INDUSTRY FEATURE: MENTALLY HEALTHYWORKPLACES
In May 2021 the Federal, State and Territory Ministers who are responsible for work health and safety met and voted to amend the Work Health and Safety Regulations which see the inclusion of specific provisions on psychosocial risks. WHS regulators are currently drafting a code of practice to clearly articulate expectations and strategies regarding the management psychosocial risks in the workplace. So, what is psychosocial risk and what should hospitality businesses do to minimise exposure to work-related hazards and factors? Professor Angela Martin of the Menzies Institute forMedical Research,who is known internationally for her research on the relationships between work and mental health, shares that the word psychosocial refers to an interaction between a person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviours and features of their environment. “When we talk about workplace psychosocial risks, it’s about people’s workplace environment. It’s about the tasks of their job as well as the people they interact with. It’s those things we experience in our work that impact our thoughts, feelings and behaviours, and ultimately our mental health.”
Professor Martin often gets asked whether psychosocial issues are different for different people. “They are, because they are based on perceptions,” she says. “There are some objective things that you can assess about the job or work environment but there’s also perception-based stuff and that’s affected by many different things. Because we’re all different, we can have different reactions to things in the environment. So, what might impact somebody’s mental health quite negatively, might not be a bother for someone else.” The kind of psychosocial risks seen in the hospitality industry reflect the constantly changing circumstances of both personnel and customers. “A common psychosocial hazard for hospitality relates to customer service. Whilst positive interactions with customers can make the job enjoyable, negative interactions involving customer aggression and/or harassment, receiving negative feedback, dealing with complaints and trying to keep customers happy, which is sometimes called emotional labour, can be very stressful,” shares Professor Martin. Emotional labour is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirements of a job. Workers in hospitality
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