According to both the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) and the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, mental ill-health is now the number one cause of sickness absence in UK workers. It is a widespread social problem, with one in four people in the UK experiencing some sort of mental health problem during the course of the year. These problems take in a broad spectrum from stress to schizophrenia, but at all levels they can be debilitating for the individual concerned and a serious issue for the employer.

As a result, many companies are beginning to think about how they should address this problem. In a recent CBI survey of 800 companies, 98 per cent of respondents said they thought mental health should be a concern for companies. This is not simply an issue of caring for vulnerable employees, however. There is also a strong business case for tackling mental ill-health in the workplace. Recent figures from disability charity The Shaw Trust suggest that the total cost of this issue to UK business is more than £9billion a year. This is primarily in the form of sickness absence, but mental ill-health can also affect productivity.

While mental illness can affect every sector and every business function, it is a particular problem for contact centres. James Bradley is the director of service delivery for Employee Advisory Resource, a provider of employee assistance programmes to companies such as The Carphone Warehouse and Aventis. He says: “A recent survey by the UK Health and Safety Executive revealed that call handlers are more likely to report depressive tendencies than any other worker. They also came second only to managers in terms of feelings of anxiety.

“The same survey showed that call handlers had the lowest job satisfaction when compared to other professions,” he adds. “Within the profession, it seems that the smaller the call centre, the less likely these problems are to arise. The use of scripts was revealed as a key cause of anxiety and depression, as was excessive target setting by management. Contact centres are so notorious for absence due to — mainly stress-related — mental health issues that the Trades Union Congress has set up a dedicated support line for call centre employees. It has reportedly been deluged by callers.”

So what can those in charge of contact centres do about it? Research would suggest that they should reduce the size of the call centre, never use scripts and refrain from setting targets for their staff. This might well be desirable, but in practice it’s unlikely to be feasible. Yet, there are still steps that concerned call centre managers can take to mitigate the effect of mental illness on the business.

The first step is to manage people, not figures. All too frequently, contact centre managers spend their time looking at tables of figures, rather than engaging with their staff. While customer waiting times, issue resolution rates, and prospect conversion rates are all important, the best way to improve them is to communicate with those  who can directly affect them — the agents. This sort of human interaction between managers and agents can significantly    enhance the working lives of all involved, and it can also allow managers to identify potential mental ill-health at an early stage. Once they have identified a problem, contact centres should be prepared to offer all necessary support to the individual. That might involve counselling, job redesign and even time off where appropriate.

Proper management, issue identification, and treatment are a good start for any policy for tackling mental ill-health in the contact centre, but there is much more that can and should be done. Occupational psychologist Sherridan Hughes believes that effective recruitment is vital. He says: “Most stress results from the person being mismatched with the job, or role, or organisation. So, my advice would be to select and match employees appropriately through a full assessment of motivation, ability and personality, then highlight potential development needs and train them well for this and subsequent positions. Remember your best agents do not necessarily make the best team leaders.”

Finally, physical environment can play an enormous role in mental wellbeing. For instance, new office lights released by Philips last October were shown in tests to have increased the productivity of workers in a Stockport call centre by more than 19 per cent. Dr Peter Mills, chief health officer of health consultancy vielife, says: “This shows how physical environment affects the health, wellbeing and productivity of employees. It is especially useful for the six per cent of people who suffer from seasonal affective disorder.”

There are many ways in which contact centres can act to improve the mental health of their employees. Some companies have already understood the importance of this and begun to act. BT is one. Spurred on by the realisation that it had around 500 people off sick every day with psychiatric problems, it set up Work Fit — Positive Mentality, a major health awareness programme drawn up in collaboration with the Communication Workers Union and Connect, as well as with the support of charities the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health and MIND.

 

All of the company’s 104,000 employees were given information on how to combat mental ill-health and on the range of support services that the company provides. Launching the programme, BT’s chief medical officer Dr Paul Litchfield said: “Mental wellbeing is the biggest health issue facing us in the western world. BT takes pride in the way it supports people who develop mental illness, but we want to go beyond that and help all our workers avoid ill health in the first place so they can lead happier and more productive lives.”