Agenda

This workshop will explore how St.Amant has used virtual technologies to maintain relationships, create meaningful connections and support the mental well-being of staff, volunteers, and the people supported by the organization.

Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, almost all of St.Amant programming, consultation, social gatherings, meetings and professional development occurred in-person at St.Amant’s main campus. In March of 2020, like many organizations, St.Amant was compelled to pivot to virtual technologies. While some initial challenges emerged, this change brought about opportunities to expand accessibility and foster inclusion in new ways throughout the organization.

For many, there are gifts that have emerged from the shifts we have made since March 2020. Virtual spaces offer a new sense of social safety for some people, creating new opportunity to participate, learn and grow in community. Virtual spaces can break down barriers of time, travel and the social constructs of work, education and play and allow some people to participate with increased ease and comfort.

We also recognize the challenges that virtual experiences can create in relation to people’s communication needs or barriers to technology. St.Amant is balancing our return to in-person gatherings, maintaining valued virtual or hybrid experiences wherever possible.

In this workshop, we will define vicarious trauma, review risk and protective factors for its development, and discuss primary warning signs to look for. We will then introduce evidence-based strategies for managing vicarious trauma reactions at the macro (e.g., strategic planning; open communication), meso (e.g., implementation of a buddy system; break rooms; setting boundaries), and micro (e.g., engaging in meaningful activity; practicing mindfulness) levels. We will conclude the workshop by reviewing additional mental health resources that are available.

There are SO many pressures on managers and employers these days – between the pandemic, return to office, increased rates of mental health struggles, and the threat of the Great Resignation.

This session focuses on identifying and addressing immediate needs for leaders and their teams, as well as steps that can be taken with limited time, energy and money.

We’ll start with about 35-40 minutes of information and ideas that managers/leaders can take back to their teams, all rooted in the 13 Factors that Impact Mental Health in the Workplace and the framework of the National Standard for Psychological Health & Safety.

The remaining time will be devoted to tackling specific issues or concerns that participants are grappling with. I’ll take questions through an online feedback portal (conference platform or Menti, Slido or similar) and offer tailored, specific advice and feedback.

Participants will also receive access to an electronic workbook which includes key themes from the presentation as well as worksheets to begin to put the principles into action in their own workplace.

There’s been a gap in our education as leaders, something we’ve been missing that’s held us back from being as successful as we could be in really showing up as our best selves in our careers. The evolution of leadership training over the past 20 years or so has put more of a focus on work/life balance, innovation and looking at performance from different perspectives but the policies, governance and really, the way we approach our work hasn’t kept up to the pretty words we hear about what to do.

This workshop is here to help with that. In the next 45 minutes, you will learn the mental health skills you need to thrive at work. We’re going to focus on you as a leader, on your mental health, and give you the ideas, tactics and strategies you can use to model out loud what you’ve learned which will show your people how they too can take care of their mental health, which leads to more flourishing, more productivity and ultimately healthier workplaces and communities.

It’s every leader’s job to create an atmosphere of psychological safety within their team. While this might seem like an abstract concept, the skills and behaviours required to do it are concrete and actionable. In this workshop we’ll break down key domains of leadership behaviour that create psychological safety and provide you with concrete takeaways to help you foster a sense of safety – and ultimately wellbeing – within your team.

We know that 1 in 5 workers will experience a mental health concern. When a worker is off work, it is very important to know and understand the importance of creating a psychologically healthy and safe work environment. This session will share practical information about implementing the CSA Standard for Psychological Health and Safety and Manitoba’s Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace Strategy. We will also explore WCB trends and the principles of return to work to understand why we want to work together to build psychologically safe and healthy workplaces.

Historically, OHS professionals have typically focused on the physical and ergonomic aspects of specific jobs/tasks while incorporating worker and workplace characteristics in the development of safety programs intended to control hazards that lead to (physical) injury or illness. This over-emphasis on physical factors has brought confusion and uncertainty about where psychological and psychosocial risk factors fit in. Could there was an easier way to reframe the CSA Standard and help make it a little bit easier to get started? What if there was a single approach you could take that could super-charge your entire planning process and help sustain commitment from all stakeholders? In this proposed workshop, the facilitator will guide participants down a slightly different pathway. The target audience should include mental health champions who have advocated for workplace-level change, but who feel unheard or overwhelmed by the challenges they face in their workplace culture. Organizational change is hard work – it takes more than written commitment and verbal affirmations especially if morale is down or there’s wavering trust in the employers’ ability to follow-through. Promoting awareness and knowledge about mental health, mental illness and stigma are all laudable and necessary activities, yet there is something even deeper, more fundamental than knowledge alone and that’s psychological safety.

Recovery is the return to a state of normal health and functioning. Pre-pandemic conditions in our communities and workplaces fell short of those necessary for all to live and work well, so post-pandemic “recovery” should not be our goal. This workshop will outline the framework created by the presenters to support organizations aspiring to transformative change instead of recovery. The framework is the product of clinical service delivery to organizations before and during the pandemic, the developers’ reflections upon their own pandemic experiences as clinicians, leaders and community members, and a combined half-century of clinical experience. Participants will learn about the framework’s development process, enabling them to use this process to create robust interventions for their teams’ unique needs. The framework will be described in detail, including its application to the post-pandemic experience. How the framework creates both a foundation for future organizational supports and an opportunity to make meaning from the pandemic experience to benefit the workforces of today and the future will be presented.

For the past three and a half years three of Manitoba’s leaders in community health education have been collaborating on a a new, cutting edge approach to sexual harassment prevention in our province. Research has shown us that the old ways of addressing harassment in a professional setting is ineffective at best and often results in unintended consequences like fear, increased stigma, and the insulation or protection of those most responsible for causing harm in the first place.

Our approach is different. We take a community focused, strength based, and trauma informed approach to the issue at hand.

We know that you and your team have tremendous strength and capacity. We take those assets and give you additional tools to build upon the best parts of your existing culture to help you create effective, lasting change at all levels of your organization.

The workplace has changed significantly in the post 2 years. How has our leadership? What do our employees need now to succeed in their work and their wellbeing? In this session we will discuss what is needed in leadership to address our current situations and craft cultures at work that protect and promote mental health.