When the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace was released just over a decade ago by the Mental Health Commission of Canada and the Bureau de normalisation du Quebec, many employers questioned the benefit and effectiveness of the voluntary standard, said Liz Horvath, manager of psychological health and safety at Opening Minds-Mental Health Commission of Canada (pictured right), during a fireside chat at Benefits Canada’s 2024 Mental Health Summit in June.
The commission took that feedback under advisement. After receiving $820,000 in funding from the federal government to assist with developing a psychological health and safety auditor training and qualification program, it’s now piloting an audit and assessment program with a select group of employers.
Launched in January 2013, the standard was the first of its kind in the world. It’s a set of guidelines, tools and resources to help organizations promote mental health and prevent psychological harm in the workplace. The standard includes information on assessing and controlling mental-health risks in the workplace that can’t be eliminated, practices to support psychological safety and how an organization can measure the effectiveness of its approach.
“The more we talked with people, the more we heard that, ‘Yeah, we’ve got certain things in place but we don’t really know what to do next or how to move things forward,’” said Horvath. “When you’re looking at trying to translate something like the national standard, what does that actually look like in a workplace and how do we measure the impact of it? So that’s what we’re really looking at.”
The audit and assessment program will give employers a detailed report on the level of integration of the standard into their workplace and a customized action plan for where they should focus their efforts and resources going forward. The assessment isn’t pass or fail, but an assessment of strengths and weaknesses.
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Successful implementation of the standard’s guidelines could show up in a range of metrics, noted Horvath, including attraction and retention, workforce diversity, accident rates, disability claims, absenteeism, interpersonal conflict, creativity and innovation and customer service.
Montreal-based biopharmaceutical company Lundbeck Canada is among the employers taking part in the pilot. Also speaking during the session, Michelle Wilson, the company’s vice-president of people and communications (pictured left), said while the organization wants to ensure employees feel valued and psychologically safe at work, it’s hard to know where to start. The organization has applied external research and education to its own policies and culture and implemented mental-health training for people leaders.
Employers don’t have to wait until they feel they’ve fully implemented the standard to receive an audit, said Horvath. “My reason being, how do you know what you need to work on first? How do you know what you’re going to measure against?”
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A three-year case study by the MHCC, which followed 40 organizations that implemented the standard, found many of them couldn’t accurately assess their progress in that time, because they hadn’t developed baseline data.
Lundbeck applied to receive an audit before fully implementing the standard, partly because the company wanted to demonstrate to employees that it was partnering with an external provider to assess its performance and what it could do differently, said Wilson.
The MHCC is in the midst of work on a new edition of the standard, set to be released in 2026, which will integrate workplace mental-health research from the past decade and incorporate an intersectionality lens.
Read more coverage of the 2024 Mental Health Summit.