Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: We can't just expect our employees to become resilient in a vacuum. We interact with our environment.
So if I drink 10 pints a night and I don't do any exercise and have four hours sleep, you know, I could go to work in the healthiest work environment, but, you know, my well being is not going to be that great. And this opposite applies. You know, I could be the healthiest person in the world, I could be the most resilient person in the world, but if I go into my office and it's really toxic workplace and the workload is like six times larger than I have capacity for, then, you know, know I'm going to suffer in that environment.
So both parties have to be playing a part.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Hello, everyone, I am Jess Chapman and this is Wired to Work, a podcast about how we make work work better for everyone. Now, those of you who have been listening in for a while, or certainly since 2018 when I started recording things, will know that I have been in HR for the last 20 or so years. And over that time I have seen a lot of things in the HR space change. And I'm starting to see things out there that make me question how H is being received and also supported in the organizations that they work in. And so today I'm super excited to have Dr. Jo Burrell join us. She is a clinical psychologist and co founder of Ultimate Resilience, which she will tell you about.
But I came across Jo on the wonderful world of social media and really loved what she was highlighting around the world of HR and support and resilience. So I asked her, I asked her if she'd come and join us today and share her wisdom with us and she lovingly agreed. So thank you very much for that, Jo, I really appreciate it.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: You're very welcome. Lovely to be here.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: So tell the folks who are listening a bit about Ultimate Resilience, your organisation, what you do and why you think that's so important.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: So I actually spent most of my career working in the National Health Service in the UK as a clinical psychologist. So I was a, you know, a leader and a clinician for well over 20 years.
And my business partner, who's also a clinical psychologist, we were colleagues in the nhs.
We started to notice in our clinics that lots of the people that we were seeing who were coming to us with mental health issues, the source of their problems was really in the workplace.
And so that was really the kind of motivation for us to start Ultimate Resilience, because we really wanted to bring our expertise into the Workplace rather than what we were finding is that we were getting people whose problems are, had, you know, had become really big and problematic and were really troublesome for them. We wanted to kind of get to the source of the problem and perhaps catch it before it started to affect people really significantly.
So that's, that was a kind of impetus behind us launching Ultimate Resilience.
And we wanted to bring our clinical expertise and really evidence based approaches because I think there's a lot out there, I mean this was 12 years ago now, but particularly nowadays there's a lot out there that I think is not very evidence based. Right. Not very clinically grounded. So we really wanted to bring that expertise into the workplace. So we started out really doing training and coaching. Those were our main services. And then about five years ago, we got particularly interested in the well being of HR professionals. But I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit more about that.
[00:03:21] Speaker B: Yes, yes. So, well, actually that's a good jumping off point. So what caused the switch? Why did you go from kind of broadview down to hr?
[00:03:31] Speaker A: So if we cast our minds back five years or so, obviously we were in the midst of a global, global pandemic at that time and we'd been running for sort of, you know, six years or so. And HR professionals had traditionally been the people who commissioned our services but didn't necessarily utilize them.
And around that time, about six years ago, suddenly we noticed a shift and that was that increasingly HR and people professionals were asking for help for themselves.
And I guess we just thought this was a notable change, you know, and we wondered what data was out there that told us something about the mental wellbeing of HR professionals and why they might be suddenly reaching out in the way that they were. And of course we'd got to know lots of HR professionals too. So we were hearing anecdotally about the sorts of pressures and challenges that they faced in their role, which I think increased significantly during the pandemic, you know, yourself, and I'm sure lots of people listening remember it, you know, or otherwise.
But I suspect, and we suspected that actually this was a catalyst time, it was a time that was, that was a catalyst. But actually there were issues that were rumbling around even before the pandemic that were contributing negatively to people's mental well being. So we said, okay, what data is out there about the mental wellbeing of HR professionals? And we looked and we looked and we looked and we found pretty much nothing really. And that was quite surprising. Cause, you know, if you look for data about the mental health of lawyers, for example, or nurses. I can guarantee you'd find something that in and of itself was a notable thing. You know, there was a real data gap.
And so we decided to gather some data and we were really interested to find out, I guess, whether what we were hearing anecdotally and seeing in our day to day practice would be reflected in the data that we gathered. And that first survey we launched in 2023 and the report came out in 2024 and we have subsequently run two further surveys and you know, having released some data which was actually quite stark data and you know, I'll go on and talk a little bit about the 2026 data shortly.
But it really painted a very stark picture, a shocking picture, which was actually worse than we'd expected.
[00:06:07] Speaker B: Right.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: And I think that then kind of captured the minds of people who perhaps had been aware that there were issues around, but people weren't really talking about it. And I think it kind of really caught the attention of people and that in and of itself kind of catapulted us down a journey, a route that we'd really not expected to go down. And now actually almost all of what we do is working directly with HR professionals. So supporting HR professionals.
