the host of The Work Well Podcast.
If you’re looking to bring sustainable wellbeing to your workplace then check out The Work Well Institute’s flagship programme, Developing a Workplace Wellness Programme that Lasts.
In his spare time, Brian is bringing free resistance training to every county and community in Ireland through his parkHIIT social enterprise.
If you have any suggestions for future topics you'd like to hear on the show, email Brian directly, brian@workwellpodcast.com