by UNIBO Team
Here it is! Its name is “Mental Health at Work Platform” and today, January 31st, 2023, is the official date in which the final beta version has been released and made available to the public.
We are talking about the H-WORK Innovation Platform, which aims to help employers, Human Resource managers, and Occupational Health and Safety professionals to address mental health at their workplaces, based on the international scientific research activities carried out throughout the EU H2020-funded H-WORK project.
This is one of the most important outcomes of the project, as it aims the three-year work done so far to have an impact on the outside world.
At its very core, the Mental Health at Work Platform is a set of services and tools that practitioners can use to act upon mental health and well-being in the organisations – especially public organisations and SMEs.
On the one hand, three Interactive Tools are provided, namely:
- the H-WORK Benchmarking Tool, to discover how one’s organisation is doing on mental health and well-being as compared to other similar organisations;
- the H-WORK Decision Support System, to make a snapshot of the organisational situation and see which action for improvement might be implemented;
- the H-WORK Economic Calculator, to calculate how much money an organisation could save by carrying out mental health actions.
Put simply, users can access the tools and are just requested to answer few short questions and fill-in some basic information in order to get feedback, suggestions, tips, and trick on what to do and how do it. Try out to believe!
On the other hand, eight PDFs can be downloaded from the seven-step H-WORK Roadmap, which guide users through the whole process of preparing, planning, implementing, and evaluating multilevel interventions to promote mental health and well-being in the workplace. With the roadmap, users are able to learn how to
- adopt the overall H-WORK approach (Introduction), encompassing job demands and resources, multilevel intervention, a bottom-up participatory approach, and process evaluation;
- prepare the ground (Step 1), setting up a team and communicating the mental health intervention project;
- prioritise the needs (Step 2), identifying opportunities at different levels of the organisation for improving mental health in the workplace;
- plan the actions (Step 3), engaging stakeholders and developing an action plan;
- put actions into practice (Step 4), implementing mental health interventions;
- keep track (Step 5), monitoring how well the interventions are going and employees’ feedback;
- sustain the progress (Step 6), ensuring employees’ adoption of learning on the job;
- and measure success (Step 7), collecting data before, during and after the interventions to evaluate mental health and well-being improvements.
Basically, the steps constitute a much more user-friendly adaptation of the H-WORK Assessment Toolkit (HAT), H-WORK Intervention Toolkit (HIT), and H-WORK Evaluation Toolkit (HET) developed and validated throughout the project. Wait for other languages of the steps to come in the next months!
Finally, the Mental Health at Work Platform allows to download the Policy Briefs that the project is producing to provide guidelines and recommendations to practitioners and policymakers at national and EU levels.
The Mental Health at Work Platform is the output of a great collaborative effort between the project Consortium and the Italian software house Indici Opponibili. Overall, it aims to fill one of biggest existing gaps when it comes to workplace mental health management. Indeed, many European managers say they are concerned about mental health in their workplaces, but few of them have procedures in place to deal with this. There is a lack of knowledge, guidance, and tools. The Mental Health at Work Platform is designed as a service addressing such a challenge.
Now that the platform is out there, it is ready to be tried out by users, who can start exploiting its potential.
At the same time, in the following months the H-WORK team will be conducting a testing phase aimed at collecting users’ feedback on how to improve the platform and make it as fitting as possible to their preferences. Stay tuned!
If you are an employer, manager, HR or OHS practitioner and want to help us with testing the beta version of the H-WORK Innovation Platform, please access this survey and leave us your e-mail address. We will contact you and engage in the testing activities (e.g., questionnaires, interviews, etc.).
Thanks for your precious collaboration!