Chapter 1
Workplace mental fitness

Mental fitness is the essence that underpins the greatest achievements. You see it in a spectacular sporting feat or an artistic masterpiece. You hear it in the calm and kind response to a torrent of verbal abuse. You feel it when you're swept away by an epic piece of music. You recognise it in that truck driver who waves you to merge in peak-hour traffic with a smile. These are examples of individual mental fitness.

For the purpose of creating high-performing teams without burnout, we focus on collective workplace mental fitness, which is made up of the mental fitness of individuals in the organisation.

A person with high mental fitness is aware and assertive, resilient and respectful, considerate and collaborative. A person with low mental fitness can be accusatory or argumentative, distrustful or untrusting, competitive or careless.

An organisation made up of people with high individual mental fitness creates great workplace mental fitness that underpins a high-performance organisational culture without burnout.

You want to establish great workplace mental fitness as it is the bedrock, the lifeblood, the springboard and every other amazing metaphor propelling your organisation's stratospheric success.

Mental fitness and mental health

Mental fitness and mental health are two different concepts.

'Mental health' tends to be associated with negative traits such as depression, anxiety and paranoia, and has a stigma attached to it. It refers to the wellness of the individual's mind, in the realm of psychology.

'Mental fitness' is associated with positive mind states such as resilience, cheerfulness and adaptability, and has no attached stigma. Our interest is in workplace mental fitness - the wellness of the organisation's mindset or culture - in the realm of sociology.

When told they need to implement a mental health program at work, managers often can't relate to it as part of their job. They can't link it directly to company deliverables and regard it as a 'nice-to-have'. Even if they recognise the value of it, they don't have the skills of a mental health professional to really take care of their people's mental health.

A mental fitness program, on the other hand, is a management tool for taking care of the workforce. It is a 'must-have'. It's a manager's job to, well, manage their people to bring out their best. This gives the workforce the best chance to fulfil the goals of the organisation.

In our consulting work, we have demonstrated time and time again that it is the confusion of mental health with mental fitness that prevents organisations from getting the results they want. They don't get their desired results because they have not built up workplace mental fitness.

Here's an analogy. If you are physically fit, go to the gym regularly and play sports, it doesn't mean you can't have health issues. But research says you are giving yourself the best shot at staying physically healthy.

Same thing with mental fitness. If you are mentally fit and regularly practise mindfulness, it doesn't mean you don't or won't have a mental health issue such as depression. However, keeping mentally fit gives you the best possible chances of having fabulous mental health.

Workplace culture

If managers look after an organisation's culture, they create a workplace where individuals are empowered to look after themselves. Workplace culture can have a great impact on the mental health of employees.

So what is workplace culture?

It's the 'how we do things around here' that results from the 'what we think of our people, and what we need to do to succeed in our business' mentality of the leadership. Very often, in a place that puts profits before people, the workplace culture will suck, and guess what! Ironically, it affects profits in the long run.

As managers, we are responsible for the mental fitness of our workplace culture. This is part of our job to optimise business performance. In contrast, it is neither our job nor our expertise to focus on the mental health of individuals. Leave that to the psychologists and psychiatrists.

Whenever we say this to people, we get a variety of responses. They go 'Aahhh!' and a light bulb goes 'ding' and lights up in their minds. Or they go 'Ohhhhhhh .' and heave a slow sigh of relief. Some go 'Huhh?', so let's clarify it for you.

Workplace mental fitness does not guarantee individual mental health. It can, however, influence individual mental health in a big way.

When an organisation is mentally fit, it provides the best environment for its individuals to be in great mental health. At one level, occupational burnout may seem to be about mental health: an overworked doctor commits suicide. An overworked project manager turns alcoholic. An overworked designer plunges into depression and develops an eating disorder. An overworked truck driver gets road rage and kicks a motorist, crashes a car, or throws things at another driver.

When you zoom in, you see mental health problems at the individual level. When you zoom out, we can guarantee you there are mental fitness problems at the organisational level. Many workplace mental health programs are impotent because they are barking up the wrong tree.

For every doctor, project manager, designer or truck driver who hits boiling point, there are thousands of others simmering under the surface, soldiering on, being slowly eroded by stress day after day. If we, as managers, don't do something to manage the heat and cool things down, there will be more eruptions, some of them fatal.

To prevent our workforce from experiencing such sorry states, the first thing to look at is their alertness.

Alertness first: MaxWell Mind

Workplace mental fitness is not hard to implement. The first thing you need is an alertness program. If your people have been suffering from burnout and fatigue, they won't be in the right state of mind to develop mental fitness.

To develop alertness, say hello to MaxWell Mind. He's a great imaginary friend we introduce at workshops. He reminds us to perform with a maximum wellness of mind and we encourage everyone to get acquainted with him.

In MaxWell's mind, fatigue is your friend. It is a signalling system from our perfectly engineered human bodies that we are not functioning at our optimum. Accepting our humanness means accepting that we will experience times of low alertness and high alertness. Allow individual differences in the work environment.

When we accept and allow human beings to be human beings, we can manage fatigue more effectively.

How do managers say 'I care about your fatigue' through their actions?

One way is to provide SmartCap5 technology to site workers and truck drivers. It's a biofeedback device that monitors fatigue and eliminates microsleeps.

In a mentally unfit workplace, workers would be nervous about revealing so much of the inner workings of their minds; the data could be potentially damning. But in a mentally fit workplace, workers feel supported by this technology, as is intended by management.

Failure is not having poor SmartCap data. Failure is falling asleep and crashing into a tree.

Impact of alertness tracking

Malcolm, our safety adviser, didn't want to wear the SmartCap. He was on a two-on, one-off swing on a remote mine site. (If you're unfamiliar with fly-in fly-out work rosters, that means he flew in to the worksite and worked for two weeks, typically on 12-hour shifts, then flew out and had a week off.)

Before SmartCap, Malcolm, a 27-year-old, vaguely knew he had a sleep issue but never did anything about it. His data prompted him to seek medical help, and he discovered he had sleep apnea. Early discovery, early intervention. Imagine if we never found out what was affecting his productivity? The lifetime trajectory of his career performance could have been affected.

To create a high-performance workforce, managers need to commit to improving alertness. The rules can be simple: accept human fatigue, and design programs to maximise fitness for work.

MaxWell Mind recommends workplace mental fitness (WMF).

WTF is WMF?

In our books, not looking after something as important as the mental fitness of your workforce is inexcusable. Let us share a piece of our impassioned right brains before our 'civilised' left brain takes over in the next section.

So WTF is WMF and why should anyone care? Because it irritates us that there is a lot more talk than action taken to address mental wellbeing in most workplaces and we want to eliminate the airy-fairy BS.

It's all well and good for white-collar managers to spout abstract concepts and quote industry statistics. But if you don't translate that into something practical and meaningful, you will have no impact.

Mental fitness is not intangible. It is not unattainable. What you measure, you can improve.

A practical manager translates workplace mental fitness into concrete measurable data specific to the individuals and teams in their organisation. Besides tracking alertness, we have the DASS-21 diagnostic tool...