Guide to Improving Wellbeing Management in Education

COVID lockdowns hit education sector hard

Between COVID lockdowns and remote learning, educators have had a rough go of it. Data has recently confirmed how much educators’ mental health and wellbeing have been affected.

The Institute for Positive Psychology and Education at the Australian Catholic University, for one, issued its Australian Principal Occupational Health, Safety and Wellbeing Survey.

Headline findings were dismaying. School leaders were found to have worked an average of 55.6 hours a week in 2021. That’s while dealing with a sharp increase in partial and/or complete school closures – up 26.1 per cent from the year before.

Closures, experienced by nearly two thirds of respondents, led to elevated rates of burnout and cognitive stress, particularly among younger educators – the highest recorded since the survey began. Indeed, 29 per cent of school leaders received a red flag email alerting them of their risk to at least one of Quality of Life, Occupational Health, and Self-harm.

Beyond school closures, school leaders had other keen sources of stress. Many of which persisted from 2020. The main sources included the following:

• Sheer quantity of work
• Lack of time to focus on teaching and learning
• Mental health issues of students
• Expectations of the employer

Educators are not alone

Educators, however, are not alone when it comes to dealing with stress, burnout, and generalised wellbeing and mental health issues. In fact, mental illness remains one of (if not) the leading causes of sickness absence and longterm work incapacity.

Numbers, here, are stark.

Almost 3 million Australians have a mental illness out of a total population of less than 26 millionⁱ. An additional 440,000 working-age people in the country care for someone affected with mental illnessⁱⁱ. 

Elevated rates of mental illness spill over into the wider economy. The annual cost of ill health and suicide ranges from AUD 43 billion to AUD 70 billion, according to a parliamentary productivity commission. Every year the direct cost of healthcare expenditure and other services and supports comes in at around AUD 16 billion. In the U.S., for comparison, the American Psychiatric Association estimated the macroeconomic loss at USD 210.5 billion per year. Just a single, extra poor mental health day every month was associated with a 1.84 per cent drop in per capital real income growth, or USD 53 billion lost in total income every year from 2008 to 2014, according to a separate analysisⁱⁱⁱ.

Productivity loss from absenteeism and presenteeism was one of the key culprits. Employees with unresolved depression experience a 35 per cent reduction in their productivity, according to the American Psychiatric Association.

In Australia, the Productivity Commission estimates that employees with mental illness take an annual average of 10 to 12 days off due to psychological distress, with total costs from lost productivity ranging from AUD 12 billion to AUD 39 billion. 

The cost of ignoring duty of care

Compliance costs come into play, as well. Persons conducting a business or undertaking (PCBUs), such as education institutions, are legally obligated to eliminate risks to the health and safety of their employees.

By Australian statute, health encompasses physical and psychological wellbeing. As a result, a broad array of psychosocial hazards will come into play for educational institutions.

These are aspects of work that have the potential to cause psychological or physical harm and must therefore be addressed. Aspects of work which fall under an institution’s duty of care obligation include:

• Bullying
• Fatigue
• Mental stress
• Overseas work
• Remote or isolated work
• Workplace change
• Workplace violence or customer aggression 

The costs of flouting this component of duty of care have been steep and might be getting steeper. The cost of workers compensation claims related to work-related mental health conditions is about two and half times higher than that of other claims. They also involve significantly more time off work for employees. 

The emotional fallout from the COVID-19 crisis is also increasing employer compliance risk, as the education sector no doubt understands. Rates of depression rose sharply from a pre-COVID-19 baseline of around 10 per cent of the population to nearly 30 per cent (27.6 per cent) in 2020^iv. Anxiety also rose, from 13 per cent to 21 per cent over the same period, according to OECD data. 

What can be done?

