Mental health at work is also a work-design issue

Over the years, one thing I have learnt from working across occupational health and safety, training and organisational development is that when something goes wrong at work, it is rarely enough to look only at the individual.

We look at the task. We look at the environment. We look at supervision, resources, systems and the way the work has been organised.

The conversation around workplace mental health has developed considerably. Organisations today are more willing to talk about wellbeing, provide counselling support, run awareness programmes and encourage employees to speak up.

All of this has value.

My own experiences of challenge and uncertainty have reinforced the importance of resilience, perspective and support. While people draw strength from different sources, these can play an important role in helping them navigate difficult periods. However, supporting individual wellbeing is only part of the answer. We must also understand and address the conditions that create pressure in the first place.

But there is another question that deserves equal attention:

If workloads are consistently unrealistic, priorities continually compete, responsibilities are unclear, working hours leave little opportunity for recovery or people carry accountability without enough authority to act, then we cannot look at mental health only as an individual wellbeing issue.

We also need to look at the design of work.

Psychosocial risk is a workplace risk

In health and safety, we are accustomed to identifying hazards and understanding the conditions that create risk.

Psychosocial risk should encourage similar thinking.

When someone is experiencing work-related stress, the immediate response may be to think about resilience, coping skills or individual support. These can certainly help. But they do not tell us whether something within the work itself is contributing to the problem.

That requires different questions.

These are mental health questions, but they are also management and risk questions.

Workload is not simply about how much work someone has

A busy workplace is not necessarily an unhealthy workplace.

Most of us will experience demanding periods in our careers. There will be deadlines, operational pressures and occasions when additional effort is required.

The concern is what happens when exceptional pressure becomes the normal way of working.

Workload can be affected by far more than the number of tasks someone has. Constant interruptions, conflicting priorities, insufficient staffing, unclear decisions, unrealistic deadlines and repeated changes can all increase the demands placed on people.

This is why telling someone to manage their time better may sometimes address the symptom rather than the cause.

Responsibility needs to be matched with control

Another area I have seen create unnecessary pressure is a mismatch between responsibility and authority.

We may give someone responsibility for an outcome but not the authority to make the decisions required to achieve it.

Or we may expect employees to deliver against several priorities without making clear which one takes precedence when they conflict.

People need clarity about what they are responsible for, but they also need the information, resources and appropriate level of control required to perform that responsibility.

Good work design therefore requires alignment between:

When these repeatedly fall out of alignment, pressure can become embedded within the role itself.

Working time deserves the same attention

Working hours, shift patterns, overtime and recovery periods are another important part of the picture.

This is particularly relevant in sectors where operations run continuously, staffing requirements fluctuate or production demands can change quickly.

Compliance with working-time requirements is important, but compliance should not be the end of the discussion.

We should also be asking:

That means looking at working time alongside staffing, workload, operational requirements and the realities of the job rather than treating each issue separately.

Look for patterns, not only individual cases

Perhaps the most important shift is from responding only when an individual is struggling to understanding what the organisation itself may be telling us.

Individual cases matter. But patterns can tell us something about the system.

That is where health and safety thinking has something valuable to contribute to the workplace mental health conversation.

The objective should not be to remove every source of pressure from work. That would neither be realistic nor necessarily desirable.

It should be to understand where demands become unreasonable, sustained or poorly controlled and whether the organisation has the mechanisms to recognise and respond to them.

This World Mental Health Day, ask a different question

World Mental Health Day gives organisations an important opportunity to talk about mental health.

But alongside asking what wellbeing initiatives are available, I believe leaders should ask: