The official theme of this World Mental Health Day is ‘It is Time to Prioritise Mental Health in the Workplace’. We couldn’t think of a better person to turn to then, than long time friend of the CTO Craft Community Claire Russell from Mental Health in Business to understand where businesses and the leaders within them are in 2024 and what has changed in recent times.
CTO Craft:
Claire, would you start and kick us off by reminding us a little bit about what your company Mental Health in Business does and the work you do?
Claire:
Yes, absolutely. I started this Mental Health in Business (MHIB) six years ago and we work with businesses across lots and lots of industries, sectors, and the whole purpose behind the work that we do is about helping our clients to create conditions of psychological safety at work. And by that, a place of work where people feel safe and comfortable to be themselves and able to ask for help when they need it.
We deliver things like workplace and mental health First Aid, suicide awareness and suicide intervention training, training for managers and leaders. And then we’ve got a huge suite of seminars and webinars and workshops on a whole range of different subjects.
There’s everything in there from things, like mental health and neurodiversity to menopause through to grief and bereavement through to managing stress and avoiding burnout and everything in between.
So, there’s a real kind of breadth to what we do and the way that we work with clients but it all centres around how we help to create those conditions of psychological safety.
CTO Craft:
Can you bring us right up to date in terms of what has changed (good and bad) in the last 12 to 24 months? What are businesses and individual leaders doing that’s different to before that period?
Claire:
I think there’s been a really big shift over the last couple of years. I think businesses have started to take mental health more seriously and I think that there’s been a shift in most organisational settings. A shift away from seeing mental health as a fluffy nice thing to do, and It’s moved up the agenda. I’m seeing businesses think about workplace mental health in a similar way that they would health and safety.
That’s what we need to see. We need to see it be aligned.
Often in organisations, you’ve got this nice wellbeing proposition over here and then you’ve got health and safety over here. And actually they need to be closely connected, because they are. For most organisations, the health and wellbeing of its people is actually one of the biggest risks that they should be managing.
If a business is managing that risk, then a lot of the other risks within the business will take care of themselves.
In terms of individuals, I see people expect more from their organisations, and I think a lot of that is connected to some of the changed ways of working that were forced upon a lot of us as a result of the pandemic. I think people now expect different things and that kind of flexibility and autonomy and different ways of working. People are able to work in ways that suit them as an individual. I think you’re seeing that more and more and I’m definitely seeing that with some of the tech businesses that we work with.
And I’m seeing people begin to prioritise their own mental health more than perhaps they would have done a few years ago or they would have done pre-pandemic. Giving it the same time and attention that they were to their physical health as well.
CTO Craft:
Do you find businesses are addressing it proactively or are they waiting until they’ve got an issue that they need to address within the business.
Claire:
Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think that often when a business starts on the journey of really addressing workplace mental health and wellbeing that often the initiatives that they will put in place and prioritise tend to be the reactive interventions. Often it’s because there is a problem they’ve become aware of or an issue. Or they might have even had quite a serious crisis or something really quite serious that’s happened. That might be the catalyst for them, starting to do more.
So we’re on that journey with them. They get those reactive interventions in place and then as it begins to mature in their internal proposition and culture matures, then they will start to think about how they can ultimately get to a position where they’re supporting everyone in the organisation to have the best mental health possible and not just dealing with the problems when they happen.
CTO Craft:
Do you have any case studies you can relay that have had positive outcomes where people might be able to recognise a situation they’re dealing with or see something they can implement?
Claire:
Yeah, I met with a client this morning who is just about to start thinking about planning for next year. With that a lot of our clients we have an annual program in place.
She told me that they have some well-being survey results which they were just about to publish and they were blown away by the feedback that they got and specific to the interventions that we’ve put in place or that we’re delivering within the business. They’ve been blown away by the engagement with what we’ve been rolling out. It’s quite a male dominated business, and they weren’t sure how some of these interventions were going to land and how much engagement there would be because, sometimes in a more male-dominated environment, there’ll be a lower level of engagement because some of these things tend to be seen us not necessary and that men don’t necessarily engage with, but there’s been a phenomenally high level of engagement and the feedback has been phenomenal. They’ve seen a significant decrease in sickness absence and a real increase in employee satisfaction engagement, which is just absolutely phenomenal.
She was actually able to give me and a really specific example of two people who came to do one of our training courses within their organisation. (They’ve never done any mental health or related training before.) One of the topics that we cover in mental health First Aid training is suicide, amongst other things.
These two individuals had gone away from the training and between them, within 24 hours had identified somebody that they felt was experiencing a really serious mental health crisis and, between the two of them, they put a plan in place and they approached the individual and ultimately they got that individual into the hands of professionals.
It was a really serious suicide crisis and it was having done that training that gave them the insight and the skills to know what to do. They both came back afterwards and said we wouldn’t have spotted those signs had we not done that training. The individual involved has subsequently come back to the business and shared their experience and what a difference it made to them to receive that support and has literally said, I don’t think I would be alive today had that not happened.
CTO Craft:
The sands continue to shift on remote working and there’s a lot of press about big tech companies bringing people back to the office. How do you see the implications for mental health shifting around that ongoing conversation?
Claire:
There’s a few layers to that around where people are working and whether they’re working remotely a lot or most of the time or even all of the time and how much in-person interactivity they have with their team.
I don’t think it’s necessarily all bad or all good. I think that for some people there are actually a lot of mental health benefits in giving an individual more flexibility to work in a way that suits them if they’re managing a mental health condition.
