What actions can you take to maintain your own mental health and to ensure that your workplace is psychologically safe?
Reaching these goals requires deliberate effort, according to the presenters of “Developing Leaders to Support Total Worker Health,” a recent International Foundation webcast. LaBarron Burwell, faculty and employee assistance consultant at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Judith Plotkin, national vice president of health solutions at People Corporation in Toronto, Ontario, provided strategies for achieving both objectives.
Do You Have Onion Breath? Building Mental Hygiene
Burwell introduced the concept of mental hygiene, which is the science of maintaining mental health and preventing disorders to help people function at their full mental potential. He compared mental hygiene to personal hygiene, explaining that much like people need to brush their teeth or take regular showers to maintain personal hygiene, they need methods to take care of their mental health.
One person’s strategy to deal with a negative experience might be to call a parent, while another might lie in the grass to relieve stress. “Each person has their own set of mental hygiene routines and practices that work for them,” Burwell explained.
To further illustrate the importance of these techniques, Burwell compared the daily stressors most people encounter to taking bites of an onion.
“If you woke up in the morning and you bit an onion, surely before you talked to someone, you’d brush your teeth, pop a mint . . . you’d do something,” he said. Everyday stresses—a call from a spouse about a child’s behavior at school, getting cut off by another driver in the parking lot—are like bites of an onion for someone’s mental health, he added.
“What are you going to do to get that onion off your breath?” he said. The more bites of an onion someone has, the more they are likely to react, so people need techniques to create peace of mind. They can also use techniques to calm themselves before stressful situations.
Possible mental hygiene techniques include the following.
- Mindful eating
- Taking regular breaks
- Seeking social support
- Engaging in physical activity
- Expressing emotions
- Practicing forgiveness
- Limiting news consumption
- Deep breathing
- Mindfulness meditation
- Gratitude journaling
- Positive affirmations
One of the ways people can make sure they’re prepared for the world is by taking care of their mental hygiene, Burwell concluded. “Ask yourself a simple question—Before you walk into work or school or before you greet your spouse, did you brush your teeth after you bit that onion?” he said.
Creating Psychological Health and Safety at Work
Plotkin discussed the concept of psychologically healthy workplaces and offered strategies for leaders who want to champion them.
She offered several definitions for psychologically healthy workplace, including: “A psychologically healthy and safe workplace is a workplace that promotes employees’ psychological well-being and actively works to prevent harm to worker psychological health.”
Psychologically safe workplaces are correlated to successful teams, and they can create environments where people can share creative ideas, Plotkin said. They also support diversity and inclusivity.
A workplace that is not psychologically safe might have some of these hazards:
- Low employee engagement and/or lack of influence over daily work
- Little or no professional development opportunities
- Poor physical work environment
- Physical violence
- Abuse of authority
- Lack of work accommodation.
Obvious manifestations of these hazards are behaviors, such as bullying and insults, and conditions, such as inequity and discrimination, but there are less recognizable signs, such as lack of role clarity, lack of ability to understand the work required or lack of transparency in decision making, Plotkin explained.
Employees who don’t feel psychologically safe at work can experience physical and emotional symptoms, and bystanders and entire teams can also experience trauma in these workplaces, she noted.
Leaders are the key to creating a culture of safety, Plotkin stressed, adding that they must shift attitudes and make safety—including physical, emotional and psychological safety—a priority.
“Cultivating that shift requires us to call on our leaders to be safe and secure in demonstrating empathy and compassion rather than judgment when they are interacting with their teams,” she said. They can also disclose their own struggles, if appropriate, to destigmatize mental health.
Plotkin suggested that those who want to champion psychological safety in the workplace focus on the following areas.
- Model being respectful and mindful of others. “Be mindful of language. Don’t use language that’s judgmental or discriminatory.”
- Provide and advocate for strong role clarity. “Make sure people know what they’re coming to work to do.”
- Independently investigate any complaint of harassment. “Make sure that you take any kind of complaint seriously and investigate it independently.” That sends a message that the organization takes complaints seriously and they will not be swept under the rug.
- Talk about the cognitive demands of jobs. In addition to factors such as work hours and physical demands, consider how demanding the job is from a mental health perspective.
- Work to infuse these concepts throughout the organization. Get executive buy-in and include psychological safety in mission and vision statements.
Plotkin emphasized that everyone can play a role in achieving psychological safety at work. “Anyone can be a champion for psychologically safer workplaces. You don’t have to be the president. You don’t have to be a senior management. You can just be that advocate and start to raise awareness,” she concluded.
