Nathan Cartwright, Subashini Suresh, PhD., Suresh Renukappa, Ph. D., and Khaled Algahtani
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton, England, UK
Mark Stride
Bromford Housing
Wolverhampton, England, UK
Mental health and wellbeing has gained importance within the workplace, especially within the construction industry. Findings suggest that there are essential issues with construction professionals, who discuss the comparisons between their stress and the unbearable demands of their workloads and the demands of the construction industry. Research has discovered that the lack of basic testing, informing, and treating mental health wellbeing within the workplace, has made the ability to deal with problems in mental health worse. Furthermore, the information that is circulated publicly is via media such as television, and not within the construction workplace.
Due to the lack of information concerning mental health within the construction industry, the objective is to investigate the relationship of construction professional’s workload and mental health wellbeing. A review was made into the demand of a construction employees’ workload, how a professional is expected to manage their workload and how associated mental health effects can incur.
The primary research method was questionnaires, using a sample of 70 participants. The questionnaire was targeted at construction professional’s workload considering their weekly hours, deadline pressure, responsibilities, mental health awareness and their views on mental health wellbeing in their workplace. This gave all participants the opportunity to give their honest opinion on how they feel at work, how they work under pressure and if they think mental awareness need to be improved within the workplace.
The data analysis revealed that 70% of the participants only saw mental health and wellbeing on the television and 77% of participant felt that their job impacted their mental health with a further 50% explaining that there is a link between stress and workloads. Further to this, 45% of participant said that they did not have access to mental wellbeing specialists and 49% of participant explained that they did not have enough information of the current mental health wellbeing schemes and services. This research concludes that there is a strong relationship between mental health wellbeing and employees workloads, therefore explaining that not only does more information need to be provided within the workplace but companies need to review the stress that is directed towards employees when they are given too much work and tight deadlines for completion.
This study highlights the significance between the stress and anxiety employees feel due to the pressures of the workload and tight deadlines consumed on a daily basis. Therefore, there must be further research completed to decipher if there are further links to both males and females leaving the construction sector and therefore expanding the skills shortages further and losing valuable experience within the built environment as well as increasing construction costs, slowing down the house building programme and burdening the National Health Service further. Further to this more research must be done to understand how employers can support their workers to stay within the industry by removing the stress that is related to their positions.
Keywords: Health and wellbeing, Workplace, Workload