The mental health crisis

All three leaders are passionate about finding ways to improve wellbeing in the workplace and beyond.

Brad Banducci

I always think of Woolworths as a microcosm of our society; we have 200,000 people working for us and right now we lose a team member to suicide every three weeks. That basically mirrors the national stats – and for every person who suicides, there are more than 10 who consider it. It’s a massive issue in our society.

The first thing we’ve tried to do is ensure we’re not embarrassed to talk about it. Suicide happens in every part of society – it doesn’t discriminate. We did a completely confidential survey with the 200 people at our six-monthly strategy session and the results showed that 15 per cent of the people in the room on that day – our most senior people – were in a very bad mental state. In fact, you’d have said they needed immediate counselling. That really shocked me.

So we have a lot more to do. The preventative side comes back to sleep, nutrition and overall health, including financial wellbeing. We’ve had 24,000 people do our I Am Here [volunteer] program and we have a mental first-aid course, which is the next level. I wish I had the answers but I do think it’s important that we start being overt about it.

Didier Elzinga

Where 15 to 20 years ago the prevailing view in business was, “I hope no-one at my work suffers from mental illness”, we now have an understanding that everybody is going through something. People don’t necessarily have a faith or family and friends as they may have had in the past. They’re relying on work to provide that for them.

I had one person who told me that being part of our company had been transformative for him because others had recognised themselves in him and had reached out and said, “Hey, I know what it’s like to be you.” Just creating those opportunities in the workplace – creating a sense of belonging and allowing people to heal and deal with the things they’re going through – is incredibly powerful.

But it’s tricky. One of the major challenges we see is that managers are being asked to deal with things that are clinical. So how do we get the right people to [talk to] the right people at the right time? I think it is going to become a bigger part of our role as leaders. It has been like this for decades – it’s just that before now, we never allowed ourselves to know about it.

Melanie Silva

People’s holistic wellbeing is something that keeps me up at night because it’s one of those fundamental ingredients to having a happy, motivated and engaged team. People are going to achieve their potential when they’re feeling whole. So, for me, mental health and mental wellbeing are really important for holistic wellbeing.

It’s something we encourage people to talk about. We also want to make sure we have the right resources in place to show that we care and can provide the right level of support when someone really needs it. We have a couple of programs, including Blue Dot, where you put a blue dot on your computer and that says to everyone, “Hey, I’m someone you can talk to if there’s anything going on.” It’s a bit trickier if it’s stuff that’s going on in the workplace so we make sure we have a number of channels for people to report that sort of thing, too.

We have a predominately young employee base and we keep a close eye on our team members’ ability to disconnect from devices. We have discovered that being able to disconnect when you want to is one of the biggest drivers [that affect mental health]. And so if I’m the boss and I’m sending the email, [how can I ensure you don’t] feel the need to respond straight away? And how can we use some of the tech that’s causing these issues to actually solve some of them?