Employers need to fix depression-causing workplaces
Toxic Workplace Cultures: In March, the Strategic Capability Network (SCNetwork) hosted Michael Koscec at its monthly breakfast event in Toronto. Koscec, an author and president of Entec Corporation, a firm specializing in employee well-being surveys, talked about how to spot toxic workplace cultures and how to change them. SCNetwork provides a forum for business leaders to discuss leading-edge issues in HR management. For more information, visit www.scnetwork.ca.
Toxic workplaces as bad as unsafe ones
Leaders responsible for mental health
SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies
Toxic workplaces as bad as unsafe ones
By Andy Shaw
The more engaged employees are, the more successful an organization is likely to be. That was the good news Michael Koscec, a consultant and author, gave the audience last month at the monthly Strategic Capability Network (SCNetwork) breakfast in Toronto.
But Koscec quickly warned that lax leadership and toxic workplace practices commonly spawn a high percentage of indifferent or disengaged employees and even some who quietly, but happily, sabotage their employer’s success.
Koscec is president of Entec Corporation, a Toronto-based firm specializing in employee well-being surveys. His book, Energizing Organizations: A New Method for Measuring Employee Engagement to Boost Profits and Corporate Success, draws on Entec’s survey statistics as well as his own experiences amassed over a 25-year corporate career spent mostly with what was then Ontario Hydro.
In the book, Koscec illuminates how depression, physical disease and even death can be the fate of employees left to fend for themselves in working environments that damage their psyches. But he also offers hope on how to turn a toxic workplace into a healthy workplace.
Koscec was hired to manage the process and people involved in buying land for Ontario Hydro’s high-voltage transmission lines. He soon found out the working conditions for purchasing agents were highly toxic. One agent negotiating with a farmer had his bottom-of-the-line company car filled with manure. One agent suffered a heart attack and died right in front of Koscec, possibly because of the always-on-the-road lifestyle imposed on agents by an uncaring leadership.
“In Canada, about 4,000 people die in suicides every year and if you extrapolate the percentage of people we know from our surveys who are depressed at work, you can say that about 1,000 of those people commit suicide directly as a result of their place of work,” he said.
In making his pitch for greater focus on mental health of employees, Koscec cited other sad statistics about depression in the Canadian workplace.
“We know that 40 per cent to 50 per cent of the cost of lost time at work today is due to (temporary) mental disabilities,” said Koscec. “When a person goes off for stress leave, they’re off for three months at least. But when they come back they are not treated like someone who has come back from a physical health problem… The mental health patient is thrown back into the very same environment that caused the problem in the first place.”
The cost of that blind inhumanity is very high, said Koscec.
“Prescription and drug costs climb with the number of depressed workers in a company. Overall, the economic cost of depression is about $16 billion a year. And about 30 per cent to 35 per cent of depressed people suffer it as a result of work,” he said. “We also know that about 48 per cent of all workers at some point in their lives will experience depression. So we have this huge elephant standing in the room and yet not many are seeing it. There are a lot of people out there who are hurting so we need to be so sensitive about the kind of workplaces we create for them.”
That means employers should create workplace conditions that foster a higher percentage of engaged employees, to their mutual benefit, he said.
“Only people who are passionate about their work, who are fully engaged with it, will give you that creativity and innovation. But they have to be mentally and emotionally happy in order to do that.”
To fix the problem at Ontario Hydro, Koscec had the utility company give purchasing agents top-of-the-line company cars, relocate their families so agents did not need to be on the road all week and institute weekly meetings where agents could air gripes and be assured of remedies.
Leaders are most valued by employees for the personal ethics and values with which they imbue the company, particularly their sense of fairness, he said.
“When people can trust they are working in a situation of fairness and justice, their capacity to handle stress is significantly increased.”
Andy Shaw is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
Next executive series
Look for coverage of the April event, which looks at understanding cultural differences, in the May 19 issue. Want to attend one of the breakfast series in Toronto? On May 22, guest speaker Claudia Joyce will talk about mobilizing minds. Visit www.scnetwork.ca for more information.
Return to the top of the page
Leaders responsible for mental health
SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies.
