Understanding your company’s mental health needs

Understanding your company’s mental health needs

Each organisation should consider what is relevant to them depending on their size, location of staff and specific needs for a particular production or considering the work that the company or team does.

What do you need to provide to ensure the psychological safety of everyone who works with you and how can you offer appropriate, relevant and meaningful support?

To answer these questions, you should carry out a risk assessment. There is more advice on how to do this below. It will help you identify what is needed so you can then start addressing each need.

Bigger organisations might have internal, corporate structures in place to help support workers, such as in-house training, HR resources and an Employee Assistance Programme.

For smaller companies, there are still ways to provide support even if your company only has a few permanent staff members. For example, you could contract a third-party independent organisation to provide HR support at a cost that is appropriate to the scale of your company and workforce.

Companies of any size should have corporate policies in place, for example safeguarding and anti-discrimination. Make sure these are kept up to date – again, a third-party HR organisation can help with this. These policies should be made available to everyone who works with you.

Consider your organisational or production-wide communications procedures. What is the mechanism for reporting upwards? How will you stay in touch with your workers? Include this information in your on-boarding documentation, for example on call sheets or when agreeing contracts.

 

Further support and best practice recommendations: