In aid of World Mental Health Day on Sunday 10 October, SHP caught up with Karl Simons OBE, Executive Director for Health, Safety and Wellbeing at FYLD.
Fostering a positive mental health environment for workers across all industries is at the forefront of health, safety and welfare strategies. Mental health affects the quality of life of workers as well as the morale and productivity of workplaces – whether that be in an office or out in the field. As such, tools that help identify sources of stress and improve work processes – particularly for distributed workforces such as those out in the field – can make a significant difference to employees and employers.
What do you think the main factors are when developing a positive mental health environment for field teams?
Karl Simons (KS): “Research shows that one in four people in the UK will experience a mental health problem at some point during their life, with around 14% of people experiencing mental health problems in the workplace.
“For field workers, they are under pressure from many angles in hazardous environments that can affect their mental health as employees. For example, frustrations arising from the burden of paperwork and compliance requirements can place an excessive administrative load on field teams. Instead of being enablers for work safety, workers often feel that these systems exist to protect their employer from liability and they consequently feel unprotected at work.
“There are also unexpected hazards that field teams frequently face. They must perform risk assessments and put adequate control measures in place, but they may feel they lack the knowledge or experience to make significant decisions about risk. This uncertainty leads to anxiety and stress and is detrimental to their mental health.”
It’s not just field workers that are affected by potential mental health issues, is it?
(KS): “No, contributors to mental health problems are not just limited to field workers. Supervisors also face challenges that cause stress or anxiety. During for example, the movement of personnel has been more limited than usual. Disruption to normal services, caused by factors such as resource depletion, have left supervisors having to adapt to new challenges. They have been unable to get to sites in-person as often as they would like, leading to a sense of disconnect with their field worker teams.
“In normal circumstances, supervisors would typically oversee between four-six gangs and site visits were common. However, the demands of increased paperwork and lack of oversight to prioritise sites with the highest risk can prevent supervisors being as mobile and visible as they, and their management, would like. This uncertainty and added frustration contributes to the stress of the supervisory role and keeps supervisors in a reactive mode, often overwhelmed.”
What solutions are available to combat these challenges?
(KS): “AI solutions are revolutionising the way teams operate in the field. FYLD is an artificial intelligence platform that enables safer, more productive, field force operations. It includes a risk assessment module that has an immediate psychological effect on workers that, in turn, immediately and positively impacts their behaviour on site.
“With FYLD, the risk assessment is transformed from being a frustrating and routine task. Workers are no longer just sitting in huts or vans, repetitively completing generic tick box questions or cutting and pasting into forms. Instead, they work with a live and interactive system that visualises risks to make their work safer. FYLD requires teams to be out on site looking at and describing the hazards in front of them in real-time.
“Teams take a video of their job site while talking through the hazards they see. The FYLD solution, uses natural language processing and machine learning to codify hazards from the verbal messages and images received, and then provides control measures to the field team that are pre-agreed with the organisation’s safety team. Team leaders can therefore be confident that a dynamic and robust assessment of the site is in place and will be complied with. They can have this confidence 100% of the time – regardless of whether they can get to site.”
What are the key advantages of using AI technology over traditional methods for improving workers’ mental health?
(KS): “FYLD enables companies with large field force operations to deliver safer, more productive operations. A significant advantage of FYLD over paper-based systems and tick box questions on electronic forms of tablets is cloud connectivity. Managers and safety professionals can see the risk assessments in real-time and make proactive contributions to assessing hazards and control measures. This interaction brings a level of expertise to the field that is not available presently in companies normal risk assessment or operating systems. It transforms the risk assessment from a routine task that frustrates workers to a live visualisation of risks that makes their work safer. It also allows supervisors to visualise the work site, helping bridge the communication gap to the field and overcome the sense of isolation that comes from working at home.
“An open API with the ability to connect and integrate with other company systems is available. This means that external information can be combined with FYLD data. This can include simple but powerful information that meets the essential needs of workers while in the field and ease worker anxiety, for example, the location of the nearest open public toilet or hospital. Alerts for changing weather patterns that will impact site safety can be delivered to field workers, too. FYLD can also make the job site location available to emergency responders in the case of an incident. With job locations often in remote, hard to find areas, this can dramatically improve the ability to secure treatment for an injured work mate. All these features contribute to the well-being of workers both psychologically and physically.”
What is the impact of using an AI powered solution for risk assessments in the field?
(KS): “There are many tangible benefits of adopting an AI solution. For example, access to risk assessments and workflows at the touch of a button on a smart-phone or tablet enables supervisors to be far more proactive in removing job blockers and, therefore, field worker frustrations. FYLD works to support field workers and relieve their frustrations. For this reason, it is being adopted easily by field workers. FYLD is removing sources of negative mental health at the frontline.
“At FYLD we frequently hear stories about how our solution has positively affected the health and wellbeing of field workers. One recent example occurred when a supervisor picked up a change in tone of voice from a field worker while he was undertaking a real time review of a site risk assessment. The supervisor immediately contacted the field worker out of concern for their state of mind and provided input to resolve the source of anxiety. FYLD provided the catalyst for positive engagement, enabling a supervisor to impact the worker’s mental health in the moment. Gone are the days where these situations should be dealt with reactively once they have already escalated into a health or safety incident.
“FYLD is the first AI-powered risk assessment solution that enables a positive psychological impact on managers and frontline operatives to support the prevention of harm within organisations. On World Mental Health Day, we are proud to share the positive impact FYLD has on the mental health of field workers.”
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In this episode of the Safety & Health Podcast, ‘Burnout, stress and being human’, Heather Beach is joined by Stacy Thomson to discuss burnout, perfectionism and how to deal with burnout as an individual, as management and as an organisation.
We provide an insight on how to tackle burnout and why mental health is such a taboo subject, particularly in the workplace.