Leaders make the difference
By Dave Crisp
Without question the most telling point supporting Michael Koscec’s suggestions for improving and energizing organizations is the stark difference between how we view and deal with physical versus mental or emotional safety in the workplace. We need to find a sensible way to hold managers accountable for the less tangible problems they can cause and develop effective leaders who not only avoid causing problems, but improve results through more energized, engaged staff — a tremendous potential upside.
With physical safety, the clear goal is to continue to reduce the number of deaths and serious accidents to zero. Yet all too often we tolerate work environments that clearly have the potential for terrible consequences from mental stress because the connection seems far less direct and measurable.
Regardless of which statistics you agree or disagree with, the number of deaths and serious disabilities due to mental or emotional stress has to outnumber the lower numbers we’ve achieved through effective physical safety programs and heavy penalties.
The problem is we rarely see immediate, direct links with mental issues. People go home to have heart attacks and breakdowns. They are rarely taken straight from work to a mental-health ward. But for a fraction of the massive number of cases that occur annually in society, the connection is very real.
Even though stress leave and extended sick time for depression and other mental challenges often result in longer time off, we rarely hold the workplace or its leader primarily responsible. It’s easy to argue predisposition, off-the-job lifestyle and home life bear a larger responsibility. After all, we know others deal with the pressures and survive, even thrive, so if one or two break down, it must be their fault.
With physical accidents we have a clear, easy distinction — those that happen on the job are seen as job-caused and we hold managers accountable. It’s not so easy with mental or emotional problems, but HR managers know the culprits just the same — from exit interviews, dealing with ill people and complaints through whatever feedback systems are in place.
I don’t think we necessarily want government to regulate this as England has (see www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/step2/index.htm). We do, however, want and need to reduce the human damage, the time off and the ballooning cost of such problems whenever the workplace is a strong contributor.
Koscec has dedicated much of his life to working out how to identify such situations. We need to hear more of what he and others in the field have to say. Leaders make the greatest difference — good or bad. If we don’t improve them, so they in turn improve the workplace, someone else will.
Dave Crisp is SCNetwork's lead commentator on leadership in action. He shows clients how to improve results with better HR management and leadership. He has a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co., where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.CrispStrategies.com.
Return to the top of the page
Efficiency or effectiveness?
By Barry Barnes
Michael Koscec brings a practical approach to the difficult question of how to define and manage employee engagement. Based on his experiences in a toxic environment and the horrible experience of having an employee die from a heart attack right in front of him, he created Entec Corporation.
How much sense, he asks, does it make to create an environment that drives employees to take stress leave, treats them while absent from the workplace and, once they are cured, brings them back into the same environment? It’s the old notion of behaving the same way and expecting different results. It doesn’t work.
We have created corporations based on philosophy, structures, systems and procedures focused on efficiency and results to the detriment of the people who make the business work.
Entec has identified four groups of employees in organizations: actively engaged, engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged. In good companies there are always actively disengaged employees, and in poor companies there are always actively engaged employees. (This table summarizes data based on Koscec’s book.)
From the research, it seems the individual primarily drives engagement, but the corporate environment can more easily influence disengagement and active disengagement. Across the spectrum of companies from good to poor, the largest majority of employees sit in the disengaged group. They are not “bad” employees. They come to work, they do their job and they leave. They just don’t add the extra effort that comes from being more highly engaged.
So what’s the lesson? The greatest determinants for disengaging employees are the practices and processes that impede work. Employers often create workplaces that show no respect or recognition for employees. The difference between a “good” company and a “poor” company when assessing the level of employee engagement is not terribly large — but there are serious consequences for employee health and corporate performance.
We need to examine our corporate policies and practices to make sure gains in efficiency are not costing us effectiveness.
Barry Barnes is SCNetwork's lead commentator on organizational effectiveness. He is executive vice-president of ESOP Builders, a firm that develops employee-share ownership plans for private Canadian enterprises. He is also president of The Crystalpines Group. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
Return to the top of the page
‘The times, they are a changing’
By Matt Hemmingsen
I am not an avid fan of Bob Dylan. However, I do occasionally find his words timely and reflective. This was never more so than throughout Michael Koscec’s presentation. We certainly have come a long way in the past 30 years from a singular focus of workplace safety and injury prevention to a holistic approach of workplace wellness.
