“Rushing to survey” is a term we use to describe organizations that are not adequately prepared before they engage employees in any type of survey.
We recommend that you review the following carefully to have a plan of action ready before you send out the link to the survey. This will help support successful outcomes and avoid skepticism about the value of completing a survey when no timely action appears to be taken on the results.
Organizational readiness
Consider organizational readiness for change. There may be internal or external factors that make taking action more difficult:
- Potential mergers or major reorganizations.
- Current labour disputes or pending strike actions.
- These may not be the ideal times to begin a process in which management and the union are expected to work together.
- Impending business issues such as shutdowns, layoffs, terminations or redeployments.
- It may make sense to focus first on limiting the risk related to the impact of these issues.
- External events impacting the organization, especially where there is a lot of uncertainty.
- This may, however, be an ideal time to address the most pressing needs related to the uncertainty.
Any of the above may make it difficult for large-scale change. This should not prevent the workplace from supporting employees through difficult changes, grief at the loss of co-workers or increased workload pressures. Identify what could be helpful and narrow your focus to making incremental positive changes. For inspiration, consider completing the Organizational review.
Getting buy-in
It’s important to get buy-in and commitment to proceed with a plan to address psychological health and safety in your work environment.Without this prior approval, the process can be halted by concerned leaders who are not clear on the risks and benefits and are focused on other priorities
The purpose of getting buy-in is to establish that psychological health and safety is a priority to your organization and getting written Commitment, leadership and participation for psychological health and safety (labour and management) in the form of a directive or policy statement.
Be prepared to respond to questions from senior leaders in management or labour about the:
- Costs and benefits of assessing psychological health and safety
- Estimated time and effort that will be required
- Structure that will support implementing your plan
- Requirement for employee and leader time during and after the process
- Management of employee expectations for change
Each of the following can help you do this:
Costs and benefits
Beginning a dialogue with leaders and employees about how psychosocial factors impact work may result in positive changes, even without a formal implementation process. Larger initiatives and programs are not always required.
- The economic and social benefits of a psychologically healthy and safe environment can include sustainability of an engaged workforce and a healthy bottom line. Psychological health and safety statistics are available to provide evidence.
- Considering the costs can help you use your own data to make the business case for addressing psychological health and safety.
- A strengths and weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis can be a useful tool for decision-making. Free information for conducting a SWOT analysis is provided courtesy of Businessballs Free Work and Life Learning | PDF.
- Consider having leaders complete the Psychologically Safe Leadership Assessment (PSLA) to identify specific leadership strategies that support psychological health and safety.
Time and effort
Estimate the time and effort required to do the assessment, analyze results and implement change. The size and scope of your plan will be relative to the complexity of your organization and the initiatives you choose to implement. Some organizations might survey and implement limited changes once a year, while others will create a continual improvement process.
Estimate the time your organization may need for the following tasks:
- Developing the business case, including baseline measurements.
- Securing commitment from top leadership from both labour and management.
- Creating a communication plan that addresses any potential concerns.
- Setting up the survey process by choosing when and how it will happen, who will participate and what will be included from among the options.
- Administering the Guarding Minds at Work survey (This is probably the easiest part).
- Analyzing the Guarding Minds at Work results.
- Communicating results, celebrating successes, and identifying areas for improvement.
- Engaging the workforce in proposing action plans. This participation is critical to success.
- Engaging a working group in implementing the plans that could eventually become part of a day-to-day routine.
- Measuring outcomes. Did the plans achieve the goals that were set?
- Taking corrective action including modifications or new approaches as indicated by the evaluation of outcomes.
- Establishing a process of continual improvement. Consider re-administering the survey every couple of years.
- Estimating ongoing time allocation. For example, you may choose one hour every two weeks per team to maintain the improvements in psychological health and safety.
Demands on employees and leaders
Psychological health and safety supports employee productivity and a healthy bottom line. Organizations or departments may believe that they do not have enough time or resources to invest in this. Like all health and safety approaches, you may wish to consider the following when discussing priorities:
- Organizations may begin by looking at just one psychosocial factor. Identify one or more which the leaders believe is impacting success.
- One example is workload management. Effective workload management is rarely about doing less work. It focuses on doing work with less stress and distraction. This concept can open dialogue, help identify solutions, reduce stress-related absenteeism and help create an atmosphere for continued improvement.
- Leading-edge organizations conscientiously choose best practices for continual improvement. Psychological health and safety can follow this approach.
- Comprehensive resources are provided in Psychological health and safety policy recommendations to help modify and improve existing policies and processes.
- Have leadership openly accept responsibility for the current situation and the need to make changes. By accepting responsibility (as opposed to blame), they can reduce the need for others (employees or leaders) to justify or defend their current behaviours or positions. Consider and act on the results of the Psychologically Safe Leader Assessment.
- This can be an opportunity to engage staff in discussing ways to protect psychological health and safety in the workplace. The On the agenda workshop series materials can help.
Engage external experts, if appropriate. Guarding Minds at Work is a free, self-serve resource, but some organizations prefer an external consultant to assist. Existing knowledge and expertise may reduce overall effort and time.
Serious employee considerations
- Risk management approaches are necessary when any part of your workplace could be considered poisoned or toxic. Put safeguards in place to help ensure no further harm is done to employee psychological safety.
- Immediately address issues of trauma, violence, harassment, bullying or discrimination.
- Be sensitive to the current ability of those who are affected by trauma to complete the survey. They may require extra time or a quiet place without distractions.
- See also Impairment and addiction response for leaders, Grief response for leaders, Suicide response for leaders and Psychosis and how to help in a crisis for additional resources.
Manage employee expectations
There may be some concern that talking about psychological health and safety will create unreasonable expectations from employees.
- Psychological health and safety is about optimizing employees’ focus and energy, which leads to improved productivity and performance. It is about supporting every employee to do their best work.
- Some may worry that discussing psychological health and safety with employees will cause problems or invite unreasonable criticism. But avoiding or denying workplace issues may allow problems to worsen until they become a crisis or a risk-management concern.
- Proactively identifying and addressing psychological health and safety issues can help prevent time-consuming and morale-dampening situations. This also leads to a more effective plan for prevention.
- The National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace provides an evidence-based framework to support taking action and avoid risk to employee psychological safety.
Explore more information or begin using the survey tools.