A new mental health plan could be ‘turning point’ in PS renewal

Quite the list:

Wilkerson said executives and managers will be the key players in leading a change to rid the workplace of the management and organization practices and policies that contribute to stress and depression of employees:

1. The bureaucracy ‘treadmill. Public servants jumping from job to job with no ‘overall picture” of why and what it means.

2.  Giving employees lots of responsibility, but little discretion.

3. Too much work and not enough resources to do it.

4. Heavy and ‘destructive’ reliance on emails and texting to the exclusion of personal conversations.

5.  A workplace where ‘everything is a priority.’

6. Unclear expectations among employees of what they are responsible for and ambiguity around who is charge.

7.  Employees skills and the jobs people they are asked to do are not well-matched.

8 Employees are discouraged from and feel they have “no voice to question workload or priority-setting”

9. The loss of capacity to execute projects.

10. A pervasive sense of erratic management and perpetual delegation from the top down to the rank and file, which diffuses accountability and erodes faith in managers.

The plan comes as the public service faces a massive generational turnover with the departure of the baby boomers and Wilkerson estimates 85 per cent of new jobs demand “cerebral” not manual skills.

As the country’s largest employer, Wilkerson said the public service is a microcosm of the Canadian workforce and tackling the stresses there will give policy-makers a blueprint for preventing mental illness among all Canadians.

He said the Canada’s health care system has failed all Canadians, including public servants, facing mental illness with 75 per cent unable to get access to the services or care they need.

“Understanding the experience of their own employees –  senior government officials will escape the blinders of budgetary policy-making to see just how devastating the under-funding of mental health care in this country really is,” said Wilkerson. With that, Wilkerson argue Canada could be international model and press to make  mental health a “global development priority’ when it hosts the G7 meetings in 2018

Source: A new mental health plan could be ‘turning point’ in PS renewal