11 July 2016 | Herpreet Kaur Grewal
Four organisations – The Building Engineering Services Association (BESA), Electrical Contractors’ Association (ECA), CIBSE Patrons and The Samaritans – are campaigning to address mental health and workplace stress in the building engineering services industry.
It follows a joint BESA / ECA survey that suggests 31 per cent of building engineering services firms find on-site mental health issues “hard to manage”. Four in five of the firms surveyed also believe workplace mental health issues “will have a serious impact on their businesses over the next five to ten years”.
“As an industry, we have made impressive progress on workplace safety in the past 20 years, but on health – and mental health in particular – we still have a long way to go,” says BESA chief executive Paul McLaughlin. “Mental health is the forgotten health and safety issue.”
It’s a good initiative aimed at an important demographic – but what about the bigger picture? To what extent is the mental health of your team – and the end-user clients you provide for – a big issue in your organisation?
That’s the theme for this month’s Think Tank discussion. Are workplace stress and other mental health concerns a “forgotten health and safety” issue? Are links between stress and mental health being made? What initiatives have you been involved with? Is a strong HR department key to good mental health awareness? And what do you see as the true extent of the problem?
Here are the questions we’d like you to answer. Please answer all or as many of them as you feel comfortable with. Also, as usual we’re keen to hear from you with any further comment on this issue and what you believe should be done to address it.
Questions
Are you or the organisation you work for involved in any project to address levels of mental health / workplace stress?
Yes / No
Please rank out of ten the importance you believe your organisation ascribes to dealing:
Are you or the organisation you work for involved in any project to address levels of mental health / workplace stress?
Yes / No
Please rank out of ten the importance you believe your organisation ascribes to dealing with mental health issues in the workplace
(Rank from 1 = not important to 10 = critically important)
Which of the following do you believe is most important to addressing mental health concerns in your organisation? (Select only the one you see as most important)
– Enforcing a good Work/Life balance
– Good communication between management and staff
– Well-worded and well-policed company policy / working practices
To what extent is having FM jointly working with HR the key to addressing workplace mental health concerns?
- – Critical
- – Very important
- – Nice to have, but not critical
- – FM can address these issues itself
Please email your answers to: newsdesk@fm-world.co.uk. We want to have your answers back by the end of next Tuesday, 19th July 2016. Thank you in advance for your responses.
