How to Manage Psychosocial Risk

In this episode, Mary Conquest speaks with Mary Ann Baynton, a workplace relations specialist, consultant, speaker and author, who has been called “the godmother of psychological health and safety.” She’s the principal of Mary Ann Baynton & Associates and Director of Strategy and Collaboration at Workplace Strategies for Mental Health.

Mary is on a mission to reduce unnecessary workplace stress, distress or conflict, and in this warm and wide-ranging interview, she helps safety professionals understand the key ways they can help identify and mitigate psychosocial risk.

The starting point is an overview of Canada’s National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (which Mary helped develop). The Standard is a set of voluntary guidelines, tools and resources intended to guide organizations in promoting mental health and preventing psychological harm at work - the first of its kind in the world.

Mary then shares evidence-based approaches to help safety professionals address 10 key workplace psychosocial factors. She describes each factor’s risks, provides practical solutions, and suggests how EHS professionals can secure leadership support to implement these strategies.

You’ll learn about organizational culture, work-life balance, workplace civility and respect, change management, building trust, personal development, involvement and influence, psychologically supportive environments and managing workload stress.

For every element, Mary shares compelling evidence for adopting workplace psychological health and safety.

♪ [music] ♪ - [Mary] My name is Mary Conquest. I'm your host for "Safety Labs by Slice," the podcast where we explore the human side of safety to support safety professionals. We move past regulations and reportables to talk about the core skills of safety leadership, empathy, influence, trust, rapport, in other words, the soft skills that help you do the hard stuff.

♪ [music] ♪ Hi, there. Welcome to "Safety Labs by Slice." It's all well and good to understand why psychosocial injuries are a serious issue for health and safety professionals, but taking the step from understanding to implementing change is another matter.

Where should OHS professionals start? How can psychosocial risks be identified and mitigated? And maybe most importantly, how can we get leadership to understand and support these kinds of health initiatives? To help us explore this, we have Mary Ann Baynton here today. Mary Ann has been called the Godmother of Psychological Health and Safety. She served, I think you should say fairy godmother from now on, but anyway.

- [Mary Ann] Thank you. I really like that.

- She served as the co-chair of technical committee for the National Standard of Canada on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. And she's a member of the Mental Health Commission of Canada's Workforce Advisory Committee. She's the author of several books in the field of workplace mental health, including "The Evolution of Workplace Mental Health in Canada: Toward a Standard for Psychological Health and Safety."

Mary Ann also proudly serves as the director of strategy and collaboration for Canada Life's Workplace Strategies for Mental Health, which provides free, practical ideas, tools, and resources to help with the prevention, intervention, and management of workplace mental health issues. Ms. Baynton strives to reduce unnecessary workplace stress, distress, or conflict because it's unnecessary. She joins us from Watertown, Ontario.

Welcome.

- Oh, thanks, Mary. I would say that there's lots of stress that is necessary, so yes, let's get rid of the unnecessary stuff.

- It's true. We can't live entirely stress-free, but... Okay. So, today we're going to talk about psychosocial factors identified in the National Standard of Canada on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace. It's quite a mouthful. But for our international audience, can you briefly explain what that standard is?

- Sure. So, we've been dealing with workplace mental health issues for decades. And what we wanted to do is help employers see the difference between being nice or kind and really fulfilling their duty to do no harm to employees and what the difference was.

So, the standard is a psychological health and safety management system of the Plan-Do-Check-Act model that everybody's familiar with, where you're going to assess risk to employees and other stakeholders.

You are going to then either eliminate or mitigate those risks, and you're going to have a process of continual improvement. It is very much the occupational health and safety framework expanded to include hazards that put our psychological safety at risk.

- So, it's beyond yoga and a stress pause.

- Apples and jumping jacks I say. Yes, it's beyond that. You know, I was just talking to a health and safety professional in the mining and energy sector, and they were talking about the workers who are more likely to have an injury or an accident that could affect them or other people.

And that the common denominator is that they are not focused, they're not attentive to the task at hand. And so when you think about that, that is the psychosocial impact, that they're worried about something at home, they're worried about a conflict in the workplace, and they're not focused.

And so when we look at psychological safety, it's completely tied to physical safety. So, to put it in the most common terms, all we're doing is trying to improve the energy and the focus of every worker.

- So, when this national standard was created, there were a number of psychosocial factors that were identified. Do you know how many? There's quite a few.

- The thing is that in the standard, there's actually 14. So, 13 of them are named. They're all intertwined. They're not discreet because the workplace is a system. So, for instance, if we have bad organizational culture, it could affect civility and respect. It could affect how clear leadership actually is.

It could affect our work-life balance. And so these factors are just sort of ways to categorize and point to things that are within the influence and responsibility and control of an employer because there's many other things that affect our health and safety that are beyond the employer's control.

The 14th factor listed in the standard is other chronic stressors identified by employees. What that means is the employer has to ask the employee what other stressors or hazards exist.

- Is there a risk? If stresses or hazards exist, does this mean in the workplace or does that mean at home? Like, you know, I'm going through a divorce, or I'm worried about my parents?

- Well, just think about it, Mary. If you were going through a nasty divorce, if your parents were ill or dying, would it impact your work?

- Oh, yeah, of course. Of course.

