Coping with COVID-19: why mental health is key when working from home
You’ve sorted the technology, but it’s the mental health of your employees that you will need to watch when they work from home
Australian bosses who do not actively manage the mental health of their employees while they work from home will experience an unprecedented number of health and safety claims next year.
Occupational health and safety lawyer Michael Tooma, the managing partner of Clyde & Co, expects a record number of mental health claims to be lodged well after the COVID-19 crisis has eased and employees have returned to their place of work.
“The claims, investigations and prosecutions will come in eight or 12 months and we’ll be wondering why there’s such a spike in claims,” he says.
“But they will have their origins right here, right now as we are going through this crisis.
“How we connect with our people through this crisis and what we do to invest in their personal and mental resilience will be the key to preventing a tsunami of claims that inevitably will come in 12 months.
“The reality is that this is probably the biggest work health and safety risk that businesses have faced for a very long time.”
Some business leaders are already urging the federal government to ease working from home restrictions as the number of COVID-19 cases in Australia declines. However, the eventual return to our usual workplaces — while initially a welcome reprieve — could be as disruptive as the abrupt retreat into our homes last month.
“Change is stressful, whether it’s change from working in the office to working from home, or after six months of working from home with a well-established routine, to going back into the office,” Tooma warns.
“But it’s the accumulated anxiety over the period of the crisis that will make many workers vulnerable. There will be a straw that breaks the camel’s back that will be an event that happens much later, when we are all back in the workplace and it’s all back to normal.
“We’ll start to see all these additional claims over what would otherwise be relatively minor issues, but it’s because we’re going through this period of prolonged and heightened anxiety.”
He is concerned that much of the discussion on the health of employees working from home has focused on their physical safety, the ergonomic set-up of their workplace and the prevention of muscular-skeletal injuries rather than their mental wellbeing. He stresses that employers are as responsible for an employee’s mental health as they are for ensuring their workers have access to technology.
“Psychological risk has been part of the duty of care from the very beginning of duty of care,” Tooma says.
“Regulators in recent years have started to pay significant attention to this area. They look at it in terms of stress, they look at it in terms of bullying, but they also look at it in terms of what programs have businesses put in place in relation to promoting positive mental health in the workplace and preventing depression and self-harm.
“Now we’re hit with this public health crisis which has the potential to turn into a significant workplace crisis from a mental health perspective and, unless businesses are careful, they might see a significant deterioration of the mental health of their workforce and it is very much a part of their duty of care and responsibilities under work health and safety laws.”
Tooma commends the behaviour of most businesses during the crisis, describing many as having shown great leadership by adopting social isolation policies and telling employees to work from home long before any government restrictions required them to do so.
But he says there has never been a greater need to promote awareness of mental health in the workplace, and businesses need to promote strategies and programs that build mental health resilience.
At a minimum, this should include regularly checking-in on their workers to make sure they are OK.
“Reassuring messages are so important at this time,” Tooma says.
Jenny George, chief executive of corporate mental healthcare provider Converge International, says working from home is not — on its own — a problem for many workers. It is the combination of working at home in an isolated environment during a period of great economic uncertainty, heightened health concerns and no idea when life will return to “normal” that is creating widespread anxiety.
For many employees, the lack of control over their future is causing anger and distress. “When people chose something for themselves, when they have autonomy, they have much better mental health outcomes,” George says. “But in this instance, working from home has been forced on a whole lot of people. People have had that choice taken away and that loss of autonomy is something that can have quite a negative effect.”
The federal and state governments’ gradual shutdown process, which began in the middle of last month, may also have contributed to the public’s sense of dread. With every announcement — from the initial ban on gatherings of more than 500 people and the inevitable cancellation of events, to the closure of schools, the shutdown of non-essential businesses, social distancing rules and travel restrictions — Australians were forced to adapt rapidly to living under a new level of restrictions. They had barely enough time to adapt to each change before further restrictions were announced, sometimes within days of previous announcements.
George says that while she understands the governments’ timelines, the drawn-out implementation of restrictions gave Australians little time to accept, adapt and deal with new work and living arrangements.
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‘It will take a few weeks for the full extent of the short-term impact of COVID-19 on mental health to be known.’
— Jenny George, Converge International chief executive
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“One of the unexpected side effects of the gradual introductions of measures in Australia has meant that no one has really known when the ground might shift from underneath them again. Some countries went very hard and immediately shut down, which allowed people to settle into the new normal faster, and I think for some people that helped them to ground themselves better.
“I feel the more gradual introduction of some of these changes has meant that there hasn’t been time to readjust because everything keeps changing.”
Managers now face a daunting juggle of responsibilities from keeping their business afloat to ensuring their workers feel emotionally supported and helping employees to remain productive as they work remotely.
