By HR and health & safety consultancy Peninsula Canada

As temperatures rise, it can quickly become dangerous for outdoor workers. It is important for employers to take all reasonable precautions to protect outdoor workers and keep them safe from all potential hazards. Below are some measures employers can take to keep outdoor workers protected in summer.

Provide appropriate PPE year-round. No matter what the season, workers should be equipped with the necessary PPE based on their specific job tasks and environmental conditions. This may include items such as safety gloves, protective footwear, and high-visibility clothing.

Offer sun protection. Outdoor workers should be encouraged to protect themselves from harmful UV radiation. This can be achieved by providing sunscreen, wide-brimmed hats, and sunglasses.

Implement heat stress prevention methods. During extremely hot and humid conditions, employers should implement measures to prevent heat-related illnesses. This can include providing shaded rest areas, encouraging frequent hydration, and scheduling work during cool times of the day.

Train workers on hazards and safety procedures. Ensure that workers receive proper training on identifying and mitigating hazards specific to their work environment.

Risk assessments. Regularly assess the work environment to identify potential hazards and risks. This allows for the implementation of appropriate control measures to minimize the likelihood of accidents or injuries.

Consider weather conditions. Stay informed about weather forecasts and make adjustments to work schedules if needed. Extreme weather conditions such as heat warnings, wildfire smoke exposure, or flooding pose additional risks to outdoor workers and may require temporary suspension of work.

Peninsula is a trusted HR and health & safety advisory company, serving over 6,000 small businesses across Canada. Clients are supported with ongoing updates of their workplace documentation and policies as legislation changes. Additionally, clients benefit from access to our 24/7 employer HR and OHS advice line and coverage on legal through our Peninsula Protect service promise.

By Sarah McVanel

Sarah McVanel is the founder of Greatness Magnified, an organization that specializes in providing training programs and certifications for employees at large. She is a recognition expert, professional speaker, coach, author, and creator of F.R.O.G.—Forever Recognize Others’ Greatness. She invigorates companies to earn great people and to see their people as exceptional so that, together, they can create a thriving culture where everyone belongs.

I’ve said it before; I’ll remind us all again. A paycheque—even a good one—is table stakes. As The Beatles sang, “Money Can’t Buy Me Love.” Yet the results of a recent survey released by Gallup indicates that a “recognition-less”—or recognition-lacking—workplace is turnover territory.

Do you provide an environment of meaningful connection, purposeful contribution, and acknowledgement of impact? Do people leave or sign off at the end of the day knowing that their work matters to you, your peers, and your customers? Have they heard why their effort mattered and why they need to return the next day?

If they get to trade their time, experience, education, effort, and attention for a paycheque, they want it to have an ROI. They know the stakes are too high (a byproduct of living through the most significant health crisis of our lifetime) and that time is too precious to waste. You get one life. But you get many careers (if you want them; and workforce trends say people do).

Recognizing someone today—no, right now—means that people are more likely to affirm, “I choose you.” We spent a lot of time discussing how some people see their work as a job, others as a career, and others as a vocation. How can we put people in such a tidy little “work motivation” box? Pretty contrived, right? Instead, let’s look at a workforce as a group of people who want to be engaged and are experiencing varying levels of engagement.

Our world needs everyone at work—and I mean everyone—to make it better for peers, customers and beyond. Think of how many hours people work on any given day. That is how many hours of impact people can have! Why wouldn’t we recognize that so that impact can exponentially increase?

Even if you’re not the boss or part of HR, you have control over moving the needle on recognition. Because everyone needs to know they are valued. Every peer can ensure that happens. Don’t miss an opportunity to point it out.

What we recognize is reinforced. And that is priceless.

Improving the mental health environment of a workspace is not all about dealing with stress. “Work is never going to be stress-free,” says St. Thomas, Ont.-based workplace mental health consultant Kristy Cork. “So, if we focus only on stress, we are missing a big part of the issue.”

The upside of having mental health policies in place is that employee retention goes up, Cork said. She gave a seminar recently in front of the members of a restaurant association. There, she saw rubber bracelets being distributed that said, “Retention Is the New Cool.” The alternative, if your employees don’t outright quit, is “quiet quitting.” Cork defines this as an attitude in which the worker says, “I’m not going to work for the equivalent of 65 hours a week anymore. I’m only going to do what’s in my job description.”

With these kinds of challenges facing workers, and the companies that employ them, improving the environment to support your workers’ mental health is critical. “You cannot, in any workplace, prevent mental harm if you don’t know what your hazards are,” Cork said. “You have to do an assessment. You have to talk to people. You don’t start throwing darts at the wall hoping you’ll hit the problem.”

