Poor support
Practical step by step ideas, tips and suggestions to help employers of different sizes prevent mental injury and create a safe and mentally healthy workplace. Use tools, templates and resources to focus on work-related factors that impact mental health and learn good practice. Check out the full range of topics on the Toolkit.
Step 1: Learn about poor support
What is poor support?
Poor support means not getting enough support from supervisors or other workers, or not having the resources needed to do the job well.
Poor support at work occurs in tasks or jobs where employees don’t have sufficient:
- emotional and practical support from supervisors and colleagues
- information or training to support their work performance
- tools, equipment and resources to do the job
Poor support at work can harm your business in several ways. It can lead to lower productivity, reduced morale and increased absences and mental injury claims. It could even lead to staff resignations, requiring additional time and money to hire and train new staff.
What are your rights and responsibilities at work?
Employers must provide and maintain a workplace that is safe and free from risks to health, including psychological health, so far as is reasonably practicable.
Employees have a responsibility to take reasonable care of their own health and safety in the workplace, and the health and safety of others. They must also cooperate with employers to create a safe environment.
Step 2: Consult your employees
Consultation can be done in a number of ways. Depending on your workplace, it can be as simple as casually walking around your workplace having a conversation, or as formal as setting up a health and safety committee.
Good consultation has lots of benefits – it leads to better decision making and greater cooperation and trust between employers and employees, who get a better understanding of each other's views.
Consultation isn't just good practice though, it's actually a legal requirement for employers. Employers must consult with employees including health and safety representatives (if any), about matters that directly affect, or are likely to directly affect, their health and safety. So far as is reasonably practicable. This includes identifying whether poor support may be a hazard at the workplace, and working out how to eliminate or reduce the risk of it occurring.
At a minimum, consultation must involve sharing information about any health and safety issues, giving employees reasonable opportunity to share their views on those issues, and taking those views into consideration.
Learn about your rights and responsibilities, as well as how best to consult
Step 3: Identify the hazards and risks
A hazard is anything that has the potential to cause harm to a person. Think of hazards like 'situations' or 'things' in the workplace that can hurt someone, either physically or mentally. The risk is the potential of the harm actually happening.
For example, a ladder is a physical hazard. The risk is being physically injured from falling from that ladder. The same applies to hazards that affect our mental health – these are known as psychosocial hazards.
Poor support is an example of a psychosocial hazard that can negatively impact someone's mental health. It's about more than having to wait for someone to get out of a meeting to answer a non-urgent question. Poor support becomes a hazard when it is severe enough and/or if it happens often enough that it could pose a risk to someone's mental health.
Examples of poor support:
- having limited tools, equipment or resources to get the job done
- receiving information that is unclear or not passed on in time
- supervisors that aren't available to help, who provide unclear guidance, or take a long time to make decisions
- not receiving a sufficient induction into the role
- no training to support competence in the role
- not being able to easily get help
- not knowing who to get help from
- supervisors who are unable to be contacted in times of need
- a highly competitive or critical workplace culture that discourages support
- workers are too busy to help each other
Often multiple hazards can be present at the same time and can combine to increase the risk of harm occurring. Identifying poor support as a hazard and understanding factors that contribute to it occurring is the best way to prevent it from happening.
Some factors that might make poor support more likely include:
- poor systems of communication between employees
- limited training for supervisors on how to provide practical and emotional support
- insufficient training to support with organisational induction such as where to access risk register
- limited opportunities for feedback on performance
- leadership that doesn’t provide sufficient or equal support to employees
- employees that work remotely, alone or in isolation with no access to timely support
- lack of knowledge on relevant policies and procedures
Managing these factors well should decrease the risk of poor support occurring in the workplace.
Step 4: Assess the risks
A risk assessment will help you understand the risks to your employees' health, and how to prioritise your efforts to manage them.
It is good practice to identify hazards, both individually and together, that are creating risks to health and safety. Once you have identified the hazards, you can assess the risk of them occurring.
Risk assessment tips
- Observe work and behaviours
For example, workers struggling with tasks because they are waiting on others to complete a task, or observing negative interactions between co-workers such as poor communication toward each other.
