How a Mental Health Audit Can Help Your Company

Mental health audits are about allowing a company to identify and understand the struggles employees are facing in the work environment so they are better able to manage them. We call these struggles the psychosocial risks, and they are the factors in the work environment, social and organisational, that can cause harm to an employee’s mental health.

When organisations manage these risks in a proactive way they can reap the benefits in employee engagement and morale, in improved performance and productivity and a reduction in worker turn over.

What are Psychosocial hazards?

Psychosocial hazards are aspects of work and situations that may cause a stress response, which in turn can lead to psychological or physical harm. These factors usually relate to aspects of work design and management and can apply to social and organisational aspects at work.

Safe Work Australia has identified the psychological risk factors that organisations should prioritise to assess and manage:

• Role overload with high workloads or job demands
• Low workload or job demands
• Low job control
• Poor support from supervisors, manager’s or co-workers
• Conflict or poor workplace relationships between workers, supervisors, manager’s and co-workers
• Role conflict or lack of role clarity
• Poor organizational change consultation
• Inadequate reward and recognition
• Poor procedural justice
• Hazardous physical working environments
• Remote or isolated work
• Exposure to traumatic events
• Workplace violence and Bullying
• Harassment including sexual harassment

Since COVID further psychological triggers for the workplace include anxiety over returning-to-work.

In addition, by proactively addressing psychosocial risks, organisations will be compliant with WHS regulations and successfully navigate workplace inspections by WHS regulatory bodies (such as Safe Work Australia). Obtaining satisfactory outcomes from these inspections will ensure business continuity, as well as stakeholder and employee assurance in the organisational WHS policies and procedures.

How does a mental health audit work?

To find the psychosocial risks for a team of employees we go to the source and ask them directly.

Surveys are distributed to all employees and we work through the honest, anonymous feedback.

From the surveys our registered psychologists are able to create a report with targeted recommendations on how an organisation can remove or improve on the risks their employees are facing in the workplace. And we can arrange feedback sessions so employers can easily see how our recommendations can be implemented.  

If your organisation would like to proactively improve the mental health of your employees by removing unnecessary mental health risks call our specialists on 1800 258 487 or Contact Us.