Under the Hard Hat: Mental Health and Safety Culture in Construction

[00:00:00] Steven Gallo: Hi, everyone. I’m Steven Gallo, your host and the Vice President of Client Services at Reputation Ink. We’re a public relations and thought leadership marketing agency for B2B professional services firms, including architecture, engineering, and construction firms. You can learn more at rep-ink.com. Before we start today, a quick note. Today’s episode is going to be discussing topics of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling, help is available. You can call or text 988 anytime in the US and Canada to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.

Let’s jump in. Construction has a well-known safety culture — hard hats, OSHA training, fall protection — but the industry has a mental health safety crisis that is hiding in plain sight. Suicide claims five times as many construction workers’ lives each year as on-the-job injuries do, which is staggering.

Today we’re talking about what AEC firms can actually do about it and why communications and culture are at the heart of that solution. Our guest is Sonya Bohmann, executive director of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention, a nonprofit dedicated to making construction a zero-suicide industry. Welcome to the show, Sonya. Thank you so much for coming on.

[00:01:22] Sonya Bohmann: Thanks for having me. I’ll make it easy for you — we can just call it CIASP from here.

[00:01:26] Steven Gallo: CIASP. That works for me on second reference. So tell us a little bit about CIASP and what drew you to this work in the first place.

[00:01:37] Sonya Bohmann: Absolutely. I come from construction — remodels, refreshes, facilities, maintenance — and I did that for more than a decade and really loved it. The people of construction are dedicated and strong and gritty — all of the things we think about when we think about construction workers. But I’m also a loss survivor, and so having an opportunity to merge two things that I’m passionate about was really my dream job, and that’s how I ended up at CIASP. There are lots of winding roads in between, but that’s the short end of the story. I get to work with an incredible board of 15 volunteers that sit on our board of directors and truly want to move this mission forward and work tirelessly every day to do that. We are a small nonprofit. We focus on construction, suicide prevention, and mental health. I am their only paid employee.

[00:02:33] Steven Gallo: Wow. It’s such important work, and so grateful to have you on to talk about it. As we mentioned off the top, the suicide rate in construction is striking — more than 5,000 workers a year die by suicide, compared to fewer than a thousand from on-the-job injuries. What have you discovered in your work? Can you give us some insight into what is driving that at its core?

[00:03:00] Sonya Bohmann: There are some very specific risk factors to construction. The things we can easily think about — the fact that it is really hard on our bodies. There’s chronic pain involved in the work that we do. There’s also a lot of isolation, where you are isolated because of the position that you hold. Sometimes it’s from a leadership standpoint — that isolation where you don’t feel like you have someone else at the same level, especially if you’re a very small construction company. You certainly can’t share down when you are an independent company, because you scare all of your employees. So it’s really hard to have that peer group. We also ask our employees to travel a lot, so they’re not with the communities they’re used to. Jobsites can be isolating — they may be out in the middle of nowhere putting up a data center or any other construction site. There also tends to be, along with those things, a culture of substance use or misuse. There is a large veteran population in construction. There are multiple factors that go into the risk of why construction has a higher rate of suicide than most other industries.

[00:04:11] Steven Gallo: It makes sense. A lot of factors swirling together at once. As employers who employ construction workers and laborers, they want to take action. They obviously recognize this is a current and present issue, but they may not necessarily be sure how. Where do you advise they begin in terms of a place to start tackling this problem?

[00:04:39] Sonya Bohmann: Well, this is my favorite conversation — giving people that first place to start. I would say, take our pledge to stand up to suicide prevention. It’s 100% free. You can do that right on our website at preventconstructionsuicide.com. What’s really great about it is that you can make it a splash if you want to. You can do it very casually if you want to. But from there, it means you’ve entered the conversation. All of the resources on our website are 100% free, and you can figure out which ones work best for you. We’ll have some time to share some of my favorites as we go along. Just start entering the chat, as they say.

You have two opportunities that are national. You have Mental Health Month, which is a great way to start entering the conversation, and that’s in May. And then you also have September, which is Suicide Prevention Month. But there is a calendar of national events related to mental health where you could, almost every single month, tie something back to the mental health conversation — and it doesn’t always have to go from not talking about this at all directly to talking about suicide prevention, because there’s a big spectrum in between those two things. Just doing small, simple things to start — slightly changing the culture — then starts to have a snowball effect.

[00:06:00] Steven Gallo: I imagine that’s the hardest part — starting that conversation. You don’t necessarily know what the entryway into that conversation is. As you mentioned, there are opportunities to have an outside, external date — an excuse, for lack of a better word — to bring that up.

