 What I'm going to talk about today is what is a mentally healthy workplace? Many of you already have an understanding of that, but I'll just give a clear, I suppose, overall umbrella definition as to what that would look like. And more importantly, why are we talking about this? Why are we all coming together to share information and stories and build our expertise in this? Why? What is the drivers behind this that we need to consider and think about? I'll talk about how we can engage business. I'll look at what are the practical actions that you can take in your workplaces and then talk about what next after this. So a mentally healthy workplace promotes and protects the mental health of individuals and can have a positive impact on productivity, creativity, retention and being perceived as an employer of choice. One of the key things when we look at a mentally healthy workplace is leadership. So the people who have influence in a workplace need to have a really good grasp and a really strong commitment to having a mentally healthy workplace. It doesn't just happen by chance. It isn't a, oh, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. We want this to be the norm in all workplaces across Australia. So when we look at leadership, a mentally health workplace needs to be considered when you're looking at performance, when you're looking at innovation, the actual workforce, strategic direction, the well-being that is embedded in these things, the growth, and this is around change. When we're going through changing workforces, this is often when stress levels are coming up. So how do we keep it healthy? How do we anticipate the impact and the risks of change that are taking place? The organisational values, do they reflect a mentally healthy workplace? Are they in line with us supporting people and having conversations, of having open-door policies? Is that how the workplace functions? And the workplace culture, does it reflect a mentally healthy workplace? So as I said, it should be embedded in all of these things, underpinned by really good leadership on an ongoing basis. Over the years, I've been working with Beyond Blue and have had the privilege of doing lots of workplace programs and doing workshops with managers. And the theme that seems to come through, overdoing for this for six years, is it's kind of chance for most workplaces and for people in workplaces, whether they get a good manager, whether they have a great CEO, it's not a given, it just seems to be a random chance. And this is where our focus is wanting to change that and wanting to shift that, that it should be a given. Your manager, the leaders in organisations, should have an understanding of what a mentally healthy workplace looks like and then take that next step to implement it on an ongoing basis. Why is it important? Sorry. You all have your own ideas as to why this is really important and I think our biggest driver is the stats when we look at mental health in the workplace. I think when you look at these stats, they're quite sobering. They're taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2007. The way they collected these stats was they knocked on the homes of over 8,700 residents and conducted a mental health assessment. And this is where these numbers come from. It's the most robust study available at this point in time in Australia. And what it told us is that 1 million Australians every year are unwell with depression, one in three women are unwell with anxiety and one in five men are unwell with anxiety. I'm going to flip back to the men and women with depression. There is a discrepancy with this number. There's many reasons as to why this is the case, why it presents even here, but probably one of the biggest issues here is that men are getting unwell. We know they're getting incredibly unwell. They're not going to the doctors. They're not seeking professional support. They're not seeking support from their communities. We know they're getting really unwell because of that big six down the bottom there, which I think really brings home the tragedy when we look at mental health conditions. Six people die by suicide every single day in Australia. Five of them are men. So that is really sobering I think and really reminds us how tragic the outcomes of these things can be. And if we link this back to the workplace, reminding ourselves what the workplace does is it provides another forum for people to get help. It's as simple as that. And that's why we want to educate people in workplaces because we don't want these stats down the track. We want to shift these stats. I've got more stats for you here. Linking it still to the workforce. A lot of them are between that age group of 35 to 44. They are the highest risk of suicide in Australia at this point in time. So we have access to them in the workforce. As I said, they're not always going to doctors. They are often using alcohol and drugs as a way of trying to manage and cope and mask the symptoms. What we know about those strategies is they are terrible. They are terrible. They don't work, okay? They actually exacerbate the symptoms. Here's those stats again on suicide. Again, taken from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So this is one of the real drivers for the Australian businesses and our community at large to really say we need to address mental health anyway and every way we can. The other area, which I'm going to talk a little bit about now as to why workplaces should create mentally healthy workplaces is the cost. And all of you would be under pressure, constantly around costs in workplaces. But what we have here is the cost, specifically to mental health in the workplace. These costs were published only to the public a couple of weeks ago. They come from a PWC report that was commissioned by Beyond Blue. If you're interested in costs and more of these stats, I'd encourage you, this is where you can scribble down on your piece of paper, to actually get a copy of the PWC report. You can access it through the Beyond Blue website. You go Beyond Blue website, heads up and it gives you an option to go into the full report. The reason I would encourage you to look at it is because I was really surprised and I've worked in this area for a long time at the cost of absenteeism here at $4.7 billion and presenteeism, they're so high and we're not always equating them with mental health conditions. We look at that little slice, that tiny little green bit in the middle which is $0.146 billion. We all know about at workers' comp and we put a lot of vigor into that. We also put a lot of energy into guiding and telling, well, if we've got high claims, we must have problems. If we've got no claims for stress or mental health, we've got no problems. Well, no, you have. This is the problem right across Australia. This tells us there is a huge cost burden associated with mental health in the workplace. People not coming into work because they are too unwell to come in, because they can't get out of bed, because they're too overwhelmed, because they're feeling sick in the stomach about having a meeting tomorrow and they're feeling too anxious about it, not coming in for those reasons and just not having the energy to come in or coming in, as is the case with presenteeism, and just not having the energy or the mental concentration or focus because they are unwell to do the task that is