Recommended strategies to improve the wellbeing of educators

Understanding the underlying causes of ongoing stresses to educators is key to addressing these concerns. And so, school leaders must be supported in reshaping work practices, role demands, and targeted professional learning. Per the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, the following should be kept in mind:

• There is frustration with administrative work that does not improve student learning. We need a national conversation with system and school leaders to develop comprehensive reform of the role. Teacher shortages are now at their highest rank as a source of stress since the survey commenced. Cooperative system planning across all sectors can redress these shortages. 
• There are significant differences in levels of burnout, stress, and job satisfaction between inexperienced and experienced principals. Associations and governments can provide more targeted principal preparation and early career support.
• Female school leaders reported higher results than male school leaders for all five COPSOQ demands at work subscales. This trend may result in more female principals experiencing higher levels of Stress and Burnout. We need further research to understand these differences and their causes. 

Further recommendations include:

• A shared dialogue to address bullying and violence, in particular some wider community members need to change personal and online behaviour towards principals, as 84 per cent of Australian school leaders reported at least one form offensive behaviour. 

Global interventions to improve wellbeing

Indeed, educational institutions and other employers might be loath to intervene in what they consider personal issues. But the evidence indicates that workplaces need to play an active role in maintaining the mental health and wellbeing of their workers. 

Besides avoiding high compliance costs, educational institutions who intervene proactively also stand to benefit from lower rates of absenteeism, as well as increased worker productivity, engagement, and loyalty. The remaining question, however, is how.

Well, it’s difficult for organisations and institutions to develop mentally healthy workplaces, without first understanding what the factors that contribute to such workplaces are. According to the research^v, global factors include:

• Job design. Demands of the job, control in the work environment, resources provided, the level of work engagement, the characteristics of the job, and potential exposure to trauma.
• Team/group factors. Support from colleagues and managers, the quality of interpersonal relationships, effective leadership, and the availability of manager training. 
• Organisational factors. Changes to the organisation, support from the organisation, recognising and rewarding work, how justice is perceived in an organisation, a psychosocial safety climate, positive organisational climate, and a safe physical environment. 
• Home/work conflict. The degree to which conflicting demands from home, including significant life events, interfere with work. 
• Individual biopsychosocial factors. Genetics, personality, early life events, cognitive and behavioural patterns, mental health history, lifestyle factors and coping style.

Attributes of a mentally healthy workplace 

• Work designed and managed to minimise harm
• Protective factors promoted at an organisational level to maximise resilience
• Personal resilience enhanced
• Early help-seeking promoted and facilitated
• Workers’ recovery from mental illness supported
• Increased awareness and reduced stigma of mental illness 

Challenges to developing a mentally healthy workplace

If only it were so simple to turn those attributes into a self-executing wellbeing management program, though. It’s not.

Sure, progress is being made. School leaders and other senior officials have overcome a traditional aversion to discussing mental health in the workplace. Still, formidable challenges to developing mentally healthy workplaces remain.

At most institutions and organisations, wellbeing and safety management represent separate initiatives, managed by different departments, with different budgets, metrics, and incentives.

Worker mental health (specifically) and wellbeing and wellness initiatives (more generally) are traditionally handled by HR and/or a combination of third-party resources, including employee assistance programs (EAPs).

Why then should Safety get involved at all? Well, beefing up wellbeing management entails Safety involvement. Besides a basic overlap with wellbeing management, Safety teams have the technical know-how and experience influencing workers. 

Overcoming the challenges to developing mentally healthy workforces: practical recommendations

Having senior leaders intervene to clarify the importance of workplace mental health and wellbeing is one way to
overcome structural challenges to developing mentally healthy workforces. Education leaders must also be committed and
provide support to get wellbeing programs off the ground or to take existing programs to the next level.

Leadership might deputise wellbeing committees to conduct situational analyses of the current state of wellbeing in their
respective institutions. Measurement tools available to such committees might include data coming from or related to:

• Sickness absence 
• Work-related psychological injuries 
• Return to work rates
• Exit interviews
• Staff turnover rates
• Audits of existing mental health policies and procedures
• Focus groups of employees
• Surveys of employee engagement 
• Audits of existing leadership and management training
• Examinations of the mental health strategies of similar organisations
• External expert advice and best practices from psychologically healthy workplace programs
• Recognition of upcoming organisational change

Gathering and synthesising that data is only a first step, however. With the blessing of education leadership,
wellbeing committees must then abstract from the data to identify and implement the appropriate intervention strategies
for the workplace.