She says the best way to begin this process is through an employee survey. Cork has tracked her clients’ results and found out that, on average, only about 30 percent of employees answer “yes” to the question: “Does your employer promote a healthy work environment?”

Cork lists 10 major causes of work-related stress: heavy workload, changes within organizations, job insecurity, lack of autonomy, over-supervision, lack of proper resources, lack of equipment, few opportunities to be promoted, insufficient training, and long hours.

“I left that job for health reasons. They were sick of me, and I was sick of them.”

That old joke doesn’t seem so funny anymore. Not when mental illness has taken a serious toll on both workers and managers through two exhausting years of Covid lockdowns.

Now that we have work-from-home and hybrid workplaces, the mental health issues—still unaddressed in most businesses—loom even larger.

Mental health in the workplace was the subject of a seminar at the Retail Council of Canada’s Human Resources Conference, held recently in Toronto.

The presenter was Kristy Cork, a workplace mental health consultant based in St. Thomas, Ont. Her seminar focused on “steps retailers can take today to improve psychological health and safety into safety programs.”

Traditionally, those safety programs have focused on preventing physical accidents. Worker and customer safety has properly been the first training that new shop-floor employees receive. A case in point: Home Depot Canada spends about a third of its roughly 20 hours of “Before the Apron” new-hire training focused on physical safety. This includes hazardous materials, working at heights, equipment safety, and customer safety protocols.

But what about the mental health aspects of today’s workplace? Abusive or difficult customers, the urgency and stress created by digital media, relentless demands from well-meaning (or not) managers looking for ever-increasing productivity… It’s no wonder that Cork is so busy as a specialist focusing on the mental health part of HR.

“I like to talk about a culture of carelessness,” Cork said. “I’m sure you have physical safety provisions. It should be that way with mental health, too. Because workplaces cause harm.”

Cork said that everywhere employees are struggling—and some of yours are, too.

“There are employees parking their cars in the morning and they can’t come into the workplace before they sit there and give themselves a pep talk.”

Obviously, there is a problem here—one which is described by CSA National Standard 21003: Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace.

It reads, simply: “Psychological safety is a state in which workers are free from exposure to reasonably foreseeable, significant risks to their mental health arising from the acts and omissions of other people in the workplace so that there is a low risk of mental injury.”

The costs of ignoring this little-known standard are real, Cork said. She put up a slide that listed some of them: increased turnover, litigation, absenteeism, short- and long-term disability claims, incidents, and conflicts.

Absenteeism is costly but “presenteeism” is just as expensive. That relatively new HR term, Cork explained, is where the employees show up at work but are unwell. They can even be in physical pain from their mental unwellness.

It was not an industry that attracted a lot of women. And it sure wasn’t considered flashy. Sound familiar? No, it’s not home improvement retailing. It’s residential and commercial pest control. But, like in our industry, times are changing.

Case in point: Abell Pest Control is a leader in the Canadian market. And the company’s HR lead is a woman. Meet Sara Cromwell, director of people excellence. Abell now has 23 locations across North America. Cromwell oversees the HR for all of them.

She’s been a director for almost four years, a role she took on right before Covid. For 15 years before that, she served as the company’s HR manager. Cromwell says she “kind of fell into the role.” She was at Trent University in Peterborough, Ont. taking political studies, but wondered whether she’d ever get a job in that field. She ended up at her father’s firm in payroll. “You often get into HR from one of two paths—either recruitment or payroll,” Cromwell observes.

Eventually she was cold-called with an invitation to apply at Abell, but she admits the pest control industry didn’t sound very attractive—especially for a woman. But after she met with the management, her attitude changed “and it was love at first sight.”

The right attitude “starts at the top.” Her boss, John Abell, is a strong supporter of his team. “He trusted me fully and let me bring my authentic self.” She says it was a “terrific choice” for her.

Nor is she alone. Over the past decade, Abell has doubled in size, while the number of women in management roles has grown 116 percent. But women are filling the ranks on the front lines as well. As people consider Abell as a possible employer, they can see more women in senior roles, which has encouraged young women to join the company as technicians or in other operations roles.

“Women in operations have gone up 73 percent, a change that has been both organic and intentional, says Cromwell. “We really did focus on supporting women—we support everybody—but we really support women throughout their journey. We understood that there were some things that were holding back women from taking on roles in the company.”