George suggests it will take a few weeks for the full extent of the short-term impact of COVID-19 on mental health to be known.
“We’ve had much more calls from people who really are in acute distress and the levels of distress are significantly higher,” she says. “But the actual number of calls is slightly lower than usual and that is a normal and expected thing.
“It happens when there is a significant amount of change because people are right in the midst of new ways of working and adjusting to new regulations that the government has brought in. It normally takes two or three weeks for that to settle down. We’re about two weeks into the new arrangements so we expect the calls will start to increase in about a week’s time.”
She agrees with Tooma that employers need to check in regularly with employees but says individuals also are responsible for their own wellbeing.
“It does get complicated when people are working from home, though each of us … has a responsibility for ourselves as well,” she says. “We can’t simply say that everything that happens in our homes now is somehow our employer’s responsibility. We do need to balance that up.”
For some, working from home is a blessing, a reprieve from bosses, annoying colleagues and long commutes. Mary-Jo Duffy, a psychotherapist and clinical psychologist based in Margaret River in Western Australia, says some people are thriving under the new work environment.
Some parents who live on farms or rural properties are enjoying having their children home from school and have more time now that they’re no long taking their children to and from school.
Others who were experiencing loneliness and isolation before the arrival of COVID-19 may be feeling a psychological lift now that so much of the world is also in isolation, which has led to greater online connectivity and a focus on personal relationships and goodwill to others.
“We have a highly individualistic, acquisitive society and suddenly it’s a little bit more about connection and that we’re in this together, and I think that meets a basic, fundamental human need,” Duffy says.
She urges employers also to reassure workers that they are “all in this together”. However, not knowing when the COVID-19 crisis will end is perhaps the most challenging aspect of dealing with the disease.
“Not having an end point is having a huge effect,” Duffy says. “If people could lock this down they would probably cope better but the uncertainty of it all is challenging. This is like a trauma and what helps when people are traumatised is when they feel as if they have some influence or control, and that’s been taken from them.”
George says there is some evidence that the increased focus on workers’ emotional wellbeing may lead some people to actually develop mental health conditions.
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The strategies that managers would normally use ... are much more difficult to implement when employees are working from home
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“That increased awareness, in some cases, appears to have a contagious effect for some kinds of mental health conditions,” George says. “So that when you see or believe that a lot of people around you are experiencing something, it makes it more likely that you might experience it yourself. But the evidence on that is a bit mixed.
“There are clearly benefits from higher awareness of mental health issues, such as people going and seeking help, but there may be side effects with that higher awareness. So it is a bit of a double-edged sword actually.”
Mental health charity Mind Medicine Australia is calling for the establishment of a mental health innovation taskforce to tackle mental health illnesses caused by COVID-19 and the recent bushfires. It believes both events have triggered a “mental health epidemic”.
Tooma says Australia was experiencing a mental health crisis well before the arrival of COVID-19.
A 2008 Australian Bureau of Statistics study predicted that 45 per cent of Australians between the ages of 16 and 85 would experience a mental health condition in their lifetime. In 2014, a report into the mental health of Australian workers by TNS Research found one in five Australians had taken time off work in the past 12 months because they felt stressed, anxious, depressed or mentally unhealthy.
However, the strategies that managers would normally use to look after employees experiencing mental health problems are much more difficult to implement when employees are working from home.
“Normally the way we would manage it in a workplace setting would be to check in on people, to look for signs in behavioural change and to try to intervene early, and seek and obtain help on their behalf,” says Tooma. “It is more difficult, but not impossible, in a remote or virtual workplace setting.”
George says the most important thing employers can do during COVID-19 is provide clear, calm, two-way communication so that employees — as much as possible — know what’s coming.
“It involves more effort and much more communication than you’ve ever had before because things used to happen by osmosis, when you sat next to someone in the office and you could see by the expression on their face whether they were having a bad day or not. Now we have to take a bit more effort to reach out and find that out.”
HERE’S WHAT EMPLOYERS CAN DO
● Maintain regular contact with employees by phone and virtual meetings
● Keep staff informed about the company’s response to COVID-19
● Listen to employees’ concerns and display care
● Be attentive to any signs of mental health concerns and provide programs to assist those in need of support
● Reassure workers that they are not alone
● Try to create social networks through face-to-face online meetings and Friday afternoon drinks
HERE’S WHAT EMPLOYEES CAN DO
● Develop a routine
● Maintain a separate work and personal space, if possible
● Exercise regularly
● Eat healthy food
● Try to get more sleep
● Avoid drinking too much alcohol
● Try meditation or mindfulness techniques or apps to deal with the uncertainty of the future
● Talk to someone every day, if not in person then by phone or the various virtual online meeting services
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