- Can your employer do anything about what's happening at home?

- No.

- Can they do anything about helping you to focus at work?

- Yes.

- Right. So, you've just explained the entire process.

- Well, you're welcome. No, I just wonder if there's ever any pushback from people who don't want to disclose what's going on at home and sort of.

- Right. And we don't need to get all the dirt on people.

- Yeah, of course.

- We don't need to probe into their private life. What we need is for it to be safe enough for people to say, I'm not in the best place today. I'm struggling today. My focus may not be there today, and I might need some help. I might need some quiet time. I might need to be reminded to focus. That's the psychological safety.

Not so that I can tell you everything that's going on in my life, but that I feel safe enough to be supported to do my best on my worst day.

- Yeah. And I would think also sort of educated or having it as part of the conversation to know what accommodations to ask for, maybe knowing what accommodations are available as well.

- Well, and we talk accommodation under the duty to accommodate as the big A accommodation, right? So, there's you have a disability or a prohibited ground, and so we have to accommodate on that basis according to human rights. But there's also the small A accommodation. You know, your child's sick today, you need to leave a little early, or you need to check-in.

Those kinds of things that don't take a lot of money, that don't take a lot of extra effort on the part of other people, that's part of a psychologically safe workplace. I'll be flexible for you and you, employee, will then be more committed, loyal, and flexible for me.

Because as your employer, there's going to be times in the year when I might need a little more from you. And so if I can give to you when you need my flexibility, then maybe you can reciprocate.

- So, you recently led a worker's compensation session in Manitoba for health and safety people, where you went through 11 specific psychosocial factors. You gave evidence-based suggestions on how to address them. Before we go through them, which I'd like to do, can you tell me briefly about the body of research that the suggestions were drawn from?

Like, is there sort of a single body, is there a repository, or is it just really, you know, over the years, all the different research that you've looked at?

- Yeah. So, you're talking about the evidence-based approaches that live on the workplace strategies for mental health website. And they are drawn from research and evidence, which is evolving every moment by the way. But what we do is we get research assistance to do a lit review based on the psychosocial factor. What are the things that the evidence says have an impact on this particular thing, and that they're generalizable because some things are going to work in one workplace and not in others?

And what we've done is we've just given a laundry list of different types of approaches that then employers can look and say to their employees because this is supposed to be something that is meaningful and involved and integrated and engaged with employees, but then they can give them this list and say, from this list, what do you believe would make the difference?

Rather than, you know, somebody said to me, what would help your mental health? I would say, well, chocolate every afternoon would be great, but that's not going to be the organizational approach to this because it's not on the list. So, this gives the employer that safety that, you know, as they say, you're not opening up a can of worms and saying, do you want the sun, the moon, and the stars?

I'll try and figure out how to give it to you. It's of these evidence-based approaches or practice-based approaches. And we work with the Canadian Positive Psychology Association, who has the Canadian Work and Well-being Awards. When people apply for those awards, they share all the amazing things that they're doing to improve psychological health and safety in the workplace.

And we, in turn, get to share those with the general public to say, hey, your colleagues, your competition are doing this and it's working for them, you might want to consider it. So, just an approach. Yep.

- I was just going to ask, and those suggestions are online?

- Yes, they're on the workplace strategies for mental health website. You'll find them all there if you actually typed in evidence-based approaches and we're continually upgrading them. Continually.

- Okay, that's fantastic. We have an international audience, so it's great that this kind of information is available to everyone. And it occurred to me too that, you know, employers don't come to their job with a degree in psychology necessarily. So, even if they fully intend and want to create a psychologically safe workplace, they might not know where to start.

So, I think it's great that that kind of information is available.

- Can I say too that even if you could become a psychologist or a mental health expert, if we're in the workplace, it is not ethical for you to start to diagnose, treat, or counsel people that work for you. And so we don't want them to become mental health experts. We want them to become performance management experts.

And there's a new way to do that, that is psychologically safe, that is more motivating, more engaging, more sustainable than what you might have learned 20 or 30 years ago. So, that's what we're asking of employers, not to become experts in mental health.

- Well, that's an excellent reframe. So, what I'd like to do now is go through some of these psychosocial factors and ask the same three questions for each. And those questions are, what is the risk of not addressing this factor? What are some evidence-based suggestions to address it?

And I think pretty importantly, how can safety professionals get buy-in from leadership to implement some of these strategies? And as you pointed out, these aren't discreet things. I'm sure that, you know, there's going to be overlap.

- And that's it. As you go through and ask them, you're going to get a lot of repetitive answers because when you fix one, address one, it's going to have a positive impact on the rest. So, let's go through them, Mary, and we'll see how much value we can add for each one.

- Well, yeah, and also, you know, of course, feel free to answer questions I didn't have on that list, like, how is this connected? You know, while they're all interconnected, I imagine some of them are a bit more closely, sort of in the same realm.

- Yes. Yes. For sure.

- All right. So, we'll go through. The first one is, I'm quoting here, "A work environment characterized by the shared values of trust, honesty, and fairness.

- So, that's organizational culture is the factor. And, you know, from a health and safety perspective, you might think, "Well, I can't do anything about that, right? That's the culture." But culture really comes down to the way that we feel about the way we're treated in the workplace. That's why honesty and trust is so important.

