Healthy humans
Psychologically safe work, by design
Burnout, psychological injury and turnover are not the worker's weakness. They are what the job, the schedule and the supervisor's practice produce. We help you design them out.
The problem
A poster and a phone number
Most services answer psychological injury with a wellness program: an assistance line, peer support, a resilience course. Those have their place, and the people who use them value them. They do not touch the stressors that produce the injury: the call after a traumatic call with no recovery time, the schedule that never lets anyone sleep, the supervisor who was never taught how to lead a crew through a bad week, the review that found a person instead of a cause. Psychological health and safety is an organizational outcome. It is designed, so it can be redesigned.
What we do
Four things we build with you
A hazard profile of the work
The psychological hazards in how the work is actually done, mapped to the psychosocial factors of CSA Z1003 and, for paramedic services, Z1003.1. What you get: a written profile, ranked, with the controls that sit above training.
A just culture people believe in
A policy and a practice for the moment after a mistake, agreed with the people it applies to and with the association. What you get: the policy, a decision aid for supervisors, and the briefing that explains it in the crew room.
Learning teams instead of blame
For the recurring themes, a learning team of the people who do the work, run on a method they can keep running without us. What you get: the method, two facilitated teams, and the register of what they changed.
The job, the schedule and the supervisor's practice
One control redesigned with the people who use it: recovery time after a traumatic call, a schedule, a supervisor's first week with a struggling crew member. What you get: the redesigned control, written down, with the measure that shows whether it moved.
For leaders in any sector
Deciding, leading and recovering under pressure
Corporations bring in the military to talk about pressure. Emergency services live it every shift, and we built the systems behind it. For leadership teams outside emergency services, a keynote or a workshop on how people actually decide under pressure, what a badly built system does to them, and what to fix first. The system work follows when you want it.
The standard
Written so your committee can audit it
In Canada, the National Standard for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace (CSA Z1003) and its paramedic edition (Z1003.1) describe what a psychologically safe workplace does, and occupational health and safety law already requires every reasonable precaution. We work to the standard, and we write what we build so the joint health and safety committee can check it.