Working on the front lines of pest control does not come across as “sexy,” she admits. “It requires working in a job confronting cockroaches, or bedbugs jumping everywhere, and you have to look confident.”

But when it comes to recruitment, women may be less likely to apply for a job if they don’t feel they meet all the criteria. They are more “risk-averse” Cromwell says, while men can be more likely to push ahead. “So we re-examined our job postings and reconsidered the qualifications.” For example, the requirement to be able to lift up to 40 pounds might come up only a couple of times a year on the actual job. The requirement was eliminated.

What makes Abell Pest Control a successful workspace, one that everyone, women included, can thrive in? “I think it’s to build an environment where people can bring their true authentic selves to work without being slapped down, without being told, ‘this is the way we do this,’ or people feeling they need to mirror the behaviours of the leadership team,” says Cromwell.

“You don’t get diversity of thought or diversity of innovative products when everybody thinks the same way. The more trust your people have in the leadership and the decision-making process, the more I feel they’re able to bring their true selves to work.”

“That’s the basis of a great workplace: how much trust do your people have in you?”

Hardlines was recently at the grand opening of a new location for Wolseley, the specialty plumbing distributor. The opening of the location, just east of Toronto, had all the trappings of a well-run opening day: lots of food and refreshments, in-house specials for contractor and plumbing pro customers, and a table-top show featuring some key suppliers.

But in addition, one of the tables had two Wolseley employees in it. Dakota Sheppard and Daljeet Obhi are part of Wolseley’s Talent Acquisition Team. They’re based out of the company’s headquarters in Burlington, Ont., and their job is to create awareness of the opportunities within the company for new hires—using existing staff as ambassadors. The team’s slogan is, “Join the Pros.” Sheppard and Abhi travel to Wolseley locations across Canada and encourage existing staff to talk up their own jobs and careers at Wolseley to attract more talent.

They told us this was the first time they tried setting up a booth on behalf of the Talent Acquisition Team at a store opening. But it sure seemed like a great idea to us!

Laura Freeman is the executive vice-president of human resources and chief human resources officer at Orgill, Inc., the giant Memphis-based hardware wholesaler.

So many companies now put huge focus on attracting new hires, promising great benefits like unlimited vacation days or non-stop snacks on the job. But how do you focus on the people you already have and not take them for granted amidst all that outward-looking effort?

“When you think about your workforce and how it has changed, a lot of it has been around technology,” says Orgill’s HR lead, Laura Freeman. “Some of us think ‘Oh, that’s easy.’ We have to really think about those skillsets that not everybody feels comfortable with. That means ongoing investment in existing team members, but also finding a good fit for them.”

For example, says Freeman, “When it comes to upskilling, tech may be a tough one for some of team.”

The other thing is keeping people engaged, Freeman explains. “What does that mean? I want to be recognized for the work that I do. And it doesn’t have to be monetary.” Recognition is important, but even basic concepts like this can get lost in the shuffle. “As a manager, sometimes you just forget those things.”

That means more focus on guiding managers on your team to embrace and employ concepts like recognition that are tailored for individuals on your team. Teach your managers that people need to be valued and want to be respected, Freeman urges. It requires two-way communication: get input when change is afoot and include and explain the changes to your people.

“Take time and talk about the goals and how an individual worker is contributing to that. These are things that must be kept in mind when considering upskilling. You have to really make sure you’re meeting your employees where they need to be met.”

By HR and health & safety consultancy Peninsula Canada

Mental Health Research Canada has found that one in five Canadians live with mental health challenges. Employers will certainly feel the effects of this in many ways, such as decreased productivity and increased absenteeism.

According to a new survey by Peninsula Canada, the workplace stigma around mental health appears to have lessened, with 43 percent of employers stating that they’ve witnessed people talking more about their mental health in the last 12 months. Although more workers are talking about mental health, employers can still do more to address and support mental health in the workplace. Here are four tips to get started.

Create a mental health policy for your workplace. Your mental health policy should set out the protocol to follow when an employee makes a mental health disclosure and requests an accommodation. It’ll help provide clarity to both employees and supervisors on what to do in such a situation. Include your mental health policy in your employee handbook and share it with your staff.

Be transparent in communication. Supporting the overall wellbeing of staff will help to create consistency and transparency with their teams. Burnout and job-related stress have become common in the workplace. Employers can do their part by keeping routine meetings for check-ins and communicating in advance when change is coming.

Connect employees to mental health resources. Employers need to evaluate their company benefits. There are several areas to consider from a mental health perspective. For example, does your policy include mental health coverage, time off policies, or an employee assistance program? Investing in resources can provide support for any employees struggling with mental health issues and can get the assistance they need.