So, as a health and safety professional, you could be asking people on the ground floor, you know, what is your experience? What would it take for you to trust that this organization had your back, had your best interest balanced with the interests of the organization? They can ask that and get an honest answer.

And they can turn around and say to the employer, like they would with other hazards, here are some ways we think that you can mitigate this risk and improve it. And it's as simple as that, that you are getting information that maybe the employer can't get through a survey, that maybe they can't get it through interviews, but people will be honest with you because of your position.

And you know that if you can change the way people feel about the organization, you're going to change the way they work. You're going to improve that idea of a safety culture where we all have each others' backs.

- I want to then zoom in a little bit on getting support from leadership. So, you said, like to me, someone coming to me as an employer and saying, or as an employee and saying, here's a risk. Here's how I think we could mitigate it. You would think that all employers would be like, "Great, that's fantastic. I'm glad you identified this. Let's get after it."

But I think we all know that that's not always the case, especially in something like this where, you know, there aren't numbers necessarily behind it. It's not something you can measure, or maybe it is.

- Yeah. I was going to say, you know, there definitely is research. And if you look, there's a piece on the workplace strategies website called Evidence for Psychological Health and Safety, and you'll see all of the reports that we had our researchers look at. And there is evidence that in an organizational culture where there is honesty and truth, things are not hidden, things are not...the likelihood of sabotage by an employee, the likelihood of embezzlement or theft by an employee, it all goes down.

And so there is evidence for it. We just maybe hadn't looked for it in the past, or we hadn't done the studies in the past. But in the last 10 years since the standards come out, this has been an area of study. That's why I say it's evolving as we speak.

And there's great studies out there that this is not about being nice. This is a good business decision that may save your business from being obsolete to the limited talent pool.

- So, that's a little bit of, I hate to use the word ammunition, but a little bit of support that you can use if you're talking to leadership that remains unconvinced that this is important.

- So, I just want to speak on that for a second, is I think since the advent of the standard that we keep wanting to convince employers that they need to look at psychological health and safety, that they need to consider psychosocial factors. I actually feel like we need to shift that a bit.

And we need to start to say employers right now are stressed about the pandemic. They're stressed about sustainability. They're stressed about environmental impact. They're stressed about recruitment and retention of a shrinking talent pool. Instead of us trying to teach them or convince them about psychological health and safety, what if we support whatever they're trying to do with a solution that also protects and promotes psychological safety?

So, instead of us saying, we're going to go through all these factors and we're going to do this, to ask the employer, you know, what are your goals? What are your strategies? What are your objectives? What are you trying to do, and say they say, all I care about is sales because we're drowning here in debt. Great.

I know how I can help with sales. There's direct correlation between emotional intelligence and sales. So, if I'm able to help improve the emotional intelligence of your entire sales department, we should see a direct correlation to their ability to sell. Now, you and I know that the way we're going to teach them emotional intelligence is going to improve the way they interact with each other.

It's going to improve psychological health and safety, but we don't have to say that to the employer. We just need to say, we can support you with what you want, but we know we're going to do it in a psychologically safe way.

- Yeah. So, yeah, that's an excellent reframe. It's like sneaky psychological health and safety. But I mean, it's not sneaky because it's supporting them. And also I would say not coming to them with, oh, by the way, here's something else you need on your plate.

- It's like if I take my car into the mechanic and they want to teach me about how the engine works. I don't care. Just fix it and help me not to have this problem again. Now, maybe one day I'll want to learn about engines, but not right now. So, if you fix it and you say you really can't slam your brakes on like that anymore, okay, I won't slam my brakes on anymore.

That's fine. So yeah.

- Yeah, that's a great way to explain it. I'm going to move into another one and see what comes up. So, this is the quote, "A work environment where there's recognition of the need of employees to be able to manage the demands of work, family, and personal life." And I think that we're all keenly aware of this in the wake of pandemic, lockdowns, and just, you know, how those personal responsibilities shifted so quickly.

- Yeah. And, you know, a lot of people...so this is work-life balance. A lot of people found out really creative ways to manage. Many of our parents of young children who were being homeschooled or doing online just shifted so that they were with their children during the day, and that in the evening, they did their work.

This idea of freeing people up to be able to balance those things isn't...again, it's not because we're being nice or flexible or lenient, but it's because we want the best from them. And to understand if I'm a caregiver and my parent is dying at home, well, if I had some flexibility to work when they were sleeping or to be able to respond when they had to be rushed to an appointment, then first I'm going to be more effective.

Second, I'm going to be much more loyal. And after this settles down, I will appreciate what the employer did for me.

- Yeah. There are some things as they say, that money can't buy, and that kind of valuable respect is one of them. And a little bit too rare, I'd have to say.

- Well, and even organizations where that flexibility's not possible, we have a retail or hospitality or an assembly line, the flexibility comes in, can I just get another part-time worker or somebody else to fill in for me? Will you trust me just to get my replacement so that I don't have to ask permission and maybe get it, and maybe not, but that there's a way for us to manage our shifts amongst ourselves?

- Yeah. And that's just trusting your employee's competence to make it solve the problem. One of the things in work-life balance, one of the suggestions I noticed was ensure that leaders, excuse me, model positive work-life balance behavior. And, of course, two things...well, one thing comes to mind sort of as a metaphor is Elon Musk and his hardcore engineers only.

