Psych Health and Safety in Canada Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

This is a special two-part episode where we meet team members from YMCA Workwell, a social enterprise dedicated to creating better communities via better workplaces, and one of their clients, Rising Oaks Early Learning Ontario. In this we walk through senior leader buy in, gathering wellbeing data, teams meeting to analyze data and co-create solutions to reduce burnout, increase staff retention, and impact families with great childcare. We take this up a notch to apply to many organizations to show how shared accountability can impact employee wellbeing, workload, burnout, and staff retention.

This is a special two-part episode where we meet team members from YMCA Workwell, a social enterprise dedicated to creating better communities via better workplaces, and one of their clients, Rising Oaks Early Learning Ontario. In this we walk through senior leader buy in, gathering wellbeing data, teams meeting to analyze data and co-create solutions to reduce burnout, increase staff retention, and impact families with great childcare. We take this up a notch to apply to many organizations to show how shared accountability can impact employee wellbeing, workload, burnout, and staff retention.

THIS IS A REPLAY OF EPISODE #62 The Psych Health and Safety in Canada Podcast will be returning late January 2024! Dr. Manju Varma is a nationally recognized expert in anti-discrimination. Before her current position at the Nova Scotia Community College, Dr. Varma was the Anti-Racism Commissioner of New Brunswick. Dr. Varma also serves on the Board of the Canada Race Relations Foundation. Psych Health & Safety Podcast Canada host, Kim MacDonald and Dr. Varma talk about her path from school teacher to anti-racism, human rights work and equity, inclusion and diversity specialist. She shares the challenges and opportunities in the work and offers advice on how to create workplace and classroom psychological health and safety, protection from harms to mental health, and the important role education and communications play in managing issues of equity, inclusion, fairness and safety.

Host Kim MacDonald's special guest in this episode is Mike Russo, a health and safety specialist, occupational hygienist and ISO health and safety auditor. Using a well known work health issue as the basis for the conversation, Kim and Mike demonstrate how you effectively apply the workplace Health & Safety RACE model, traditionally used in physical health and safety risk, impact and practice, to risks, hazards and harms from the two perspectives of physical and psychological and physical health and safety lens. They demonstrate and share practical considerations and the questions to ask at each stage of the model (recognition, assessment, controls, evaluation). They discuss potential risk factors, indicators and influences, the crossover of physical and psychological impact, and discuss some of the obstacles that can get in the way of introducing change.

In this episode host Kim MacDonald speaks with special guest Dr. Stefanie Ruel a professor at Cape Breton University in human resources and organizational behaviour. Dr. Ruel is a former space life sciences Mission Manager who historical and contemporary justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and Indigeneity (JEDII) challenges and opportunities in STEM and entrepreneurship. Dr. Ruel's latest research explores new understandings of grief, grieving, and work and their importance for health-oriented, workplace leaders, managers and supervisors who are interested in continuous improvement and applying newer research and understandings. Using the example of grief and grieving, Dr. Ruel also helps us understand how important it is to regularly review HR practices, policies, and benefits to ensure they are not creating invisible barriers to thriving and flourishing at work. Dr. Ruel shares how outdated, disproved research and models have and continue today to shape workplace beliefs and guide employee benefits and policies. The DSM-5 now recognizes complicated grieving as a mental illness. Dr. Ruel shares her thoughts on the role of workplace culture (one of the 13 psychological health and safety risk factors), the need for attention in supporting the area of grieving as a mental health concern and what all workplaces can learn from indigenous culture and practices.

Host Kim MacDonald's guest in this episode is Dr. Liane Davey, author of The Good Fight and specialist in workplace team leadership, behavioural dynamics, and team functioning. Liane works with global companies to not only change business success, but change mindsets, and build new skills that result in sustainable workplace change. They discuss the impacts of leader action and attention, communications and expectations, work design, workload and a new risk area called "thought-load". Each of these are essential considerations in executing either the Canadian National Standard for Workplace Psychological Health & safety or the ISO45003 standard. Liane shares how a leader's understanding of their own behaviour, including what they are rewarding, either intentionally or unintentionally, has a significant impact on psychological health and safety, the culture and outcomes. Liane shares a set of practical evidence-based actions that will make the biggest positive difference in team functioning, employee anxiety, and overall mental health, and your own productivity, along with the 1 thing she wants team leaders to do differently.