[00:06:18] Sonya Bohmann: Absolutely.

[00:06:19] Steven Gallo: What would you say is the most common mistake you see when firms first try to address communicating around mental health and engage in these kinds of conversations?

[00:06:32] Sonya Bohmann: When it becomes a priority — or a flash in the pan — it needs to be a consistent conversation. It can’t just appear that we’re checking a box. If it is just for this moment the priority, because we want everybody to see that we’re doing this — it’s really about making that cultural shift. When you make the cultural shift and it goes from a priority to a core value, that’s when you have real change.

[00:06:56] Steven Gallo: So important. It’s not a one-off thing. To make this a year-round conversation, what are some ways that firms can do that? As you mentioned, there are some observances throughout the year on the calendar that lend themselves to this. What does that look like on the ground?

[00:07:13] Sonya Bohmann: The one thing that I think is the easiest, the least expensive, and the way that starts to signal to your company that you are going to make a culture shift is to change your email signature. It’s so simple. Have it say: If you or someone you care about is in crisis, contact 988. Then people see it every single time you send an email. I personally send hundreds of emails a day, and so do most of us. When they start to see just that small change, it’s a really good way to start dipping your toe into the conversation and then start observing things like Mental Health Month at a safety stand down or at your company all-hands or town hall, or in your newsletter. Just start mentioning that May is Mental Health Month. And then that starts the conversation to get us toward September. And then in September, start talking about Suicide Prevention Month. Put some of the resources up. Start using 988 stickers around your office or jobsite. Introduce warning signs. These are just simple ways to start messaging that don’t feel like such a change from what you’ve been doing — or so aggressive in the conversation.

[00:08:34] Steven Gallo: That’s a great point. The consistency piece of it — when it’s something that’s never talked about but once or twice a year, that’s when it becomes this big deal. Some of the largest clients in the industry — big firms that may have big parent companies — require a mental health component as part of the proposal process. I’m curious what you’ve seen in your work and how significant that shift is. Do you see that as something that will continue?

[00:09:13] Sonya Bohmann: It’s gigantic, and in such a great way — because it’s starting, again, that conversation we’re just not having enough of. Requiring it in the proposal process — New York City has just passed a law where it’s required in the permitting process, too, that you have to have a mental health component to the training, just like you have your OSHA training. It really allows us to start having conversations in places and spaces where we wouldn’t otherwise be having them. And that starts to shift the culture of the entire industry.

[00:09:46] Steven Gallo: It’s a long-term play for sure.

[00:09:49] Sonya Bohmann: Absolutely.

[00:09:50] Steven Gallo: So tell me a bit about CIASP’s free needs analysis tool. I’d love to learn more about how it works and how firms can access it.

[00:10:02] Sonya Bohmann: Absolutely. That is step two. You take the pledge to stand up to suicide prevention, and then you have the needs analysis. What it really does — I liken it to a “choose your own adventure,” if you remember those. You really have an opportunity to start by laying out what you have in place from a mental health, suicide prevention, or wellness program, and then where your gaps are. It digs as deep as finding out not only what you have in place, but who’s responsible for it — because if there’s no one responsible for it, it isn’t really in place. From there, it allows you to say, where do I need to go next? Because people enter this conversation in lots of different ways.

You either enter with awareness — the conversation we’re having now, like how do I start having this conversation — or you enter what we call prevention. Or you enter at the intervention level, where you’ve done a little bit of prevention — you’ve seen the 988 posters, you know it’s Mental Health Month or Suicide Prevention Month — and you want an actual training. That’s intervention. Or you’ve had a crisis and didn’t know what to do at that time, so you need a plan. That’s another place people can enter the conversation. And then, unfortunately, some people enter the conversation at postvention — after a suicide loss — whether it happened on a jobsite, the jobsite was used as someone’s lethal means, or it happened to an employee that works for the company but maybe didn’t happen during working hours. That’s another way we have to start the conversation as well. People come to it from different places, and from there you can choose what resources you want to put in place first. The needs analysis directs you through that process.

[00:11:51] Steven Gallo: That’s excellent. It sounds like a tool that is meeting you where you are, but also helping establish what the baseline is of what you’re doing and what you could be doing more. And I imagine you’re having conversations with folks across the spectrum in the industry, on the operations side — your HSE folks.

[00:12:12] Sonya Bohmann: Yes.

[00:12:12] Steven Gallo: But for our show, a lot of folks in our audience are communications professionals and marketing directors. Obviously, communicating is a huge, if not central, part of this. So for that marketing director who wants to really be a champion for this — but they may be getting some pushback from leadership for one reason or another, or it just hasn’t been the cultural priority up to this point — what’s your advice to someone in that scenario on how to shift that conversation?