Organisations and institutions shouldn’t simply implement interventions without follow up, though. Committees must
review outcomes and adjust intervention strategies along the way

What might workplace mental health strategies and tangible actions look like? According to the best-practice literature^vi, they might look like the following:

The role of digital technology in operationalising your mental health and wellbeing program

What about the start-up costs of getting such a bestpractice wellbeing program operationalised? Clearly, organisations and institutions can’t afford to belabour implementation and tracking, especially now in the face of an acute mental health (and compliance) crisis.

Here, certain digital wellbeing management technologies can help organisations and institutions (1) respond to mental health and wellbeing events, (2) implement and track proactive initiatives to support their personnel, as well as (3) better understand the opportunities for mental health and wellbeing improvement. What capabilities in particular? 

• Gain situational awareness of current events impacting on personnel through live weather, Twitter, and pandemic feeds
• Broadcast communications to distributed personnel in seconds using email, SMS, or voice 
• Conduct welfare checks at scale enabling personnel to respond via email, SMS, or voice
  – Triage response to events
• Push surveys to personnel to understand how they are coping before, during, and after events
• Launch initiatives with templates that take the heavy lifting out of creation and implementation
• Customise initiatives based on current events or unique organisational requirements
• Schedule periodic working from home ergonomic assessments for distributed staff
• Enable personnel to request mental health and wellbeing support
• Direct personnel to support programs and best-practice content 
• Securely store personnel information in a single solution or import from your HR Software

Besides that, the platforms in question provide tools for all levels of the institution weighing in on wellbeing questions. Senior leaders can oversee events and analytics; others can manage events and launch initiatives with centralised dashboards as well as access wellbeing tools and participate in initiatives on any device. 

Benefits of digital wellbeing management technology to educational institutions 

• Integrated with safety management software to reduce start-up costs and increase efficiency
• Reduce safety risk
• Reduce educator churn by providing better supports to personnel 
• Understand how educators are coping with traumatic events
• Increase resilience by providing tools for educators to grow in their work and personal life
• Monitor organisational morale across the institution
• Draw insights into which initiatives add the most value
• Effective spend of Mental health and Wellbeing budgets to deliver on institutional targets 

Finally, educational institutions are on the frontlines of a major wellbeing and mental health crisis, and there’s little reason to believe the crisis will resolve on its own.

Education leaders, as such, will have to intervene proactively to get wellbeing programs off the ground and get to the root of some of the concerns colleagues have.

As the crisis grows in acuteness, there’s even less time for delay.

As a result, leaders will have to redouble their efforts, using wellbeing management solutions, such as Noggin, to implement safety and wellbeing programs more expeditiously. By enabling better understanding of the events that impact educators, these solutions will help institutions proactively manage worker mental health and wellbeing, reduce compliance risk, and ensure continuous improvement. 

Sources

i. Edie-Louise Diemar, HRM: Employers’ role in addressing Australia’s $220 billion mental health issue. Available at https://www.hrmonline.com.au/mental-health/productivity-commission-employers-role/#:~:text=The%20report%20estimates%202.8%20million,estimated%20%2417%20billion%20a%20year.

ii. Ibid.

iii. Penn State, Science Daily: Poor mental health days may cost the economy billions of dollars. Available at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/07/180730120359.htm.

iv. OECD, OECD Policy Response to Coronavirus (COVID-19): Tackling the mental health impact of the COVID-19 crisis: An integrated, whole-of-society approach. Available at https://www.oecd.org/coronavirus/policy-responses/tackling-the-mental-health-impact-of-the-covid-19-crisis-an-integratedwhole-of-society-response-0ccafa0b/.

v. Dr. Samuel B Harvey et al, School of Psychiatry, University of New South Wales: Developing a mentally healthy workplace: A review of the literature: A report for the National Mental Health Commission and the Mentally Healthy Workplace Alliance. Available at http://affinityhealthhub.co.uk/d/attachments/developing-a-mentally-healthy-workplace-final-november-2014-1476727013.pdf

vi. Ibid.