Every worker deserves to arrive back home as healthy as he was the time he left for work. This ideal automatically turned Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) into a crucial aspect at the workplace; not merely to fulfill legal requirement, but rather to anticipate the impending economical consequences behind it. The treatment and rehabilitation cost of injured workers, the loss of manhour due to ill employee's absence, and the rare-but-huge cost of fatalities HR department need to allocate are instant examples of the potential economic loss a corporation may face. Poor OHS management at the workplace obviously will increase the possibility of such loss, hence it is expected that modern companies conduct a well-measured cost analysis to anticipate potential capital loss coming from poor OHS management. Generally, it is very feasible to make analysis out of physical illnesses due to its tangible nature, making this the primary focus of discussion whenever OHS issue is raised on the workplace. Then what about measuring the rather intangible aspect, the mental illness?
Mental Illness, Work-Related Stress
In the past years, the awareness of the importance of mental health has significantly increased in a global scale. To point out an example, ILO's theme for health and safety day in 2016 was "workplace stress: a collective challenge". As also defined by WHO, the health status of people is not only measured by their physical condition, but also their mental condition and wellbeing. Unfortunately at most workplaces, mental health seems to always be the second interest after physical health.
Remarkable transformations from a great variety of perspectives have occurred in the workplace during the past several decades -- globalisation, the free market, advance information & technology, new working time arrangement, and people's movement. Today, it is very easy to stumble upon people who spend longer time at work compared to their own house. The workplace becomes a significant factor that influences personal mental health. Hence, mental illness rooting from work-related stress is increasingly perceived as an important issue at the workplace. Statistical data and research showed that work-related stress contributes as one of the major occupational diseases. Workplace stress occurs when an individual cannot manage the demand and pressure originating from their workplace. Excessive workload, long working hours, uncertain job status, low wage, lack of supervision, poor relationship with co-workers, and unfitting organisational culture are some popular causes of workplace stress. So, what is the consequence of work-related stress?
The Consequence of Work-Related Stress
Data from surveys and researches conducted in several developed countries strongly indicate that work-related stress is associated with employee productivity, which indirectly create an extra cost to companies. Absenteeism is the term that we usually hear as one of the indicators to measure employee productivity, where employee tends not to come to the workplace for unclear reason. The cost caused by absenteeism is still feasible to be measured. However, there is another consequence of work-related stress that may contribute to a higher cost than absenteeism but seems to be harder to measure. It is called presenteeism, which means individual still comes to work, but not with maximum productivity due to slight illness like fatigue or neck pain resulting in lack of concentration, forgetfulness, and poor interaction with colleagues. Presenteeism, which is generally caused by poor management system, is predicted to inflict cost 1.8 times bigger than those inflicted by absenteeism. However, it seems many employers still give minimum attention to manage this issue, mainly due to the difficulty of identifying one's presenteeism. For instance, if there is an incident at work, the investigation process generally fails to identify presenteeism as an underlying factor of the incident. Hence, control measure rarely gets to inspect or cater this mental problem due to failure of spotting it at the very beginning. Beside it, presenteeism may potentially cause poor interaction with colleagues leading to conflicts at work, which may trigger employees to leave the company. Therefore, in this recent years, presenteeism has come up as a big threat to companies, when it comes to employee health and performance.
As a conclusion, we can see that mental health is of equal importance with physical health. Employee performance is not only determined by good body condition but also by a happy and content mind. There is an economical cost that may incur to the company due to poor management of workplace stress. With capital consequences in mind, it is critical for employers to start thinking about how to identify and manage the mental health risk that may affect their employee at the workplace. Â
