Your Team’s Mental Health: Old dirty 91 Fuel or A1 Jet Fuel?

Maintaining high performance car - like maintaining a high performance team.

When your staff’s mental health is neglected, it’s like running your ute with no old dirty fuel: inefficient, smokey and risking a total breakdown when you need it most.

But when your people are supported, motivated, and mentally healthy, they become the turbocharger of your operation enhancing performance and driving productivity far beyond what raw horsepower alone can deliver.

And here’s the important part: New Zealand’s construction sector is finally recognising this.

Mental Health Now Part of SiteWise Guidance

SiteSafe has taken a major step forward by incorporating mental health into the “guidance for each of the 14 questions that make up the SiteWise annual assessment.”

Question 12 - Mental Health focuses directly on how you ensure a mentally healthy workplace and how you, as the PCBU, manage psychosocial risks.

The key question is blunt and clear:

How does your company ensure a mentally healthy workplace? Do you have a policy or procedure that describes how a mentally healthy workplace is managed?

This means it’s no longer good enough to simply 'care about mental health' you now need to show how you manage it.

Policies matter. Procedures matter. Action matters.

But the payoff isn’t just compliance. It’s performance.

Why Mental Health Drives Profitability

A crew that is calm, focused, and engaged will always outperform one that is stressed, distracted, or drained. Simple as that.

A mentally healthy team brings you:

• Higher productivity

• Fewer mistakes and rework

• Better communication

• Stronger culture and loyalty

• Safer behaviour on site

• Better decision-making under pressure

Undistracted, content, motivated teams don’t just make work easier, they make your business more profitable.

In a competitive and sometimes unstable construction market, this might be the biggest advantage you can build.

Matthew’s Experience: From the Tools to Resilience Leadership

Matthew from Resilience Coahing NZ brings something not many resilience trainers can offer: extensive first-hand construction business experience.

He’s lived the realities of site pressure, industry downturns, and staff management. And he has faced the heavy side of the job including dealing with WorkSafe and supporting his team after a staff member was almost cut in two on-site.

Those experiences sharpened his understanding of:

• how stress compounds in construction

• how quickly things can go wrong

• how culture impacts safety

• why resilience training is not a “nice to have”

• why leadership under pressure is everything

Today, Matthew is a leader in micro-resilience training giving business owners, and site leaders simple, practical tools to lift their own performance and the performance of their teams.

No fluff, psyco-babble . Just tools that work.

Turbocharge Your Team, And Your Business

Construction is tough. Margins move. Markets change. But the biggest factor in the success of any business especially in trades is the people running it.

If your team is mentally drained, distracted, or overwhelmed, it slows everything down. If your team is supported, resilient, and mentally healthy, it accelerates everything upwards.

Think of mental health like your vehicle’s performance system:

• Neglect it, and your business runs rough.

• Support it, and your business runs like it’s turbocharged.

If you’d like help developing a mentally healthy workplace policy, improving your SiteWise Question 12 response, or building a resilient, focused team that performs better under pressure, Matthew from Resilience Coaching can help.

Contact via email: info@resnz.com or text 020-472-8112