[00:06:38] Speaker B: Love it. Yes. To what extent do you. So I think Covid was an interesting period in human history, never mind anything else. And we look back in time, we'll be like, okay, this is a defining moment.
But I'm really interested in your comment around how much of this existed before COVID because part of the work that we do in Neuro Works, which is the other side of my, my brain is around the fact we are still running workplaces based on management models from the 1900s where people are units of production and your goal is to squeeze as much productivity out of people as possible in however you manage to do it. Instead of recognizing that we have much greater understanding today of how people function, why they do what they do, what we need to be healthy and well in today's environment and designing workplaces for that. And my sense was that to your point, those cracks were already there. What all Covid did was kind of speed up the extent to which we felt it. And the people who were closed filling in those gaps, being hr, suddenly got overwhelmed by an avalanche of new needs that they didn't have the capacity to handle before. Is that kind of what you're like? What does, what does the research show you for sure?
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Yes, I think so. I mean, I think, I mean, because we didn't conduct any research before 2023.
[00:07:54] Speaker B: We don't know
[00:07:57] Speaker A: what the factors were. But what I suspect is, and what I guess, you know, over time, you know, we've come to understand HR and the profession. Obviously I've never worked in HR myself, so I'm only looking at it from the outside.
But I think there's a load of really interesting factors and I, you know, I could talk to you for the rest of the day about this and
[00:08:16] Speaker B: maybe we will at some other time,
[00:08:19] Speaker A: but I think there's a load of interesting factors. I think there's the fact that the profession has changed insurmountably over the last 20 to 30 years. Okay. When I first, you know, worked as a clinical psychologist, you know, as a young clinical psychologist, HR was essentially an admin role. You know, it was personnel.
It's changed exponentially since then. And that, you know, that's no bad thing. It's become professionalized, the remit has broadened. I think, you know, HR is much more front and center of businesses and I think that's a great development, you know, because we're it. It's a role that thinks about us as humans.
And so that's a great thing. But I think with it has become, with that development has come a huge broadening of the remit. Lots of additional things have come along. They've been added on and bolted onto the role.
And HR have come to be seen as the people who are responsible for well being. What's one of the additional things?
And so HR are the people that you go to if you've got a well being concern.
And I think that alongside that development, that change that's happened around the actual role itself and the profession itself, there's been very little mind to what's the impact of that change on the people who are delivering those services, that function. What's the impact on that function?
And I think there's also been a cultural kind of narrative around which is HR professionals don't need anything. They cope behind the scenes. They are the copas. They are resilient, they, you know, consummate professionals.
[00:10:06] Speaker B: Yes. No emotions, you know, and a big
[00:10:09] Speaker A: expectation that you should cope. And actually, to your point about us being parts of the machine rather than human beings, I think that's, you know, we cannot make that assumption. We cannot make the assumption that people can just withstand more and more and more and more and often, you know, now that I've got to know lots of, you know, HR professionals and I'm working incredibly closely with them, I'm talking about compassion fatigue, I'm talking about vicarious trauma, I'm talking about moral injury. You know, we cannot expect a whole profession to withstand all of that without any support or even recognition that that's going to have an impact on them.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: So when we look at what people say they want out of the workplace today, you can, you can map the trend over time. So when I first started in hr, leaders were technical experts who needed to know the job and teach you how to do the job. And then we became like this whole thing about human capital and people and maximizing potential. But in the last kind of 10 years, even slightly prior to Covid, but I think accelerated through Covid, we've seen much more of a shift in people seeing their leader in particular as someone who's supposed to help with their general well being, a part of their kind of social circle.
And for me, HR is a shock absorber. Right. So what happens is if you're expecting your leader to know how to handle your personal life, interaction with work and be part of your support network. Well, we never train leaders to do any of that. And so the leader is going to go, I have no idea how to cope with this mental health issue, this accommodation need, this person's challenges, this neurodiversity, diversity requirements. I don't feel equipped, and we hear it regularly in our work. I don't feel equipped and I'm petrified to make a mistake. And who are the people that they go to to hr, but they all go to hr. So we're concentra, all of the friction of the organization in one function. And HR is supposed to be expert in a whole manner of things. And obviously when we do leadership training, we talk about the fact that to be a leader in today's world, you're not likely to be capable of doing everything that's expected of you. Well, that's true for me, for HR too. I'm a little weird in that my HR background is in a vast variety of bits and pieces of things, including bits of neuroscience and bits of learning and those types of things. But most HR people are trained to do technically a function like compensation, union relations.
