Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Guarding Minds was designed to be used by employers, associations, governments and institutions, regardless of business type. It is especially useful to anyone with responsibilities or concerns about psychological health and safety such as human resources, managers, supervisors, consultants, union representatives, and small or mid-sized business owners. The resources are simple to understand, accessible, easy to use, and require no special training.

All of the tools and resources are provided at no cost for any employer to use. There is absolutely nothing to buy, but there is a cost in terms of your time and effort to take action on the results. The total cost for your psychological health and safety initiative will depend on the actions you choose to take for improvement. Evidence-Based Actions for Psychological Health and Safety includes many low-cost or no-cost strategies that help you take action, even on a limited budget. 

Setting up the survey should take less than 30 minutes if you are familiar with your organization. The survey itself takes only 15 to 20 minutes for each employee to complete. And it takes only minutes to close off the survey and download your results.

Although the survey is designed to be quick and efficient, the work prior to administering the survey, to analyze the results, and to effect sustainable change are part of an ongoing journey.

We strongly recommend you read Using Guarding Minds at Work Effectively before you begin. Psychological health and safety is not a single project. It is an “evergreen” process of continual improvement, so allocating adequate time and resources should be part of your annual strategic planning. 

CCOHS protects the confidentiality of information provided in completion of the Guarding Minds survey. They host and maintain the website and provide email and telephone technical support in English and French.

Canada Life’s Workplace Strategies for Mental Health and CCOHS collaborate to increase use of Guarding Minds by raising awareness of the free resources as a leading approach for assessing and addressing psychological health and safety in the workplace.

We recommend that you begin with reading Using Guarding Minds at Work effectively.

The Guarding Minds dashboard is a secure area of the website that allows representatives of your organization to develop and access the survey links to send out to employees, and to generate reports that will provide a visual summary of the survey results.

An account is only required to administer surveys. All other resources including sample reports are available for download in the Resources section, which does not require an account.

No, only an organizational representative who is planning on administering Guarding Minds surveys needs to sign up for an account. Each dashboard account is limited to one organizational representative. This representative will generate and email the survey link to employees. You cannot have more than one representative per account.

Yes. You can distribute paper copies of the survey and manually enter the results of each survey. To print copies of the survey, login to your dashboard and click on the Print/Save a Copy on the bottom right under your survey name in the Active Surveys section. To help protect the anonymity and confidentiality of employees completing the survey by paper, we suggest that you designate a place accessible to all employees where the surveys will be made available, as well as a locked box, similar to a ballot box, where completed surveys can be dropped. Once you are ready to complete the survey, collect any completed paper surveys from the box and enter the data manually by clicking on Manual Input on the bottom right under your survey name. If you need to enter any additional surveys after you close your survey, open the Closed Surveys section in your Dashboard and click Re-open Survey.

Yes, all of your employees could take the survey at the same time. The approach of having all employees complete the survey at the same time during working hours is ideal in terms of optimizing participation and ensuring your results are reliable.

The Stress Satisfaction Scan is not required if you do the more comprehensive Guarding Minds at Work survey because all 6 statements in the Stress Satisfaction Scan are already included in it in some form.

Sometimes, however, you may be unable to administer the full employee survey for reasons such as:

• You may have too many other surveys going on
• Your employees may not have the time
• You did the full survey within the last 12 months

The Stress Satisfaction Scan can provide a quick check on the level of stress in your workplace. If employees are more satisfied than stressed, it can confirm it is a good time to focus on other priorities. If employees are more stressed than satisfied, you may wish to do the comprehensive Guarding Minds at Work employee survey. 

The psychosocial factors in Guarding Minds were originally based on the American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, National Council on Measurement in Education, and the Joint Committee on Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing (United States) (2014) practice guidelines for survey development and implementation.

Factor development included consideration of relevant scientific literature pertaining to workplace psychological health and safety, and current Canadian regulatory, legislative, and legal requirements. In addition, a consultation was conducted with select representatives from labour, research, government, and corporate sectors to ensure appropriate language was used in the factors.

The above criteria helped ensure that survey content is:

• Consistent with the objective of determining the degree to which employers mitigate select psychosocial hazards in their workplace, as evaluated by their employees.
• Compatible with current Canadian legal and regulatory guidelines.
• Informed by emerging issues identified by policy makers and sectoral experts.
• Bias-free, non-discriminatory and uses plain language that is clear and easily understandable by all users. 
• Solution-focused, based on a positive psychology approach. 
• Statistically related to and conceptually relevant to the associated factor and definition.
• Answered based on the personal experiences, knowledge, and opinions of any employee without requiring speculation beyond the scope of personal knowledge.
• Relevant across occupations, locations such as urban-remote, and sectors including large-small, private-public, for profit, not for profit, union/non-union, etc.

Based on these criteria, a pilot survey was created and shared with a diverse array of national and international informants to gain additional input into the appropriateness, relevance, and consistency of the survey. Based on this feedback, an initial employee survey was created. This was administered to a stratified sample of working Canadians by Ipsos-Reid in 2009 in order to determine psychometric properties, external norms, and cut points. This was repeated in 2012 and 2016.

Another national survey was developed by Queen’s University in 2020 and 2022 based on the updated version of Guarding Minds. These surveys were conducted by Mental Health Research Canada. 