But what do you do if you're in a situation where leadership isn't modeling that? It's really hard to change people's habits.

- It is. But we do need to understand that if you say, do as I say and not as I do, the message we're really giving is, if you want to stay at the level you're at, you can. Just do this. But if you want to progress, you have to be like me. But the other thing is that those leaders who...including, unfortunately, Elon Musk, who have poor boundaries and are very driven and don't have good self-care, also have to think about the impact that they're having on the people around them.

So, you may be...you know, I get all the time people saying, well, that's just who I am. No, that's just what you do. It's not who you are. And the reason that I stopped being an overachiever with poor boundaries, who was always intense and always wanting to do more and never feeling good enough, is when I started to understand the impact I was having on people around me.

And that that was never my intention. It was my own insecurities that drove me to work so hard. But as I started to understand I was stressing people out around me, I started to relax, I started to have more reasonable expectations, but guess what? My productivity, the quality of my work went up, and so did everybody else's around me.

So, part of this, Mary, is that the old-school way of thinking and working had us believing that that level of intensity was more productive, and we now have evidence that it's a lie. It's not true.

- Yeah. And I think that's an important possible reframe as well, is that, you know, you may feel that there's nothing wrong with what you're modeling here, but actually you're posing a risk. You're posing a risk to yourself and to the company. So, the next one is, "A work environment where employees are respectful and considerate in their interactions with one another, as well as with customers, clients, and the public."

- So, here's the challenge with that, is that what I think is respectful, you might think is really rude. And so in this area, it's much more important...and this is civility and respect. It's much more important that we have clarity about what our agreed-upon interactions will be than that they are all the same across the organization.

It needs to be that each team develops their own agreement about this is how we're going to support each other on a good day. This is how we're going to support each other when we're having a bad day. And this is how we're going to resolve issues and this is what we will and won't do. So that if you behave or say something that is within that, even if normally I might have been offended, I will know this is the way we agreed to interact.

And so it's expected. But the other thing that I want to mention in this particular one is from an employer's perspective, it's not just how the employees treat each other. It is how we allow clients, customers, and patients to treat our employees. And I was talking to someone from a retail chain and they said, you know, we have mostly young people or much older people that work here.

They don't have a lot of experience. And a customer will come in in a bad mood and they'll be screaming at them, and it's traumatizing. And what they decided to do is when that happened, that because they didn't want to have their employees be rude to the customers, you know, the customer's always right, we don't want to...

But what they would do is have any employee who witnesses it to come and stand beside the clerk, whoever that person is, looking at them, not at the customer, and saying to them, "Do you need some support?" So, the customer's going to get the idea that we've got this person's back, but more importantly, the employee's going to know somebody's got my back.

And they may say, "No, that's okay. I'm helping them." Or maybe you could let them know what... And so it's a such a simple, little thing that isn't going to damage customer relations, but it is going to change the way the employee feels.

- Yeah. And I would think just having someone standing there gives this implicit message we are together. And also for the customer, who might not realize that they've kind of gone over the top, that like they've crossed a boundary if someone else is seeing that this is a problem. You know, it's not just this particular clerk that they don't happen to like.

- Right. It's a gentle, kind, respectful way to have the employees' back without offending the customer, but still saying, "Hey, let's solve this."

- So, something that comes to mind here, I had a previous guest and we talked a lot about workplace bullying, which is the opposite of this. I guess I think, you know, it's great to think that a health and safety professional can come into an environment and sort of set things up. But, of course, we come into a culture that already exists, and we don't always know during the job interview, you know, what kind of culture exists.

And so let's say that you're in that position and you start to see workplace bullying. How do you get a bully to stop? How do you...I don't know, I'm not saying that you have the definitive answer, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

- Sure. So, a few years back when British Columbia, a province in Canada started to have compensation for bullying through workers' compensation, and Ontario and other province in Canada had chronic mental stress compensation. And we started to ask with bullying, you know, how it was going, how were the claims going?

And what they told me is that they had thousands of claims and only a handful got settled. And I said, why? And they said, because we can't prove that the intent was to bully. And I said, so you have thousands of people who got the nerve up to file a complaint and thousands of people who have now been accused, what do you do with them?

Well, we tell them we're not going forward. And this hit me in such a profound way because I'm thinking, "Are we helping or making it worse with these claim processes?" And so we stepped back and with the help of some of the people from WorkSafeBC actually created something called Psychologically Safe Interactions.

And there's three parts to it. The first part is there's a difference between my intention and your perception. And I need to take time to consider what that might be. That my intention that, well, I'm just frustrated, or I'm just trying to get my point across, or I'm just whatever is not good enough.

And so how do we bring people in a kind way to understand that regardless of their intention, they must consider the impact on the perception of others? The second part is me listening to you on a good day, anything you say would be like water off a duck's back. But what if I'm having issues at home?

What if I'm having a health problem? What if I'm going through a lot? You could say the same thing and I may react to it completely different. So, we also have to understand about the assumptions that we make about other people's motives and examine that.

