It’s a given that taking care of people’s physical health is an important part of making sure employees realise their full potential and companies thrive, yet many businesses are still unaware of how to carry out a mental health risk assessment.

And while most organisations are on their way to accepting that mental health is just as crucial, there's a big difference between being committed to the idea of mental health support and actually putting it into practice.

That’s where a mental health risk assessment comes into play to boost your business through happier, healthier employees. It gives you an opportunity to support, understand, and make reasonable adjustments to people who are dealing with mental ill health.

In this blog post, we go into how you can identify potential mental health risks, evaluate their impact, and how you can implement measures to mitigate these risks in your workplace such as Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training.

What is a mental health risk assessment and why is it important?

A mental health risk assessment is your internal procedure to identify, evaluate, and address risks to the mental health of the people in your organisation.

The prospect of defining your organisation’s mental health risk assessment can be somewhat daunting. There are several legal obligations to meet and the issues themselves are of a delicate, personal nature.

But this can be an incredibly positive experience because, at its very core, you’re finding the best way to look after your employees.

It’s not just individual employees who benefit from robust mental health risk assessments and supporting policies. Healthier staff usually means a healthier bottom line too!

Benefits to your business include:

• Less sickness absenteeism
• Reduced staff turnover
• Increased productivity

Step 1: Identify potential mental health risks for your employees

The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) Management Standards is a framework designed to help employers gauge their mental health risk system against a ‘good practice’ example.

It divides the experience of work into 6 key areas that are connected to:

• Increased absences due to sickness
• Higher accident rates
• Lower productivity
• Poor health

It’s your good management of these 6 areas that make sure your workers have the opposite experience.

What are the HSE 6 key areas of work design?

1. Demands

When employees have high-pressure roles with big demands, it can cause a strain on their mental health. People feel like they are constantly failing and under pressure if they’re overloaded with too much, or the wrong type of, work.

When you properly manage employee demands, they feel that they can cope with the workload, work patterns and work environment of their job.

How to ensure demands are not causing poor mental health:

• Ensure employees understand what they have to do and how to do it
• Regularly assess if the demands and deadlines of the work are achievable
• Update training as required
• Match your staff’s abilities and skills to the requirements of each role
• Evaluate the idea of flexible working hours as a way to manage demand on employees

2. Control

If people lose autonomy and control over their work, they become disengaged and less productive – especially if there’s no obvious way to grow and advance.

You should avoid micromanaging and ensure that employees feel they have a say in how they do their work.

How to give employees adequate control:

• Involve employees in decisions about work patterns, breaks, and workloads
• Encourage employees to use their existing skills and take initiative, and to learn and apply new skills that put them in the position to advance to more complex jobs

3. Support

If employees feel that they have no one to talk to about workplace issues, they can’t see any resolution to those problems. This lack of support likely leads to an increase in sickness absence, as people can no longer tolerate a situation they see no way out of.

Instead, you want employees to feel that they get the right level of information and support from both their immediate colleagues and senior leaders.

How to offer the right support:

• Your organisation has policies, procedures, and systems in place to support employees – particularly in terms of what support is available and how to access it
• Your management team have clear systems to support their teams
• Your employees know how they can look after each other
• Regular formal and informal feedback helps to identify any resources employees may need to do their job to their best

4. Relationships

Anything relating to poor relationships is a high cause of workplace stress. Discipline issues, frequent grievances between staff and bullying exist when there hasn’t been enough investment in building a positive working environment.

To create a good workplace culture with healthy relationships, you need all colleagues and managers to act professionally and shut down unacceptable behaviour immediately.

How to maintain good workplace relationships:

• Zero tolerance of any bullying or harassment behaviours in your organisation
• Active promotion of positive workplace behaviours to promote fairness and cooperation
• Clear systems for reporting and dealing with unacceptable behaviour, for employees and managers

5. Role

People feel nervous and anxious about their job if you don’t set clear expectations about their role. Everyone in your organisation needs to understand their role and responsibilities and be kept in the loop if anything changes.

How to set clear employee roles:

• Make sure every role has a clear set of requirements and responsibilities: job description, induction checklist, and new employee job specification statements
• Make it clear who employees should go to if they have questions about their roles and responsibilities
• Explain how each role fits into the success of the wider organisation
• Update your team if any roles change and how it impacts them

6. Change

Any changes at work can be incredibly stressful for employees, particularly if there’s a risk to their job security. The worry of uncertainty in the organisation’s future reduces people’s ability to focus on their work.

You want employees to feel that they’re kept in the loop during times of change, though regular, clear communication.

How to positively approach change:

• Explain the reasons behind changes to employees, ideally with time to process what they mean for them
• Consult with staff about prospective changes to get their ideas and so they feel invested in the new thing, rather than just someone that has to deal with the fallout
• Give clear timetables for when any changes are becoming reality and support for any job changes this causes.

A key factor for all these 6 areas is that there’s a well-understood system in place to hear and address employees' concerns with any of these issues.

Being listened to and seeing action taken around individual issues is essential to mitigating workplace stress.

How to measure mental health risks at work

These 6 factors – and any other elements that are important in your organisation – can be measured in a number of ways, such as:

• Questionnaires and surveys
• Focus groups
• Observations
• 1:1 interviews
• Reviewing employee records – employee turnover rates, exit interviews, and absenteeism rates

Using the data insights from both qualitative and quantitative research is a powerful way to get an accurate picture of your organisation's current risks to good mental health.

