Using Guarding Minds at Work effectively

This will help you:

• Get buy-in
• Make the business case
• Understand the time and effort required
• Manage expectations

Step 2: Understand factors and hazards

It’s important to understand what you are and aren’t measuring. You are not measuring individual employee health indicators. You are measuring organizational conditions that can impact employee well-being.

The Guarding Minds employee survey¹ measures psychosocial elements that potentially impact the health, safety and well-being of employees. Your employee survey report will include results by:

• Psychosocial factors are work conditions that can have either a positive or negative effect on employee psychological health and safety. These factors, within the influence and responsibility of employers, can include interactions with co-workers, clients, or management. They don’t include factors outside the control of the employer such as family history, employee health or genetics.
• Psychosocial hazards are potential negative outcomes that can result when work conditions aren’t psychologically healthy or safe. 
• Indicators of workplace inclusion help identify the extent to which employees are exposed to stigma, discrimination or exclusion.
• Indicators of stress or trauma help identify the extent to which employees are exposed to work stress or trauma. 

Step 3: Determine an assessment strategy

Choose which assessment tools your organization will use:

• Organizational review. This is a review for senior leaders to explore existing policies and practices in relation to the same psychosocial factors found in the survey. It can be done on its own or in addition to the survey. This may be your only option if your organization has fewer than 10 employees, or if it is not convenient to conduct an employee survey.
• Employee survey. This is a 61-item survey you can administer to all employees in your organization or work unit. It provides an assessment of employee perceptions for each psychosocial factor and hazard.
• Stress satisfaction scan. This scan provides 6 items for employees to rank the extent to which they are stressed or satisfied at work. This is suitable for your organization if:
  
  • You want a quick snapshot of stress versus satisfaction among your employees.
  • There are insufficient resources to conduct and respond to the more comprehensive Guarding Minds survey at this time.

The recommended option is to have your senior leaders complete the Organizational Review first, then send the Employee Survey to everyone else as a comparison to the leaders’ perspective. This approach provides the leaders a chance to become familiar with what the employees will be asked, and to think in advance about possible actions they might take. It also helps reveal any discrepancies in perspectives that require further exploration and discussion with employees.

Organizational review

This resource is a set of worksheets intended to be completed manually by a leader or leadership team. It helps them consider how psychological health and safety may impact various data measures such as absenteeism, disability, conflict, grievances, and turnover. It supports them to consider how existing policies, programs and procedures can be improved. It also provides a way for leaders to explore solutions and strategies unique to their organizational realities.

There are different ways to use the organizational review process including:
In advance of the survey: This approach can provide a good foundation of knowledge about psychological health and safety for leaders, a chance to preplan potential solutions and a comparison of their perceptions and the perceptions of employees which are often different.

To compare with employee survey results: If you complete the Organizational Review and enter the results on the Guarding Minds Dashboard (via the Organizational review input button within your Active survey), your report will show the leadership perspectives along with the employee results for comparison once you have completed and closed the survey.

Instead of a survey: The organizational review is also a helpful exercise for small business owners, team leaders or any organization in which an employee survey is not possible or practical. This may be your only option if your organization has fewer than 10 employees, or if it is not convenient to conduct an employee survey. The organizational review can even be part of an open discussion with the team members where there is trust and transparency.

Read more about facilitating an organizational review and review the questions.

Employee survey

This is an automated resource that allows you to register your organization and send out a link to the 61-item survey to every employee.

Once the survey is completed, your report is automatically produced in a digital format for you to read online in an accessible format or download in PDF format to print out. 
Employee identity is kept confidential. The aggregated results provide a snapshot of how the organization is experienced by employees on measures that are known to impact psychological health and safety in the workplace. See the Guarding Minds at Work overview for more information about how confidentiality is protected.

You can review the Survey statements in advance.

Stress satisfaction scan

The 6-question Stress Satisfaction Scan is available as a quick pulse check when the recommended option is not practical.