Host Kim MacDonald speaks with workplace recognition and reward author and specialist Nelson Scott about his niche, one of the 13 psychosocial risk factors in the Canadian National Workplace Standard for Psychological Health & Safety. They talk about perceptions and interpretations of a work topic that can be understood as simple common courtesy, or can be deeply linked to our experiences and perceptions of respect and organizational fairness, two additional workplace hazards embedded in both the National Standard and the global ISO 45003 standard. Nelson emphasizes shared responsibility and some of the known and unknown benefits when R&R is authentically delivered and becomes a part of workplace culture. He says that what can seem like a no-brainer in benefits to employees and the workplace, doesn't always get the attention it deserves. Operational demands, no expectations for the behaviour, and daily events can take a toll on our best intentions. Nelson's book, Thanks Again! offers even more simple and effective ideas to reset recognition habits, for both up-and-coming and seasoned managers: https://books.friesenpress.com/store/title/119734000020745519/Nelson-Scott-Thanks%2C-Again%21

Substance abuse in Canada is not often talked about at work. But it is a major crisis in human suffering, harm and risk to safety, health and death by suicide. It touches virtually every workplace, every family and every friend group. And the cold, hard costs to the workplace of that suffering, harm and risk? A 2020 study by the Canadian Centre on Substance Use and Addiction (CCSA) and the University of Victoria's Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research (CISUR) reported the cost to people in Canada at $49 billion, with the largest portion in lost workplace productivity at $22.4 billion. Nearly 74,000 substance use-attributable deaths occurred in Canada in 2020, more than 200 deaths a day. In this episode host Kim MacDonald explores this workplace issue with special guest Candace Plattor who will help us break down the myths, stereotypes, and misunderstandings that many of us have built about what enabling, protection and caring looks like in today's workplace environment. The type of substance use can vary from an employee drinking alcohol during a workplace or business lunch to an employee affected by an addiction to opioids. Employers and employees can feel the impact through lowered morale, through the climate it can create or when the workplace has a culture of acceptance and not participating results in exclusion. If reducing harm and risk at work is our collective objective, Candace believes we first have to unlearn a lot of what we believe are the most helpful actions. She believes that the crisis requires a new level of workplace education to more accurately reduce risk and protect mental health and psychological health and safety. Candace discusses how to eliminate unintentional enabling, and support it all by specific actions and policies, including around some of the new drugs that workplaces now have on-site to save lives when someone has overdosed. Organizations have a non-negotiable responsibility for health and safety at work, and Candace has surprising advice for human-centred, caring leaders. Check out Candace's TedX Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VadN5wpk_-0 Love With Boundaries: https://lovewithboundaries.com/wp2022/

Kim speaks with guest Lisa Lounsbury about her work with companies in the mining industry.

In this episode, host Kim MacDonald talks with guest Charmaine Hammond about her work with companies and organizations following traumatic events that change a community in unimaginable ways. When a natural disaster or disaster of human making happens, company leaders, employees, families, and friends find themselves under enormous emotional, psychological, physical, and financial stress. Finding a way back to normal and managing the impact of external factors on the workplace climate, working conditions, and mental health of employees, is a challenge many organizations are not ready to manage. Using the wildfires in Fort McMurray as a case study Charmaine will talk about the kinds of shifts that are needed in these circumstances, the psychological health and safety environment and risk factors that were impacted, and what organizations need to do to prepare when being trauma-informed becomes central to the daily operations. She will also share some of the best actions companies took and how they impacted mental health in the workplace and the company's role in managing during and in the years following the event. Here is a link to the incredible animated short that aims to raise awareness about mental health, through the eyes of woodland creatures coming back home after the Fort McMurray Wood Buffalo wildfires, released in July 2023: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJD64fAEQnU