10 business benefits of effective and engaging workplace wellbeing.
Mental health and workplace safety —is your business doing all it can?
For the purposes of this article, we define a psychologically healthy and safe business or workplace as: “A workplace which promotes workers’ psychological wellbeing and actively works to prevent harm to psychological health, including reckless, negligent, or intentional ways.”
What is ISO 45003?
ISO 45003 is an occupational health and safety management standard that aims to improve psychological health and safety at work.
ISO 45003 addresses an important gap that was previously missing from health and safety standards – mental health.
It serves as a benchmark for creating a management system that effectively eliminates or manages psychosocial risks. Assembling a positive work environment can boost organizational resilience, performance, and production.
Why do we need ISO 45003?
The current pandemic has shone a light on how much our jobs can affect our mental health, providing organizations with the impetus to develop a structure that identifies key risk factors.
Over the last few years in particular, many people and organizations felt under pressure with work-related stress. This has highlighted the need for a proper workplace mental health management structure.
What are the benefits of ISO 45003?
Achieving ISO 45003 has many advantages. Following the health and safety guidelines will make the workplace safer and more productive for all. It will help enhance your business’s reputation by demonstrating high performance.
ISO 45003 describes how to identify psychological hazards that may harm workers and provides examples of successful—often simple—management measures. Many organizations don’t have specialist, trained mental health professionals. With ISO 45003, you can manage current challenges and continuously improve your management system’s effectiveness.
Below we explore the top ten business benefits. These include improved recruitment, retention, and diversity; enhanced worker engagement; increased innovation; legal compliance; reduced absence from workplace stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression; improved company reputation; a boost in employee satisfaction, increased profits, and an improvement to the bottom-line.
Why is ISO 45003 important?
Before delving more into ISO 45003 and why it’s so popular among businesses, let’s examine why it’s essential in the first place.
People are the foundation of any organization. COVID-19 has compelled organizations to prioritize human-centered approaches.
Physical, mental, and cognitive needs and expectations mean that not only should we be kept healthy and safe at work, but we should also be able to grow, develop, and prosper.
People are your most valuable assets.
Seeing people in their home environment has led to a recognition that we’re all people, which has helped to contribute to a large shift towards a more human approach to managing risks in and outside of the workplace.
We all have busy lives balancing jobs, family, friends, and other commitments. For many, it’s a delicate balancing act with many moving elements that can easily go wrong if balance is lost.
We are seeing fresh approaches to risk management and how we define risk in relation to work health and safety. ISO 45003 is designed to help enterprises manage psychosocial risks within an established health and safety framework.
Combating mental health issues
The health and safety field has recognized that preserving employees’ mental health is as vital as protecting their physical health.
No longer can all mental health disorders be grouped under the label ‘stress’ and be solely the individuals’ responsibility. We now understand the scope of workplace mental health and how this needs to be supported as a priority from the top down
Mental health costs
Psychological factors also have a cost that can no longer be overlooked. According to the UK Centre for Mental Health’s 2020 Spending Review, the social and economic cost of mental health disorders in Britain has risen to a record £119 billion over the last decade.
Anxiety and depression caused by working account for one-fifth of lost working days. Investing in your employees’ mental health makes financial sense. A Deloitte study found that almost half of all lost working days in Britain were due to Stress and that one in six workers experience mental health issues at any given time.
Why is ISO 45003 good for business?
The business case for managing mental wellbeing and psychosocial risks
Facilitating good mental health within your business has never been more critical.
A framework for managing psychological health and safety can help you build a positive working environment, improve organizational resilience, engagement, performance, and productivity.
Top 10 benefits of good workplace mental health.
Implementing practical proactive workplace wellbeing solutions can improve your workplace environment and benefit your business in the following ways:
- Improved organizational resilience: better risk management and a solid support network will allow workplaces to adapt to potentially stressful situations or changes while maintaining worker mental health.
- Increased awareness: greater monitoring and training can help employees understand their own mental health, while managers can identify personnel at risk of burnout.
- Reduced absenteeism: mental illness might cause workers to need time off. Having procedures in place to safeguard employees from psychosocial risks can help reduce absenteeism and mental health recovery time.
- Boosted productivity: stress and other mental risks can reduce worker output. Workers are more productive with greater wellbeing. You can expect better work performance and reliability from a healthy happy workforce.
- Supporting diversity: by having processes in place to support and protect all workers with whatever they need when they need it, organizations can serve a diverse workforce.
- Recruitment and retention: a positive supportive workplace with the right management in place can help attract top talent, increase employee retention, and reduce recruitment costs.
- Legal compliance: by law, employers must safeguard workers and conduct risk assessments to ensure their safety. The correct workplace wellbeing helps meet this requirement.
- Better communication: the Standard provides a framework for increased communication between workers and management, helping to remove barriers and encouraging employees to work together to reduce psychosocial risks.
- Stronger and safer policies for remote working and out-of-hours work: employers can use the Standard to design systems that protect workers who don’t work in the organization’s buildings or during normal working hours.
- Greater confidentiality: by establishing a confidentiality process, the Standard helps to protect workers from further psychosocial harm and maintains compliance with laws and regulations.
Aside from the apparent benefits of a healthier and happier workforce, managing psychological risks impacts practically every aspect of your business. This can boost productivity, increase profitability and improve your business’s bottom line.
ISO 45003 and workplace wellbeing – can it help your business prosper?
Psychological health and wellbeing is a new field for many health and safety professionals worldwide. Changes in workplace mental health and safety will be gradual, but we must all start taking proactive actions to address it.
Many regard the new ISO 45003 standard as a long-overdue look at mental health and safety. While many ISO standards address physical aspects of health and safety management, little has been done to provide mental health protection for employees in the past. The good news is that there are now simple cost-effective preventative solutions that deliver multiple business benefits.
Employees value a workplace that prioritizes their mental and physical wellbeing. It also enhances work/life balance and fosters stronger relationships at work.
Empower wellbeing for life
Blisspot is ready to support your company’s mental wellness. We realize that achieving ISO 45003 compliance might be a longer process, but you don’t have to go it alone. Blisspot offers a personalized wellbeing plan for you, your team, and your business tailored to exactly what you need.
Blisspot’s team of mental health experts, psychologists, doctors, therapists, councilors, and specialists from all over the world are here to help you with workplace wellbeing. Online accessibility 24/7 means that employees can take what they need when they need it, self-managing their health and wellbeing for immediate needs and long-lasting results.
Blisspot’s Online Mental Wellbeing
The ISO 45003 guidance document is for organizations looking to improve work-related mental wellbeing as part of managing occupational health and safety.
Blisspot is the ideal platform for organizations wishing to cover multiple key areas when it comes to an end-to-end solution for the best in employee wellbeing.
To help promote healthy workplace wellbeing, Blisspot offers a range of FREE Wellbeing Tools and members benefit from unlimited access to over $10,000 worth of Courses designed to help all levels of employees recognize and address workplace wellbeing issues within themselves and their colleagues.
Get a free, no-obligation 14-day trial for any of our world-class wellbeing resources today. Alternatively, you can request a free consultation to find out everything Blisspot has to offer and how we can tailor world-class wellbeing to your business.
Invest in your team’s wellbeing today for the health of your business.
