Unhealthy Workplace, Unhealthy Workers

Australian businesses aren’t prioritising their employees’ mental wellbeing with healthy workplace cultures and are suffering economically as a result, according to national mental health organisations.

In 2016, workplace mental illness cost Australian businesses approximately $12.8- billion in compensation costs, absenteeism and presenteeism, according to the 2018 KPMG and Mental Health Australia report Investing to Save.

Leanne Butterworth, founder of virtual-reality mental health awareness organisation LOSEYOURMIND, says that nurturing employees is cheaper than firing and replacing them.

“[Employees] need to feel safe because the people around them are interested in them as human beings, not just as money making machines,” she said.

“Leaders with empathy have better teams. So, if you put emotion and humanity back into the workplace, you get better business outcomes and you get better human outcomes.

“It’s in [employer’s] best interests to make sure [their employees] are happy and healthy in their work, because that’s winning for the mission, it’s winning for the business, it’s winning for [employees], it’s winning for them,” Ms Butterworth said.

Beyond Blue says a mentally healthy workplace is one that protects and promotes mental health and empowers people to seek help for the benefit of the individual and organisation.

Nine out of 10 employees agree that mentally healthy workplaces are important, but only half believe their workplace is, according to Beyond Blue.

Donna Thistlethwaite, a career counsellor at Career Vitality, says that signs which indicate an unhealthy work culture include poor morale, bullying, sexual harassment, poor leadership, lack of trust, burnout and dreading going to work.

“If we are not happy at work, it will generally spill over into other areas of our life. We should all get to do work we enjoy and that aligns with our values,” Ms Thistlethwaite said.

“Some people work in psychologically unsafe environments where they don’t feel valued or the workload expectations are unrealistic,” she said.

Ms Thistlethwaite says a healthy workplace has healthy conflict, high trust, respect, honesty, leaders who know and support their employees, reasonable hours and policies and procedures which manage mental health.

Dr Jennifer Wilson, a clinical psychologist at Benchmark Psychology, is concerned that workplaces don’t take enough responsibility for the culture they create and its impact on their employee’s wellbeing.

“There are all kinds of things that can pop up at work which result in people being really impacted from a psychological perspective,” she said.

“When employees inadvertently place the responsibility for mental health onto the individual it takes away [their] responsibility to consider whether their expectations are reasonable, whether they’re supporting people to have a good work-life balance and whether they’re expecting people to be constantly attached to their work phones.

“People might be working really long hours over long periods of time. They might even be asking for extra support, extra resources or extra help and that’s not provided,” Dr Wilson said.

According to Ms Butterworth, managers have a duty of care to make sure their employees aren’t making themselves physically or mentally sick.

“If everything’s measured in dollars, not in human factors, then people can be overlooked,” she said.

“If you have leaders without empathy, that causes people to feel distressed and dismissed,” Mrs Butterworth said.

Health experts agree that anxiety, depression and chronic stress can also inflame physical problems.

“People in chronic stress situations are at risk of a whole range of other health complaints if it continues too long, because there’s only so much that your body can sustain at that speed,” Dr Wilson said.

“Chronic stress produces an awful inflammatory response in the body that is really bad for our health and immune function generally.”

Dr Wilson says highly-strung people will often experience physical symptoms like heart palpitations that won’t settle down, tightness in their chest, feeling sick in their stomach, sweatiness and inability to sleep.

Stress can also make an appearance in subtle, behavioural ways, such as emotional eating. According to the most recent Australian Psychological Society Stress and Wellbeing Report, 75- per cent of Australians eat to manage stress.

Inner Health Nutrition dietician Taylor Vickery says that intense stressful or negative emotions can lead to unhealthy relationships with food.

“There’s definitely a relationship between mental health and poor food choices,” she said.

“A lot of the time when people are emotionally eating, they have a lot of guilt and negative emotions associated with that overeating, and that worsens the longer they emotionally eat without getting support,” Ms Vickery said.

A Brisbane based businessman, who shall remain confidential, prevents his employees from reaching unhealthy stress levels or encountering physical issues with strategic and empathetic leadership.

“People join companies and leave because of the manager,” he said.

“I like to give my [employees] lots of responsibility. If people are responsible for something, if they feel they own it, they take more care of it and have pride in it.

“Praise publicly, admonish privately. If they do something wrong don’t go in front of everybody. Talk to them privately about it.

“I’m very flexible. I encourage my staff to question me. I’d much rather be embarrassed in front of them if I say something wrong than a client,” he said.