And then the third part is what I call moral courage. If you are intensely speaking to someone, and I think it sounds like you're bullying, harassing, or intimidating them, and I get in your face and say, "Mary, you need to stop this right now." I'm bullying the bullying, more or less.

Like, I am perpetuating the behavior that I'm trying to stop. So, how can I intervene in a way that's respectful of you, respectful of the other person who may or may not be intimidated by you at all? It could just be my perspective. And we as a team come up with a way to do that, that we come up together with a way that I can say, you know, Mary, sounds like you're a little frustrated or a little passionate about this, and that would be your cue that, oh, am I?

Like, am I coming across that way? And then, yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe I am. And then you can talk it through. But the whole point of this is instead of pointing fingers, instead of waiting for investigations that we all become more self-aware and we become more accountable to each other in respectful ways.

- Yeah. It sounds to me like that would reduce the temperature, whereas getting in someone's face and saying, stop it, stop it really just sort of raises the tension. And the other thought I had was that it's about clarity, isn't it? Like, if a team knows that, hey, if I go up to you and gently touch your shoulder, you know, that is the sign.

Or if I give the timeout sign with my hands or something, then we've all agreed ahead of time, then, yeah, I think that would be helpful.

- Well, and if we agree ahead of time that whatever we choose means, I know you don't mean to cause harm to anyone. I know that you might be frustrated or overwhelmed or even just passionate. I want to protect you so that nobody's going to accuse you of something that I know isn't your intention. And when you hear it, you hear all of that.

You don't just, "What are you touching my shoulder for?"

- Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it touch isn't the great. No, but, you know, that's a good...

- [inaudible 00:33:52] words. Yeah.

- Yeah. That's, again, about clarity so people understand this is the full meaning of this message or this sign or, you know? So, the next one is, "A work environment where there is effective leadership and support so that employees know what they need to do, have confidence in their leaders, and understand impending changes."

And I think that's a big one. Change management is huge. Humans don't like change at all. We really, really find it uncomfortable.

- Which is hilarious because it's the only constant in our life. And there are no workplaces where you should expect no change. So, first, we have to set the expectation that we're going to work on a project until something changes, and then we're going to work on another project.

We're going to use this equipment until there's better equipment, and then we're going to get trained on that. We're going to do this process until we have a new process. And then we're going to do that. We need to start to say that is going to be the way work is going to be going forward, period. There's no static technology. There's no static anything.

And so first, we got to set that expectation. But the other thing which you have already articulated is clarity. And from a leader's point of view, they're so busy because most leaders are not just managing people, which would be ideal, right? I always think we just have the whole system wrong.

There should be the Elon Musks, the Steve Jobs, those tactical, brilliant thinkers should be supported to do that. And everybody else should be protected from them. And that we shouldn't make management of people the only way to progress. There should be a whole group of people that are great statisticians, great tactical thinkers, great critical thinkers, but then there's people who have high levels of emotional and social intelligence, and their job should be to support the success of employees, to support the success of every employee.

And so that becomes two different roles. Unfortunately, we often expect one human being to be able to do both. And so while they're busy doing the budgeting, doing the quotas, doing all of that, they don't have the time or energy to manage the people or they manage the people, and then everything else goes.

I think we need to rethink this.

- I've heard this conversation in terms of the corporate world and the individual con contributor track is that previously the only way forward has been to become a manager. And people are starting to say, you know what? I don't want to manage. I want to continue and become a senior in whatever. This is in the creative fields I'm thinking, but I'm...

- It's in every field.

- Yeah. I think the conversation is starting is what I'm saying.

- Yeah.

- Okay. So, yeah, again, clarity. So that employees know what they need to do and have confidence in their leaders. How can you build confidence?

- I'm just starting a series building trust for leaders because often...and there's lots of information already on the site, but here's the thing about trust. We think if we're honest, that that's enough to build trust. I don't lie to you. I don't tell you things I can't tell you, but I don't lie to you.

But trust is so much more than honesty. Trust is, are you credible? Do people know that you know what you're doing? And how do they know that? Are you humble enough to listen to criticism, to be able to hear things? Because if I don't trust you to handle my feedback, I'm just not going to give it to you, right?

Are you able to treat everybody in a fair, equitable way? Because you might be really great to me, but if I see you speak to somebody else in a derogatory way, you don't have my trust. And if you gossip to me about other people, I'm pretty sure you're gossiping about me.

So, I don't trust you, even though you may think, well, I'm on your side. So, there's many different things that leaders need to consider rather than just, "Am I being honest to build trust?" And the unfortunate reality is that it takes time to build trust and it takes an instant to knock it down.

And in that case, what I say to leaders is you don't always have to take the blame when things don't go well, but you always have to take responsibility. So, if your project got shelved and you just say, well, those people in head office or those people in the government or whatever it is, and it's all them.

That's what we call the common enemy mistake because you're just making people feel more victimized, more hopeless, more powerless. Whereas what you could say is, yeah, the decision was made to do that. Now, let's regroup. What could we do to bring ourselves together and see what we want to do next, where we're going to go next, how we're going to have the kind of work environment that we want next?

And again, it's I'll trust you if I know you're taking responsibility, but I don't trust you when you blame everybody else.

- How can we fix this together, basically?

- Yeah. It is what it is if something went wrong, and now how can we work to move forward?

