For an industrial contractor like Turner Industries, safety is paramount. But ensuring safety takes more than sound equipment and well-trained workers.
People with mental health issues like depression or substance abuse can lose their focus on the job site, putting themselves and their co-workers in jeopardy, Dan Burke, Turner’s director of corporate benefits, tells 10/12 Industry Report in a feature from the current quarterly issue.
So in January of 2014 the company put in place an employee assistance program to help its workers address potential issues that may arise. Such programs are becoming more commonplace, providers say, although many employees aren’t taking full advantage of them.
Turner employees have access to five free visits with a counselor per year, Burke says. The EAP also provides “critical incident support.” If there’s a serious and potentially traumatic accident, the provider sends a professional to talk with anyone who witnessed it or was involved.
Despite the company’s efforts to promote it, Burke says, the program is underutilized. Turner’s workers are spread out at various job sites across the region, so it’s hard to get materials describing the program into everyone’s hands.
But he suspects culture also plays a role.
“In the industrial construction business, there may be a stigma attached to making use of mental health counseling,” Burke says. While the program is completely confidential, “there’s a macho culture that may prevent folks from making use of the services.”
Turner and many of its workers are based in the Baton Rouge area, which suffered devastating floods in August. But even a historic catastrophe didn’t lead to an uptick in Turner’s EAP usage.
Burke hopes to get workers to take better advantage of the mental health and wellness programs available to them by establishing the connection to safety performance, which is already ingrained in the corporate culture.
“If you can make the correlation between health and wellness, mental wellness and safety, you can really have a bigger impact,” he says.
BASF maintains a “very robust” EAP, says Al Bailie, HR director for the company’s Capital Region plants. It’s part of the company’s “holistic approach” to help employees meet their physical, mental and emotional needs.
BASF also brought in additional resources to help employees deal with mental health issues potentially brought on by last year’s flood. As the company learned which employees were affected, BASF offered to set them up with a counselor. The company also brought counselors to the worksites to meet with employees and help managers and supervisors recognize when employees were having issues.
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