Step 2: Evaluate the impact of those identified risks

Let’s be honest, you were probably muttering ‘Yes, we already do that’ as you read through that list!

Of course, you’re already taking care of your employees’ mental health and making sure you’ve reduced the level of workplace stress for as many people as possible...

But even when you already know the inner workings of your organisation, using the HSE framework gives you a panoramic perspective on your employees’ experience and spot any workplace risks to employee mental health.

You can now evaluate the impact of those risks and put control measures in place to reduce or remove them.

Assessing severity and likelihood

You need to consider the likelihood of each risk happening and your proposed controls.

It’s easier to see the big picture by using a table, grid or other visual framework to map out your risk matrix for mental health. You’ve probably already got something similar for physical risk assessments.

However you decide to present it, your mental health risk matrix has all the key information in one place, including:

• Risk: All the risks to employees mental health
• Impact: Their impact on individuals, other staff, and the organisation, if they occur
• Likelihood: What are the chances of them actually happening?
• Controls: What you put in place to mitigate or eradicate the risk

Prioritising risks

It makes sense to focus resources and attention on the highest-impact risks that either affect the highest number of employees or have the most severe consequences.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t recognise the importance of other risks, but it indicates where to start as you tackle the risks to employee mental health you have identified.

Legal compliance considerations

Legal compliance underpins all your policies, and mental health is no exception. Just as with physical health, you have a legal responsibility to help employees with mental health. This applies whether work is causing workplace stress or exacerbating an existing mental illness.

It’s also your responsibility as an employer to minimise the risk of work related stress by identifying any risks and mitigating them as much as possible.

The current UK laws relevant to your management of your employees’ mental health at work are:

• Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 [Health and Safety at Work (Northern Ireland) Order 1978]
• The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999
• Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013 [Mental Health (Northern Ireland) Order 1986]
• Equality Act 2010 [Disability Discrimination Act 1995 DDA]
• Human Rights Act 1998 [Northern Ireland Act 1998]

Step 3: Implement measures to mitigate mental health risks

Risk assessments are one thing, but it’s action that makes the real difference. You’ve moved through a lot of important steps already:

• A full mental health risk assessment to identify areas of risk in your organisation
• Considering the impact of each identified risk
• Evaluating the likelihood and severity of each identified risk
• Prioritising the order in which to tackle the risks

Now you’re at the action plan stage. You need to plan what you’re going to do, who’s responsible for this action point, and the timeline for getting things done. This needs to be clearly articulated for each of the risks you identified during your mental health risk assessment.

Organisations often invest in professional training to support whole staff mental health awareness development. Sometimes issues can be resolved with simple adjustments to work patterns or communications.

Mental Health First Aid Training

At Resilient People, one of our core services is delivering Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training – an internationally recognised 2-day course.

It’s a great way to kick off education around mental health awareness, spotting signs and symptoms of mental ill health, and workplace stress management techniques.

Mental Health Policy Development

It’s important that your documentation is fully interconnected. This means using the information from your risk assessments to inform your DEI policy, bullying and harassment policy, and any other policies where you see relevance – not just creating or updating a specific Mental Health policy.

You need to make sure your policies don’t just sit in a Health and Safety folder until something goes wrong.

Your mental health policy needs to be a working document that people in your organisation understand and feel they can contribute to.

Just like your policies for physical health and safety, when things change – either within your organisation or externally – update the policy accordingly.

Employee support services

Many organisations include employee support services that offer professional support for good mental health. For example:

• Employee Assistance Programs (EAPs): Providing access to counselling and mental health resources. This might be simply signposting all the locally available support there is and curating it in one place for your employees to easily access. Other organisations may be able to invest in actual on-site, or paid-for counselling services for their staff.
• Wellness Programs: Promoting physical health activities that can improve mental well-being. This might look like free yoga classes at the end of the working day, or subsidised membership to the local gym. Again, even just doing the ‘finding out’ and putting all the available local activities into one list is positive input from an employer.

Workload management

Workload management can be tricky because it can be quite nuanced. But it’s essential to hear how your staff are feeling about their workload, and type of work, in order to avoid burnout and eventual resignation.

Even slight adjustments, like flexible start and finish times, can make all the difference to productivity and good staff mental health.

Improve employee communication and involvement

Honest communication is at the heart of understanding your employees. You need to know:

• What will help them avoid workplace stress?
• How you can support them in times of mental ill health?

These are difficult things to talk about, so trust needs to be built by regular check-ins and employees being involved in developing solutions. They need to know that you will listen empathically, maintain confidentiality, and together find practical and effective ways forward.

Regularly review your mental health risk assessments

A mental health risk assessment isn’t a ‘one and done’ thing. Like any other risk assessment, time for review and adjustment needs to be put in the diary.

Situations change, people experience unexpected trauma or mental ill health, work environments need to adapt to a new challenge, so ongoing mental health risk assessments need to incorporate all those things.

Whatever review structure you already have in place for other areas of your business are likely to be helpful with this. Figure out how you’re going to measure the success of your risk management measures, how you’re going to get feedback from employees, and embed the expectation that this will be reassessed on an ongoing basis.

Take a proactive approach to mental health risk assessments

As managers, you have a brilliant opportunity to add another layer of protection for your staff through your mental health risk assessment process. It will become another reason why your people love working in your organisation.

Hopefully, this has helped you envisage a framework to build out your mental health risk assessments. Resilient People are here to back up your bold leadership with expert training and support – for you and your employees.

Let’s have a chat about how we can help you support good mental health in your organisation.