When Psychosocial Hazards are outside your control, but are impacting your people, what can you do?
TL:DR - Flex your Psychosocial Risk Management plan. Identify what you can control, and control that.
My brother Nathan is a sparky in Auckland. He text me recently and mentioned he’d been working in Mt Roskill, doing electrical “make safe” work on homes impacted by flooding.
Wading through unclean waist-high water, looking at the ruins of his people’s homes whilst trying to stay physically safe and get the job done.
I’ve been simultaneously proud and worrying about him ever since, and that got me thinking.
My big bro hard at work.
When the Psychosocial Hazards we planned for are exacerbated, or new ones arise
Most leaders have at least a rough understanding of what burn-out is and the steps they can take to protect their teams from work-stress.
Leaders may even have a Psychosocial Risk Management plan in place to control for this and other psychosocial hazards, or be looking to implement one.
Most people will intuitively understand that various psychosocial hazards at work will be experienced in different ways by different people, depending on their response to particular stressors and their overall wellbeing at any given time.
But what if everyone at work is dealing with the same trauma simultaneously? How can leaders equip themselves to support their people through traumatic events that are impacting entire communities?
Individual factors
In an OSH sense, ‘psychosocial hazards’ refer only to hazards created by work and the work environment.
But people are not lab rats, we are humans, and our workplaces are not hermetically sealed environments. We bring ourselves to work, and whatever our state of wellbeing is, mentally and physically, interacts with workplace psychosocial hazards to produce an outcome (or more likely, a series of cascading outcomes).
In Psychology and in H&S lingo, what we bring with us to the work environment is referred to rather benignly as ‘individual factors.’
We can design and adapt work around individual factors, for example, ergonomic changes to account for different physical statures or abilities. We can provide support assistance to help with individual needs that may be present at the time of hiring or arise later down the line, from EAP (free counselling sessions), Mental Health First Aid, ‘open door’ policies or health care assistance to help with addiction, depression, grief, recovery from an illness or other life event.
But once in a while, a major upheaval or event can strike across a workplace, a community, a country (or in the case of Covid, the world). How can leaders adapt their Psychosocial Risk Management plan to deal with that?
Artist credit: Dinos and Comics / Dinosaur Couch
Right now, NZ is dealing with a lot. I’m a Kiwi living in the UK and the disasters just seem to keep on coming. Every time I wake up in the morning there’s a new weather warning or tale of heroism (regular people busting out their wetsuits and motorboats to rescue others - classic kiwi behaviour). I can’t even imagine what it’s like for the people and communities whose lives, homes and transport networks have been turned upside down by this.
Practical tips
In the interest of keeping this blog helpful, I’m going to focus on some workplace Psychosocial Hazards that may be exacerbated (meaning the level of risk associated with these hazards increases) as a result of Cyclone Gabrielle, and some practical tips for how employers can control these Hazards and manage this risk.
In addition, we will look at signs to watch out for from a more holistic mental health support point of view and low-cost and simple tools that leaders can implement right away to support their teams. From a compliance point of view, this might not be required; but we recognise that leaders are human too - yes, we want to ensure that we are providing the mental health support required from an OSH perspective but we are not just box ticking here, we want our people to be well or at the very least help them to avoid harm - whether or not this is essential for compliance.
Common Psychosocial Hazards exacerbated by extreme events (risk of negative outcomes increases):
Dirty, dangerous and uncomfortable work
Tradespeople, roadworkers, civil engineers, water treatment workers, power producers, insurance surveyors, emergency service workers, farmers, and anyone else whose role includes physically working at impacted scenes will be working through significantly higher levels of this hazard.
Where my brother may previously have worked in somewhat uncomfortable conditions as an electrician (crawling into roof spaces for example), he is now working in significantly uncomfortable and dangerous conditions.
Artist credit: Dilbert by Scott Adams
Dealing with conflict and distressed people
Call centre workers will be bearing the brunt of this at the moment. Anyone taking calls for insurance purposes, emergency services, debt repayments, accommodation bookings for displaced people, organising and co-ordinating the response. Emergency workers dealing with repetitive road traffic accidents, flooded communities. Hospitality workers who are having more frequent interactions with displaced persons.
Going back to my brother the sparky, where previously he may have interacted with customers who were somewhat annoyed or distressed that their power was out, at the moment it is likely that distress will be much greater as people are losing their homes.
Long working hours
Some professions will have more demand for their services than they can physically cope with. Groundworkers, roadworkers, electricians, forestry workers, builders, doctors and nurses, emergency responders, those staffing community shops and supermarkets, insurance agents and anyone else whose work involves getting things ‘back to normal,’ may feel a desire to work well beyond the hours that are healthy for them out of a desire to help others.
