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The power of positive
leadership on
workplace wellness

The right leadership approach sets a positive tone for everyone in the workplace and helps foster a healthier environment.

As a leader, you and your management team play a crucial role in building and maintaining a mentally healthy culture.

Ensuring your people are mentally healthy is essential for a more enjoyable and productive workplace.

What are the mental health challenges in your workplace?

The mental health challenges, or risks — sometimes referred to as ‘psychosocial risks’ — could be related to an employee’s workload, schedule, or environment, plus factors like career opportunities and personal development.

The risks are unique to each organisation, but here are some of the main ones to be aware of.

  • Harassment or bullying
  • Exclusion or discrimination
  • Unclear job role
  • Job insecurity, inadequate pay
  • Unhealthy work/life balance
  • Understaffing, excessive workloads
  • Inflexible, long, or unsocial hours
  • Lack of autonomy
  • Unsafe working conditions
  • A culture that enables negative behaviours
  • Lack of support from colleagues or management

Action and prevention; supporting your employees

The good news is, many of the potential risks and challenges can be addressed, and there are actions you can take, to help build a culture where people are mentally healthy.

Your actions can prevent risks associated with work-related mental health issues by promoting and protecting workplace mental health, supporting any workers with mental health conditions, and curating an ‘environment for change’.

Improving mental health in the workplace

There are several ways to help create an ‘environment for change’ and strengthen workplace wellbeing.

  • Embed mental health into existing systems for occupational health and safety
  • Engage workers in decision-making, especially those with lived experience
  • Ensure recommendations and actions are based on the latest evidence.
  • Integrate workplace mental health into relevant policies
  • Dedicate resources to improve mental health at work
  • Make mental health and employment services available
  • Align with current employment laws and regulations
  • Implement non-discrimination policies

The advantages of positive leadership

Positive leaders excel at using people’s strengths to address issues — they don’t ignore poor performance or inappropriate behaviour.

This helps set a precedent for other leaders and colleagues and ensure accountability.

If you can be open and approachable, use balanced judgement and act with integrity — you’ll have higher levels of engagement, greater inclusiveness, better performance and improved wellbeing in your team.

The more authentic and personable you are, the more relatable and effective your actions will be.

Skill development for all leaders

If all leaders in an organisation have the knowledge, resources and skills to promote and support mental wellbeing, you have a much better chance of achieving meaningful change.

The right training will improve the capacity for leaders to:

  • Uphold their competence in duty of care
  • Improve their ability to identify and manage the psychosocial risks
  • Be able to measure and report on workplace health indicators
  • Effectively address common mental health challenges

Leading an environment that supports workplace wellbeing

For any organisation, supporting employee wellbeing is an essential aspect of a mentally healthy work environment, and it starts with thoughtful and compassionate leaders.

Businesses with strong leaders who understand the importance of supporting employee wellbeing have been proven to be more successful.

So, becoming a leader who can champion a mentally healthy workplace is not only beneficial to the day-to-day culture and enjoyability of your employees, but also advantageous to improving efficiency and productivity.

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