Pyschological safety and mental health in the workplace is in the spotlight for local governments. It's been a couple of years since the WA Work Health and Safety (WHS) Act (2020) was introduced and lifted the profile of pyschological safety.

Although local goverments, as PCBUs (person conducting a business or undertaking), have always had a duty of care to provide a safe workplace and take all reasonable steps to manage physical and pyschological hazards, the Act now explicitly talks about pyschological safety.

LGIS provides a suite of services to support members at all points of their risk management journey when it comes to pyschological safety. Fundementally the LGIS programs is designed to help members to create an environment where employees feel safe, share their concerns, and seek support when facing psychological challenges. It emphasises fostering a culture of respect, professionalism, empathy, and open communication.

LGIS' Pyschologically safe program

The program helps members to adopt tertiary, secondary and primary interventions that target all levels within an organisation – individual, leadership, team, and organisation wide.

The program is divided into four main stages:

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Promote

The first step is to build employees capacity to understand mental health issues, develop their own resilience and contribute to mentally health workplaces. By openly talking about and promoting mental health local governments can reduce stigma and build resilience.

Prevent

Unlike physical hazards, which are present for specific roles, mental health risks exist in every industry and job. The prevention part of the program includes workshops to develop individuals and teams understanding of local government's duty of care requirements, dealing with difficult behaviours and identifing and managing pyschosocial hazards.

Intervene early

Supporting and accommodating employees at the early stages of a mental health issue helps lessen recovery time and reduces their time away from work. Members should consider offering an EAP service to address employees' personal and work-related concerns. LGIS offers three types of intervention services – counselling for workplace issues, mediation to address potentially toxic workplace relationships, and people leader self-harm prevention resources.

Support recovery

Supporting workers post-injury is critical in influencing successful return-to-work/stay-at-work processes. Along with leadership support and communication with the worker, alignment to an injury management process, and provision of a critical incident debriefing opportunity helps in the  recovery. LGIS provides critical incident debriefing when a major incident occurs that impacts workers, and advice/consultancy services during 'high-risk' times.

More information

For more information on how LGIS' pyschologically safe program can support you in creating a mentally healthy workplace contact the People Risk Team.