Healthy workplaces for small businesses

By creating a mentally healthy workplace, small business owners can prevent and address workplace issues early on. These issues may include staff not coping with the demands of their role or experiencing a mental health condition. Reducing job stress experienced by staff is a requirement for all business owners under work health and safety legislation. By being on the front foot, you can encourage staff to speak to you about an issues as it arises and address it before it affects your business. 

Staff who work in businesses that support them and promote their mental health are more engaged, productive and provide better customer service. Although many people with mental health issues manage their conditions well, some may take more time off or be less productive in the workplace. For example, if you have four staff and one is away sick, this reduces your capacity by 25 percent and can create pressure on everyone else in your business. By creating a mentally healthy workplace, you can increase the engagement and productivity of staff, and reduce absenteeism and the number of any stress claims.

Being a workplace that promotes positive mental health and wellbeing can make it easier to find and keep the best staff. This can save you significant amounts of time and energy finding quality staff to help with your business. Research by Instinct and Reason found that three-quarters of Australian employees say a mentally healthy workplace is important when looking for a job. Young workers in particular value mentally healthy workplaces.¹

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A good way to start is to ask yourself and your staff a few questions to get a better idea of how people in your business are going.

Look at staff engagement and participation

• How do your staff greet each other when they arrive each day?
• Are they respectful to each other?
• Are they happy to help each other out?
• If staff work remotely do they still join in teleconferences and/or email conversations?

Ask your staff

• What do they value about their work?
• What do they find challenging?
• What ideas do they have for improvements?

You can have conversations with staff via one-to-one meetings, in team meetings or informally over a coffee. Think about the approach that best fits your business (e.g. if you have a catch up every week, you may just add it on to this). As small businesses are generally dynamic places to work, with demands and pressures constantly changing, it is important to have these conversations regularly. Based on the answers to the above questions, rank the issues by importance to improving mental health and wellbeing, and choose a few to focus on as a starting point.

Ensure your plan is realistic as this will increase the likelihood of it leading to clear benefits for you and your business. Below are some lists of potential actions you can take as part of your plan. Choose the ones that you feel will be the most relevant to your business.

Addressing work-related stress

All business owners have an obligation under work health and safety legislation to take reasonable steps to minimise work-related stress experienced by staff. Common causes of work-related stress include working long hours or without breaks, low levels of control over work, having an unclear role and responsibilities, low levels of support and poorly managed relationships. Many small businesses have challenging work demands, so it is important to keep checking in with staff and monitoring risk.

Simple things to do (which you may already be doing) include:

• Educate yourself about the causes of work-related stress and actions you can take to reduce it. Also identify staff who may be at greater risk of experiencing stress (e.g. young or new workers).
• Greet staff every day. If you don't see them, contact them by phone, send a text or email.
• Have regular one-to-one meetings. Even if you work in a close knit team where everything is discussed, it is still important to have one-to-one meetings with staff to allow them to speak in confidence to you.
• Let staff have a say in how their own work should be done and decisions that concern their work.
• Ensure every staff member has a position description which accurately describes their roles and responsibilities, and ensure this is updated as needed.
• If possible offer flexibility in working arrangements (e.g. start and finishing times, and working from home). Often changes are small, inexpensive and are very specific to an individual (e.g. an employee may ask to leave early one night a week to they can play a team sport). 
• Encourage staff to take regular breaks and lead by example (e.g. take a lunch break).
• Model respectful, supportive behaviours in the workplace and encourage staff to share their concerns about conflict or inappropriate behaviours at an early stage.
• Thank staff regularly for their contributions. If you don't see them, contact them by phone, send a text or email to say thank you for a specific task they have done, or a difficult situation they have dealt with.
• Spend time together as a team for non-work reasons. This could be a morning tea or a BBQ out of work hours. This could also involve family members.

Supporting staff with mental health issues

The small business workplace is often described as being family-like and as the employer, you may have close ties with your staff. Sometimes, these close ties help you to recognise when one of your staff is not themselves. Almost half of all people will experience a mental health condition at some point in their lives. Whether this is related to work or not, it's in the interest of business owners to create a working environment where staff feel comfortable seeking support in the workplace. This can enable them to access the support they need and recover faster.

Simple things to do (which you may already be doing) include:

• Speak openly about mental health in the workplace, including sharing any personal experience you have of a mental health condition to normalise these types of conversations in the workplace.
• Educate yourself about mental health, how to have a conversation with someone you are concerned with, and how to provide ongoing support.
• Promote events such as Work Safe Month, R U OK day and Go Home on Time Day to encourage conversations about mental health in the workplace.
• Make available information and resources (e.g. Heads Up resources) about the signs and symptoms of common mental health conditions, looking after your mental health, and available mental health and wellbeing services and supports.
• Provide reasonable adjustments (a requirement under discrimination legislation) as part of a stay-at-work or return-to-work plan for staff who have been diagnosed with a mental health condition (e.g. flexibility regarding work hours and task).
• Deliver a brief tool box talk on mental health and the workplace.
• Show video clips of people speaking about their personal experience of a mental health condition and recovery.

Information specific to small business owners supporting others can also be found here.

As small business' needs and demands are always changing, it is important to regularly review how things are going. Some key questions to ask yourself are:

• Have you managed to implement all the actions in your plan?
• What changes have you observed in the workplace?
• What kind of feedback have you received from staff?

By asking these questions and checking in with your staff you can determine whether the actions you are implementing are working or a different approach is needed.