Blogs
Bridget Jelley
Winter Wellbeing 101

Keeping our minds resilient and strong is important no matter the time of year, but in the winter months, especially as our days grow shorter and the sun slants lower in the sky, we need to put in more effort.

Blogs
Bridget Jelley
Did you say 'feedback'?

I asked a group of individuals in a performance session recently, what comes to mind when they think about feedback.

psychosocial risk management

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How Can Leaders Create Connectedness at Work?

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How Can Leaders Create Connectedness at Work?

Workplaces can be the drivers of positive mental health outcomes.

We live in a world where a huge number of people suffer from mental ill health and access to help is poor. As employers, why not go a step further from just ‘not making things worse’ to actually making things better?

Creating social-connectedness at work is one opportunity for leaders to impact their people positively. Loneliness experienced at home can seep into the workplace and leaders have the power to not only prevent work-based loneliness, but combat loneliness overall.

Workplaces can be the engines that drive a socially connected world.

How can leaders create an environment that fosters social connection?

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What is Psychological Well-being at Work?

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What is Psychological Well-being at Work?

Most people are familiar with the terms burnout and stress, and have an understanding of what poor workplace mental health looks like. But what is it that we are aiming for? What does a psychologically ‘well’ workplace look like?

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How to Protect Yourself From Burning Out (Without Doing Yoga)

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How to Protect Yourself From Burning Out (Without Doing Yoga)

In our last blog we covered how to identify burnout risks, and how to protect yourself at the recruitment stage by spotting which organisations or job roles might pose a high risk to individuals.

In this blog, we will cover some of the steps that individuals can take to lower their burnout risk and protect their mental health at work when they find themselves in a job role or organisation that may present a higher risk.

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How to avoid burn-out and keep your spark alight

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How to avoid burn-out and keep your spark alight

Perhaps the best thing an individual can do to avoid burn-out is to work for an organisation that has a robust Psychosocial Risk Management plan in place to support positive workplace mental health outcomes and protect their workers from chronic stress.

But how can you choose the right job? And what other practical steps can individuals take to protect themselves from burnout and feel good at work?

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How to Work through Worry

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How to Work through Worry

Worrying can impact our mental health at work significantly, and has been the subject of sage advice for centuries.

Inspirational quotes about improving your mental health by simply ‘not worrying’ are easy to find, but much more difficult to put into practise.

Can you control worrying by simply choosing not to worry? And if so, how?

In this blog we will explain in simple terms what worry is, how you can control worrying, and how you can work and live your life despite having things to worry about.

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How to Increase Your Social Connectedness - Even if You Work Remote

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How to Increase Your Social Connectedness - Even if You Work Remote

Developing strategies to increase opportunities for social connection is a major research concern that is impacting public health policy globally at multiple levels; from the design of community living spaces to employment regulations, public health campaigns and how we harness technology.

What can individuals do to ensure they are getting the social connection they need for mental and physical wellbeing?

Firstly, establish how much social connection you need.

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Loneliness: A Psychosocial Hazard?

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Loneliness: A Psychosocial Hazard?

Canada - that bastion of forward thinking - is currently working on developing public health guidelines for social connection to improve population mental health, and control mental and physical health risks. Bit like your five a day, but in chit-chats rather than fruit and veg.

Does that mean Friday night pizza parties are back on the work perks list, or should even form part of your Psychosocial Risk Management plan?. (TLDR: no. For more nuance, read on).

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How Can We Control Work-Related Stress?

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How Can We Control Work-Related Stress?

Stress: so ubiquitous, the idea of preventing it altogether might seem a bit like trying to hold back an incoming tide.

But stress doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of life, and it definitely doesn’t need to be an inevitable part of work.

How can employers control work-related stress?

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Can’t Handle The Jandal: Stress and Burnout - what’s the difference?

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Can’t Handle The Jandal: Stress and Burnout - what’s the difference?

Burnout: the imagery in that word is evocative, and perhaps one reason why the term has become popular. Why? Because the picture that burnout conjures is so very much like the experience of it.

Burned out individuals keep going, like flames across a landscape, until they run out of fuel entirely and have absolutely nothing left to give. Not one spark remains. They are quite literally ‘burned out.’

How can we tell the difference, why does it matter, and what can we do about it?

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Gender Microaggression - What is it, and how does it impact women at work?

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Gender Microaggression - What is it, and how does it impact women at work?

During a panel discussion of women leaders that I recently attended, the panelists were asked ‘what do you consider to be your biggest achievement?’

Without exception, every panelist responded ‘just surviving.’ One added ‘just managing to get to where she was.’ They gave the sense of having managed to move forward and reach their goals, but of having to perpetually push through a current, whilst dragging a parachute, to do so.

What was holding them back and how can we recognise gender discrimination in the modern workplace?

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One Way to Manage Psychosocial Hazards for Women in the Workplace

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One Way to Manage Psychosocial Hazards for Women in the Workplace

International Women’s Day 2023 has been and gone but the challenges that women face to experiencing equity in the workplace remain.

What are those challenges, and what would an environment that successfully controls for psychosocial hazards at work that particularly impact women look like?

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Psychosocial Hazards and Community Trauma

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Psychosocial Hazards and Community Trauma

When Psychosocial Hazards are outside your control, but are impacting your people, what can you do?

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?

Psychosocial Risk Assessment: Why Does It Matter?

Psychosocial Risk Assessment: Why Does It Matter?

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have come about entirely by accident.

Penicillin was born when Sir Alexander Fleming took a two week holiday and returned to his lab to find that a mould had grown over elements of his research, and that the unexpected mould deterred the growth of bacteria.

It took another 12 years and the work of two chemists, Howard Florey and Ernst Chain to isolate, test and turn the compound that Fleming had discovered into a useable product, and the urgency of the World War 2 effort to stimulate mass production. Penicillin saved many lives and changed the course of medicine globally.

Fleming, Florey and Chain were each awarded the Nobel prize in 1945 in Physiology or Medicine. From their efforts, we have antibiotics, and also a recipe for turning data into a useable, scaleable positive intervention.

How can we apply this to mental health in the workplace by way of Psychosocial Risk Management?

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Psychosocial Risk Management and the Three Ghosts of Christmas

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Psychosocial Risk Management and the Three Ghosts of Christmas

The weather is bitter, the poorhouses and the prisons are full, and a money-hungry employer is keeping a shrewd eye on the company’s heating bill while his overworked and shivering clerk tries to remain optimistic in the face of inflation.

The year is 1843, but it could as easily be 2022.

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Cane Toads and Wicked Problems: Seven Golden Rules for Successful Psychosocial Risk Management

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Cane Toads and Wicked Problems: Seven Golden Rules for Successful Psychosocial Risk Management

Psychosocial Risk Management and the Cane Toads of Australia are both what we call ‘Wicked Problems'.’ That is, a problem which is difficult to solve because of complex and changing requirements that interact with each other, to the point that there is no single solution.

Think about your Psychosocial Risk Management process (or any other process that has been implemented by your organisation as a way to solve a problem). Did it solve the problem? Or did it create other problems?