Help Employees Talk About Mental Health in the Workplace
Occupational Safety and Health Administration
Helping employers protect worker safety and health since 1971. OSHA is an agency of the U.S. Department of Labor.
What does a safe workplace make you think of? Hard hats? High-vis vests? Safety inspections? Mental health conversations?
Employers are responsible for maintaining a safe workplace for their employees, and that includes supporting mental health and wellbeing. Workplace stress is common. In fact, 83% of U.S. workers experience work-related stress and 54% report that work stress affects their home life. Research shows reducing workplace stress not only improves job performance, productivity and physical health, but also reduces workplace injury rates.
Maybe you’ve already helped reduce workplace stress through actions like ensuring employees take breaks and can split workloads when appropriate, but there's no replacement for a workplace culture that supports mental health.
Support One Another: Talk about Mental Health in the Workplace is a new training toolkit that can give your employees conversation starters and the words to start having conversations about mental health with each other.
Here are some examples of conversation starters from the toolkit:
- How can I support you today?
- How are you doing with the new project?
- Have you taken a break today?
- How has your workload been recently?
Employees need the emotional connections and support they can give to each other and the ability to have conversations and share their feelings without managers around. You might not know if they have discussions about mental health and wellbeing. But you can build a supportive workplace culture by giving your employees the tools to start mental health conversations, recognize signs of workplace stress in each other, and check-in with each other. Safe workplaces are sound businesses.
Explore the toolkit here. For more resources on workplace stress and mental health, visit osha.gov/workplace-stress.
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