At top authority, employers are called to raise their awareness and to ensure their lawful PTSD policies and accommodations are stronger than ever before. Beyond recent changes and trends, pandemic threats are triggering anxiety responses. At Ollenburg LLC our work creates leadership wins, organizational wins, people wins, legal wins and financial wins. The right handling of PTSD creates best possible outcomes for all and addresses newly escalated risks and opportunities. This is a situation that can be properly addressed, and the following blueprint serves to assist.
Prepare Your Company’s Leaders
1. Train Your Leaders in Clues and Prevention: Well-prepared lists of specific behaviors and physical clues are available through The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Ollenburg LLC, Crisis Prevention Institute, MercyMultiplied.com, StopItNow.org, Mayo Clinic, Legal Cases and Definitions and many other dedicated training sources. Communicating this training to your leaders not only creates a crisis prevention step but also provides a definition of reasonable suspicion to ensure all steps taken thereafter are compliant, non-discriminatory and in protection of all.
2. Keep Corrective Action, Discipline and Termination in Well-trained Leadership Hands: No manager should ever be empowered in these without proper training. Where clues, reasonable suspicion or ADA accommodations for PTSD and mental health conditions are present, it can be especially critical to control timing, language, methodology and overall approach.
3. Enforce a Well-trained Anti-harassment, Anti-bullying Inclusion Culture: While a positive culture attracts, engages and retains top employees and is essential to the employer brand, a negative culture can trigger PTSD, panic attack or other manifestation. Workplace violence can become a threat.
4. Never Underestimate the Impact of Company Change: Whether leadership change, M&A, relocation, job change or modification to practices, fear of security and the unknown will manifest and may trigger mental health trauma. Personal identity, relationships, culture, communication and practice alignment must be meticulously addressed by behavior and talent management scientists.
Incorporate PTSD and All Mental Health into ADA Policy Compliance
A well-crafted ADA policy ensures that employees know the onus is on them to request accommodation and provide proper and detailed medical certification. A designated privacy officer will be well-trained and diligent with that info, protecting HIPAA and personal privacy on a “need to know” basis. Identification of triggers is critical to PTSD accommodation and must be weighed against the likelihood of avoiding those triggers during the normal course of expected job performance without undue hardship or a change in performance expectations. Similar to FMLA, best practices will avoid employee abuse and also ensure employees and risks are properly safeguarded.
Teach Triage without Overstepping
PTSD, PTS, moral injury, generalized anxiety, depression, panic attacks, bipolar and any mental health or mood condition each call for different treatment plans and manifest in unique ways. The employer’s role is to enlist specialist practitioners for diagnosis and treatment swiftly upon reasonable suspicion or when benefits conditions are met per consistently administered policy. As with any medical condition, don’t allow treatment by the untrained, or the situation could exacerbate for the employees and employer.
Consider Supplemental Mental Health Benefits and Lock Down the Privacy Info
State approaches to PTSD coverage vary and workers’ compensation may or may not apply. Whether the job description is first responder or private sector also weighs into coverage along with job description, job environment and medical history. Along with employer-sponsored and/or voluntary buy-ups, supplemental mental health benefits should be considered in the offering mix. As with all medical information, privacy lock down must include application for benefits where medical information is revealed.
Knowing the PTSD diagnosis is becoming increasingly more common outside our military veteran community, we recently sat down with Andy Weins (Friend, Sergeant First Class & Serial Entrepreneur) for his thoughts. Amidst energetic exchange of impactful ideas on handling PTSD and leadership protocol, he speaks to the 5 stages of grief as applying to PTSD and the importance of knowing an individual’s triggers through careful ADA compliance. We further agreed that real trauma need not be isolated to military trauma, nor should PTSD be exclusively applied to the real trauma of our military veterans. We at Ollenburg LLC have tremendous respect for our military, and it is our mission to ensure the best possible treatment and workforce engagement for veterans acclimating to civilian workforce.
Our experiences in crisis response are gained through the reactive clients who didn’t hire us for prevention. For those employers, we’ve successfully addressed active shooter threats, sexual abuse including that against children, workplace violence, and so much more. We credit each of our savvy clients for recognizing the clues in time for intervention and finding the right resources with diligent care. Those who have been proactive in hiring us or otherwise following this blueprint for prevention have been able to mitigate or avoid crisis, so we can validate this blueprint through experience.