My big bro, again, might normally say ‘no’ I’m not free to do this job at 5pm on a friday, but if he gets a call now from a vulnerable or fearful person stuck without power or in an unsafe situation, what is he going to do? `
Artist credit: Dilbert by Scott Adams
Lone working
Lone workers may be at increased risk from the demands of isolation; due to them potentially suffering from higher levels of anxiety, stress, and a heightened emotional state.
Nathan is self-employed and usually works alone unless he is alongside other trades, he’s a bit of an introvert so this usually suits him, but right now it means that he has no one to ‘debrief’ to after visiting particularly difficult sites.
A lack of control of work and working methods
Anyone dealing with an environment that is behaving differently to the norm may be suffering from heightened levels of stress. Groundworkers, roadworkers, farmers etc who are working in muddy, ever-changing and dynamic conditions that require a different to usual working method that may feel less safe.
Scheduling work that is weather-dependent during long periods of bad weather can also be tough. For tradespeople and many primary industry workers, they rely on dry days to get certain jobs done. Trying to schedule work around unexpected weather conditions can be stressful, worrying and frustrating and a lack of control around this factor is a psychosocial hazard.
Conflicting work demands
For those in larger organisations or more corporate roles, this could be anything from multiple managers requesting different things at the same time, to the push and pull of wanting to do work that helps the community vs work that pays well.
For the self-employed or those in primary industries with multiple clients, it could be simply having competing demands with not enough time to meet them all. For example a builder sacrificing one project to work on another.
Artist credit: Yes, it’s Dilbert by Scott Adams again - basically an entire comic about Psychosocial Hazards at work.
Reduced resilience: This is not in itself a psychosocial hazard from an OSH perspective, but remember that team members may be entering the working environment with a reduced tolerance for the above-named and other stressors. Stress, whether directly caused by work or not, can lead to poor sleep, poorer nutrition choices, tension in relationships and a rise in unhelpful coping mechanisms such as misuse of drugs and alcohol.
Artist credit: Sarah Andersen
How leaders can help
There is a saying ‘the same boiling water that softens the potato, hardens the egg.’ It’s often used as tough love motivational speak, i.e it’s not your circumstances, it’s what you’re made of, but it can also be read to mean that exposure to the same hazard can have a different impact on different people.
In other words, when we’re looking to implement controls to reduce the risks of psychosocial hazards, it’s important we take into account individual needs.
How do we know what an individual’s needs are? Don’t assume - ask them.
Artist credit: Dinos and Comics / Dinosaur Couch
Start with the basics
Get yourself right first.
We’ve all heard this one before, but part of the reason things become cliché is that they’re often true. Put your own air mask on before you help others.
Are you sleeping well, are you over-working, do you need to talk to someone about how you’re feeling? Do you have a lower than usual level of tolerance for work stressors? Don’t be afraid to tell your team what steps you are taking to control psychosocial hazards that impact you at work. Mental health can be difficult to talk about and normalising taking care of yourself can help others normalise it too.
Artist credit: Sarah Andersen, Sarah’s Scribbles / Oddball
It can be tempting to just focus on taking care of others, especially during a crisis. But it’s really important that we take care of ourselves. Your team will follow your lead.
Do you lead teams of people who are physically involved in the response effort? Check that their PPE is fit for purpose. If their work is currently more arduous due to the conditions, do they need more frequent or longer breaks, or more food and water?
Do you lead customer-facing teams? What measures do you have put in place to help support them through vicarious trauma and conflict resolution? Check these measures are robust, and if levels of support need to be increased. This doesn’t necessarily need to be high-tech. Peer support groups, de-brief sessions, or a leader checking-in and escalating support requirements can be helpful.
The best control for psychosocial hazards is prevention. Can you re-design work for a temporary period to account for exacerbated hazards? For example, some one-person roles could become two-person roles. Working hours could be re-designed. Flexitime could be offered. If you have multiple teams working with different customer groups, teams working with they highest-stress customer groups could be rotated more frequently.
How is your sign-posting? If your organisation offers an EAP service or access to talking therapy sessions, financial advice services or other wellbeing help, are your employees aware of what help they are entitled to access and how? It may be worth re-informing your teams of what help is on offer and how they can get it.
Artist credit: Dinos and Comics / Dinosaur Couch
Do your people have physical or community needs that you can check up on? Have they or their extended friends and families been displaced? Do they need bedding, access to transport, time away from work to make arrangements?
Do they simply need to talk, or to know that someone is thinking of them and checking in?
The ripples of an emergency can fan out far wider than the acute location of the disaster. People who have relocated away from areas that are impacted may be feeling an acute sense of loss or worry over places they once called home.
I am all the way over in Bristol, UK but nonetheless, experiencing some anxiety about what friends and family may be going through, and sadness that places I once lived in or visited have been changed so dramatically.
Individual Needs
Your team is unique and each of them has a different relationship to their community and to the impacted communities.
Natural disasters have a heavier impact on people who have fewer socioeconomic resources (access to insurance, emergency accommodation, ability to replace personal possessions or to buy healthful ready meals, for example).