We don't, we're not training people broadly in understanding psychology even, or neuroscience or emotional regulation or any of those things. And yet when we go into the workplace, we expect them to be experts in all of that. And I don't like that. Just to me that doesn't make sense. And that's one of the things I see in terms of creating this, this load for people.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. And so I guess, you know, I will talk a bit more about the kind of work that we do now, but you know, a feature of the work that we do is about, I guess, skilling HR professionals up in those psychological skills, you know, that, that you need them because, you know, you're the one person in the organization that is like, for example, you know, I, I speak to people all the time who I, I'm kind of flabbergasted sometimes when they tell me some of the things that they tell me. But there's one standalone HR professional in an organization of 250 people and sadly a colleague dies and the CEO sends an email out to everyone saying if you need to talk to anyone, go to, Wait a minute. You know, you're that one person that anyone who's distressed, who's been triggered, who, you know, who's struggling at work, who's overwhelmed, you're the one person that everyone goes to and you haven't been trained in grief counseling.
So what do you do?
And it's a huge responsibility.
And that's one example of the many, many that I hear from people where they're expected to deliver something that they're really not trained to and actually struggle to know how to respond because they feel the hue, they, they, they feel the human need and they want to help and they feel a responsibility towards people.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I, so I did a session last year for the Chartered HR Professional association here, talking about having a seat at the table because I think the other thing that happens for HR people to your point, is we often enter the profession because we want to be helpers. Right? We enter the profession because we. Not true for everybody, but for a large portion of us, we end the profession because we're like, we want to make work a better place.
So then when someone comes with a need, one, we don't want to say no. Two, it's a smack to our personal self esteem and how we and our own general sense of competence if we say no, and then we're left wondering what happens to that person. If we say no, we're also rewarded for saying yes. Right. So when the leader can't cope and comes to HR and HR come in and help but save the day, maybe then the leader's like, oh my God, I wouldn't be able to do this without you. And that ticks all the dopamine release buttons. And then we actually get stuck in this loop of helping to almost the detriment of ourselves and I think one of the biggest things for HR folks is how do you learn to say, I'm not equipped to do that? Like, that's not something I. I can do. Because it's also dangerous in places.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Like, if we're doing work on that level and we don't have the skill set to do that. So I was in a conversation with the CEO this week, working with somebody in their team, and I said to them, I do not. I do not have the skills to help this person at the level of help that they need. They need to be talking to a therapist or a clinical psychologist who has a background I do not have. I can help facilitate that conversation. I can help guide that conversation. But ultimately I'm not actually being kind and helpful if try and help this person. And I think those things are important for us to think about, too, as HR professionals, because sometimes we aren't the right person to do the help.
[00:15:42] Speaker A: Totally, totally. And that's about boundaries, you know, And I. And I think that's in and of itself a conversation that's very hard, as you. For the reasons you've described, very hard for a lot of people to. To, you know, to engage in. And they. They feel terrible about saying no. And they. And they are on the receiving end of this massive expectation, oh, you'll sort it out, you'll deal with it. And so then they feel bad if they're not dealing.
But actually, sometimes it is just equipping people with a line or two lines or sentences that they can say. In this scenario, this is what I'm going to say. You know, I'm not trained to do this. And therefore, here's the place that you can go. I can signpost you or. And having that sense of when to sort of, you know, to bring in that boundary is really important. Hard to do, but it's really important. Yeah.
[00:16:31] Speaker B: Yes, I. So it's a little easier on my team. I think they have the.
They have the out of me. So I'm like, at any point you are uncomfortable. Your stock answer is, I need to have a chat with Jess about this. Let me take it away and I'll come back to you. To give them a buffer in suddenly being expected to handle things kind of on the spot, but when you're wired to help that badly, sometimes it's hard to kind of have that momentary pause, and we've got to practice that behavior before we end up in that space. So we can be able to do that. Yeah, that's good. Absolutely.
[00:16:59] Speaker A: And that was what I was trained to do, you know, as part of my training I was trained to do exactly that. Because when you're dealing with beings, you're dealing with unique people and therefore unique dynamics, unique situations. And there's always going to be a time when you go, oh, do you know what, don't know what to do here? And it's okay to say, can I just go away and think about this? I'm going to consult someone, I'm going to come back.
It's always fine to say that.
[00:17:27] Speaker B: So tell us a bit more about the, the survey results. So I will say. So the survey is in the uk, Correct. It's the UK population. So some people might be listening to this and going, well we're in Canada.
So two things I would to that one is to your earlier point, there's not a lot of data here. Right there I went looking for data on mental well being of Canadian HR professionals. I found one survey which is a relatively small population of people, but it says that 47% of HR professionals in Canada are experiencing burnout.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Okay. Yes.
So I would slightly correct you in the sense that we run this survey in the UK but we don't actually know where the responses are based.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Okay, perfect, thank you.
[00:18:09] Speaker A: So I would say that, you know, my guess would be the, the overall majority of people who are based in the UK because that's the population that we're most connected to. But you know, we've done some webinars recently and we've had people join us from all over the world. So it's very possible that in there, in the mix we've got people from Canada, we've got people from Asia, we've got people know Africa from the rest of Europe, all over the place. But I think probably the large majority is the uk. Yes.