Workplace wellness is now viewed as having three components: occupational health and safety, organizational culture and personal health practices. Employers have made considerable strides and improvements in embedding a healthy and safe environment into the workplace. But only progressive organizations and those that understand the importance and value-add of employees in building wealth and sustainability, are building bridges to the other two.
Although Koscec brought considerable passion to his presentation, I found his Ontario Hydro example dated and his use of statistics somewhat generous. Notwithstanding these issues, his underlying message was simply this: If you want to get the best from your people, you must ensure leaders understand the direct relationship between employee satisfaction and employee health and then incorporate workplace wellness as a cornerstone of business strategy.
Workplace wellness needs to be an integral component of an organization’s growth plans. The connection is obvious — it factors into the ability to attract talent in a very competitive market, the need to manage health-care costs, reduce absenteeism, increase overall productivity and build greater sustainability within an ever-changing world.
For any company, the focus must be on organizational culture — going beyond the fundamental components of a health and safety program. Sustainable companies create environments that promote and influence the health of employees. Examine those companies that qualify for the “best employer” award and you see this philosophy ever present.
Not so long ago, the concept of workplace stressors would not have been considered a strategic factor in the management of people. But when stress and conflict permeate the workplace, negative energy is created that undermines business performance. Leaders must understand workplace wellness creates the positive energy that galvanizes employee commitment. This leads to positive and sustainable change, and the time for that change is now. Our future depends on it.
Matt Hemmingsen is SCNetwork's lead commentator on strategic capability. He has held senior HR leadership roles in global corporations. He is a managing partner with Personal Strengths Canada, a member of an international company focused on improving business performance through relationship awareness. For more information, visit www.personalstrengths.ca or e-mail [email protected].
Return to the top of the page
Engagement
The four groups of employees
A slight increase in the number of actively engaged and engaged workers marks the difference between good companies and poor ones. While the individual primarily drives engagement, according to Michael Koscec, the corporate environment can easily influence disengagement and active disengagement.
Toxic workplaces as bad as unsafe ones
Leaders responsible for mental health
SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies
Toxic workplaces as bad as unsafe ones
By Andy Shaw
The more engaged employees are, the more successful an organization is likely to be. That was the good news Michael Koscec, a consultant and author, gave the audience last month at the monthly Strategic Capability Network (SCNetwork) breakfast in Toronto.
But Koscec quickly warned that lax leadership and toxic workplace practices commonly spawn a high percentage of indifferent or disengaged employees and even some who quietly, but happily, sabotage their employer’s success.
Koscec is president of Entec Corporation, a Toronto-based firm specializing in employee well-being surveys. His book, Energizing Organizations: A New Method for Measuring Employee Engagement to Boost Profits and Corporate Success, draws on Entec’s survey statistics as well as his own experiences amassed over a 25-year corporate career spent mostly with what was then Ontario Hydro.
In the book, Koscec illuminates how depression, physical disease and even death can be the fate of employees left to fend for themselves in working environments that damage their psyches. But he also offers hope on how to turn a toxic workplace into a healthy workplace.
Koscec was hired to manage the process and people involved in buying land for Ontario Hydro’s high-voltage transmission lines. He soon found out the working conditions for purchasing agents were highly toxic. One agent negotiating with a farmer had his bottom-of-the-line company car filled with manure. One agent suffered a heart attack and died right in front of Koscec, possibly because of the always-on-the-road lifestyle imposed on agents by an uncaring leadership.
“In Canada, about 4,000 people die in suicides every year and if you extrapolate the percentage of people we know from our surveys who are depressed at work, you can say that about 1,000 of those people commit suicide directly as a result of their place of work,” he said.
In making his pitch for greater focus on mental health of employees, Koscec cited other sad statistics about depression in the Canadian workplace.
“We know that 40 per cent to 50 per cent of the cost of lost time at work today is due to (temporary) mental disabilities,” said Koscec. “When a person goes off for stress leave, they’re off for three months at least. But when they come back they are not treated like someone who has come back from a physical health problem… The mental health patient is thrown back into the very same environment that caused the problem in the first place.”
