On January 3, 2024, the Australian Financial Review (AFR) reported on a survey conducted by mental health initiative SuperFriend which found more than half (56 per cent) of Australians felt comfortable sharing mental health issues with their employer.

The pandemic changed employer-employee relationships.

However, regardless of location — either cleaning the grot from the pint glasses which drunken men used as an ashtray for their cigarette butts or reading a crime novel on the soft sand of Garrabup beach — since 2018, chronic mental and behavioural conditions increased by more than 6 per cent, which contributed to the 56 per cent by default.

This may be why the Curtin Student Guild advocated for more Curtin counselling resources.

“For a few years now since I started studying, the Guild has been advocating for Curtin counselling to have more resources to expand the capacity of the services it offers,” said Curtin Student Guild Faculty of Business and Law (FBL) Representative Hannah Northey.

Organisational Psychologist Steve Barrett told the AFR it took a pandemic for employers to realise “what happens at home affects our performance at work.” 

I, and I assume many others, would have thought this was common sense. But for some workplace leaders, this was news.

As a consequence of this ignorance, lead partner at national architecture practice Gray Puksand Heidi Smith reported many Australian workplace leaders do not attain the skill set required to deal with mental health effectively.

On the bright side, the survey itself may act as evidence of mental health de-stigmatisation within the Australian workforce.

For instance, from workplace public awareness campaigns aimed at promoting understanding and tackling social myths to creating opportunities for leaders to learn and listen from people with lived experience of mental health conditions, the Australian Government has provided recommendations for workplace de-stigmatisation which you can find here.

Nevertheless, regardless of these guidelines, some leaders believe they have been asked “to draw on skills that weren’t necessarily part of our [their] toolkit when they became leaders,” Ms Smith said.

To combat this, the Curtin Student Guild offered a program for students determined to lead in the future.

Ms Northey recommended the Student Guild’s First Year Representative program for those commited to build their leadership competency.

“Our First Year Representatives program gives appointed students the opportunity to represent their fellow first-year peers and bring any issues directly to the Guild,” she said.

“This includes any issues relating to mental health in students.”

In reaction to workplace leaders’ inadequate mental health management skills, some companies like Australian property group Stockland have encouraged their staff to undertake mental health first-aid training to resolve their believed incompetence. 

Personally, as a student who has studied business at Curtin, I assure you, my lectures did not tread lightly on emotional intelligence — the ability to understand and manage emotions. However, to play the devil’s advocate, it is a recent concept coined in the 1990’s, which many of today’s leaders may not have been taught.

Some may read this and believe mental health should be left to the Human Resources department — and to an extent, they are right. Although Curtin offers commerce students the freedom to enrol in Human Resources units, in reality, not all businesses can afford to finance an HR team.

Think less white collar and more customer service. Pub managers, for example, may be accustomed to the abuse of a drunken pisshead, however, new employees are likely not. So often the employer will act as a shoulder to lean on.

For a workplace leader who studied at Curtin, their empathetic shoulder may have been developed in the Organisational Behaviour unit which students who majored in management would have undertaken added Ms Northey.

“Organisational Behaviour correlates to developing an understanding of the link between how groups of people work together and the influence they can have on each other,” she said.

According to Saha et al. (2022) Emotional intelligence is a predictor of positive leadership effectiveness and outcomes. Therefore, to navigate modern-day wokeness and improve employee retention, leaders who have claimed to have inadequate mental health management skills may wish to consider developing this competency.