Hello everyone and welcome to today's ON Series session
titled Reasonable Adjustments & Mental Health Conditions.
The topic and expert speaker is brought to you
by the Office of Industrial Relations.
As a Department we are committed to driving
initiatives across the whole scheme that improve safety,
wellbeing and return to work outcomes
for both businesses and workers.
My name is Alicia Bailey.
I'm the Manager of Engagement Services for
the Office of Industrial Relations
and the presenter today is Michael O'Hanlon.
Michael has over 20 years' experience in operational
and management roles in the mining and information
technology business followed by a period in
a major information technology company and
a state-based occupational health and safety regulator.
For the past 10 years Michael has worked for beyondblue,
an independent, not for profit organisation
working to increase awareness and understanding
of anxiety, depression and suicide.
His current role as Workplace Engagement Manager
combines both his professional and personal experience
of depression and anxiety to advocate to corporations,
industry associations and peak bodies
about the benefits of improving mental health
in the workplace. We are extremely pleased
to have the opportunity to share Michael's expertise
in how Queensland businesses can make
reasonable adjustments for workers who have or are
suffering from a mental illness or psychological injury
and are returning to the workplace.
So over to you Michael.
Thank you Alicia and welcome everybody and thank you
for taking the time to view today's webinar.
What I'll try and do in the next few moments during the
webinar is give you an overview of the linkage
between mental health conditions and reasonable
adjustments in the workplace.
What I'd like to start with is a picture of why
should we even worry about mental health conditions?
So if we have a look at Australian society you can
see here that in any one year 3 million people in
Australia are experiencing depression and/or anxiety.
You can see the prevalent rates are higher in women
in both cases and tragically every day
in Australia eight people die by suicide,
six of whom are men. For every death there's 30 suicide
attempts and every suicide has a ripple effect around,
impacting about 135 people.
So that's the society that we live in.
What that means from a workplace perspective is
that everyone listening will through some way,
either directly or indirectly through their families, friends
or workmates, be impacted by a mental health condition.
When we go through these slides I'd like you to
think not just of the workplace but think for
some people viewing today this may even be you,
so that mental health conditions are actually
very democratic. They affect anybody across
all ages and all occupations in the workplace.
The majority of people who experience a mental health
condition however, you won't even notice in the
workplace because they are very productive.
So if we take it down a bit more specifically what
those statistics mean is that poor mental health is
likely to affect one in five workers.
Just apply that to your workplace for the moment
and just do a quick calculation of what that would mean.
That highlights why I said earlier that it will impact
most people in a workplace.
Mental health conditions like many other things in
life are covered by legal obligations and I've just
got here the four key ones.
There's the Work Health and Safety legislation,
the Disability and Discrimination Act,
Privacy Act and Bullying Act.
What we'll focus on today are the first two,
the work health and safety regulations
and the Discrimination Act.
They're the two that particularly relate to
reasonable adjustments in the workplace.
If we start with the Queensland Workers' Compensation
and Rehabilitation Act of 2003 Section 228 subclause one
clearly states that 'The employer of a worker who has
sustained an injury must take all reasonable steps to assist
or provide the worker with rehabilitation for the
period of which the worker is entitled to compensation.'
The obligation applies equally for physical and
psychological injuries sustained by the worker.
There is no distinction.
Equally there's no distinction in the
employer's obligation to make reasonable adjustments
within the workplace to accommodate the worker's
level of functionality.
This also applies not just to an injury that occurs
in a workplace, the legislation also applies
to exacerbating an existing injury.
There's good research around the health benefits
of good work highlighting that recovery at work following
an injury, be it physical or psychological is more
beneficial to the worker and their overall rehabilitation.
The other Act that is relevant to this area as I
mentioned is the Disability Discrimination Act.
It's a broader Act.
It protects everyone in Australia against
discrimination based on disability and within the Act
the term 'disability' includes mental health conditions.
So if an employee has a disability, be that a
mental health condition, then the employer must make
workplace changes or workplace adjustments
and if necessary seek advice from government agencies or
organisations around how to provide those services
to an individual with a disability.
What does this mean?
It means it's simply unlawful to discriminate against
someone on the grounds of a disability and there's some
of the areas or all the areas that are covered.
It's the recruitment process, decisions on who
will get a job, terms and conditions of employment,
promotion, transfer or dismissal or other
detrimental impacts on an individual.
So they're the two pieces of legislation that we'll
be basing today's webinar around.
Let's move onto how do we go about identifying
positive adjustments to an individual's work environment.
First of all it's very important not to make
assumptions about what someone with depression or anxiety
will or will not find challenging in the workplace.
