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Andy Barratt, Ford of Britain chairman and managing director, discusses how mental health is at the forefront of Ford's workplace wellbeing agenda and how he urges other businesses to follow suit and join the Time To Change Employer Pledge.
In Britain, one in four people will experience a mental health issue every year. As a society, it is imperative to ensure the necessary structures are in place to address this quite staggering statistic. 2017 was a transformative year for mental health awareness within the UK. In general terms, I believe that the true extent of mental health issues in the UK was not widely acknowledged in mainstream public discourse until last year. However, through the marvellous campaigning of numerous organisations and a number of special reports published on the topic, this appears to be changing.
Relating specifically to the workplace, the Stevenson/Farmer Thriving at Work review highlighted the costs of poor mental health provisions within the workplace, namely: 300,000 people with long-term mental health issues lose their jobs each year; poor mental health costs employers between £33 billion and £42 billion each year; the economy loses £99 billion per year as a result.
Business in the Community’s latest Mental Health at Work report found 15% of employees face dismissal, demotion or disciplinary action after disclosing a mental health issue at work. This could currently apply to 1.2 million people of working age in the UK. Subsequently, just 11% of employees felt able to disclose mental health issues to their line manager.
These figures are appalling and must be addressed urgently. At Ford, we need to ensure that we are not negatively contributing to these truly awful statistics. In 2017—following the recommendations from both reports—we began to put into motion a series of training initiatives for all Ford of Britain employees, delivered by community interest company, Mental Health First Aid England (MHFA) England.
Their evidence-based training, grounded in research and tested by those with lived experiences of mental health issues is an excellent fit for what Ford is trying to achieve. MHFA England has trained over a quarter of a million people, is accredited by the Royal Society for Public Health and ensures its profits are reinvested into its wider social mission of spreading mental health skills and awareness. We are proud to be a partner and supporter of this mission and look forward to seeing an increasingly open and progressive culture towards mental health within our UK sites.
MHFA training courses teach people to spot the signs of mental health issues, offer initial first aid help, and guide a person towards the appropriate support. MHFA does not teach people to be therapists, but rather to listen non-judgementally, reassure and respond, even in a crisis. The training can also help stop preventable issues arising by building a supportive culture around mental health. Through a mix of presentations, group discussions and workshop activities, MHFA courses and resources provide participants with skills that are not only beneficial in the workplace, but in their personal lives too.
Our modus operandi is to keep Britain moving. This is not possible with the current scale of workplace mental health issues that we see constantly highlighted in surveys and reports. Encouragingly, businesses are now beginning to speak up on the issue: Lloyds Bank recently ran an excellent awareness campaign—with the help of a number of celebrity ambassadors—on dealing with mental health as a non-visual illness. More recently, we launched our ‘Elephant in the Transit’ campaign encouraging greater discussion between friends and co-workers around mental health, particularly with men.
2017 may have been a transformative year for mental health awareness, but it is now our responsibility as British employers to ensure the provision for mental health issues in the workplace meets the necessary standards. The Time To Change Employer Pledge—which we signed earlier this year—is the first step to achieving this, in conjunction with the training provided by MHFA England.
I sincerely hope that businesses will continue to challenge their existing structures of occupational health to ensure that those suffering from mental health issues do not have to do so alone, or with the fear of discrimination. It is clear that we really can make a measurable difference to the lives of our employees and I strongly encourage other businesses to take the necessary steps to make that positive change.