Why you need to be careful you aren't contradicting your health, mental health & wellbeing strategy.

This month, I'm going to be looking at Mind the gap. And the gap that I mean is the gap between your excellent health, mental health and well being strategy. And all of the other policies and strategies you've got in place.

What I see is an organisation writing a really good health, mental health and well being strategy that stands alone, but not weaving, health and mental health to all of their existing HR policies, processes and systems. And that can lead to you're not being consistent or authentic, about your approach to health and mental health.

A really good example of this that I've seen in a few organisations I've worked is the organisation, as part of their mental health work, wants people to come forward and disclose that they've got conditions. I've managed somebody with bipolar disorder, who was encouraged by the organisation in which we work to come forward and disclose her illness, which she then did.

The reality was, though, was that she, because of her disorder took more absence than other people, despite being a really strong performer in every other way. What I saw was that the same organisation that had a great health, mental health and well being strategy, and that had encouraged her to come forward, wasn't paying her sick pay, so she taken too much absence for the policy to pay out.

I see this a lot with organisations, which is why when you are writing your health, mental health and well being strategy, you need to go back and look at every other policy and process that you have, make sure it's woven through, but make sure that you're not contradicting yourself. If you are asking people to come forward, you can't then discriminate against them for the things that they are coming forward for, you need to flex your other policies around health and mental health conditions.

Another way that organisations aren't authentic or consistent around health, mental health and wellbeing is that they haven't updated their performance management systems to reflect work or behaviour in that area. So for example, an organisation might have a great health, mental health and wellbeing policy. But their performance management system does not reflect any work that an individual has done on either their own health, mental health or well being.

So if you really want to be authentic around health and mental health, you need to look at what you're measuring people on and your performance management and ensure that the behaviours that are positive around health mental health are recognised.

What I see regularly is that despite an organisation professing to care a lot about health, mental health and well being, it rewards people on their sales targets or revenue targets or chargeability. Not on whether they've actually taken good care of themselves in their team. And in fact, those that take good care of themselves with their team, but don't quite hit their targets are penalised in a performance management.

And a third way I've seen organisations not be consistent or authentic, is that when people have come forward with diagnosed health and mental health conditions and have been given reasonable adjustments by the organisation, such as flexible hours or being able to work from home or leaving early, what can sometimes happen is when business performance slips and the organisation isn't doing as well, then the reasonable adjustments around mental health are the first things to go or the in a redundancy round, the people with reasonable adjustments are the first ones out the door.

So what I'm exploring this month is how we can be authentic and consistent. I'd like to hear from you. Whether you've seen any examples of people being penalised, or whether there are any policies and systems that you've seen being inconsistent with the work done on health and mental health.

Right below drop me a message and I look forward to seeing you more next week.

Do you want support and guidance with an expert in the field? Mentorship with Amy McKeown is available - check out more info HERE