TELUS Health's Dr. Matthew Chow explains why cost-of-living anxiety belongs on every safety leader's risk register
TELUS Health released the latest edition of its Mental Health Index earlier this month, finding that 63 per cent of workers in Canada name the cost of living as their single biggest financial worry, and that one in five say that strain is already cutting into their productivity on the job. For Dr. Matthew Chow, chief mental health officer at TELUS Health, the numbers point to a blind spot in how most Canadian employers define a hazard.
"We're seeing a shift in people's mental health and well-being," Chow said in an interview with Canadian Occupational Safety. "The pressures on them are moving from inside the workplace, which is a place we're very familiar with, to outside of the workplace and coming from externally. We're talking about pressures like finance, caregiving, family transitions like return to school. And although these pressures come from outside the workplace, they land squarely inside."
Why financial anxiety belongs on the hazard register
"A large number of employers do not treat financial worries and financial anxiety as a workplace hazard, as something to address," Chow said. "And quite frankly, I don't blame them, because this is a change in how we think about workplace health and safety. We typically think about risks inside the workplace, risks that are under our control. This is something that happens from outside the workplace."
Canada's National Standard of Canada for Psychological Health and Safety in the Workplace already asks employers to manage psychosocial hazards such as workload and role clarity, and the Mental Health Commission of Canada is currently developing a second edition of the standard with the Canadian Standards Association. Chow argues financial stress belongs in the same category, and should be met with a step-by-step approach to identifying and preventing psychosocial hazards rather than treated as a private matter outside the employer's control.
"If you start thinking about something like financial well-being, financial anxiety as an addressable workplace hazard, your attitude shifts and your mitigation strategy starts to change," he said. "Even though employers cannot single-handedly change the economy, the macroeconomic situation, the geopolitical situation, what they can do is make sure that their workers are being supported."
What early signs should safety leaders watch for?
Financial strain shows up long before it appears in absenteeism data or performance reviews, Chow said, and the first place to look is attention and focus.
"It's like we have a fuel tank for attention and focus," he said. "If we're burning up the fuel in that fuel tank worrying about our finances, worrying about back to school, worrying about caregiving responsibilities, that means less of that's available in the workplace. That's why health and safety professionals are going to notice that in their incident logs and in the number of safety incidents in the workplace, as a sort of early warning sign that there are challenges being experienced outside the workplace."
The disclosure gap safety leaders can't ignore
The same TELUS Health index found that 27 per cent of workers in Canada don't feel safe disclosing a mental health issue to their manager. Chow said that same reluctance likely extends to financial stress, and to safety itself.
"You can imagine if someone is not willing to talk about their financial anxiety, they're probably not going to raise a safety issue in the workplace either, or raise a finance control issue or other hidden issues that can seriously affect a workplace," he said.
That stigma gap is not abstract for every employer. Purolator's health and safety team has spent recent years building internal programs aimed at reducing stigma around disclosure, the kind of cultural shift Chow says is needed more broadly.
Closing that gap takes more than an open-door policy, he said, pointing to reporting channels that don't route through a direct manager, and to leadership that models transparency about its own pressures.
"A leadership team that clams up and is not particularly transparent about the business and about the macroeconomic situation is not going to be seen as trustworthy," Chow said. "A leadership team that openly talks about mental health and well-being and talks about financial issues is far more likely to be trusted by the staff to raise those same issues."
From the clinic to the boardroom
Chow practised as a clinician and taught at the University of British Columbia's medical school before moving into corporate mental health leadership. He said the shift changed how he thinks about prevention.
"When I practised clinically, I saw people that were often quite profoundly disabled by mental illness, people that had been off work or off school for a long time," he said. "What I've seen in the corporate world is the very earliest stages of those problems, at a stage where you can still make fundamental changes and interventions to prevent the more serious problems that I would see in the clinic."
That shift is part of why a growing number of Canadian organizations are treating employee wellbeing as core to overall safety performance rather than as a benefits line item, framing it instead as prevention infrastructure with a measurable return.
"Employers who take proactive steps to address that financial anxiety are going to see a return on that investment," Chow said, "in terms of a more focused and attentive workforce, a workforce that's less likely to make serious errors that can affect themselves, their colleagues and their business."