- And also, if a leader is saying that to a team, they're extending trust, right? Because they're saying, I trust your opinions and your ideas. Let's do it together. Okay. There's a few more.

- Yeah. I do ramble sometimes, Mary. Sorry.

- No, no, no. It's great. All of it is great. A work environment, now this is interesting to me, where employees feel connected to their work, co-workers, and their organization, and are motivated to do their job well. What's interesting to me is I remember the dot-com bubble when the way that employers would try and do this is they would have like crazy foosball tables and we're all going to go white-water rafting.

And, you know, there may be some echoes of that in tech, but it was pretty insane at that time. And I guess that was the way to get engagement is force employees to have fun together.

- Whether they liked it or not, right?

- Exactly. Because some introverts don't want to do that.

- No. And some extroverts don't want to spend their personal time with the people at work. So, no matter who you are, being forced to have fun is not fun. And I think we lost the point. The point of engagement is that you feel good about the work that you're doing, not...

And so, yes, some of that is having social connection, knowing the people you're working with, wanting to have each other's backs. So, there are things, but we have now created a bunch of team building activities where instead of foosball, we're actually looking at how can we bring people together, have an interesting conversation, and be building team cohesion and be building engagement and helping people.

But the thing about engagement that has long bothered me is that many employers will hold up their engagement score and say, "Look, we're doing really good." But in fact, most engagement scores are measuring the intrinsic motivation that I have to do a good job. So, yes, you might have hired people who want to do a good job.

It doesn't mean they like their work. It doesn't mean they like their boss. It doesn't mean they like their team. So, your engagement scores don't always reflect what's really going on in the workplace. And every time we've done the national survey for guarding mind, which measures psychosocial risk, is that we get engagement scores are the highest.

Well, that's because it's who I see myself as, which is somebody who wants to do a good job. But you look at all the other scores and they're not doing so good. And so the employer needs to not depend so much on engagement scores to decide if they have a psychologically safe workplace.

- Yeah. I think there are a few metrics that tell the whole story in isolation across the board, like no matter what you're looking at. If you're only looking at one metric, it's probably not telling the whole story. So, the next one is about professional development, I think. So, a work environment where employees receive encouragement and support in the development of their interpersonal...okay, it's bigger than this, interpersonal, emotional, and job skills.

So it's bigger than just professional development.

- So, many employers will think this means how much money per person do I give for training, growth, and development? But we know that if we just called our team together and said, we want everybody to bring in something that helps them do their job better and talk about it, we want people to bring in fun facts, we want people to bring in the idea that most pique their interest this week.

We could do growth and development on an ongoing basis at no cost while we're doing team building. So, we know that in some organization, there's no opportunity for promotion. There's just no jobs that are there that you can be promoted to.

And yet, if we can help people grow as individuals to become more self-aware, to become more emotionally intelligent, to become more aware of things that are going on in the community and the world, then we are contributing to growth and development.

- Yeah. It's a different take. And again, something that's difficult to measure, right? None of these things are easy - They're pretty straightforward when you think about it. Psych health and safety in spite of all the assessments, all the reports, all the research, comes down to how do we treat each other.

It's all it is. It's how we treat each other. How management treats employees. How employees treat each other. How clients or customers or patients treat employees. That's all it is. And the better we can make that, the more we can maximize the energy and focus of our employees.

- The next one is, "A work environment where employees are included in discussions about how their work is done and have input into decisions that impact their job."

- Right. So, this is involvement and influence. And some people will say, well, we can't have the tail wagging the dog, right? Can't have employees making decisions? But if you read it, it's not a decision about what work you will do, it's decisions that will impact the work that you're assigned.

And so, you know, instead of asking me, well, what would you like to do today, which is ridiculous, to say, you know, what do you need to be able to do the best job and then still go home at the end of the day with energy left over? Because if you go home with some energy left over and not completely drained, you can deal with the stressors in your life more effectively and therefore, be a better employee.

So, if your job is to run a podcast, do you have what you need to do that podcast really well? Are there other things we could do? I'm not asking you, can I give you the job of your dreams or, you know, do you want me to paint your office a different color?

I am asking you what do you need to do your job well.

- And really, who better to answer that question than the person that is doing the job? Whether that's in manufacturing or, yeah, pretty much anywhere. "A work environment where the organization is supportive of employees' psychological health concerns and provides assistance as needed."

So, employee assistance programs are fairly common here now, I think. I think that it's a well-known term. I don't know how new that is though.

- But we need to go beyond, go to the EAP to, are we supportive of employee psychological, physical health concerns while they're in the workplace? So, if you're someone who struggles with depression, am I always telling you, come on, you got to get your...you know, you got to be happy and you got to be a team player?

Or am I saying understand that you're going through this, how can I be supportive? What do you need? You know, maybe you want to stay off-camera sometimes because it's easier for you. Maybe you're going to do some things differently. Maybe you want to do more of the heads-down work by yourself because that's easier for you to focus than the interactive work.

That's what psychological and social support is, is doing what we can to support you while you're at work in addition to having other things. I can't tell you how many times I've heard somebody say I was struggling at work. They said, go to the EAP. I went to the EAP, I said, I'm struggling at work. My boss is an idiot.