[00:18:41] Speaker B: Now I, as a Brit who came to Canada, I'll say a couple of things to that too, which is Covid happened everywhere.
[00:18:47] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:47] Speaker B: And HR here is not dramatically different to HR in the uk Nor is the cultural dynamic of Canada massively different to the cultural dynamics of the uk. So you know, if someone's sitting well, it's a different country. Actually I don't think, I think if you ran the same type of survey on a broader spectrum here, you'd get the same kind of results as you're going to get get from what you're, what you did in your survey.
[00:19:06] Speaker A: And certainly my contact with people in, you know, America, Iceland, I was on a podcast, you know, an Icelandic podcast, you know, Germany, various different places they Say the same thing as you. I think actually the culture and the challenges that HR are facing are pretty much the same.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Universal.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: Yeah. As you know, we ran this survey last year and the year before we. This year we had 1,447 respondents, a pretty similar number to our response rate last year.
And I would say that in terms of the kind of the picture across the three years of the survey, it's pretty similar. So what we're uncovering is a fairly consistent picture of high levels of distress and mental health issues amongst HR professionals. And just to say something a little bit about the design, this survey includes already existing pre existing standardised questionnaires for things like depression, anxiety, burnout, wellbeing. We wanted to make sure we were using statistically sound and robust measures. So these are measures that I would have used in my clinical work, actually, some of them to screen people to establish whether they were suffering from sort of significant mental health issues.
So some of our key findings, we found that 74% of our respondents were experiencing symptoms of depression and 44% met the criteria for clinically significant symptoms.
And that figure, if you compare it with the UK general population, is two and a half times higher than rates of depression in the general population.
For anxiety, a very similar picture. So 73% of respondents with symptoms of anxiety, 40% meeting the clinical threshold, and again just over two and a half times higher the rate in the general population.
In terms of burnout, 62% likely suffering from burnout and a further 12% at risk of burnout. So we've got 74%, you've got concerning sort of symptoms and in terms of wellbeing, and I'll stop after that next one.
In terms of wellbeing, low, low levels of Wellbeing evident in 63% of our respondents and 74% scoring below the UK population average for wellbeing.
[00:21:44] Speaker B: Yeah, it's pretty. Pretty stark picture. Right. Like three quarters of the people who responded are at risk or experiencing burnout. Like, that's.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And for me as a clinician, you know, people who are meeting the criteria for clinical conditions, anxiety and depression, you know, that's really concerning because those are the people. You know, had I seen these people in my clinics when I was working in the nhs, you know, those are the people that I would have been taking action on. You know, I would have been referring for medication, I would have been thinking about therapy. I would certainly have been doing a more thorough assessment to establish whether those things were required. So we'd need to be taking action on those people. And we're talking, you know, 44% of people meeting the threshold for depression. That's half, almost half of HR professionals.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: And yet we're still having them go to work and expecting them to absorb the emotional and cognitive load of everybody else's challenges on top of how they're currently feeling.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: Yeah, and they're responsible for well being. I mean, there's an irony there, isn't there? Because you've got a function that's responsible for well being and yet their wellbeing is likely to be a lot worse than everyone else in the organisation.
[00:23:00] Speaker B: Do you think we have a.
What's the right word? A self perception problem? Like your, your comment earlier about the resilience expectation. I think that some of that is self driven too. Like we hold ourselves, we think we are supposed to be the repository of everybody else's challenges and we're supposed to be able to carry the load. Do you have a view on how much of this might be unrealistic? Workplace expectations versus our own internal dialogues?
[00:23:32] Speaker A: You know, I think it's a joint project.
You know, the reality is it's a narrative that we've all bought into and I think that it's not, you know, I think it's important to highlight that certainly in the uk, I mean, I've looked at the figures and something like 75% of HR professionals are female.
So, you know, there's a connection, isn't there, between the job and the work and the fact that this is a predominantly female profession and women are socialized into caring roles.
We're socialized to be carers and to feel that. And we. So we grow up with an expectation that that's the way that we should be, that we should put other people's needs first, that a caring role is the right role for us to be in, that we shouldn't put on our own needs first. And so there's that already there in our DNA before we even go into the workplace. And then of course we're all, you know, women are much more predominant in profess that are people facing. So we're attracted to jobs that are about caring, but we've got that narrative in our DNA already when we go into the workplace and then we're met with, you know, we contrive together, us and the organizations to create this narrative or this expectation that we can just carry the load, you know, and it's convenient for organizations to have that expectation, as I think you alluded to earlier. It's like oh, it's tricky and it's difficult and it's messy and I don't want to deal with it. Oh, it's good because we've got HR and they can do it, deal with it, you know, so it's great. You know, we'd have to think about it.