Promote wellbeing. Employers can encourage well-being in various ways. These can include encouraging regular breaks, offering flexible work, and ensuring staff are using their designated days off.

Peninsula is an HR and Health and Safety consulting firm serving over 80,000 small businesses worldwide, including dealers in home improvement. Clients are supported with ongoing updates to their workplace documentation and policies as legislation changes. Additionally, clients benefit from 24/7 employer HR advice and are protected by legal insurance.

Laura Freeman is the executive vice-president of human resources and chief human resources officer at Orgill, Inc., the giant Memphis-based hardware wholesaler. Hardlines interviewed Freeman earlier this year during Orgill’s spring dealer market in New Orleans. Although she had been on the job just a few weeks, she took the time to share her insights with us.

Freeman came over from the grocery industry. She had spent the previous seven years heading up HR as chief people officer at Schnuck Markets, a family-run chain of over 100 supermarkets in the American Midwest.

Many a hardware executive has come over from the grocery industry. We asked Freeman what learnings she felt she could bring with her to the hardware distribution business. She identified some similarities. “A couple of things: one is just the dispersed workforce and the hourly workforce. How do you connect with them? So in the supermarket industry we had multiple stores in multiple states. Here, we have our distribution centres, but we also have our different business units, like CNRG,” she observed, referring to Central Network Retail Group, a group of 144 stores under a variety of banners owned by Orgill.

But at the front lines, it’s all about the people and understanding their needs, regardless of the sector. “Especially with the DCs, with the hourly workers, what are they looking for? What attracts them to us? How do we become that preferred employer? It’s so very similar to what it was in the supermarket industry.

“There’s a war on talent, and you certainly want to get the best talent.”

Freeman admits that the recent news of layoffs had been largely in the tech sector, while retail remains a tough sector to hire for. “It’s hard to find the right people, to find the right talent.”

Customer service remains a priority in any business, whether it’s the shopper in a supermarket or a customer on the other end of the line in the distributor’s call centre. “That’s what differentiates a great business.”

Freeman says the changes happening in the workforce during the pandemic had started well before the pandemic. “Even pre-Covid we were seeing our workforce change. It was not all of a sudden that it started changing—it was just accelerated.”

Organizations today have multiple generations of employees working side by side. Each generation has unique needs and goals. The core values of an organization have to resonate for everyone from Gen Z (“where’s my career going?”) to Boomers (who may appreciate the stability that being an employee can provide).

“From an HR perspective, you really have to think about that employee proposition across all different areas and then across all the different generations you have in your workforce today.”

Building materials suppliers found themselves in the eye of the storm when the supply chain worldwide began deteriorating during Covid. That disruption affected everything from the products in the warehouse to the people handling those products.

Each distributor developed its own strategies to cope, and CanWel Building Materials was no exception. We spoke recently with Marc Seguin, president of CanWel, who shared his thoughts on staffing strategy before and after Covid.

“What did we do at CanWel to offset some of the supply chain crunch? First of all, for internal resources, we kept our full staff in our offices and operations. We put the right protocols in place to protect our people, but we decided that we needed the resources because our customers were relying on us,” Seguin says. “Some of our competitors decided to let people go for a period of time or operate with a skeleton staff. I think our approach helped us to provide better service levels.”

Seguin believes home improvement was hit harder than other industries. For example, supply was affected directly by staffing, “because all of our warehouses are staffed by people that work in demanding conditions. They are at the lower end of the salary grid many times. And it has created quite a bit of turnover. And to this day it’s still a huge challenge to find people. He points out that a lot of people migrated from urban centres during Covid, putting further strain on recruiting people.

Not only was it hard to find new people, it became difficult to replace the workers who left. “We were able to hire a lot of new resources—but we operated with less staff, so people had to double their efforts,” Seguin says.

“We were fortunate to have long-time employees that are good workers. They work hard. They are dedicated. They love our company and we have good dynamics. But we need to resource ourselves better and it’s going to remain a challenge for quite a while.”

These labour issues are not going to sort themselves out in the near term, Seguin believes, even with immigration. “No, I think we’re not out of this for quite a while. Because it’s a structural and systemic problem.” He is calling on the entire retail home improvement industry to become “more progressive” to make this sector more attractive to potential employees, “like hybrid work solutions, improved working conditions, better benefit packages. We are something of a primary sector. I think there are solutions we will all have to adopt to some degree.”