And they spent four sessions doing that. Nothing changed and they're still struggling. So, I am a great supporter of EAP. It's a wonderful service that you can have somebody to talk to, you can think, but it does not solve workplace issues. And so psychological and social support goes beyond external resources.

- Yeah, I think EAPs are a good fallback when there's something maybe in your personal life, an issue, something that's sticky that for you to work through. I don't know. I mean, what do you think their place is?

- Well, EAPs are not all created equal. Some of them will offer triage where they'll do an intake and decide if you have a more serious problem and need to see a psychologist or some other kind of therapist. But some of them, because the employer wants the most economical one, they're just going to listen to you as just a brief talk therapy approach where you've got someone to listen to you for four hours and spaced out and that's it.

The other thing that I'd say about EAP is there's very low rates of use. And part of that is related to stigma. And I say to every leader, if you have never called EAP, do it. Because it doesn't matter if you're calling about a financial issue, an elder care issue, an employee issue, the fact that you could look me in the eye and say, I see that you're struggling with this, or you've said that you need this.

When I called the EAP, it took them this long to answer the phone. The intake process was like this. I was able to speak to somebody within this amount of time and I felt this way about it. Well, now you've just level set, right? This isn't for you people, this is for us people. And I know that my issues are confidential because they're legally required to keep it that way.

So, as a leader, if you have EAP, use it so you can recommend it more authentically.

- And maybe if you can't recommend it, you should reevaluate it.

- That's right. There's actually a piece on the workplace strategies website about how to negotiate an EAP, and really to be able to think about all the things that could do and to be clear about what you need. So, for instance, if I had a large indigenous population in my employee and I only had, you know, white mainstream counselors, then my negotiation would be, I want to have some indigenous counselors so that people can choose who they're going to talk to.

- Yeah. Important to know your context so that you can negotiate it, I suppose. We'll do one more, and then I just want to ask a couple of general questions. But, "A work environment where assigned tasks and responsibilities can be accomplished successfully within the time available."

And I'm giggling because I think we've all probably experienced a workplace where we've been asked to do what is actually impossible within the time that's given or with the equipment that's given.

- Yeah. And this is my thing is that workload management, which is the psychosocial part you're talking about, is about the amount of stress I have related to my work. It's not about the amount of work I have. I personally have more work than I would be able to complete in my lifetime, but I'm not stressed about it because I understand my priorities.

I understand it can't all be done and I know what I'm going to do next. And it's the same with everyone. If you and I had the exact same workload, which was way more than we could do, but your boss said to you, "Mary, if this doesn't get done, your job's on the line. We could lose this contract. We are not going to be able to survive."

And my boss says to me, "Mary Ann, let's prioritize together so that you know what's most important. And all I want from you is to do your best while you're here. And I don't want you working overtime because I know that's just going to take away from your ability. So, if you feel like you really have to work overtime to get something done for a deadline, let's talk about it first."

Who do you think's going to have more performance, productivity, and quality in their work?

- Definitely the Mary Ann, not the Mary in this scenario.

- Exactly. Right? Because I'm supported to have my focus and energy-optimized, and you are not. You are threatened. And for anybody who's interested in this stuff, I love Daniel Pink's book "Drive," where he's done a lot of studies about motivation and how external, both reward and punishment, those threats will make you narrow your focus.

Therefore, if you're expected to be innovative, creative, have good social skills, it's all going to go down the tubes because of that external threat.

- Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot to be said about, yeah, the thought that you can externally motivate someone rather than support their intrinsic motivation, which I think is always going to be more successful. But I wanted to ask you, in general, you've been working on this for a while, you're an expert in the field.

Do you see changes? Do you think things are changing, and are they changing for the better? And I suppose I could ask that both in the Canadian context, but maybe also internationally. What are the changes you've seen over your time?

- Yeah. Well, I think back, Mary, to 2003 and people would say to me, "Well, what do you do?" And I'd say, I'm in workplace mental health. And they'd go, "Oh, oh, you work with those people?" I was like, "No, I work with everybody." And, you know, helping people to work in a mentally healthy way that's not, you know... And to today where most employers will recognize the term psychological health and safety.

Now, not everybody sees it the same way. Some people still see it about employees with mental illness, which is not what it is. But I think about employees with respiratory illnesses like asthma, we're going to clean away the chemical hazards for everybody, but it's going to have a more profound effect if we don't do it for them.

But we don't take hazardous materials away only for people who are more vulnerable. We take them away because nobody should be at risk. Anyway. So, I see things evolving around the world and it's for the better, but what it is doing is it's holding a light up to those who are refusing to evolve and it's making people, the general population, much less likely to tolerate a work environment that is psychologically unsafe.

So, there's Great Resignation we're talking about, people saying, "I'm not going to do it anymore."

- What do you think is the biggest challenge to the kinds of changes that you'd like to see happening?

- I think the biggest challenge is that we overcomplicate it. Systems and assessments and reports and research, all of those things have their place, but they're also used as an excuse not to take action because it's too much, it's too involved, it's too complex.

The other thing that I see as a challenge is sometimes the very people who are advocating for psychological health and safety are doing it in an argumentative, confrontational way. And we're never going to sell it if we can't even live it, right? If we can't walk the talk and not be hypocrites ourself, how do we ever expect that we're going to convince others?