[00:25:09] Speaker B: Yeah, we are the stress relievers, which is great, but you're not actually doing anything to relieve the stress of the stress relievers. So how long do you, how long do we think that this can go on for? I'm having a conversation next week with the HR Professional Society in Nova Scotia about how we ended up here as a profession and like, where do we go with it? For the organizations that have, would have strategic hr, the frame is normally that HR builds the framework, the leaders deploy the framework, going to HR advisers on the framework, and that that's a reasonably sensible, logical setup for things. Right. You ask the people expert to create the rules, then leaders are supposed to manage the rules, and HR helps when there's challenge.
That only works though, if leaders know how to do the how. Right. And so I, I think in, in our world, we'd say that we have seen a decline in the last probably four or five years since COVID in the extent to which we're seeing organizations focus on leadership development too. Right. But we aren't developing HR people at all beyond the technical function of do you know how to do compensation evaluation? Have you done your investigation training? Have you done your collective bargaining training? Now, I'm not knocking any of those things. We need the technical skills to do the job. But in today's world, like, do you know what emotional regulation looks like? Do you know how to tell if somebody's dysregulated or not, that you don't know how to deal with this person? And do you know where the line is? And we aren't actually teaching anybody those skills to be able to handle it. And so expecting HR to be able to do that, I think is a misnomer. And so that piece about the CEO that says if you've got a problem, go to hr, it's not wrong in the way that we've set HR up as a function, but we haven't backstopped that function to do that and to do it en masse.
[00:26:46] Speaker A: And we're living in an increasingly complex world, aren't we? And so that, I mean, I think that's, you know, there's something about that in our data that the outcome of that lands on the, in the laps of HR professionals. In all sorts of different ways. You know, we've got, we've got, you know, employees who are experiencing higher rates of mental health issues. We've got so much uncertainty and therefore anxiety and anger and frustration and, you know, fear, you know, all that perma crisis stuff that's going on and it's filtering into the workplace and HR are on the receiving end of it.
[00:27:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, we had a conversation. So the two, two sessions we recorded last week was one with Angie Cockrell, who's the Easier Thrive, which is an organization that helps homeless people and those folks who are getting out of the sex trafficking business.
And she was talking about Trau informed workplaces and that we're still really only at the beginning. And I don't know, I don't know any organizations that actually train HR people in understanding trauma informed works. And then interestingly, Ashley, who came in the afternoon, her whole research background is in climate grief, which is a whole field that I didn't even know existed around the impact, particularly here in Canada for indigenous people who live so closely tied to the environment and to the land and the, and the sense of loss that people are carrying around, the changes to environment. These conversations, we're just starting to have the conversation. But then the expectation is at HR people that we're somehow experts in some of that stuff. So when a leader gets a question, we're supposed to backstop it and kind of fill it in, which I don't know, is realistic with where we are.
So how do you, what are some of the things that you do at Ultimate Resilience to help? Like what are the things, some of the things that you would suggest we can do about it?
[00:28:26] Speaker A: One thing I would say from our data is that we ask people, do you feel supported at work in relation to your mental wellbeing? And only 13% said they felt well supported.
So that's a place, let's start there, shall we?
And actually this year we did add a question that we hadn't asked in previous years, which is, have you used accessed your employee benefits in the last year in relation to your mental wellbeing needs? And only around a quarter said they had accessed those benefits. And so what we've got is we've got a picture of people where there's really high levels of distress and difficulty in terms of mental wellbeing, low levels of support or take up of support where it is there.
So that gives us some clues.
You know, it gives, I think that, you know, firstly it speaks a little bit to what we've been talking about already, which is that there's reluctance in HR professionals themselves to put themselves forward, to put their hands up and say they need something. You know, I've heard people say, oh, you know, we've got, I don't know, coaching in our organization, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't step up and take it. I think that's for other people.
So there's a reluctance to actually say I need help and to access those services.
But I think that there's also an issue about, you know, services or support initiatives that are fit for purpose.
And I think the challenges that HR professionals face are very specific and unique to their, you know, to their roles.
And so actually what we should be delivering is something that is, is, you know, fit for purpose, that suits their needs and particularly helps them around the kind of thorny emotional toll stuff, the compassion fatigue, the vicarious trauma, the ethical decisions. You know, I mean, that fact that you're walking that really thin tightrope between the needs of the organization and the needs of the employees means that you're very frequently in situations where you feel, feel, you know, challenged. You know, you're in a dilemma around, that's, that's difficult to hold. Ethical dilemmas are tough. You know, I know from my own job that it's really difficult.
So I think there needs to be a tailored approach. I think it needs to be a regular, ongoing approach. We cannot be fixing the sorts of difficulties that we've been talking about today with a one off training session.
