The Evolution of Psychological Health and Safety: An Interview with Mary Ann Baynton

Ashley: Hello and welcome to Safe and Sound with CCOHS. In today's workplace, we know that prioritizing psychological safety alongside physical safety is part of building a truly healthy and safe workplace. And though psychological safety has been around for a while, the way workplaces have approached it has changed a lot over the years. Here to discuss that evolution with us is Mary Ann Baynton. Mary Ann served as co-chair of the Technical Committee for the Canadian Standard on Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace, was a member of the Mental Health Commission's Workforce Advisory Committee and the Employment Standards Committee, and a director of Workplace Strategies for Mental Health. As a consultant, she supports employers, governments, unions, teams, and associations to resolve issues involving mental health, psychological safety, conflict, or performance concerns. Mary Ann, thank you for being our guest today.

Mary Ann: That's my pleasure, Ashley.

Ashley: You've described psychological health and safety as moving from a values-based discussion into operational risk management. What do you think has made organizations start seeing psychosocial hazards as a workplace issue, rather than just an HR or wellness concern?

Mary Ann: It's interesting – I was with the Canadian Mental Health Association back in 2004, and at that time, even talking about workplace mental health, most people didn't know what I meant. They thought I was treating people with mental illness at work, and that wasn't it at all. That started to change as people began to understand that work can impact our mental health. Back then, there was this idea that you brought your mental health to work already damaged – that work itself didn't cause it. That was new. People started to recognize that you could take a healthy person and make them sick at work, or take someone with an illness like depression or anxiety and support them to stay productive at work, even while they're experiencing that illness. As I started working in this area, I saw that in some workplaces it was really easy to accommodate someone with a mental illness – you'd just tell the manager to remove certain distractions and put some checkpoints in place, and they'd say, "No problem," and do it. But in other workplaces, the chaos, the pressure, and the rudeness of people made it really difficult to separate the people with a diagnosis from the people who were just miserable and negative at work. I didn't have the language of psychological health and safety yet. In fact, when we started work on the standard, the working title was a standard for workplace mental health. Then we asked, should it be health and safety, since most standards are health and safety standards, and we put "psychological" in front of it? Today, I wish we had gone with "psychosocial" health and safety instead, because I think it makes more sense – but back then we worried people wouldn't understand the word psychosocial. That's really what it is, though: we're not looking at people's brains or their mental state, we're looking at the impact of work on them. Psychosocial refers to the things in the environment that affect your psychological health and safety. Even from there, this was really more of an HR issue than anything else – protect employees, do no harm, and look at these things because you want to optimize their performance and productivity. Fairly self-serving reasons for organizations to do this, honestly – not because they're all nice, but because they saw the value in employees who could really focus and do their work. But since then, because of what's going on around the world, and because of evolving legislation in Canada – where the general duty clause of occupational health and safety is increasingly interpreted to implicitly include psychological harm as well as physical harm – because of human rights legislation, labour law, and contract law, employers in Canada are increasingly being held responsible. When we look at Australia, for instance, they have a regulation that says employers must assess psychosocial hazards and must mitigate them – just like we do in occupational health and safety, where we identify hazards and either eliminate or mitigate them. That's the law in Australia. So here in Canada, I'm telling employers, let's get ahead of this, because it's going to be a scramble if that kind of legislation shows up here too. If you can start embedding it into your existing systems now, it'll be a lot easier than bolting on a whole new system later.

Ashley: Absolutely. So what does that look like in practice – in terms of preparing for regulations like that – for workplaces to identify and address psychosocial hazards the same way they've approached physical hazards?