The cost of that blind inhumanity is very high, said Koscec.
“Prescription and drug costs climb with the number of depressed workers in a company. Overall, the economic cost of depression is about $16 billion a year. And about 30 per cent to 35 per cent of depressed people suffer it as a result of work,” he said. “We also know that about 48 per cent of all workers at some point in their lives will experience depression. So we have this huge elephant standing in the room and yet not many are seeing it. There are a lot of people out there who are hurting so we need to be so sensitive about the kind of workplaces we create for them.”
That means employers should create workplace conditions that foster a higher percentage of engaged employees, to their mutual benefit, he said.
“Only people who are passionate about their work, who are fully engaged with it, will give you that creativity and innovation. But they have to be mentally and emotionally happy in order to do that.”
To fix the problem at Ontario Hydro, Koscec had the utility company give purchasing agents top-of-the-line company cars, relocate their families so agents did not need to be on the road all week and institute weekly meetings where agents could air gripes and be assured of remedies.
Leaders are most valued by employees for the personal ethics and values with which they imbue the company, particularly their sense of fairness, he said.
“When people can trust they are working in a situation of fairness and justice, their capacity to handle stress is significantly increased.”
Andy Shaw is a Toronto-based freelance writer.
Next executive series
Look for coverage of the April event, which looks at understanding cultural differences, in the May 19 issue. Want to attend one of the breakfast series in Toronto? On May 22, guest speaker Claudia Joyce will talk about mobilizing minds. Visit www.scnetwork.ca for more information.
Return to the top of the page
Leaders responsible for mental health
SCNetwork’s panel of thought leaders brings decades of experience from the senior ranks of Canada’s business community. Their commentary puts HR management issues into context and looks at the practical implications of proposals and policies.
Leaders make the difference
By Dave Crisp
Without question the most telling point supporting Michael Koscec’s suggestions for improving and energizing organizations is the stark difference between how we view and deal with physical versus mental or emotional safety in the workplace. We need to find a sensible way to hold managers accountable for the less tangible problems they can cause and develop effective leaders who not only avoid causing problems, but improve results through more energized, engaged staff — a tremendous potential upside.
With physical safety, the clear goal is to continue to reduce the number of deaths and serious accidents to zero. Yet all too often we tolerate work environments that clearly have the potential for terrible consequences from mental stress because the connection seems far less direct and measurable.
Regardless of which statistics you agree or disagree with, the number of deaths and serious disabilities due to mental or emotional stress has to outnumber the lower numbers we’ve achieved through effective physical safety programs and heavy penalties.
The problem is we rarely see immediate, direct links with mental issues. People go home to have heart attacks and breakdowns. They are rarely taken straight from work to a mental-health ward. But for a fraction of the massive number of cases that occur annually in society, the connection is very real.
Even though stress leave and extended sick time for depression and other mental challenges often result in longer time off, we rarely hold the workplace or its leader primarily responsible. It’s easy to argue predisposition, off-the-job lifestyle and home life bear a larger responsibility. After all, we know others deal with the pressures and survive, even thrive, so if one or two break down, it must be their fault.
With physical accidents we have a clear, easy distinction — those that happen on the job are seen as job-caused and we hold managers accountable. It’s not so easy with mental or emotional problems, but HR managers know the culprits just the same — from exit interviews, dealing with ill people and complaints through whatever feedback systems are in place.
I don’t think we necessarily want government to regulate this as England has (see www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/step2/index.htm). We do, however, want and need to reduce the human damage, the time off and the ballooning cost of such problems whenever the workplace is a strong contributor.
Koscec has dedicated much of his life to working out how to identify such situations. We need to hear more of what he and others in the field have to say. Leaders make the greatest difference — good or bad. If we don’t improve them, so they in turn improve the workplace, someone else will.
Dave Crisp is SCNetwork's lead commentator on leadership in action. He shows clients how to improve results with better HR management and leadership. He has a wealth of experience, including 14 years leading HR at Hudson Bay Co., where he took the 70,000-employee retailer to “best company to work for” status. For more information, visit www.CrispStrategies.com.
