Conducting an Organizational Review
Why complete the Guarding Minds at Work organizational review?
The organizational review is an opportunity for senior leaders to reflect on what the organization is already doing to support each psychosocial factor and write down what they believe their organization or team’s score would be for each psychosocial factor. By completing both the organizational review and the survey, you can generate a report that compares senior leader and employee perspectives. It also provides a way to ensure leadership is informed in advance of the implementation of the survey and are able to interpret the results.
Who completes the organizational review?
The organizational review may be completed by one or more individuals within the organization – this may vary depending on the size and nature of the organization.
You may wish to create a subcommittee or select a small group of staff to participate in the process. To heighten the objectivity of the process, you may also consider using an external psychological health and safety consultant with expertise in the Guarding Minds at Work process.
What is involved in the organizational review process?
The organizational review process involves the completion of worksheets that guide an exploration of your workplace's current state of psychological health and safety. Each worksheet is dedicated to one of the psychosocial factors.
Each organizational review worksheet includes:
- Description of the psychosocial factor
- Benefits of addressing the psychosocial factor
- Information and data that would be helpful to refer to or collect
- Checklist of what your workplace might be doing now
- Review of psychosocial factor statements
- Additional discussion questions
- Indicators for Workplace Inclusion, Stress and Trauma – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Balance – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Civility and Respect – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Clear Leadership and Expectations – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Engagement - Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Growth and Development – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Involvement and Influence – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Organizational Culture – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Protection of Physical Safety – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Psychological and Social Support – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Psychological Competencies and Demands – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Psychological Protection – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Recognition and Reward – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
- Workload Management – Organizational Review Worksheet opens a new window
What do you need to complete the organizational review?
The following may help you complete the organizational review worksheets:
- Documentation: Gather and refer to policies, practices, reports, documents, statistics, or other data relevant to employee and organizational functioning. Each worksheet suggests relevant information to gather.
- Employee input: Information from your employees including suggestions, complaints, health and safety committee reports, and employee surveys.
- Review psychosocial hazards: Understanding the psychosocial hazards identified in the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 45003:20211 Standard can help your team consider some common drivers of risk to psychological health and safety in the workplace. This can be helpful when reviewing the factors.
How to select psychosocial factors for the organizational review
It can be difficult to determine where to begin. For this reason, we recommend that you prioritize the organizational review worksheets you’ll complete. Focus on one psychosocial factor at a time. This helps to streamline your efforts and increases your likelihood of success.
Begin by completing organizational review worksheets for:
- Factors that disproportionately impact your organization financially or reputationally, such as psychological protection, protection of physical safety and organizational culture.
- Factors that are particularly relevant to changes occurring within your organization or work unit. For example, if there have been recent changes in leadership, you may want to select the corresponding organizational review worksheet for clear leadership and expectations, growth and development, workload management, and engagement.
- Factors that are particularly relevant to key incidents or events such as grievances, human rights violations, mergers, such as balance, involvement and influence, civility and respect, psychological competencies and demands, and psychological and social support.
We recommend that you eventually complete all the worksheets in order to provide the most thorough review of your organization’s psychological health and safety.
Please note, you can choose to complete only the organizational review worksheets you deem a priority, but to generate a survey report with comparisons to the review, there must be data input for every psychosocial factor.
Where should you begin?
Where possible, complete the organizational review worksheets before, or at the same time as, administering the survey to your employees to allow for comparison and ensure leaders are informed.
Generating a report
Once management has completed the organizational review worksheet for all the psychosocial factors, collect them and input the information as instructed below to generate a report once the survey for employees has closed.
Here are the steps to generate the report:
- Log into your Guarding Minds at Work Dashboard
- Select Active Surveys
- Select Organizational Review Input
- Input the responses that management has completed within all the organizational review worksheets
- Once you have input the answers for all the psychosocial factors, select Submit
- From your Dashboard, select Generate Report from your Active Survey. Note that you need to close the corresponding employee survey before your report can be generated.