This scan provides six statements that indicate to what extent your employees are stressed or satisfied at work. This short survey is suitable for your organization if:

• Your organization has other employee surveys to conduct and you want to add this measure to it. Note that the Guarding Minds Employee Survey already includes this measurement, so the Stress Satisfaction Scan is not necessary.
• There are insufficient resources to conduct and respond to the more comprehensive Guarding Minds survey at this time.
• You want a quick snapshot of stress versus satisfaction in your organization. This can establish if there is a need for more significant investment in addressing psychological health and safety in your workplace.
• The scan can also be done along with the Organizational Review for a more complete assessment.

For more information read Understanding the Stress Satisfaction Scan.

Step 4: Create a plan

It’s vital to ensure the appropriate people are involved and committed to your plan for addressing psychological health and safety.

It’s also important that all stakeholders, including employees, understand the purpose of the survey, how confidentiality will be protected and the deadline for completion.

The intention is to get buy-in, maximize participation in the survey and create an understanding that it’s everyone’s responsibility to contribute to a psychologically healthy and safe workplace.

It is also at the planning stage that your evaluation strategy should be decided.

Read more about Creating a plan.

Step 5: Sign up and launch survey

This step-by-step guide helps you understand all of the information you’ll be required to input and consider the pros and cons of the options that are provided in relation to the Guarding Minds employee survey. Read this in advance to be prepared and make the process easy for you.

Step 6: Review results

When you’re ready, Interpret your Guarding Minds at Work survey results provides information to help you analyze your report and choose your next steps. 

Step 7: Take action

Once you generate and download or print your results, there are many tools and resources to help you take actions towards psychological health safety in your workplace.

The Guarding Minds survey is a snapshot in time of your employees’ perceptions. The survey results alone will not help to improve psychological health and safety. It will help you identify areas of strength as well as areas for improvement, so you can take actions towards a psychologically healthier and safer workplace.

The following resources are some options to help you take action:

• Evidence-based actions for psychological health and safety. Suggested actions are based on research or practice that can improve each psychosocial factor as well as inclusion, stress and trauma. In most cases, free resources are provided to help you move forward with or without additional funding.
• Psychological health and safety change process. This process provides you with strategies and tools to create effective and sustainable changes that support psychological health and safety at work. This information is intended for those responsible for policy and process change.  
• On the agenda workshop series. This workshop series is based on each psychosocial factor and includes free materials and facilitator tools. There are two parts to the series: 
  
  • Creating Awareness supports a psychologically safe team discussion about what team members can do to improve psychological health and safety without necessarily having budget or authority to change policy.
  • Creating Change gathers employee feedback and supports decision makers to focus on organizational policies and processes that support psychological health and safety.
• Employees' role in psychological health and safety. These free online learning modules help employees learn how to contribute to a mentally healthy workplace. This orientation to psychological health and safety at work is for individuals.
• Psychologically safe leader assessment. This free resource helps leaders become aware of the impact they can have on the psychological health and safety of employees at work. It helps leaders improve communication, social intelligence, fairness and problem-solving.

Step 8: Evaluate and choose next steps

While evaluation happens after you take action, it’s important to decide upon your evaluation strategy before the action plan is implemented. Some evaluation questions to consider are "How will we know whether these actions achieved our intended outcomes?" or "How will we know whether our investment in time, effort and expenses was worthwhile?"

Effective evaluation is:

• Practical: clearly relevant to your intended outcomes, straightforward, measurable, easy to implement, and cost-effective
• Flexible: adaptable to your workplace and its available resources
• Continuous: uses an ongoing quality improvement approach where employee feedback and other data is provided over time and used to modify/improve intervention(s)

Evaluation planning for psychological health and safety provides tips and strategies to help you develop your evaluation strategy.

Explore more information or begin using the survey tools. 

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1. © Samra, J., Gilbert, M., Shain, M., Bilsker, D. 2009-2020, with amendments by Stuart, H. 2022.   All rights reserved. Website development and data storage by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety (CCOHS).

Guarding Minds at Work was commissioned by Canada Life and additional resources are supported by Workplace Strategies for Mental Health.