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IT IS ENCOURAGING TO WITNESS RELATIVE
CONSISTENCY IN OUR FINDINGS WITHIN
THE SAME FRAME OF TIME, IN ADDITION TO
POSITIVE IMPROVEMENTS IN WORKPLACE
MENTAL HEALTH COMPARED TO SURVEY
RESULTS FROM ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO.
Notably, the survey in our national Evolution of Workplace
Mental Health project was distributed to 23,973 HRPA mem-bers,
and 23,700 members of other provincial human resources
associations. Fifty-one per cent of our 2,148 respondents indicat-ed
having at least some responsibility for human resources at their
organization. Thus, we considered our collective respondent group
to be an informed one – keenly aware of the state of and gaps sur-rounding
their organization’s psychological health and safety.
Numerous positive developments were observed, including but
not limited to: the release of comprehensive frameworks (most
notably the development of a National Standard of Canada on
Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (the Standard))
and legislation (e.g., workers’ compensation for workers suffering
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)) that improves accommo-dation
of mental health issues in the workplace; attitudinal and
behavioural shifts among numerous organizations toward in-creased
recognition and effective accommodation of mental health
issues; and a surge of online resources, as well as educational
opportunities (e.g., online university certificates, such as the psy-chological
health and safety certificates I have created through the
University of Fredericton) that train workers and managers to re-spect
and manage workplace mental health issues.
Supplementing our findings are the results of a national pub-lic
opinion survey on employee and manager levels of support and
beliefs pertaining to workplace mental health, conducted by the
market research organization, Ipsos, on behalf of the Centre. Ipsos
identified several positive findings, including: a decrease since 2009
in the number of Canadians who consider their workplace psycho-logically
unhealthy or unsafe; higher ratings and understanding
of psychological health and safety for workplaces that have ad-opted
the Standard; and a significant increase in the number of
Canadians that have knowledge about mental health conditions
such as depression. Our research results revealed similar findings
for these variables. It is encouraging to witness relative consistency
in our findings within the same frame of time, in addition to posi-tive
improvements in workplace mental health compared to survey
results from only a few years ago.
THE RESEARCH LANDSCAPE
In terms of the history of pivotal initiatives and developments in
the Canadian psychological health and safety landscape, almost
10 years ago, the Centre’s program director, Mary Ann Baynton,
and I connected at the Canadian Mental Health Association
(CMHA)’s Bottom Line Conference on workplace mental health.
We commiserated on the absence of credible resources that em-ployers
could easily access to address workplace mental health
issues. Baynton connected me with Dr. Martin Shain – a lawyer
with a keen interest in issues relating to psychological safety in
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HRPROFESSIONALNOW.CA ❚ APRIL 2017 ❚ 21
