[Effectiveness of mental health training including active listening for managers]

We carried out mental health training with Active Listening for managers of A company, which was the electronics manufacturing company with 1,900 employees. The purpose of the present study was to examine the effect on managers and employees in the workplace on the training. The subjects were all persons who managed regular employees directly in A company. We performed the investigation from May 2006 to February 2007 and carried out the training from September to November in 2006. The contents of the training were from the chapter on "The education and training of managers" in the "The guideline for maintenance and promotion of mental health for workers" issued by the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan in 2006. We divided the contents and implemented them in two sessions. "Responding to worker consultation" was one of the contents of Active Listening. In the first session, we explained about Active Listening, and in the second session we ran a practical involving Inventive Experiential Listening. One month later, we distributed material summarizing the training to all the participants. To evaluate the effect of the training, we conducted surveys of the participants using the Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS), prior to and after the training, and distributed questionnaires, post-training about the contents of the training and changes of consciousness and action. Furthermore, we performed surveys pre- and post-training using the Brief Job Stress Questionnaire (BJSQ) 12 items version, distributed to all employees. We evaluated the effect of the training on 124 managers and 908 workers by the investigation. The score of each subscale was analyzed by repeated measures analysis of variance. There were no significant differences in the scores of both the "Listening attitude" and "Listening skill" subscales of ALAS between pre-training and post-training, but the mean scores post-training were higher than those pre-training on both subscales. There were significant increases post-training in "Job demands", "Worksite support by supervisor" and "Worksite support by co-worker", subscales of the BJSQ 12 items version. Particularly, the "Worksite support by supervisor" subscale increased significantly in 8 of the 47 sections in a comparison among sections. In this present study, we investigated the effectiveness of mental health training including Active Listening for managers, and suggest that to train Active Listening and use it at the worksite possibly strengthens "Worksite support by supervisor".