[00:30:55] Speaker B: Lunch and learn. Yes, we did a lunch and learn in trauma informed workplaces. Congratulations.
[00:30:58] Speaker A: Yes, we Fruit Fridays or yoga Wednesdays. Do you know what I mean? It's not happening. You know, we can't do that.
And so, you know, when we uncovered this data, we asked ourselves what can we offer? What can we, what, what can we offer HR professionals that, that will help them? And, and I guess very quickly it dawned on us that we'd already been experiencing a source of support and help that has been really useful to us all the way through our careers, which is clinical supervision.
You know, it is embedded in our profession in a way that I don't think it is in many other professions. Right from the moment you start training, you are training in supervision skills and techniques and you are receiving supervision.
So as soon as you qualify, you're ready to supervise other people, the people who are coming up behind you and you are being supervised by the people ahead of you. So it's a completely self sustainable system of support.
It's a regular System of support. You have it all the time. The expectation, in fact, it's seen as, you know, professional good practice, ethically good practice to be engaging in regular supervision. And it's a place where you learn, you develop your skills and your techniques and your knowledge, but it's also a place where you can process and think about and discuss and resolve the emotional impact of the work.
[00:32:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:32:20] Speaker A: So if you've got an ethical dilemma or if you don't quite know how to do something or deal with an employee, or if you feel traumatized by something that's happened, you've got a space where you can talk about it and process it. And importantly, you know, what that means is you go home at the end of the day, having left all that stuff there. You know, it's meant to be something you do in the working day. You leave it there, you go home and then your leisure time, your free time is there for you to rest and recuperate and then be ready for your, you know, for the next day. Yeah, so that was why we launched our HR supervision service, because we felt actually it needed to be a, you know, a source of support which is ongoing, which is robust. And of course there's a clear evidence base for this source of support too. It already exists because supervision exists in healthcare settings and other settings. There's a good evidence base for it and it needs to be ongoing and there as part of your job, not just a one off thing.
Because if it's just a one off thing, then we just, all we do is we kind of, we get into coping mode and actually what happens is we shut down.
And I, you know, I speak to someone yesterday who said, you know, they want to, they don't want to shut down emotionally because one of the reasons they do the job is because they want to work with people, they want to feel, they want to bring their empathy. And if they shut down emotionally as a way of coping with the onslaught of stuff that they're having to deal with, then they can't be empathic.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And it's actually that toys the thing I wanted to ask you about because there's two examples that came up for me last week and I had a view on these.
So one was someone was complaining to me that their HR people were robots. So I would put that in the shutdown camp.
The other was an example on social media where a person, and forgive me, I don't remember who it was, but someone was talking about a bad experience they had being laid off early in their career. Which, yes, that's a thing. But they were talking about the HR component at the time, and that that department used to have an ax that they passed around when the person was doing layoff work. And it was kind of like a joke. And they were talking about how atrocious that behavior is. And my, my, my first reaction to that was, how much of that is defensive?
[00:34:43] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:34:44] Speaker B: How much of that is. This is horrific. We're having to do mass layoffs. If we don't find a way to minimize how big a deal this is for us, we, we're gonna carry this around. Right. But for the outside perspective, that makes HR seem callous, unkind, unthoughtful. But I was like, nobody gets into HR with that headspace. Like that, for me, is a minimizing behavior because you don't know how to cope with what it is you are experiencing. Is that kind of what your take would be?
[00:35:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. And I think it's really important point. And it reminds me that I spoke to a police officer once who said that there've been times when he and his colleagues have sat in a car before going into a house to tell someone that their relative has d and laughed. And I think it's the same thing. It's like, I don't know how to cope with this. It's like my, my psyche can't compute.
It sounds on the surface like it's really. I mean, that's a hideous thing to hear, you know, but it is. That's exactly what's happening. I think it's like, I can't cope with this, you know, and there's no system around me which is holding me. What a horrendous thing to have to do, you know, and so we minimize it, like you said. We kind of make lighter of it as it's the only way to cope.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: And I, you know, just to say that I, you know, I think that HR on the receiving end of quite a backlash, certainly in the uk and I don't know if the same thing's happening.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: That was the other thing I wrote down. Right. I'm seeing a lot of posts about how HR are horrible and do the organization's bidding and this, that, and the other one. I'm like, okay, generally, I think the world needs to take a collective breath and start thinking about, until you live in somebody else's shoes, you have no idea what it is to be them. So let's assume good intention. The world will be a lot nicer if we could do that, not how we're wired. So I get it. But yeah, like we see that here. There are a lot of posts about how HR is either unkind or the police of the organization.