Depending on their cultural background and family relationships, some team members may have a different response to the upheaval of te whenua than others.
Team members who identify as Māori may require different levels of support or different types of support due to their rich relationship with te taio (the natural world). For tangata whenua the impacts may be felt at an atua (spiritual) level. Māori are disproportionately affected by climatic events due to being over-represented in primary industries.
Leaders should have an awareness of and seek to educate themselves on how best to prevent and control psychosocial hazards for Māori employees and other minority groups.
If you’re not sure how to do that - ask your team members what their needs are. If seeking external professional help to ensure that your Psychosocial Risk Management is fit for purpose from a multi-cultural perspective, in the first instance prioritise working with Māori partners who can enable a Māori led response.
Glia offers a bi-cultural model for Psychosocial Risk Assessment and Psychosocial Risk Management which we created working in partnership with kaiako matua, and our registered Psychologists undergo regular diversity supervision. This area is very important to us and we are always striving to better our bi-cultural response.
For advice and sign-posting on diversity and inclusion in general, we recommend Diversity Works NZ.
How to get back to ‘normal’?
A healthy psychosocial recovery from a sudden event such as a natural disaster isn’t about going back to the way things were before. A healthy psychosocial recovery is about adapting to the way things are now.
This is also true of adapting to any change such as a death, diagnoses of an illness or recovery from one, lottery win, job loss, finally reaching a goal, etc.
You never walk into the same river twice, as the old saying goes. Your people will adapt, but things won’t ever go back to the way they were before.
Artist credit: Dinos and Comics / Dinosaur Couch
Focusing on adapting to a ‘new normal’ rather than resisting change is one way to expedite a healthy recovery.
Mental Health help for Natural Disasters
Distress following a sudden event is normal. For most people that distress will be temporary. For a small number of people, chronic poor mental health outcomes can occur, such as PTSD or ongoing anxiety.
What can we do to give ourselves the best chance of falling into the first category?
Talk to others. Reach out and connect to family, friends and the community.
Artist credit: Admiral Wonderboat by Chris Nash
Get prepared. Anxiety is often rooted in fear of the unknown. We can help ourselves to feel more confident about our situation if we have researched a response plan, and prepared as best we can. Focusing on our plan can help to dilute worry about the unknown.
Artist credit: The Awkward Yeti
Help others. Taking part in a community response, however large or small the help we are able to offer, can give us something practical to focus on which alleviates anxiety as well as elevating feel good hormones. A note on helping - effective disaster interventions are community-led, so ask local community leaders what they need.
Artist credit: Dinos and Comics / Dinosaur Couch
Practise box breathing. Breathe in for four, hold for four, breathe out for four, hold for four. There’s many variations to this which work just as well (you can make your breaths longer or shorter if that’s more comfortable for you, for example). This helps our minds to focus on the present rather than be caught up in worries, and it helps to calm our nervous system.
Focus on the things that you can control, right now. If the only thing you can control right now is your breath, control that.
Remember, however you are feeling right now, your feelings are valid. Please check in on your mates, and ask for the help that you need.
Need more help? We are offering a free Psychosocial Resource Pack to anyone who needs it. The pack includes basic advice on research-proven self-care strategies for your well-being, including sleep strategies, tips for handling anxiety at this stressful time, how to talk to your friends and family about your and their mental health needs and more.
To obtain the pack email Jay Barrett on jay@glia.co.nz. The reason for requesting the pack by email is so that Jay (registered Psychologist) can personally check in on everyone who the pack is sent to.
Artist credit: Ruby, etc
Things are tough right now but we got this, NZ. We are a nation of adapters. Let’s get in there and help each other. Leaders, support your teams. Teams, support each other. All of us, support our communities.
Yes, Psychosocial Hazards are about work. But work is a part of life, and whatever is going on in our lives, comes with us to work.
Glia is not just here to tick boxes. We’re here to help. Here to help people thrive at work, no matter what they’ve got going on.
Want to learn more about Psychosocial Hazards, Psychosocial Risk Assessments, and Psychosocial Risk Management?
Follow us on LinkedIn to tune into our LinkedIn Lives - regular free sessions where Director and Principal Psychologist Bridget Jelley and Principal Psychologist Jay Barrett chat about all things Psychosocial, from Psychosocial Risk Management basics through to all your more complicated questions answered. We also host expert guests to dig deep into those crucial compliance details.
Our next LinkedIn Live session will be on March 16th 12:30PM 2023 - read more and sign up to attend here. In this session, Jay will will be interviewing Employment Lawyer and Director of DTI Lawyers, Andrea Twaddle on what NZ organisations need to do to keep their people safe from psychological harm (and ensure that their businesses are compliant with the law). Don’t miss this chance to get informed.
Blog by Ngaire Wallace - follow Ngaire on LinkedIn here.