reducing employer profits and costing the Canadian economy bil-lions
of dollars in losses each year.
What impacts employee mental health?
There are several issues that can greatly affect employee mental
health that organizations should consider in their efforts to cre-ate
a mentally healthy workplace. The comprehensive workplace
guide, Guarding Minds at Work, identified 13 psychosocial risk
factors. These risk factors are elements that can impact employ-ees’
psychological responses to work and work conditions, po-tentially
causing psychological health problems. These problems
ultimately affect the health of the organization, individual em-ployees
and the financial bottom line. They also impact the way
in which work is done (including interactions and relationships
with managers, coworkers and customers) and the context in
which work occurs.
Included are issues that affect mental health such as stigma and
discrimination, presenteeism, job burnout, violence, harassment
and bullying and substance abuse.
Employers are required by law to protect the mental and physi-cal
health of their employees. Many provincial occupational health
and safety acts have been expanded to include harm to psychologi-cal
well-being in the definition of harassment. In jurisdictions that
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As an employer, you
can encourage positive
mental health by:
• Encouraging active employee
participation and decision-making
• Clearly defining employees’ duties
and responsibilities
• Promoting work-life balance with your employees
• Encouraging respectful behaviours
in your organization
• Managing workloads of your employees
• Enabling continuous learning to help
employees develop and grow
• Having conflict resolution practices in place
• Recognizing employees’ contributions to
help them feel valued and fulfilled
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