Global Leadership

Constructive conversations: safeguarding mental wellbeing across supply chains

by Ruth Holmes | Nov 5, 2024

October’s Make A Difference (MAD) World Construction Industry Summit in London highlighted the mental health crisis in construction today. It shared some of the solutions – including the development of a research-based, sector-wide approach – to improving wellbeing that already offer quick and cost-effective wins.

The construction industry, although backed by some of the highest standards of health and safety legislation, is still the most dangerous sector to work in. It claims the lives of more people each year than any other sector, according to 2024 Health and Safety Executive (HSE) data. In this heavily male-dominated sector where sub-contracting and sub-subcontracting are commonplace, the statistics show the vast majority of the lives behind the figures are self-employed men, with middle-aged men being the most at risk within this group.

Similarly, figures referred to by Mates in Mind, which supported the summit, show that men working in the sector are over three times more likely than the average to take their own life. Every day, two men working in the sector do so. There are many reasons for these trends. Risk factors include pressure from tight contracts and deadlines, often meaning long hours and time away from loved ones, managing strict budgets and cash flow, especially during times of rising costs, and high rates of presenteeism.

All these factors are underlined by the fact that many people across all industries and sectors still feel unable to be open at work about their mental health because of ongoing stigma.

Leading change in construction

Until recently, workplace cultures in construction – exacerbated by the gap between head office and sites and dispersed and temporary/sub-contracted workforces – have made this important issue difficult to tackle.

It is in this space that the panel and organisations represented are finding ways to improve mental wellbeing. Most of the panellists were from member companies of the Health in Construction Leadership Group (HCLG) and other bodies, including the Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB).Representing contractors, clients, the HSE, professional bodies, trade associations and trade unions, the HCLG has a mission “to protect people in construction employment from workplace harm” by developing industry-leading standards, including for mental health, which is a key theme of its current work and that of its supporters, including the tier one group of largest construction companies.

On the panel, chaired by Sam Downie of Mates in Mind, to talk about the HCLG, the tier one group and their progress to date on mental wellbeing were Jim Beestone, health, safety and wellbeing project manager at Balfour Beatty, who also chairs the HCLG’s mental health working group, David Bucksley health, safety and wellbeing director at Sir Robert McAlpine Ltd and chair of the CIOB’s health, safety and wellbeing panel, Kari Sprostranova, health, safety and wellbeing director at Mace Group, Henrietta Frater, head of HSE and wellbeing at The Crown Estate, a trustee of Mates in Mind and co-chair of the HCLG, Stuart Young, head of stakeholder engagement and management at the Department for Business and Trade, and Dr Carla Toro, associate professor of mental health sciences at Warwick University medical school.

Opening the conversations about how to improve wellbeing and mental health in the sector and the origins of the HCLG group on mental health, Henrietta Frater said mental health in construction is “definitely something we need to do a lot more about”.

“When we look at some of the statistics, people in construction don’t take time off work and potentially get to a point of crisis,” she explained. “There’d been a huge amount of work and awareness-raising, but we also recognised as a collective that we could end up in a circular conversation talking about the same things. We keep on talking about the fact there is a problem and not doing anything about it. Then there is a huge amount of fatigue about that understandably.”

After a meeting with the CIOB, the HCLG and its stakeholders realised how much more could be done. They are now working together with government and other bodies, including the convening body, the Construction Leadership Council, to understand what the sector can do as a whole together from the top down through systemic change to support the action and initiatives already happening on the ground.

“We can do a lot as a collective, as an industry, to make a change,” said Henrietta Frater. “You can do a lot around the individual, making sure they are supported. But we wanted to move away from that so the individual can be supported more effectively by looking at what we do as a system and by creating systemic, sustainable change in our industry to make a positive impact.”

“There is a lot of work going on,” said Kari Sprostranova. “We’ve come together as an industry in sessions like this. At one of them, someone said, ‘I just want you to pay me on time’. That really resonated, as well as someone pointing out how the car park was set up to differentiate between workers and leadership and where you sit in the canteen. It’s not necessarily trying to find a magic wand. It’s listening to people and actually delivering an outcome.”

