Creating Healthy Organizations by Graham Lowe

Author:Graham Lowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Developing People Skills

Training for managers and supervisors is a vital component of a comprehensive strategy to make workplaces healthier and safer. As I outlined in chapter 2, the US Centers for Disease Control recommends the Total Worker Health (TWH) approach, which can reduce work-related stress through three actions that have leadership implications: implementing organizational and management policies that give workers more flexibility and control over their schedules; training supervisors on what they can do to reduce stressful working conditions for direct reports; and enhancing workers’ stress reduction skills.25

Indeed, training supervisors and managers in TWH can pay off. A fourteen-week TWH intervention tailored for construction crews simultaneously improved safety, health, and well-being. Team supervisors were provided computer-based training and self-monitoring activities on team building, work–life balance, and reinforcing targeted behaviors.26 Supervisors and workers also completed safety and health training in small groups. As a result, workers’ health, safety, and well-being improved. Specifically, family-supportive supervisory behaviors improved, as did the frequency of daily exercise, healthy diet support, team cohesion, sleep duration, and blood pressure. Casting a wider net, a systematic search for studies published by peer-reviewed journals of workplace interventions that provided managers with training on workplace mental health found ten controlled trials that evaluated the impact of this training on managers and their direct-report employees. A meta-analysis of the pooled results from these ten studies found improvements in managers’ mental health knowledge, in non-stigmatizing attitudes toward mental health, and in support provided to employees experiencing mental health problems.27 More topics would have to be covered in order for managers and supervisors to acquire all the people skills I have mentioned. Still, what these studies show is that focused people skills training can work.

Furthermore, we know from successful practices in the OHS area that mandatory safety training increases the awareness of safety issues throughout a company’s workforce. The same no doubt would apply to basic workplace health and well-being training – although this remains an empirical question for future research to answer. For example, a study of French apprentices at the end of their schooling and start of their careers found that those receiving ‘first aid at work’ training in school had a much lower incidence of workplace injuries two years into their careers, compared with their peers who received no OHS training.28 The researchers recommend providing broadly based OHS education rather than focusing narrowly on risks associated with specific jobs. Following the TWH approach, this also would include the promotion and protection of psychological health. However, there is no comparable research on the benefits of early-career healthy workplace training – for example, on workplace stress, respect, discrimination, harassment, bullying – but surely we could expect there to be benefits for students and their future employers.

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