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Health and safety is important in any business and it’s up to you as an employer to make sure necessary measures are put in place to protect people. But a lot of business owners are unaware of the importance of psychological health and safety, and they don’t do enough to protect their employees from potential psychological dangers in the workplace.
Psychological health and safety deals with anything that could affect the mental health of your employees. Sometimes, these are direct problems involving conflict between members of staff, or they could be issues with the way that you organize and manage the workplace.
If you do not already have a system in place for managing psychological health and safety, these are some of the best ways to identify potential risk areas and deal with them.
Get A Psychological Risk Assessment
You are probably familiar with risk assessments already. Having one carried out can help you identify physical risks, but most people don’t realize that you can have psychological workplace risk assessments done too. Employee surveys and other methods can be used to identify any potential psychological dangers that could cause stress and mental health issues. As part of the risk assessment, you will also get some recommendations for steps that you can take to improve the situation. A risk assessment is always a brilliant place to start if you haven’t considered psychological health and safety before.
Put A System In Place For Reporting Harassment And Bullying
Workplace bullying and harassment are some of the biggest psychological dangers that employers need to tackle. If people do not feel safe at work and they are being victimized, this soon leads to a lot of stress and mental health issues, and it will have a big impact on productivity around the office. It’s important that you know how to recognize harassment and you have a good system for reporting harassment and bullying. Anonymous reporting procedures make people feel more comfortable about speaking out. You need to communicate to your employees that you will always take complaints seriously and take a zero-tolerance approach to bullying and harassment.
Have Regular Employee Assessments
Employee assessments are a good way to bring up any issues with employees, but it’s also a good opportunity to check in with them. During your employee assessments, you can ask if their workload is ok and whether they are feeling a lot of stress at work. You can also ask if their relationships with the rest of the team are ok. During these sessions, you will pick up on a lot of potential problems that need to be solved. If you start having employee assessments more often, you can identify small problems early on and nip them in the bud before they start impacting psychological health and safety. You don’t need to do a formal performance review every single time, just have a casual chat on a regular basis so your employees can raise any issues.
Psychological health and safety are crucial to the overall success of your business. These simple methods can help you identify any problems and deal with them, so your employees are always happy and healthy.
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