NEBRC Comms Chair Liz Murray looks at the impact of mental health and the importance of supporting a workplace culture for all to thrive.

Overnight I’d had 3 hours sleep as a guesstimated maximum. It was broken and disturbed so, when I rolled out of bed at my usual 05.45, I wasn’t quite feeling my normal early-morning self. A walk out with the dogs cleared the brain fuzziness I was feeling. Add a coffee and I was feeling much more like me by 06.55.

But, partway through my morning, one of my close family members decided to royally upset the applecart. My stress and emotion skyrocketed, remaining high for at least 45 mins afterwards until I became engrossed in something at work.

Fast forward to the late afternoon. In a team meeting attempting to share something with my close colleagues, and I clicked the wrong button on the platform I was using. I sent the details to a far larger audience than intended and then had to deal with that quickly. I worried that it was going to have wider implications so told my boss immediately. I had that horrible feeling where you know colour is draining from your face, you feel numb, and your heart’s racing. Now, I could just say that “I made a mistake,” which I did, but I’m going to suggest my entire day had an impact on the error. So, what happened?

Without going deeply into the 12 Human Factors (I’ll save that for another blog), let’s look at what had happened in my day. Firstly, I was tired when I started work and the error happened after 8 hours at work on what had been a busy day. My emotions throughout the day had been a veritable rollercoaster. Heartrate variously up and down, alongside the various emotions of sadness, frustration, anger, amusement. The error happened at a time of low mental arousal, I was comfortable in the environment and had relaxed, perhaps too much. My anxiety and worry after the error continued until I’d managed to speak to everyone affected. At that point I calmed and was able to enjoy my evening.

That was my bad day. A single day.

Now imagine if I had anxiety permanently, or was depressed yet functioning, perhaps classed as “stressed and overworked.” What if I hadn’t felt able to speak with my reassuring boss? What if mistakes were routinely punished, or escalated? What if I worked in a culture where I didn’t feel able to say, “I’m finding today tough”?

The elements given above make mistakes more likely to happen. If our workplace culture is not supporting mental health/wellbeing in a meaningful manner, if we can’t make genuine errors without fear of punitive action and if our organisation doesn’t take a view of “what happened let’s check and re-educate if needed” then mistakes will happen, regularly and could remain hidden. They can be business affecting mistakes.

Where they’re email based mistakes, perhaps clicking on a link in an email that looked benign and inviting, the ability to introduce and propagate ransomware across an organisation becomes greater. If our people don’t feel able to say that they’re struggling, if mental health isn’t truly supported in the workplace, then they will also not feel able to tell you they’ve made a mistake and clicked a malicious link.

Positively supporting employees with their mental health has benefits beyond their attendance and effectiveness in their normal work. A culture of demonstrable support coupled with reasonable reaction to errors, will make mistakes less likely in the first place. Where mistakes have been made, they’ll be discovered far more swiftly as employees will feel able to report. That’s got to be good for business.