How LVJB made wellbeing a shared commitment
Five years ago, Lothian Valuation Joint Board was an organisation committed to its core health and safety responsibilities.
Covid-19 brought lockdown and mandatory working at home for a long period of time. These circumstances brought the potential for staff feeling isolated and alone whilst continuing to meet our high standards of delivery to our stakeholders. Increased pastoral care during this time was essential, especially for staff who didn’t have a strong support network in their personal life.
Over the past five years several initiatives have been championed and promoted to protect the mental wellbeing of our staff in challenging conditions and we have progressed significantly with work around supporting mental health and wellbeing, including promoting our employee counselling service, training managers in Mental Health First Aid, providing guidance on supporting good mental health and signposting to external agencies for assistance, to name a few.
Commitment to mental health at work
Signing the Mind Mental Health at Work Commitment has been pivotal in providing us with a platform to elevate our workstreams in this area and showcase the framework of support we are engaged in. The six standards provided an ideal framework to display clearly what we were already doing and reinforce the commitment at an organisational level.
Using the Mental Health Action Plan
Using the Mind Mental Health Action Plan template was a game changer in allowing us to collate the provision of support for good mental health into one place in a systematic manner. Once developed, our Mental Health Action Plan was quickly adopted by our Health and Safety Committee, Corporate Leadership Team and our Board Members. The plan enabled us to capture a great number of practical measures and interventions to support our staff. It also provides us with solutions to measure our performance in being proactive to support good mental health and wellbeing.
The Mental Health Action Plan provided a gateway to having an excellent visual support to present our vision for supporting mental health to our staff. A presentation was organised to which all staff were invited to attend. The turnout in person for this session was huge, with standing room at the back only, demonstrating how important this subject is to colleagues and the appetite for knowledge and information on what we are doing as an employer and workplace.
The Mental Health Action Plan has enabled us to publicise our organisational commitment to maintaining good mental health, capture existing services and resources dedicated to maintaining good mental health, identify possible causes of poor mental health amongst our staff and identify what we could do more of or improve on.
Bringing everyone together in one session facilitated everyone spending more time talking about improving and maintaining good mental health and it encouraged staff to feel they can speak up about their own mental health.
The session also brought about accountability for all. We haven’t shied away from responsibilities and expectations. For example, stating that a welfare check should be included in our staff members’ quarterly performance and development check ins.
Ensuring the right support
Our Corporate Leadership Team now review sickness absence statistics each quarter, comparing absence linked to mental health vs absence linked to physical health. This has really helped to measure how our staff are doing, the impact of poor mental health and where improvements could be considered.
We continue to engage with all staff at least weekly, through our staff newsletter, ranging from promoting our employee counselling service to encouraging everyone to build simple positive habits into the working day, such as taking regular screen breaks, getting some fresh air and confiding and chatting to colleagues and friends.