Or on the flip side, I do hear sometimes from senior leaders that HR takes the employee side in things and is too soft and wishy washy. And and to your earlier point, like one of the things I talked about in the session I did last year was our job is hard because we walk the line. We walk the line all the time. And you actually have no friends and you have no camp that you are part of and you show up in every room thinking about how do you mediate all the positions in the room. Like the job never stops being emotionally and mentally taxing if you're doing it well. So to your point, we need places to offload the burden that that creates. Or you take it home, right. And then you never get recovery time, right. Because then you go home to all the stresses of home too. If you are like me, sandwich generation and all the rest of it, right. When do you ever shut down and switch off?
[00:37:19] Speaker A: And back to my point about, you know, being predominantly female profession too, too. You know, you've got caring responsibilities. You know, something like, you know, something like 95% of unpaid caring responsibilities land on women.
And so you know that in the midst of the, the life that you lead, you've got all that going on at home as well.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Now I do think so. One of the conversations I've been having a lot lately is about our approach to resilience and that we, at least here in Canada, in the work that we do, do I see resilience as being something we've somehow managed to frame as being an individual thing. So not saying it's not like I understand we all appraise a situation, determine if we can cope, et cetera, et cetera, and we can work on that.
But I also believe that we've created systemic issues in work that make it increasingly difficult for people to have resilience in the workplace and, and how we do about that. So if you were chatting to a CEO or a senior leader, what would you want them to know or think about in terms of trying to create a workplace that had more well being or better resilience?
[00:38:23] Speaker A: I guess I would want them to know that it's a joint effort, you know, that we have to work. We can't just expect our employees to become resilient in a vacuum. Like we interact with our environment.
So, you know, I've got a responsibility when it thinks it wanted, you know, to be thinking about my own well being and my resilience. So, you know, if I drink 10 pints a night and I curry every night and you know, and don't do any exercise and have four hours sleep, you know, I could live in, I could go to work in the healthiest work environment, but you know, my wellbeing's not going to be that great.
[00:39:03] Speaker B: Right.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: And this opposite applies. You know, I could be the healthiest person in the world, I could be the most resilient person in the world. But if I go into my office and it's really toxic workplace and, and the workload is like six times larger than I have capacity for, I'm going to suffer in that environment.
So both parties have to be playing a part. And organizations I think, and I think that, you know, going right back to the beginning when I started talking about why we went, why we launched our business, I think one of the problems that we saw in organizations was that their understanding of how to support and protect people's wellbeing was incredibly naive. I think, you know, as a healthcare professional, for me it was like, my God, well, you know, it was, there was this real disconnect. And I think that, you know, if you're worried about people's stress, you have to look at what the sources of stress are.
You know, you don't just bring in a stress workshop, you know, you don't just react to the fact that people are stressed. You have to go back to the beginning to the source of the stress and understand what that is. And actually I think you get some, sometimes you get some really interesting answers to that question about sources of stress. It's different in different organizations, but I think organizations have a real responsibility to do that, to investigate the sources of the problem and then to build their strategy based on what they find rather than just suddenly go, oh, I've heard that there's this thing, you know, mental health first aid.
[00:40:36] Speaker B: I've heard, let's pick 12 people from across the organization who can go and do mental health first aid. Look, we've done our mental health stuff for this year. Extra excellent now.
[00:40:44] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
And that's, you know, nothing against mental health first aid if it's applied right and done right. I think there are ways of doing it that, you know, are more effective than others. But you can't just send someone on a two day training course and then expect the whole organization to be protected against any sort of, sort of mental health struggle. At all.
[00:41:05] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:06] Speaker A: So I think that that's the thing I would say to CEOs and organizations. You need to look at the source and then you need to build your strategy on, on what you find. Find from that investigation.
[00:41:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean that's inherently extremely sensible and practical approach to things. I think one of the hiccups is that the people that we need to lead that work are also hr. Right. And so what will happen is that the CEO comes down and says, okay, we need to know if our people are stressed. Go find out if our people are stressed and what's stressing them. HR. And HRs. Like, I've already got 9,765 things today, you want me to do that on top of everything else. And so, and also I will say some of the work that we're starting to look at in terms of. Terms of contributing stress factors in workplaces, because I think part of the problem is people don't know how to do that work. Right. So how do I, unless I, I go survey everybody and then what I'm going to get is a point in time view of what's happening right now. It's going to vary greatly from person to person. So there's this kind of deer in the headlights thing of yeah, I think we've got a problem. But when I talk to people, I get such different answers on what's the problem.
Which you need to create some coherent frameworks for people around what do you actually, what are the contributing cognitive load factors in workplaces and how do you assess your organization for them so that there's a benchmark norm. And the other thing that I would probably say to CEOs and senior leaders is I don't know that we consider people expertise in the same way that we consider other technical expertise. Like if you're in it today, there is a generally accepted idea that you'll run the IT function, but you're going to need to bring in outsource providers for areas of expertise that are not the core skill set of the business. Right.
