When your boss doesn’t want to talk about your mental health

Psychological cases are outstripping physical injury costs in Australian workplaces.

Julie Mitchell, Chief General Manager of Personal Injury at Allianz Australia.

About half of the costs of workplace insurance claims will be for mental – rather than physical – injuries by the end of the decade, according to leading insurer Allianz Australia.

Julie Mitchell, the firm’s chief general manager of personal injury, says the growth of claims in mental health is exponential, with a 12 per cent leap during the pandemic.

While physical injury claims outnumber mental health claims, the latter are often more enduring – and costly. Indeed the cost of active psychological claims is 3.5 times higher than for physical claims.

During the past four years, Allianz has conducted extensive research in this area and has developed tool kits for clients in an effort to prevent illness and to reduce claims.

“Our observation over many years in this industry is that it doesn’t necessarily always matter what type of injury or illness you get,” Mitchell says. “It can often be your mindset or what’s happening for you as an individual, your relationship with the workplace and a whole range of other factors that determine how you recover and how quickly you get back to work.”

She says Allianz is keen for companies to have the tools to build cultures that are supportive and lead to engaged and healthy employees. It also offers tools so managers can respond effectively to claims.

“There’s nothing that will help recovery more effectively than being back in meaningful employment,” Mitchell says. “So how do we make that pathway simple and easy for people to achieve?”

Mitchell says the Covid-19 pandemic created significant change and issues around social isolation. “One of our key findings during that time was that people were having trouble with the balance between working from home and the office,” she says.

This in turn created problems such as burnout and extended work hours as the line between work and home became blurred. But there was a silver lining – survey respondents reported that conversations on mental health had become much richer as factors outside of working life became a part of the discussion with leaders. “All of a sudden, you had that glimpse into somebody’s home,” says Mitchell. When Allianz researched these issues in 2019, it found eight in 10 employees felt their manager would “believe them more if they rang into work sick, saying they had the flu, than if they were to call in sick saying they had some sort of mental health concern”.

“But if you roll that forward into 2021, we asked that same question and that figure had reduced to four in 10,” Mitchell says.

She concludes that while there is still a stigma about mental health in the workplace, there has been improvement in recent years. And she says that stigma comes in part from deep-seated generational factors among older leaders.

“(Mental health) has not been part of the work domain for many people,” Mitchell says.

“(There was a sense in the past) that you don’t bring these issues to work, whereas the younger generation, and even in schools today, children are talking about anxiety, depression, they’re having discussions about mindfulness and resilience, and it’s becoming more of their vocabulary and their ways of talking about mental health.”

Mitchell says the main claims for workplace compensation for mental illness are about anxiety and stress along with anxiety and depression.

Workloads are a key cause along with workplace interaction that can lead to bullying or harassment.

Workers in some jobs, for example frontline workers and healthcare workers, are more vulnerable to mental health injury but Allianz also is focused on looking at what is happening to younger people entering the workplace.

The insurer’s research reveals people are not just anxious about raising mental health issues with their managers; they also find it hard to talk about a promotion, pay and bullying.

The survey says: “Australian employees rank the top three most uncomfortable topics to raise with their manager as requesting a pay rise (68 per cent), requesting a promotion (55 per cent) or raising issues around bullying and harassment (43 per cent). Similarly, managers rank their direct reports requesting a pay rise (53 per cent), discussing bullying and harassment (49 per cent), or requesting a promotion (47 per cent) as the top three most uncomfortable topics.”

Indeed – and perhaps not surprisingly – workers find it far easier to announce to their bosses that they are resigning.

Say Mitchell: “There’s a lot of real re-evaluation happening around career and about workplace, and what brings me into the office, what’s the purpose of going in?

“So there’s a whole range of new questions, emerging for leaders to be thinking about having conversations with workers.”

Those discussions should involve employees’ future ways of working, and their future engagement in the workplace.

Where does she stand on the hybrid model?

“My view is that we are human creatures and we need social connections,” Mitchell says. “So I think a balance is right. Flexibility has become an important value proposition for employees and employers.”

The latest Allianz research, conducted online in July and August last year, surveyed 1049 middle managers and below, and 524 senior managers and above designations.

It found two in five employees were uncomfortable initiating crucial conversations in the workplace, with almost a quarter not satisfied with how often their manager checked in with them about their mental health.

And while 79 per cent of employees want to initiate a crucial conversation with their manager this year, more than two in five do not feel comfortable starting such a discussion.Workplace mental health injury claims have increased since pre-pandemic times, yet 90 per cent of managers still report they are satisfied with their workplaces’ ability to create a mentally healthy environment. In contrast, 35 per cent of employees are not sure their employers are able to do so.

While 43 per cent of managers believe it’s important to facilitate crucial conversations and have an open discussion to promote a mentally healthy workplace, the research found 65 per cent of employees would not turn to their manager first to conduct these conversations.

Rather, four in 10 workers said they would turn to their peers or someone outside their workplace before they were likely to talk to the boss.