Read more about the evidence for Guarding Minds at Work, including the responses to the 2021 Institute for Work and Health (IWH) study.  

Analysis of Guarding Minds at Work data is intended only for quality improvement purposes, to enhance the validity and utility of this survey for organizations. Quality improvement activities are not defined as research. Any formal research study would require explicit prior permission from users, as well as ethics approval.

A response rate of 50% or higher is generally considered quite good and representative. Another element to keep in mind is the size of the organization, which can have a significant impact on the interpretation of the results. For example, a 50% response rate from an organization of 20 people would be less representative than a 50% response rate from an organization of 200 people.

Of equal importance to overall percentage of responses is how representative the respondents are of the overall characteristics of the organization. For example, position, gender, union/non-union, etc. In a healthcare organization where participation by one job role (doctors, nurses, orderlies, etc.) is disproportionately low, it would be difficult to draw conclusions about the opinions of this population.

You decide how long you wish to keep your survey open. We recommend a survey cycle period of 2 to 4 weeks, but make sure to consider what else is going on in your workplace. By default, each survey closes automatically at 11:59 pm your local time, one year from when it was created, but you can edit the closing date as needed. Your survey results will still be available after the closing date but no more responses can be added.

Yes, a French version of Guarding Minds at Work is available. Click on the Français link in the top left corner. You can run a bilingual survey using one survey link. You will need to instruct your employees to open the link and then toggle to the French view to complete the survey. All the survey responses – English and French - will be captured in the same report.

At this time, Guarding Minds is only available in English and French.

No, this free resource cannot be modified.

If the language does not suit your organization, you are encouraged to clarify definitions and/or language with your employees ahead of sending the link to the survey. For example, the name of the role responsible for supervising an employee in your organization could be a manager, leader, supervisor, foreman, head cashier, charge nurse or something else. Letting your employees know in advance how to interpret the questions can be helpful. You can review all survey statements here.

You could also use a separate survey instrument to create additional customized questions or statements for your employees to answer.

There is no means for employees to submit additional or qualitative feedback within the survey due to potential impacts on the confidentiality of the survey tool. We encourage employers to consider providing additional opportunities for communication and dialogue, such as a suggestion box or other surveys.

Guarding Minds was originally commissioned in 2007, launched in 2009, and continues to be supported by Canada Life’s Workplace Strategies for Mental Health.

It was developed as a first-of-its-kind assessment tool by pioneering research-practitioners within the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (Guarding Minds at Work 2009: Samra, J., Gilbert, M., Shain, M., Bilsker, D.).

In 2022, Dr. Heather Stuart from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada did a significant update to ensure Guarding Minds aligned with current evidence and the International Organization for Standardization’s ISO 45003:2021¹. The 2022 update also provided a focus on indicators of inclusion, stress and trauma. 

To learn more about the evolution, including the ongoing research and updates, read Guarding Minds – Background. 

¹International Organization for Standardization. (2021). Occupational health and safety management — Psychological health and safety at work — Guidelines for managing psychosocial risks (ISO Standard No. 45003). Retrieved from https://www.iso.org/standard/64283.html

The change from an agreement scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to a frequency scale (never to always) within the survey helps more accurately assess how often these statements, known to protect psychological safety, are being experienced by employees who respond to the survey. Assessing the frequency of these statements better helps highlight strengths and identify opportunities for improvement.

In 2023, the psychosocial factors remain, but significant changes to the scale and survey statements mean that a direct comparison will not be possible. The reason significant changes were made after 10 years of Guarding Minds is that results prior to the pandemic cannot be easily compared to results afterwards, due to the changes we have all experienced.

If you completed a survey prior to this change, and you complete another one now, you may think the new results appear to be “worse”, but in fact they are just more accurate. Strongly agreeing or disagreeing with a statement can be quite different than stating that it always or never happens. This doesn’t mean the psychological health and safety of your workplace has gotten worse. It means you have a more accurate representation of your strengths and where there is room for improvement.

You are welcome to use the website materials. We ask that you do not alter the wording of the content. When you are using the material, you must include the following citation: Samra, J., Gilbert, M., Shain, M., Bilsker, D. (2009-2020), with amendments to the survey by Stuart, H. (2022). Retrieved from https://www.guardingmindsatwork.ca/.

Many steps are taken to protect employee confidentiality. Names are not collected when the survey is completed and are also not required on manually completed surveys. The Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety hosts Guarding Minds at Work and protects all data on its secure server. Only aggregate results are available to the organizational administrator, not individual survey responses.

For the sole purpose of improving this resource, Workplace Strategies for Mental Health will receive a monthly usage report without any identification of individual users or specific organizations.

Additional information and materials are available to help you with communication in the Resources section.

Information provided by an organizational representative and all Guarding Minds at Work survey data will be kept on a secure server in Canada and information specific to the relevant organization and any individual is strictly confidential. The Guarding Minds at Work survey data will be kept anonymous and reported in the aggregate only; individual-level data will not be released without consent. This data will be kept for up to seven years, and then securely deleted. The Canada Life Assurance Company, as part of its Workplace Strategies for Mental Health initiative, and researchers will receive a monthly report of Guarding Minds at Work users. No individual users or organizations will be identified.

Please contact us for further assistance. See below.