[00:12:47] Sonya Bohmann: It goes back to what I mentioned before — there’s that national calendar that has a day every month. If you think about it: May is Mental Health Month, June is Men’s Health Month, July is Minority Mental Health Month, August is Safe + Sound Week — there are all these little places where you can bring the conversation in. And that’s exactly what I would suggest a communications director or marketing director does: start messaging based on that. Start messaging for Recovery Month, start messaging for Alcohol Awareness Month. It can be as simple as: if you are talking about Recovery Month or Alcohol Awareness Month, instead of making it a big mental health conversation, post a mocktail recipe in your newsletter. Or, for Dry January, do that same thing. And then add a little stat about why it’s important and how it affects your mental health. It doesn’t have to go as far as posting about Bipolar Awareness Month — again, that’s taking that leap. That’s really large when we’re talking about this, but there are small things we can weave through. World Music Day — post about the effects of music on mental health. We do that often, and it’s just ways to message and give yourself an opportunity to message that are a little more subtle sometimes. Because we need that initially. And then once you’ve made this part of the everyday conversation, you can really start training on it.

[00:14:23] Steven Gallo: I imagine that’s an intimidation factor for some — feeling like they need to go zero to 100. Can you share any examples you’ve seen of easing into it, or other strategies or channels where you’ve just seen this work well for construction firms?

[00:14:45] Sonya Bohmann: We see it in all different places. Obviously, large construction companies that have gotten on board with national initiatives — that’s worked really well for them, because they need to move. It’s like turning a limousine — you’ve got to move it all at once. They will take Mental Health Month or Suicide Prevention Month and go all in, and that’s when they’ll introduce things like their EAPs or a new training program. That works really well on a larger scale. Medium companies maybe don’t always have those same resources, so for them it’s about communicating in smaller pieces. We’ve got a really great toolkit for Mental Health Month, so it allows a company to take the five weeks that are typically in May and use one of our toolbox talks that go with that. You introduce the conversation in a toolbox talk that week. You have some things you can hand out — stickers, hard hat stickers, wallet cards or coins. There’s a plan that’s already laid out for you, and that’s a great way to do that without it being hard or expensive. Smaller companies can do those things we chatted about, like adding it into your newsletter or doing it at a safety stand down you have before your job opens. Just introducing that conversation. It’s about meeting you where you are and having a resource that works for where you are, too.

[00:16:15] Steven Gallo: Absolutely. Big or small, there’s a place to start. And so important to start that conversation if it’s not being had already. Sonya, what would be the most important lesson you would hope listeners take away from our conversation today? As we’ve said, there are opportunities throughout the year. There are places big and small to start. But if there’s one thing to walk away with for communicators in the AEC and construction space, what would that be?

[00:16:45] Sonya Bohmann: This isn’t going away. Making it a conversation that’s starting now, before you have to enter at the postvention piece, is important. Figure out what works best for you, what feels most comfortable for you, but start the conversation.

[00:17:02] Steven Gallo: Start somewhere. That’s the hardest part.

[00:17:05] Sonya Bohmann: Yeah.

[00:17:05] Steven Gallo: But once you get that momentum rolling, I imagine it becomes so much easier from there and that much more important. Is there anything we haven’t touched on yet today that would be helpful to share, or that I should have asked about that we haven’t had a chance to cover? Or, as you mentioned, some of the resources you have available — any other place to point folks to learn more after this?

[00:17:27] Sonya Bohmann: Absolutely. If you’re not already following us on socials — we are at CIASP, or Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention — we post five days a week. All of our information is shareable, so you can reshare it, repost it. One of the really exciting things we’re thrilled to be sharing with the industry is that we have a lived experience video coming out. We have four construction tradespeople who shared their experiences with mental health and substance use. In their own words, they told their story. There’s a video that goes along with that, with some resources to support it. We will be premiering that to the construction ecosystem on May 7, and we’d love for you to join us on that webinar. Anyone listening now can go to our website or our socials and sign up for that.

[00:18:24] Steven Gallo: Wow, that’s incredible. And yes, we’ll be sure to pass that along and share it as well. That sounds incredibly powerful, and look forward to that. Well, thank you so much, Sonya. We’ve been talking to Sonya Bohmann, executive director of the Construction Industry Alliance for Suicide Prevention. Thank you so much for your time today and coming on to share this really important message with our audience.[00:18:44] Sonya Bohmann: Thanks for having me.