The Irish Construction Industry Awards recognise and celebrate original and innovative contractors, businesses, teams, consultants, and projects that demonstrate excellence in the built environment. The awards offer a great opportunity for companies from all over Ireland to come together, collaborate, and showcase their work.
This year our team in ADCO were honoured and delighted to be recognised as the winners of the Excellence in Health and Safety category for our ‘Mind Your Mental Health’ initiative. Here we share some details about this outstanding initiative and just why it is so important to us.
It’s quite common in the construction industry for people to struggle with mental health. Hours are long, days are stressful, and pressure is constant. Historically, our industry has not had a culture of opening up about mental or emotional challenges. In ADCO, we feel an unwavering responsibility to each other, our clients, our subcontractors, our families and our friends to make sure we all return home safe every day. Mental health is critical to being able to perform your job well, but unfortunately mental and emotional issues are much easier to hide than physical problems. We know from the research that “Mental wellbeing, psychosocial risks and work-related stress are among the most challenging occupational safety and health concerns” for construction workers, so we knew our initiative needed to be both comprehensive and impactful. With this in mind we launched ‘Mind Your Mental Health’ in order to focus on mental health and wellbeing.
We introduced a variety of targeted presentations, workshops, talks with celebrity speakers on mental health issues and communication to generate awareness of the underlying problems for people on ADCO projects. Another key step was implementing an Employee Assistance Programme (EAP) to help employees who may be suffering from mental health issues or personal problems. This includes short-term counselling and referral services not just for employees but also for their immediate family. As well as this, we actively helped to establish and promote project mental health champions across our sites.
We recently announced our partnership with the Lighthouse Construction Industry Charity. The next step was to make sure we communicated this to all of our employees as the service can only work when people know it’s there. We shared the news on our website, with an internal and external newsletter and placed mental health and wellbeing signage and literature across our projects and in our canteens. We made sure our team knows we are there 24/7 to support staff in the construction industry when and where they need it by supporting the Lighthouse Charity in offering a completely free and confidential service. Our intention is to remove any potential barriers to staff seeking help and to work towards overcoming any stigma which may be preventing people from accessing the support they need.
The efforts which go into creating safer workplaces are ongoing and never static. Constant vigilance and safeguarding are the keys to preventing and limiting risk. This is why our future plans involve; translating our mental health promotional signage to other languages to ensure word spreads throughout our teams, arranging more site visits and talks with celebrity speakers on mental health issues, training new Mental Health Champions on site and continuing to raise money for charities.
We stand united in our commitment to continuously improve our safety culture and send each and every employee home safe every day. We would like to sincerely thank everyone involved in creating and implementing this award-winning initiative and look forward to building on this legacy together.