Financial wellbeing critical for better mental health

Behind the scenes, lots of work is happening in a phased approach that involves the HCLG, the tier one group, contractors and clients. This includes research from Warwick University, which is bringing people together in forums with the trades and other people on the ground who are doing the work onsite to better understand what their barriers and solutions are.

This academic research is based on focus groups with 50 construction workers from Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, London and Somerset. The data is currently being analysed, but Dr Carla Toro was able to share some initial findings.

“What has come through so far is that certain things come up as really hard. Job demands of long work hours and unmanageable timeframes cause real pressure. On top of that, financial and job insecurity keep coming through. They have come through in other research previously, but what’s interesting about this group and the focus groups is that we also asked what the solutions could be.

“Regarding the financial insecurity, people said it would be nice if they could be paid for bank holidays and when they called in sick,” said Dr Toro. People are also asking for financial advice and support, which is increasingly being offered by companies in other sectors because of the links to mental wellbeing.

Social support – a sense of appreciation and value – is also a key area and registered low in the research. “It would be really nice if the client could treat us with a little bit of appreciation and not breeze past us,” said one interviewee. “There was something about how valuable it would be to feel like the client giving them time to create genuine bonds,” said Dr Toro. “It was really significant and could be really impactful.

“To balance that, there were really good bonds with guys on the ground. But if there isn’t enough time to just have those conversations or take rest breaks, then there is no vent for just having a conversation where there may be an opportunity to talk about something that is troubling.”

High levels of stigma and therefore concerns about opening up and showing weakness is another significant area from the early research. This shows that where management are trained as mental health first-aiders, there is a slight mistrust around confidentiality, meaning this approach may be counterproductive.

“The management perspective I got was someone saying they’d known these guys for 20 years and ‘now I’m a manager, they don’t talk to me anymore’, so you’ve kind of got the two sides of that,” said Professor Toro.

The impact of perceptions and experiences of culture and hierarchy in the workplace are also at play. “Some of the solutions offered are that people just want to be treated with a little more respect and as humans. That was huge. To be incentivised and given a little praise when it comes to project-end because often it’s the guys in the office who get rewarded and less so the people we spoke to in the focus groups.”

A ‘good work’ approach to better onsite and offsite mental wellbeing?

Professor Toro’s research also offered a unique opportunity to talk about experiences in different settings; specifically, the different experiences of workers relocating from Newcastle to Somerset to work on the Hinkley Point project who had a proper contract with a tier one contractor.

“These guys had travelled a long way from their home base in Newcastle or Scotland, but were living there pretty much permanently for a long period of time,” said Professor Toro. “What was really interesting was that when we tried to dig into the stressors, they weren’t as acute because job security and the benefits of a contract were really supportive. They could have sick pay, parental pay and the job security knowing that for the next 12 months they had a job. After that, they had also mostly already identified where they were going.

“They had made a conscious decision to miss out on family life, sure, because they were living away. Then their battle is ‘what weekend can I pre-opt to go and see my family and my kids?’ They’d make that decision because they’d get paid a lot more. The guys mentioned they were being paid twice as much as they would if they had stayed in Newcastle or Scotland.

“But by making that decision there is something, that sense, that feeling, of being empowered by that decision because you are weighing up things,” continued Professor Toro. “Therefore, there were just less-acute stressors than on the guys on the tools who didn’t have that job security.” Outside of work and away from the family, the group also formed enduring social bonds by organising events and trips away that also had a protective effect.

The findings align with the CIPD’s idea of Good Work and potentially some of the intentions behind the new Employment Rights Bill announced in October, coincidentally or otherwise, on World Mental Health Day. They also highlight what global mobility teams know about the value of safeguarding the mental wellbeing of relocating employees with proper contracts and terms, and the potential for cross-sector collaboration and practice sharing, which the HCLG is looking for as it moves into the project’s next phases.

Moving from an individual, cost-based and circular conversation around mental wellbeing in construction – and in the wider world of work – and towards collaborative, evidence-based action is therefore happening in the sector. The end goal? Helping people feel they have a voice and agency and incorporating welfare and wellbeing approaches straight from induction.

“It’s about moving the industry in step; establishing common requirements, being held to those requirements by our clients, and ensuring that we in turn audit our supply chain against those requirements,” said Jim Beestone, explaining how the research and conversation is still in its early phases.