In this podcast, HSE Chair Sarah Newton and Professor Cary Cooper, one the world’s foremost experts on wellbeing, discuss the importance of working in partnership to prevent work-related stress and to promote good mental health.

Amongst other things, the podcast covers HSE’s Working Minds campaign, which aims to ensure psychological risks are treated the same as physical ones, that employers recognise their legal duty to prevent work related stress to support good mental health in the workplace, and that they have the tools they need to do achieve this. 

----more----For more information on the campaign visit ‘Working Minds' 

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Mick Ord (Host): A warm welcome to you whenever and wherever you are listening to this Health and Safety Executive podcast from me, Mick Ord, and our soon-to-be-announced guests. This podcast is the second in a series designed to help you to make your life a little easier, both in work and maybe even spilling over into your personal life, you never know.

The Health and Safety Executive is committed to improving the health and safety of workers in Great Britain. And today we'll be focusing on an issue that affects all industry sectors, work-related stress, and its potential impact on mental health. In 2020/21, more than 800,000 people suffered from work-related stress, depression, or anxiety. The impact on workers and businesses is considerable. A recent report by Deloitte estimates that the total annual cost of poor mental health to employers has increased by 25% since 2019, costing UK employers up to 56 billion pounds a year. 56 billion! Last year, on the 16th of November, HSE launched its Working Minds campaign to encourage, promote, and support good mental health in the workplace and prevent work-related stress. And today we'll talk about the successes of the campaign, what still needs to be done and why this topic is still so important. Joining us today is Sarah Newton, Chair of the Health and Safety Executive. In addition, Sarah is currently a non-executive director of the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust. Prior to taking over the chair in 2020, Sarah's experience includes serving as a director for American Express Europe, Age Concern, and the independent academic think tank, the International Longevity Centre. Sarah was also an MP for ten years, and served as a minister in the Department of Work and Pensions, responsible for HSE and Health and Work Unit.

And we're delighted to also have with us Professor Cary Cooper, one of the world's foremost experts on wellbeing, and a 50th anniversary professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at the Manchester Business School. He's the author or editor of over 170 books, has written more than 450 scholarly articles for academic journals, and is a frequent contributor to national newspapers, TV and radio. A big welcome, both.

Sarah. First of all, thanks for joining us for the podcast. Now, your Working Minds campaign has just celebrated its first anniversary, so tell us about why you launched a campaign in the first place and what it's achieved..

Sarah Newton: First of all, thank you so much for inviting me on to your podcast this morning, Mick. You know, let's be honest about this. Any one of us can experience stress. It can affect people in different ways and different times, so it's a very prevalent issue. So why did HSE get involved with dealing with this? Well, it's clearly our mission to prevent work-related ill health, and as you said from those startling statistics in your introduction, many people are experiencing stress in the workplace, and we know it's the number one reason why people will have an absence from work is. So we were looking at a new strategy last year.

We've developed a new strategy, which is protecting people in places and five strategic objectives. One of them clearly to reduce work-related ill health, with a particular focus on stress because it affects so many people. And we chose to launch this campaign because HSE, while we have a huge amount of expertise, we don't have all the answers. And we really wanted to work in partnership with a wide range of organisations who together, we could bring the big difference that we want to see. It's all about working in partnership, collaborating with others, making sure that employers have the knowledge, the tools that they need to really support their workers to prevent work-related stress and ill health.

Mick Ord (Host): As we've heard the figures on people taking absence from work because of work-related stress have really increased over the past couple of years. What are your thoughts about that, Sarah?

Sarah Newton: Well, I think a part of it, or probably a very large part of it, is to do with the fact as a society, we've been far more prepared to talk about mental ill health. There's been a huge amount of really positive work to de stigmatise mental ill health, which of course includes stress and anxiety and depression. And so I think as a result of that, people are more prepared to acknowledge that they're suffering from mental ill health.

Mick Ord (Host): Professor Cooper, I guess that you'd echo everything that Sarah said there about the Working Minds campaign?

Prof. Cary Cooper: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, HSE has always been at the forefront looking at stress at work. It was the only country actually, 20 years ago, set up the management standards for stress at work. I was involved in that 20 years ago. And it's gotten worse, a lot of the problems. That was really ahead of its time, but times have changed. We've had a financial crisis since then. We've had a pandemic. We have a cost of living crisis. We're about to enter a recession. This has really become even more significant and more important than ever before. And the HSE, by revising the management standards, by getting involved in this Working Minds campaign is really quite important. And by the way, it's not just the UK. Every developed country has between 50% and 60% of its long-term absence due to stress, anxiety, and depression. It's not just the UK. This is a kind of global problem, particularly in the developed world.

Mick Ord (Host): Sarah, what are the next steps for Working Minds then?

Sarah Newton: So Working Minds is a collaboration. It's a partnership of a number of organisations. We've already doubled the number of organisations we work with. We're so grateful to our partners. So some of our founding partners such as Acas, Ceca, Mind, Mates in Mind. Now we're working with different industry sectors, so working a lot with their representative bodies across a huge range of industries. And a huge benefit to us of that is to draw on their expertise, but also to reach out to their members. You know, big companies will often have HR departments, they'll have investments into all types of health and wellbeing type programs, but small and medium sized companies don't always have those resources available for their staff. So it's very important that we really reach out to every business right across the UK and provide them with some tools that really will make the difference. Most employers will understand that it's their responsibility to think about the physical risks, the physical health concerns that people can have at work, But what they don't often realise is they have an equal responsibility to the psychological wellbeing of their staff. So part of our campaign is to remind employers of those legal responsibilities. They do have a duty to do risk assessments of their employees for both physical and psychological risks to ill health, and then to provide them with the toolkits to enable them to assess the risk and then manage and mitigate the risk. And by working with so many different employers, really drawing on their experience what works in their workplaces. So an element of this is going to be peer-to-peer support. So businesses say in the agricultural sector, they come, share good experiences together on what works for them. That's a very different sector than say the NHS or working in an advanced manufacturing location.

So while the principles are the same, the applications and probably the examples of good practice will be different. And so we'll be wanting to build on the huge success of the first year, have more people become partners, more people become champions, access the materials that are there so that they can take some really practical actions in their workplaces to improve the health and wellbeing of their staff.

Mick Ord (Host): And as you've already said, it's not just big companies with HR departments, is it? It's the small, maybe a company with 20 employees or something like that.

Sarah Newton: You know how right you are. But a vast majority of people in the UK are employed in small and medium size organisations. And actually recent data will show a lot of people are employed in, you know, what might loosely be called the gig economy, or platform workers. And platform workers, may be just part of their employment. Perhaps they've got a job with an employer, but then they actually supplement that income as a platform worker, and those companies are not in day-to-day contact with their employees, with the people that they are working with to actually deliver the services through these platforms. Now they really need to think hard about how they are going to reach out to those employers and make sure that they are undertaking their risk assessments, so to prevent people having ph