- Which brings us back full circle really, when we were talking about persuading leadership to support these kinds of things is, you know, you had advocated for, well, instead of asking them to do something else, why don't we support their goals? And lo and behold, there are these effects, you know, psychological psychosocial effects that are going to benefit everyone.

- Absolutely. Like, say we're doing a merger, you know, and you think, well, what's that got to do with psychological health and safety? Well, you're going to have some people let go. You're going to have teams that have to merge together. So, if you as the person who's advocating, said, look, let's help to get the teams ready for change, and then let's help to bring the teams together, integrate them, help them to see the value and the strengths in each other, and to have a new way of interacting, well, that's going to make the merger a lot more successful, but it's also improving psychological health and safety.

Like, it's just the approach that we take.

- Right. And again, it's about clarity too, because if you're going to be let go, you want to know. And if you're going to be added to a new team, you want to know and you want to understand what's going to happen. So, I have a few questions I ask every guest, so I'm going to get to those now. If you were training tomorrow's health and safety professionals, and aside from sort of technical skills, what soft skill, as they call them, what interpersonal relationship skill would you want to focus on that you think would best prepare them for their role?

- So, in health and safety, it is about shuttle diplomacy. And let me explain what I mean. It's that I can hear what the issues are from the people that are telling me or from my own observations. So, I'm going to identify the risks, but I'm going to present them in a way that is not attacking the people who need to make the decision.

So, if I get employees saying, we think leaders just keep secrets from us, then I would say, "Well, you know, what about when there's things they can't share yet because decisions aren't made or whatever." And when I presented it to the leaders, I would present it in a way that says we understand that there are times when you're not able to communicate things that are in play because decisions aren't made.

What we would like is for you to say, these are things we're considering and to have opportunity for feedback. So, not to say you're not telling us stuff, but to give it to them in a way and to understand that that's skill. To be able to take something and deliver it to someone in a way that they're not going to resist it or defend or justify their position is a skill we could use for life.

But health and safety people would really benefit from that.

- In my head, I refer to that as the you're doing it wrong approach. You know, the opposite of that, right? Like, don't approach anything by starting with you're doing it wrong. Yeah. But understanding...

- I think sometimes we feel the pain, the stress of the employees. So, when we go to talk to the leaders, we bring that with us, but it's not effective. And as professionals, we need to know how to motivate and how to help bring along the leaders.

So, you are a coach, you're that person who's translating it in a way that can be heard and can be actioned.

- Excellent advice. If you could go back in time to the beginning of your career, what is one piece of advice that you might give to young Mary Ann?

- Don't go to work in a jam factory. There's snakes and spiders in there.

- Okay. That's the most unique answer I have heard so far.

- I think probably the advice would be get over yourself. That there are no perfect people. That everybody's not waiting for you to fail. That you're not supposed to sound like you have all the answers. I think that's what I would say to myself.

Get over yourself. Yeah.

- Yeah. So, humility, and I've heard that before from other people as well.

- It's not even humility, it's almost I beat myself up all the time and it was almost, like, you know, who do you think you're supposed to be? You're just a person. And I guess that is humility, but at the time, I was a shy, insecure person.

- Holding yourself to a very high standard, I'm sure. And maybe impossibly high.

- Yeah. So, we've talked about the website and we'll certainly link to it in the show notes, but are there any other resources that you would point to for listeners who want to learn more about the topics that we've talked about today, whether they're books or websites or...?

- What I would say is there's so much that is evolving right now. The National Standard of Canada is being reviewed and will be modified. Guarding Minds at Work is going to come out with a modification to help it align with ISO 45003. FlourishDx, which is an Australian organization, have been making modifications to their stuff.

And so what I would say is try to step back and critically think about what you're trying to accomplish and then think about what could move your organization forward. What does the employer want to do?

Because somebody just asked me, you know, well, I want to get a certificate, or I want to study this right now. And I'm like, yeah, but in two years, it's going to be different and it's going to have evolved. So, I would say be open to the change, be open to the evolution, look at what is around, but then make decisions about what's going to work in your situation rather than worrying about credentialism at this moment.

- Right. Okay. And just one more time, could you speak the URL for the website that we've been talking about?

- So, I'll give you the full URL, which is workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com, but you could also use clwsmh.com. So, you can use either one of those, but yeah, workplacestrategiesformentalhealth.com is the full website and everything on there is free in English and French.

There's nothing to buy.

- Awesome. That's great. And where can our listeners find you on the web if they'd like to learn more from you or...

- They can't.

- They can't?

- In the deep dark. No, I'm not. On LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to find me. So, it's Mary Ann Baynton, and that's where I spend...the bit of time that I do spend on social media is on LinkedIn. Yeah.

- Well, that's all the time we have for today. I'd like to thank our listeners as always for tuning in, and thank you so much for your time, your ideas, your humor, and a great conversation.

- Thanks, Mary. It's been a pleasure.

- And as always, my thanks to the "Safety Labs by Slice" team. If you enjoy this episode, we'd appreciate if you would rate and review it on your podcast platform, and, of course, share it with your health and safety colleagues. Bye for now. ♪ [music] ♪ Safety Labs is created by Slice, the only safety knife on the market with a finger-friendly blade.

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