Developing a Psychologically Healthy Workplace: What Leaders Can Do?

Leadership appears to be one key contributor to the development of a psychologically healthy workplace. Leaders can directly influence morale, retention, commitment, satisfaction and perceptions of stress. A variety of approaches exist for leaders to consider employing in the development of a healthy workplace. These include:

• Gather feedback about strengths/development areas from other senior team leaders, direct reports and internal/external stakeholders by using a multi-rater feedback instrument.
• Conduct a senior leadership team analysis of strengths/development areas using interviews or team based multi-rater feedback tools. 
• Conduct annual employee engagement surveys to better understand how leaders can change policies, procedures, processes, systems and management practices to enhance satisfaction.
• Employ a department wide “balanced scorecard” to measure and monitor internal customer satisfaction of talent within your department.
• Constructively and consistently manage the performance of underperforming talent.
• Create and utilise employee teams to increase participation of employees in problem solving, decision making and planning processes.
• Analyse exit interviews for trends and develop strategies to increase retention of high potential talent.
• Support and implement work balance and family friendly policies, procedures and programs to enhance engagement (e.g., telecommuting, child care, flex time, wellbeing/health promotion programs).

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