Return to the top of the page
Efficiency or effectiveness?
By Barry Barnes
Michael Koscec brings a practical approach to the difficult question of how to define and manage employee engagement. Based on his experiences in a toxic environment and the horrible experience of having an employee die from a heart attack right in front of him, he created Entec Corporation.
How much sense, he asks, does it make to create an environment that drives employees to take stress leave, treats them while absent from the workplace and, once they are cured, brings them back into the same environment? It’s the old notion of behaving the same way and expecting different results. It doesn’t work.
We have created corporations based on philosophy, structures, systems and procedures focused on efficiency and results to the detriment of the people who make the business work.
Entec has identified four groups of employees in organizations: actively engaged, engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged. In good companies there are always actively disengaged employees, and in poor companies there are always actively engaged employees. (This table summarizes data based on Koscec’s book.)
From the research, it seems the individual primarily drives engagement, but the corporate environment can more easily influence disengagement and active disengagement. Across the spectrum of companies from good to poor, the largest majority of employees sit in the disengaged group. They are not “bad” employees. They come to work, they do their job and they leave. They just don’t add the extra effort that comes from being more highly engaged.
So what’s the lesson? The greatest determinants for disengaging employees are the practices and processes that impede work. Employers often create workplaces that show no respect or recognition for employees. The difference between a “good” company and a “poor” company when assessing the level of employee engagement is not terribly large — but there are serious consequences for employee health and corporate performance.
We need to examine our corporate policies and practices to make sure gains in efficiency are not costing us effectiveness.
Barry Barnes is SCNetwork's lead commentator on organizational effectiveness. He is executive vice-president of ESOP Builders, a firm that develops employee-share ownership plans for private Canadian enterprises. He is also president of The Crystalpines Group. He can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].
Return to the top of the page
‘The times, they are a changing’
By Matt Hemmingsen
I am not an avid fan of Bob Dylan. However, I do occasionally find his words timely and reflective. This was never more so than throughout Michael Koscec’s presentation. We certainly have come a long way in the past 30 years from a singular focus of workplace safety and injury prevention to a holistic approach of workplace wellness.
Workplace wellness is now viewed as having three components: occupational health and safety, organizational culture and personal health practices. Employers have made considerable strides and improvements in embedding a healthy and safe environment into the workplace. But only progressive organizations and those that understand the importance and value-add of employees in building wealth and sustainability, are building bridges to the other two.
Although Koscec brought considerable passion to his presentation, I found his Ontario Hydro example dated and his use of statistics somewhat generous. Notwithstanding these issues, his underlying message was simply this: If you want to get the best from your people, you must ensure leaders understand the direct relationship between employee satisfaction and employee health and then incorporate workplace wellness as a cornerstone of business strategy.
Workplace wellness needs to be an integral component of an organization’s growth plans. The connection is obvious — it factors into the ability to attract talent in a very competitive market, the need to manage health-care costs, reduce absenteeism, increase overall productivity and build greater sustainability within an ever-changing world.
For any company, the focus must be on organizational culture — going beyond the fundamental components of a health and safety program. Sustainable companies create environments that promote and influence the health of employees. Examine those companies that qualify for the “best employer” award and you see this philosophy ever present.
Not so long ago, the concept of workplace stressors would not have been considered a strategic factor in the management of people. But when stress and conflict permeate the workplace, negative energy is created that undermines business performance. Leaders must understand workplace wellness creates the positive energy that galvanizes employee commitment. This leads to positive and sustainable change, and the time for that change is now. Our future depends on it.
Matt Hemmingsen is SCNetwork's lead commentator on strategic capability. He has held senior HR leadership roles in global corporations. He is a managing partner with Personal Strengths Canada, a member of an international company focused on improving business performance through relationship awareness. For more information, visit www.personalstrengths.ca or e-mail [email protected].
Return to the top of the page
Engagement
The four groups of employees
A slight increase in the number of actively engaged and engaged workers marks the difference between good companies and poor ones. While the individual primarily drives engagement, according to Michael Koscec, the corporate environment can easily influence disengagement and active disengagement.
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