These conditions are different for everybody who
experiences them. So the best way is to talk to them
about their strengths and what they enjoy
about their job, and how you can leverage that.
Work with your discussion to help the employee identify
their own stresses and potential difficulties and then
together work through what are possible solutions.
Of course you can call on medical advice if you need
medical advice and you'll have people in your organisation
perhaps like return to work coordinators who will be
able to give you some specific advice on this matter.
What I'd like to do now is just touch on some very
simple steps that can be taken for making reasonably
practical adjustments for an individual who may be
experiencing a mental health condition.
Flexible working hours and location.
One of the things around mental health conditions is
they can impact individuals at different times during the day.
For some people it's very tough in the mornings.
So changing working hours is a great way to make
a reasonable adjustment.
Or allow for the effects of medication.
Working part time or splitting shifts.
Allowing them to take more frequent breaks.
A graduated return to work if someone has had to go
off work for treatment for their condition.
Making changes to the locations in which they're
working and the obvious things around making
environmental adjustments.
Now all of these adjustments and others I'll
go on to mention, are not ongoing forever.
These need to be managed in a considered way where you
sit down and understand what's being agreed to,
for how long and when it will be reviewed.
So this is just a normal management practice.
Some of the other areas you can look at are
adjusting workload and stress by reducing the
actual workload or modifying their tasks,
varying the task to allow a much more self paced
workload and if someone has been off work, making sure
they don't return to that awful backlog of work or
emails that we all experience when we've been on holidays.
Other areas are establish goals, prompts, reminders
and checklists to assist them with time management
to stay on top of a task that they have got to do.
You may need to look at modifying performance
related pay arrangements and reallocate work within
the team while capitalising on each person's strengths.
Training and support is another area that is of
significant impact both for the individual but also for
their colleagues in the workplace.
So provide access to professional mentoring,
coaching or on the job peer support.
Provide extra training, mentoring and support.
Make changes to supervision.
Modify the way instructions and feedback are given.
Have brief weekly meetings to check in and see how
people are travelling and allow extra time to learn
tasks and perhaps allow the employee to attend tailored
training sessions. If your workplace hasn't already
undertaken general education and training with others
in the workforce, is it possibly a time to consider
doing that so other individuals, their colleagues
will have a good insight into how a mental health condition
can impact on an individual and what they can do
to support them.
If you're looking from an employer's perspective when
identifying potential adjustments think about the
practicalities and how you're going to implement them.
Get input or support from other team members but most
importantly discuss with your employee how you will
communicate this because there is a legislation as I
mentioned earlier around privacy and you cannot
disclose that someone is experiencing a mental
health condition without their permission.
So it's very important that you seek their input how
you will communicate this.
So as a manager think about what are the
core requirements of the role.
Is there anything that cannot be altered?
Think about associated financial costs and how
you're going to manage those.
Do you have adequate resources to accommodate adjustments?
Are any disruptions likely to occur as a result
and either to other employees or work flow?
How are you going to manage any changes
in workflow on other employees?
What's the timeframe for introducing any of these
kind of adjustments?
What we've done at beyondblue to assist
workplaces managing mental health in the workplace
more generally is an initiative called Heads Up.
The Heads Up website is a central point for all
workplaces to find out just about anything you wish to
know about creating a mentally healthy workplace,
taking care of your own mental health,
supporting someone you might be concerned about
and included in that is suggestions around
reasonable adjustments. It has free resources for all
individuals across all levels of a workplace, case studies,
videos, tools, fact sheets, brochures, booklets,
all of which are there and can be downloaded
and used at no cost.
A key feature of the website is the Heads Up Action Plan tool
which gives you some suggestions around how
you may want to go around implementing a mental health
strategy in your workplace which would of course incorporate
an approach to reasonably practical adjustments.
So in conclusion I'd just like to remind you that there
is obligations in place in terms of having to make reasonably
practical adjustment in a workplace for an individual
who is experiencing a mental health condition.
These are no different to what you would do for
anyone who has a physical injury in principle.
So think from that perspective and remember
you do manage this as you do manage any other
initiative with a worker - you set a timeframe,
you agree on what will be done within that timeframe,
you come back, check in how it's going and then
make adjustments if you need to.
So if you want to know more about mentally healthy
workplaces have a look at headsup.org.au.
So thanks again for your time and I'll hand you back
to Alicia now.
Thank you Michael for sharing your expertise
and we hope that you as Queensland businesses found
those strategies concise and practical because
that's exactly what we're hoping to deliver for you.
So Michael thanks again.
We're happy to engage beyondblue in these types
of education initiatives and thank you everyone for
participating in this ON Series session and we look
forward to delivering more of these sessions for you
in the near future. Thank you.