Mary Ann: It's interesting, because we just published work on this on the Workplace Strategies for Mental Health website, and folks at CCOHS actually helped us with that – they were part of the reviewing team, so we knew it was both practical and effective. Really, we need to teach HR and health and safety how to collaborate, because health and safety needs to identify hazards and make recommendations, but then HR has to execute – they have to implement the changes. It can't be two separate groups working in isolation; they need to learn to collaborate. HR needs to give health and safety aggregate data so they can see trends and know where to focus their investigations or audits. But I think the biggest challenge, based on what many people have told me, is that the time and training given to health and safety committee members in many organizations is ridiculously small, or non-existent. You do the mandatory training, which usually isn't relevant or customized to your industry – it's just a generic thing every new hire does. And if you don't actually get time allotted to do the work properly, you end up doing it off the side of your desk while trying to keep your own job going, which makes it hard to do a good job. What we're hoping to do with the resources we've created is give committee members the information, the tools, and some of the forms they can use to look at hazards – including psychosocial hazards – but also things like how to make a recommendation that won't be ignored or dismissed as ridiculous. We can't make everybody happy, we can't always have fun at work – not that health and safety people would necessarily say that, but they might say things like, "You need more PPE," which is true – personal protective equipment can reduce our stress about getting hurt, but will it actually address the hazard or the risk? So we put together some tools to help people look at it properly, and to make recommendations to HR and management that create a system that actually serves everybody.

Ashley: Makes sense. I think we touched on this a bit, but what would you say are the responsibilities that employers, supervisors, and leaders need to be thinking about now that wouldn't have been on their radar at all ten or fifteen years ago?

Mary Ann: I trained as an engineer, so what I tell leaders is, it's not your job to diagnose or counsel someone – in fact, it's not even ethical, because you're in a power relationship. Your job is to help every employee optimize their energy, focus, and competence while they're at work. And what does that mean? It means you need to understand them enough to know what will help optimize that. I keep watching what's happening with AI, automation, and technology, and I think more and more, the human advantage – the reason we want humans in the workplace – is our discernment, our ability to think critically about a situation and its impact on other humans, and our ability to be empathic and read people. AI isn't going to be able to do that. So if this is the kind of complex emotional intelligence we're going to demand of people, then our leaders need to know how to develop and sustain it in themselves and others. Right now, I'd say only about half of leaders in organizations really know how to do that – and that's not necessarily their fault, since they may not have been trained to. So I think the most important thing is understanding how to develop and sustain employees' productivity, attention, and focus.

Ashley: So for organizations that still feel unsure about where to begin with psychological health and safety, what are some realistic first steps they can take to strengthen that at work?

Mary Ann: Interestingly, we just released a book called Less Stress, Better Business, and that's really what it's about. Say you have no support, no systems in place – you're just someone who genuinely wants to do the right thing, but you're busy and have so many demands on your time. What do you do? The very starting point is to ask your employees what might get in the way of them doing their best work. What might be an obstacle? What might be a challenge? What could you – or the organization – do to make it easier for them to do well at work? It's pretty simple and straightforward, and yet if you can build that kind of trust and conversation, that's really it – you just respond to what you hear. Early in my career, I had two employees, both with different mental illnesses, and I asked them something similar. What ended up happening was a kind of swap: one was overwhelmed by details and couldn't focus, and the other was really afraid of face-to-face client work. So they traded parts of their job, and both ended up succeeding. I was pretty naive at the time, still in my twenties, but as the employer, all I did was ask, and the employees solved the problem themselves.

Ashley: Amazing. Yep, sometimes all you have to do is ask. Is there anything else you'd like our audience to know? What would you love for them to take away from today?

Mary Ann: So much – but I think it's that being good at psychological health and safety isn't about being perfect. It's not about being nice all the time, or having no stress or demands at work. It's simply about recognizing where the hazards are and managing them in a way that makes harm less likely. Whether you're in health and safety, HR, or a leadership role, that's the balance – we're not asking you to do too much, if you know how to integrate it into business as usual, into what you already do.

Ashley: Excellent. Well, Mary Ann, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise.

Mary Ann: Thanks, Ashley. It's a pleasure – looking forward to the conference in October.

Ashley: Yes, absolutely, the Forum – we're looking forward to seeing you there. For more information on psychological health and safety, visit our website, ccohs.ca. Thanks for listening, and stay safe out there.