But I don't know that we've got there yet with people. I still think that. Or you deal with people. So people are like, if it's people, you can deal with all the people stuff instead of going, actually maybe we need to have an organization that specializes in this on speed dial. And we need to have an organization specializes on this and speed dial and that HR is then backstopped with all the support services that they, that they need. I still come across organizations that don't even think they need HR and tell me they don't have any people problems. And I'm like, if you don't think you have any people problems, you're not talking about to people or they're not talking to you, like, not in this world, not with the data we get, like, that's not happening.
[00:43:17] Speaker A: I think that also speaks to a kind of another narrative that we sort of collude around.
In the culture of hr. There's something of a need to prove yourselves.
Do you know what I mean? And so there is that sense of like. And I think it's connected again to being predominantly female, gender related.
[00:43:38] Speaker B: Totally agree.
[00:43:39] Speaker A: Difficulties having a voice and having influence and being in positions of power and all those sorts of things. And so that can lead to a kind of, yes, I can do that, yes, I can do that. Yes, I can do that. Yes, I can. And a reluctance to say, actually, I don't know how to do that, or that's not in my remit, or that's not for me.
And again, an expectation or a hope from the wider organization, they can just send stuff your way and you'll sort it.
[00:44:05] Speaker B: Yeah. When actually, I think you get more traction by saying that is a specialist skill.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: Skill. Yes, I have.
[00:44:12] Speaker B: So here's my recommendation. I mean, most of the senior leaders I would work with or have worked with over the years don't have any problem with that narrative. Like, if you sat down with them and said this, let me explain to you what this is and how it works and what we need. Here's my recommendation on how we address it. They're usually open. Budget might be a different question, but usually open to the concept of it. But to your point, I think that we think that proving our ability is doing more. When I think proving our ability is doing the bits that we know how to do well and saying no to the rest and being able. Able to coach a leader and say to a leader, I fully understand what you're going through and I'm here to help you, but I'm here to help you. Not to do it for you, not to take your monkey, not deliver the solution for you. And it's in the coaching and upskilling of the people that we create the capacity in the organization that allows us the breathing room. If we keep saying yes to everything all the time, all we do is drown ourselves in more work and we never create the capacity in the organization to breathe. So, yeah, I would totally agree with you. Totally agree with you. Awesome.
Do you have any My last question, do you have any practical. So if I'm an HR person listening to this and going, oh my God,
[00:45:15] Speaker A: yes, that is my life.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: Do you have any practical suggestions for something that someone can do this week to help them with the load that they are carrying?
[00:45:25] Speaker A: Well, you know, one of the things that I talk about a lot is the importance of social support. You know, it sounds like a small thing, but we know really, really established research, and you'll be aware of this too, that our social network networks, you know, serve this really important function in terms of protecting our well being and our mental health. So if you have a good strong social network, even if it's a small one, you know, you're, you're buffered against stress, you cope much better than with stress, you fare much better psychologically. And actually, I think this is particularly pertinent for HR people because you often feel isolated, you often feel misunderstood, you often feel like people don't really get what you do and who you are and so on.
And I've seen data which has shown that even HR people who are working as part of big HR teams are still saying they feel lonely and isolated.
So I think that that kind of connection piece is incredibly important.
So one thing that you can do is make sure you have an ally, an anchor, a person. Who is it? You think about who it is. It might be someone in your organization, it might be someone outside your organization.
The great thing about the Internet is that we can connect with people across the globe as part of networks. There are all sorts of networks on LinkedIn, on, you know, also there are sector specific HR networks, there are internal networks. You know, there are lots of places where we can connect and I would encourage you to do that, to just connect with someone else and ideally someone who gets it, who understands what it's like for you because that gives you an opportunity in an informal way to talk about what it's really like to be doing this job. You know, the reality, not, not the pretend, the thing that we think it is the reality of doing this job.
Make sure you do that. Find your person and connect with them and do it on a regular basis.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: Love it. Love it. Brilliant. Jo, I could chat to you for hours about this and I perhaps would like to at some later date. But thank you so much for coming on for now and for sharing that wisdom with us. We will, when the survey is released, because it's not out yet, we will share the link with everybody so that they can go read the findings of the data. And if you're someone in HR or in charge of an organization, I'd strongly encourage you to have a look and build your awareness of what is actually happening for HR folks or the people that own HR in your organization and think about how do we help provide that support and help them to cope with the load that they are carrying. Thank you so much for having me.
[00:47:56] Speaker A: It's been a pleasure.
[00:47:58] Speaker B: So that's a wrap for today. Thank you very much for joining in, and if you liked our conversation today, please do like and subscribe. You can find all of our episodes of the podcast Wired for Work and our previous incarnation, Unlocking your People, on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. You can also check out our websites E3CA and Neuroworks CA for more information about what we do in the wonderful world of work. So thanks again for joining in, and I look forward to seeing you on another episode.
