Leaders

Managers and leaders play a vital role in building resilience, maintaining the welfare of their staff, and creating mentally healthy workplaces.

Encouraging employees to seek support early and reducing the stigma attached to mental health can lead to employees confiding in their leaders about personal stressors, mental health concerns, and potential risks. This is why we provide additional support services to managers and leaders.

Manager Support Hotline

A confidential telehealth service available for leaders, managers, and supervisors, designed to support them to plan, manage, and respond to complex people management situations.

Delivered by Senior EAP Professionals and available 24/7, the service enhances leaders’ confidence and capability in engaging in positive and healthy conversations with staff around their mental health. 

The program guides managers and leaders to understand mental health concerns, identify psychosocial risk factors, and build a mentally healthy workplace for their staff that ensures optimal performance and productivity. Managers are provided with a range of valuable tools, strategies, and resources to assist with managing these circumstances now and in the future.

The Manager Support Hotline can assist with a range of challenging situations from effective performance management, mental health presentation in staff, team conflict, problematic behaviour in staff, or preventative strategies when risk factors may be affecting staffs’ psychological response to their work.

Manager Check-In

Manager Check-In’s are a service initiated by a leader who is concerned for the psychological safety and wellbeing of an employee.

With the employee’s consent, our experienced EAP Professional will contact the employee to assess their mental health risk and provide immediate support. The service ensures timely professional support is provided to prevent harm and to manage the immediate psychological and emotional needs of an employee in the workplace.

A Manager Check-In can be helpful when an employee is presenting with a high level of distress and emotion, such as crying, anxiety or anger. The service is not designed to replace the self-referral support available to all employees. Rather it is to initiate an immediate wellbeing check-in when there is a high level of emotional distress or safety concern. 

Manager Referral

A collaborative program where managers refer employees for counselling, in order to gain a better understanding of how they can best support them in the workplace.

The Manager Referral service is designed to assist leaders in better understanding an employee’s concerns or needs within the workplace, or to provide targeted counselling to address a work, personal or behavioural concern. Unlike the confidential counselling available through the Employee Assistance Program, this referral is collaborative, and feedback is provided to the referring manager (with consent provided by the employee).

There are two different types of Manager Referral.

Manager Referral Clinical Reviews provide an avenue for managers and leaders to better understand an employee’s mental health and wellbeing needs, in order to help inform any reasonable workplace adjustments and support mechanisms. These reviews might be valuable when the employee has had a period of absence due to mental health concerns or has recently been diagnosed with a mental health condition and the organisation is seeking recommendations on how to best support them.

Manager Referral for Counselling provides an opportunity for the manager, employee, and EAP Professional to work collaboratively to achieve mutually agreed goals. A Counselling Referral may be required if an employee has recently been diagnosed with a mental health condition, has personal concerns impacting work, or has problematic or disruptive behaviour, amongst many other reasons.

Critical Incident Response

Acacia follows the current best practice recommendations of a collaborative stepped care model when supporting individuals exposed to potentially traumatic events.

Critical incidents are unplanned events that happen in the workplace and have the potential to cause distress, disruption, or trauma to an individual or group. These critical events can include fatalities, assaults, accidents, employee death or robberies.

Acacia’s collaborative stepped care model ensures that individuals receive the level of care required for the severity and complexity of their level of psychological distress. Our model recognises that not all those exposed to potentially traumatic events will exhibit symptoms of psychological distress, and many will only experience a mild level of symptoms.

Support commences immediately following notification of the critical incident or event and continues for up to 4 weeks post incident. The response is led by a senior Acacia professional and designed to ensure organisations provide an informed and proactive response following employees’ exposure to a potentially traumatic event to reduce the risk of psychological injury.

Reflective Practice in Supervision ​

The service provides an opportunity for regular, collaborative reflection guided by an experienced supervisor to lead to developmental insights and professional growth.

Reflective practice is a semi-structured learning process, characterised by active listening and thoughtful questioning by both the individual and their supervisor. The process evokes learning and brings a critical perspective to their work. The key rationale is that training and the experience alone does not necessarily lead to learning, and that deliberate reflection on the experience is essential for insight and development.

Individuals are provided with a safe learning environment to raise issues, explore problems, and discover new ways to handle both the situation and themselves in the future. Furthermore, reflective practice helps establish effective self-care practices, continuing professional development, and improved resilience.

Psychological Wellbeing Checks

A proactive session with an experienced professional to discuss wellbeing concerns and develop a personalised plan tailored to individual needs.

The service is designed to support roles that work with difficult or vulnerable people, frontline personnel, as well as roles at risk of exposure to potentially traumatic situations, such as provocative content, heightened emotional states, threats, and/or aggression. These have the capacity to affect the psychological wellbeing of personnel and cause distress, tension, or trauma.

Prior to engagement, employees are asked to complete psychometrics sent to them via email. These provide the clinician with baseline measures of symptomology of psychological distress. Within the session, the professional will conduct an assessment including discussion around experiences and concerns regarding personal wellbeing.

Once completed, the professional will develop and document a personal care plan. This care plan will provide the employee with individualised strategies and steps they can take to build and maintain their physical, emotional, psychological, and social wellbeing.

Psychological Fitness for Work Assessment

Assessments provide an understanding of an employee’s psychological health and mental state, to ensure their capacity to work without risk of harm to themselves or others.

The service is designed to assist employers in determining an individual’s psychological fitness to work. This assessment may be requested to determine whether an employee is fit for work, or to provide further insight into their psychological fitness following the recovery from a physical injury.

A Psychological Fitness for Work Assessment is a thorough and detailed assessment completed by a Psychologist and will include recommendations to ensure a successful return to work or suggest further intervention and treatment.

The service provides an assessment of an employee’s psychological state and capacity to perform their role, including the level of risk posed, with particular emphasis on the cognitive and emotional demands of the work role. Additional treatment or intervention may also be recommended.