FM, Mental Health and Wellbeing.

Last week we focused on Men’s Mental Health. Mental health is a huge issue for everyone in almost every industry. Research conducted by the Mental Health Organisation survey identified that more than 85% of all respondents believed that their job and being at work was important to protecting and maintaining their mental health.?Ensuring staff are supported in their mental health and wellbeing is key to keeping businesses running effectively.??

Stress costs the world economy billions of pounds in lost time every year, reducing the productivity of the workforce and contributing to lost revenue.??Stress can also prevent the delivery of quality services to clients, and limiting economic growth, while an unhappy workforce are more likely to make mistakes.?

Huge campaigns have been run in many industries, encouraging people to talk more about mental health and for companies to be more supportive of staff that come forward with a mental health issue.??In industries like construction, there are now finally huge steps being taken now that people are beginning to really understand the scale of the problem. In some sectors – like FM – progress has been less visible.??

Partly, we believe, this is because the stresses of an FM role are less obvious than those in sectors like construction – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.??As a sector, we need to take a look at the jobs our teams are doing and understand how regularly they are in high stress situations delivering without a huge amount of direct support – and ten understand how we can change that so staff are less at risk of suffering from stress.??From the beginning of a client relationship right through to the operational stage, there are a huge range of pressures that can affect staff at every level of the business.??

At the beginning of a contract – even before it is signed - competitive tender processes demand time, and emotional energy from teams as they are expected to produce quality documentation within often strict deadlines.??Should a bidder be successful, the process of mobilising a contract is a particularly high stress environment with a range of stakeholders and huge sums of money on the line.??For international facilities management businesses this can often involve multiple sites across one or more countries, and almost always at least require the transfer of staff from an old site to a new building.???

Once services are up and running, FM staff operate in an environment where fully integrated with their client and can face huge challenges around expectation management and performance.??Working embedded with the client can also mean that teams are not able to distance themselves from problems and tensions in the workplace, which can cause friction and build pressure.??Beyond that, the dispersed nature of many FM jobs across contracts can mean that face-to-face contact with line managers is limited, leaving less opportunity to talk about emerging issues before they become acute.??

Agile working and mobile technology can also play a part in the inability to switch off; while the use of mobile phones and email makes remote working more accessible, they can also reduce the opportunity for people to separate work from their personal life.??If we are going to make significant steps forward for FM, then we need to think differently. This means stepping back and reviewing how we work. Do we really know the impact that mental health issues are having on our sector? How good is our data? Is there best practise from other sectors that we can adopt????

The reality is that you can’t change attitudes overnight – and in order to have a real impact, everyone in the industry needs to work together.? This isn’t something that we can solve in one company or on one contract – only sustained cross-sector collaboration will be able to deliver the results we need.??

Looking forward, Macro believes that all companies should be encouraging open conversations about mental health and the support available when employees are struggling. They should also try and develop better mental health awareness among employees, and routinely monitor employee mental health and wellbeing.?

At Macro we are beginning to try and break down the barriers that people face when opening up. We have dedicated colleagues trained in mental first aid and we encouraged teams to hold tea and talk sessions.??

We also offer support to all employees through and employee assistance programme, with a dedicated phone line for confidential counselling available for all colleagues. It’s important that all colleagues know that if they need to, they can get help.??

We know that we don’t yet go far enough – but we’re improving all the time and it’s made a huge difference already to have such a clear corporate focus on delivering better mental health outcomes for all employees.?