Safety Matters | Let’s Talk About Mental Health

     MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS | 5 MIN READ

• Morson Group is committed to maintaining mental health conversations through a number of ongoing engagement activities that support our entire workforce, including our contractors out on site

• Learn more about our mental health awareness and support initiatives 

• Download our mental health awareness whitepaper

Mental health is now a permanent part of the workplace, with figures from the Department of Health stating that one in four of us will experience mental illness at some point in our lives.

Within our own business, we’ve seen a rise in the number of staff coming forward to express their own struggles around mental illness and seek support. In response, we are working hard to strengthen our workplace initiatives and priorities towards mental health to encourage more of our workforce to speak out, improve attitudes and break down barriers.

Earlier this year, we conducted a survey with more than 1,400 Morson International contractors, including those working in roles within the rail industry, which painted a stark picture of the current state of mental health. Whilst significant progress is being made to increase conversations about mental wellbeing within the workplace, more still needs to be done.

Employers within the rail industry take great strides to protect our workforces from physical harm and this same effort towards keeping our people safe must include promoting positive mental wellbeing.

Taking care of employee mental health is not only the right thing to do as an employer, but makes good business sense. A large majority of the working days lost each year are because of issues concerning mental illness, at a cost of £billions to UK employers.

Mental health doesn’t discriminate, yet men are far less likely to seek support for a mental health problem, which is particularly prevalent in the rail sector.

Suicide is a leading cause of death in young people aged 20-34 in the UK

Three times as many men die as a result of suicide compared to women and it is the leading cause of death for men under 50

​We are committed to maintaining mental health conversations through a number of ongoing engagement activities that support our entire workforce, including our contractors out on site:

• The Morson Vital Safety Units continue touring UK sites and engaging in proactive conversations around health and safety. Helping to facilitate and focus communications, the team behind the Safety Units are having increasing discussions around emotional health and wellbeing to deliver a holistic approach. They focus on contractors working in environments more susceptible to health and safety related issues, such as anti-social working patterns and high-risk activities, with the majority of our Safety Unit talks taking place directly with our rail workforce.
  
  
• Mental health and wellbeing forms part of our quarterly briefs with all our rail supervisors to ensure we are doing everything possible to break down barriers, so that our workforce feel comfortable and that we create environments where everyone can thrive. We are as much committed to health as we are to safety and are readdressing any previous imbalance in health and safety activities in industries where safety was previously seen as a larger priority.

Using the results of our survey, together with the findings from Sale Sharks Community Trust’s own mental health awareness programme, ‘Balls to That’, which a number of our senior team have completed, we have developed a larger whitepaper focused on tackling mental health and creating happier, healthier and more productive workforces. To download, visit www.morson.com/tackling-mentalhealth.

Whatever you are going through, you can contact the Samaritans’ free helpline number 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by calling 116 123.