Edmonton targets mental health

The City of Edmonton has always been ahead of the curve when it comes to mental health support for employees.

By setting up a peer support team in the early 2000s and continuously offering mental health training programs to staff, it continues to set the bar when it comes to workplace mental health.

In 2007, the city determined — based on needs, trends and increased awareness around mental health issues — to increase education and training by introducing Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) to employees. Fast forward 10 years and the city had trained about 2,000 staff members in MHFA.

This training resulted in an overall heightened awareness around mental health in the workplace, as well as the need to do more around mental health.

The working mind

After seeing the success of MHFA, John Dowds, lead chaplain and senior mental health consultant with the City of Edmonton, started looking into other potential programs it could add to the corporate mental health strategy. Dowds reached out to the Edmonton Fire Rescue, which was training staff members in The Working Mind First Responders (TWMFR, formerly known as Road to Mental Readiness) program and seeing tremendous success.

It came about that the TWMFR offered by the Mental Health Commission of Canada (MHCC) was being adapted for the general workplace, and Dowds knew it would make a strong addition to the City of Edmonton’s internal offerings.

To move forward with the course, Dowds and his team developed a business case to present to the City of Edmonton leadership team, to highlight the benefits of The Working Mind training.

“Buy-in was very high from our leadership team,” says Jessica Culling, a mental health/healthy living consultant with the City of Edmonton.

“After our successful rollout of MHFA, there was a heightened awareness around workplace mental health and The Working Mind training received a warm reception from all the managers and supervisors.”

Before offering the training to employees, the City of Edmonton hosted a three-hour executive level training for senior-level staff. With the city manager, deputy city managers and branch managers in attendance, many returned to their individual departments praising the program and encouraging everyone to take the course.

“It was really impressive to see,” says Culling.

“Leadership was extremely receptive and supportive of the training from the get-go. They all felt the training was needed and were open to working collaboratively to get as many city employees trained as possible. They all recognized this needed to be a priority moving forward.”

Impressive results

As of December 2019, the City of Edmonton had trained more than 1,300 staff members in The Working Mind.

With plans already in place to train all employees, the results have been very impressive.

The following data was retrieved from a post-training participant survey conducted by The Working Mind:

• 95 per cent agree the topic of the training was important for their role.

• 84 per cent agree the program has reinforced their understanding and comfort with mental illness and mental health problems in the workplace.

• 95 per cent agree they can use this information in the workplace.

Next steps

The City of Edmonton is currently working toward having all managers trained by 2020.

It will also start working toward training its employee base of around 12,000 staff members. There are currently 36 facilitators who are able to deliver the course, and 12 more are expected to be added in early 2020.

Case study: Magenta

Magenta is a mortgage investment corporation, focusing on owneroccupied residential first mortgages that fall just short of the recently tightened criteria for chartered banks. CEO Gavin Marshall founded the company in 1994 in Ottawa and the portfolio has since grown to a lending capacity of $400 million.

Magenta’s growth has sometimes required employees without management experience or training to become managers. So, the company decided to build on its success by strengthening the leadership and management skills of its current generation of managers and — with an eye to the future — its prospective leaders, according to HR administrator Josie Noakes.

Magenta worked with Performance Management Consultants (PMC) of Ottawa to create a management development program that focused on leadership, communications and time management. PMC proposed a management development program designed to meet two broad objectives:

• Leading self: Enhancing participant self-awareness of strengths and of areas for improvement.
• Leading others: Developing core leadership and management skills to improve work-related performance management competencies.

Within those objectives, a number of skill areas were identified. They included management, feedback, change, accountability, delegation, communication, interpersonal skills and business writing skills.

In the first round of training, PMC facilitators worked with a dozen Magenta employees. The courses included: Managing for superior results; Business writing for impact and influence; Dealing with difficult people; Managing and leading with emotional intelligence; and Assertiveness and conflict resolution.

In the second round of training, Magenta hoped to reach beyond the employees involved in the first round, but also to avoid repeating content so that first-round participants would be more likely to return. All of the courses lasted one day, except for Managing for superior results level 2, which was taught over two days. The courses included: Communication effectiveness with Myers-Briggs (MBTI); Critical conversations; and Practical time and workload management.

The results were positive, with instructors rated highly for tailoring courses to Magenta and employee objectives, drawing on personal knowledge and experience and creating a safe space to talk about sensitive issues.

Chad Scanlan is the marketing and communications specialist for Mental Health First Aid Canada and The Working Mind at the Mental Health Commission of Canada in Ottawa. He can be reached at (613) 683-1866 or visit www.mentalhealthcommission.ca for more information.

MENTAL HEALTH SKILLS APPRECIATED BY MANAGEMENT

• 9 IN 10 Number of managers and supervisors who say it’s important for them to continue improving their skills in managing distressed workers
• 9 IN 10 Number of managers and supervisors who say they feel it’s a good use of time to focus on building skills that will help them better respond to emotionally distressed workers
• 2 IN 3 Number of managers and supervisors who say they could do their jobs more effectively if they found ways to more easily manage distressed workers
• 27% Number of people who have experienced a mental health condition or mental illness 
• 21% Number of people who have taken medication to help with their mental health
• 14% Number of people who have taken time off work or school to deal with a mental health issue

Sources: Great-West Life Centre for Mental Health in the Workplace; Ipsos

THE WORKING MIND

• understand mental health and mental illness
• recognize its signs and indicators, in themselves and others
• reduce stigma and negative attitudes toward people with mental health problems
• support colleagues with mental health problems
• maintain their own mental health and improve their resilience.