I think it’s really important to recognise that if people are remote a lot of the time then there are potentially increased risks around isolation and people missing out on human connection and community and those really fundamentally important things actually that we all need. So I think it’s having awareness around that and understanding that different people need different things and that it is about making sure that if people are working remotely that we’re giving them plenty of opportunities to be a part of the community and to experience connection and we’re not allowing people to hide behind screens because people can do that.
I’ve spoken very openly about my own challenges with mental health and I know when my mental health has been low, it’s been easy for me to hide behind a screen. I think the different ways of working that are becoming the norm for us present different challenges for us, in terms of how we look after the people that work for us. It’s really just having a really deep awareness around that, having really good communication, talking to people, being adaptable, being flexible, not having a very fixed mindset in terms of how we think things need to be, understanding that different people need different things.
CTO Craft:
That segues nicely to our next question, which is about the way in which individuals begin to think about their responsibilities. Where do people start in thinking about what they do in terms of leadership role modelling?
Claire:
I could talk on this subject all day!
I think leaders have a really important role to play in any organisation, no matter how big or small the organisation is, the leadership has a really important role to play in setting the tone of the culture that exists within the business and there’s a lot of responsibility that comes with that, and it requires leaders to have self-awareness. To be willing to look inside. To be willing to really hold a mirror up and hold that mirror up to one-another. Perhaps even within a leadership team and to be aware of what behaviours they are modelling for others.
What I often see in organisations is there’ll be an aspirational culture that the business is aiming for and then there’s what’s really happening. And what’s really happening is generally largely being driven by the behaviours of the leadership and we need leaders to be practising what they preach, walking the walk.
If leaders are saying something, we need to see them doing it. We need to see them leading the way so if it is your intention within your business to really create a healthy culture around mental health and if it is your intention that the people within your organisation, have a good healthy life balance, then you need to model behaviours that are congruent with what you’re saying. If you’re saying to your team, listen guys, I don’t want you to be working late at night and I don’t want you to be responding to emails at the weekend. I want you to have downtime and be able to switch off when you’re not working, but then you do the opposite of that and you’re sending them emails at midnight and you’re in your emails all the time when you’re supposed to be on holiday that’s incongruent with what you were saying and so that really undermines the trust that you might have from your team. So, be congruent lead the way. Model healthy behaviours. Have healthy boundaries in place for yourself and show people that it’s okay for them to have healthy boundaries in place as well that allow them to have a healthy work life balance.
CTO Craft:
We know that pressures in startups and scale-ups can come from all sorts of places, the board, colleagues, investors, all sorts of different angles – and whilst it’s generally accepted that taking a break is a good thing, it still feels that a lot of the time, people don’t really understand why taking a breaking thing is important.
Claire:
Yeah, I think this is particularly pertinent to your community. We live in this world where we’re connected all the time. This ‘always on’ culture, and it’s not healthy. One of the biggest mental health challenges facing people working in the tech industry is burnout.
That idea of having to be always connected, that’s a big risk factor and a big contributor to that.
So yeah, it’s great to have two weeks in Spain in the summer. Brilliant. But we also need to be thinking about, what are we doing to look after ourselves day-to-day? What are we doing to ensure that we don’t burn out on a daily basis and that means making self-care a priority and when I talk about self care, I’m not talking about fluffy stuff. I’m not talking about spa days and facials (I am talking about those things, they are very nice, by the way, I really enjoy those things, I advocate for people having those things) but I’m talking about it at a much more, basic level than that.
I’m talking about whatever you need to do on a daily basis to give yourself the energy and the vitality to meet the daily demands of your life. So take a break at lunch time. Put 15 minutes into your calendar that’s protected or half an hour, or an hour or whatever you can put in, but protect that time. Step away from the desk. Go and eat some food away from your desk. Take a walk outside for 10 minutes, get a bit of fresh air. That isn’t impossible to do those things.
I know what it is to be a busy person and I can do those things. I will argue all day long with anybody about this that tells me that they’re too busy, because it’s nonsense. It’s a perception that you’re too busy. It is not true, it’s about being intentional.
Look at your calendar at the beginning of the week and prioritise yourself, look at that week ahead and think, right, where am I going to protect some time for myself during the course of this week? I do this every week and sometimes I’m able to go ‘I could take Thursday afternoon off, great’ and I’ll do that. But some days my week looks like a nightmare, I look ahead and think gosh, there’s not really a lot of time that and I will literally put little five-minute blocks that I can protect, 10 minutes or 20 minutes or whatever it is.
It’s not unusual for me to be sat in my car, outside a client’s office, doing a breath work practice for five minutes before I go in because it’s the only time I’ve got that day to do a bit of self-care. but I’m doing that intentionally and that’s the key really. Being intentional, conscious about prioritising yourself enough that you’re creating that time and space to just do whatever it is that you need to do to stay well.
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Awareness around stress, mental health and burnout should always be front of mind and we’re committed to supporting technology leaders year round as part of the CTO Craft Community. If you’re looking for more information we’ve put some links below or checkout the CTO Craft blog or YouTube channel.
If you’re seeking urgent support either for yourself or a colleague here are some support services for more information:
- The Samaritans offer emotional support 24 hours a day – in full confidence. Call 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org.uk
- Mind infoline on 0300 123 3393 or email info@mind.org.uk.
- Call the CALM helpline on 0800 58 58 58 or use their webchat here.
If you’re looking for more information on this subject, Claire features in these excellent Bytes recordings:
How to create an anti-burnout culture.
Mental Health: Open Conversations to End Stigma
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