their core job. So, as I said, if you're interested in those numbers, I'd really encourage you to look at the PWC report. The good news that this report also found was that the more people invested, organised invested in their mental health in the workplace, they got a return on investment. That return on investment ranged from $2.3 for every $1 spent. For smaller businesses, in some cases, that return was up to $15. So here's your argument to take back to workplaces when you're wanting to say we want to do physical fitness programs, we want to use coaching, we want to do some mental health training. There's six particular things outlined in that report I'd encourage you to look at and what things fit best with your organisation, you are going to get a return on investment. You also are going to get people who are more engaged in their workplace, who feel supported, who are more likely to access support when they need it, which is early. And this leads me to our current heads-up initiative, which is really, really exciting for someone like me who's always trying to go, well, you can do this and you can do that, da-da, heads-up initiative. Many of you may already be familiar with the heads-up initiative. It was only put online a couple of weeks ago and the action tools will be online on the June 16th. Again, if you haven't, that's one of the things I want you to write down, headsup.org.au. Highlight that. That's all you have to do from today's talk. Highlight that. You'll be sorted. It is a co-branded social change program powered by the mentally healthy workplace alliance of which you guys, the AIG group, is part of and beyond blue. So in partnership with this collaborative impact, they've looked at what is the key to success with all the alliance members working together to deliver an initiative that is going to reflect what businesses need, what businesses are asking for, where their holes are. So it's actually asked businesses and it's had over 2,500 representatives participating in research informing its design. So it's not something that beyond blue has sat down in our lovely office and gone, I reckon this would be good, yeah. I like the sound of that. They've gone out. They've developed these relationships with businesses and groups like yourselves and said, right, let's start putting this into place. And I think that is really exciting because this is actually the first time that mental health has had such a collaborative focus around businesses. One of the things that came in the development of heads up was this insight which may have already been mentioned this morning, that there is this problem, that 54% of business leaders think that they're not well informed about current good practice in workplace mental health. And that stat doesn't surprise me. If someone is in manufacturing or if they're an engineer or if they're an accountant, they haven't picked up these skills. They are experts in what they do and it's now a responsibility we're seeing at a greater level to start training people up, not just assuming, why would they know that? That's really hard. If you're managing a call centre, how would you also know how to manage mental health? So this is about helping people to get these tools. I'm going to pull it back now before I finish up to the heads up because this draws together that reducing risks, awareness and providing support, hopefully all under the one umbrella when we look at the heads up campaign. So this is going to be one of the most useful tools, I hope for all of you in the coming months and hopefully years, because of the things it's going to offer around practical tools, it's going to provide practical information to create more mentally healthy workplaces. It's going to include information, interactive tools and resources for individuals in the workplace. It's going to have a lot of content, a lot of information. Some of it already exists out there and is already embedded in the Omblu website and other websites, but this provides a central portal for people in the workplace. So things about taking care of yourself, rights and obligations, which can often be really useful in businesses, I think. Things around confidentiality. There's information about the alliance, the return to work research that I mentioned earlier is also will be in here. And one of the other things will be the action plan tool. And the action plan has been designed for all of you within your organizations basically to sit online or printed off and start inputting what are your risks, what are your priorities and start to do it yourself rather than having to get external bodies or do it randomly in response to situations that come up. And then you can implement the actions, review it, go back again. You might decide to do this with a small team of people so you're getting this range of input. So what next? I've got ahead of myself and excited. I've said this 15 times, I think, register. Of course the other resource is the beyond blue website particularly the workplace resources here. And of course our support service is please have this phone number dotted around your workplace. Basically in summary we all have a role to play in creating a more mentally healthy workplace. How do we convince senior management about promoting mental health in the workplace because of that fear that if we start that conversation senior management will say, oh now we're going to have more claims. So it's fear driven. There's a few things that I'd recommend you do. Use the mentally health workplace alliance information as a starting point. Using things like this can be quite powerful for workplaces because all these organisations listed below there have said very publicly and made a very big commitment to saying we're on board with this. We are leaders basically. Evidence based practice is informing our decision here. So using other organisations as your leverage, that's one way of doing it. The other way that PWC report those figures I think are really compelling for senior management around things. So using that report as well. The part on return to investment within that report can be really useful and getting people on board because they're worried it's going to cost them something. The absolute reality is if they don't invest it will cost them something. It will cost them a lot more. There is really no evidence to suggest when you start talking about mental health that all of a sudden you have an increase in claims. Claims that wouldn't otherwise eventually. We really want to help people who are having a tough time at work. So it's almost reminding them and having really honest conversations with them if someone is not unwell they are not going to be unwell. A really nice stat which I think can be useful for business leaders is that three million people as I told you are unwell every year. Less than 50% of them are actually going to the doctors or getting any help at all. So there is a huge, huge stigma unfortunately, around mental health. So the likelihood of what people do in workplaces is they cover it up. They don't. Do you know what I mean? It's not the choice. Oh, I don't want to work. If people are saying they are unwell they are unwell. You need to listen. So there are a few things. A few angles to go with. And if not, get them to have their own senior briefing. Get someone external and come and talk to them in addition to all of those things.