- Consider if hazards are occurring in isolation or together
Poor support may co-occur with another hazard. For example, poor support by a supervisor may be increasing the risk or contributing to bullying between people or teams. Look at the root cause of the problem, rather than just the behaviour itself such as poor support being caused by induction or training issues. Poor support may create a higher risk in workplaces where workers often need help to do tasks safely.
- Consider who is more at risk of poor support
Poor support can affect individuals, teams or groups working in a specific workplace location. It is important to consider how poor support is impacting each to enable the design of effective controls.
- Consider how long, how often and how severely workers are exposed to poor support
The longer, more often and poorer the quality of the support the higher the risk that workers may be harmed.
Step 5: Control the risks
A control simply means 'ways to manage' an issue. Controls are things you put in place to eliminate or reduce risks. The list could be endless, but it’s really just about taking action, so far as reasonably practicable, to manage the risk of poor support happening in your workplace.
Here are some ways that employers can take action (or 'implement a control') to create a safe workplace.
- Implement supportive systems
Create systems for regular and reliable communication such as one-on-one meetings, team meetings, group huddles, all staff meetings, newsletters or notice boards. Provide systems for emotional support from supervisors or other employees e.g. peer support networks. Encourage employees to participate in wellbeing programs. Avoid asking staff to stay back late without prior notice and allow taking time in lieu for working overtime.
- Lead by example and demonstrate commitment
Employers and managers set the workplace culture. Promote a supportive culture in the workplace by coaching leaders to role model behaviours such as active listening, providing emotional and practical support, encouraging team cohesion and creating and enabling a learning culture.
Ensure clear management structures are in place and there are clear reporting lines within the team. Ensure management have appropriate resourcing to enable them to support employees adequately and to have sufficient staffing levels.
- Improve the way work is designed
Design work to increase team collaboration rather than independent working and allow opportunities for employees to talk to each other about work tasks during work time.
- Provide flexibility
If possible, allow for individual flexibility such as job sharing, remote flexible work practices that best suit individual and business needs. Provide education leave (paid or unpaid) or allow for family-friendly working hours if practical.
- Provide inductions and training
During inductions, discuss acceptable behaviours and refer to relevant OHS policies and procedures. Ensure employees receive suitable training to be competent in their role. Ensure training is available to part-time, contract, casual and shift workers and those in remote locations they will receive support. Think about a buddy system and a tailored training plan.
- Provide for growth and development opportunities
Ensure employees have access to a variety of growth and development opportunities to improve skills (such as formal training, coaching and mentoring). Conduct regular performance reviews which include fair, goal focused and constructive feedback. This template will help you assess what skills individuals in your workplace have and what skills are missing so you can see where you need to develop the capability within your workplace.
Growth and development needs template
Some other examples of ways to support growth and development include:
- experienced staff training less experienced staff
- formal training such as refresher courses, seminars, online tutorials, conferences, new technology skills (there is a surprising amount of high-quality, free training available online)
- allowing employees to take paid or unpaid leave to study
- mentoring or coaching with either an internal or external expert
- 'shadowing' someone else in your organisation
- offering opportunities to act in more senior roles for a short time
- offering opportunities to work in another department or area
- offering opportunities for job sharing
- being involved in research or innovation projects
- Develop a policy
A policy is not legally required but it is best practice. It is used to define poor support, and outlines how everyone is expected to behave and be treated. It should also include:
- steps for how to report and incident
- what actions will be taken to protect employees
- what support services are available
This can be a standalone document, or part of your general Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) policy.
Information about how to create a policy or procedure
If you have a policy, make sure everyone knows where to find it!
Step 6: Share, review and improve
A safe and mentally healthy workplace needs ongoing commitment and engagement.
If you have a poor support prevention policy, review it every year or when new information about poor support becomes available. You want to check whether the controls you've implemented are still relevant and effective (i.e. training, reporting).
By sharing the outcomes of these reviews, as well as suggestions and recommendations for improvements, you can keep the conversation going. This will continue to build trust and cooperation between you and your employees. Consultation must be undertaken before making any changes to the workplace, things used at the workplace, or the conduct of work at the workplace, and these changes should be communicated to your employees.
Here's an idea! Set a calendar appointment now to review your policy in 12 months.
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