Your Mind Matters With Maria Kempinska – Graeme Godfrey & Anita Smith, Dehumanising Employees

It is 20 years ago since boo.com collapsed. It was an overnight success and was hailed as the future of E Tailing, otherwise known as E Commerce. The owners were correct, but it was too soon and their shares plummeted. Since then all businesses have adopted technology to advance ease of communication internally and externally to the customer. Marketing is quicker with a widespread reach, data capture is easier, reporting is seemingly efficient and central organization structures enable a global reach. But what of the negative impact of technology on the mental well being of company employees on any level including juniors and right up to leaders? I am Dr. Maria Kampinska, a qualified psychotherapist and business owner and this is yous Mind Matters on Women's Radio Station and Men's Radio Station. Today's discussion is on the topic Are organizations Dehumanizing employees? I'm very proud to introduce my guests who will join in the conversation and they are Anita Smith and Graeme Godfrey. Let me first welcome Anita. Please tell me everybody, can you please tell me and everyone about yourself, your background and your experiences. Thank you Maria I retired from the Police Service after 20 years in a police staff role and I retired in 2017. I was lucky enough to be able to take voluntary redundancy and early retirement because I'd reached the magic age of 55 and that was still a very significant birthday for me. Reaching that age felt that I suddenly had all of these doors open and have freedom of choice to go through whichever one I pleased and since that time I've become a town councillor, I've run as a district Councillor, I've done some contract work with Bristol University working with one of their research groups and I'm also a part time ceremonies officer or registrar. I'm also quite creative and class myself as an environmental artist, creating outside artwork using mosaics, glass and creating willow sculptures. Now during my time with the police I worked as a PA to four Chief Constables and it was fascinating to be an observer at a strategic level to some of the decision making and direction of the police service. During that time I also decided to further my education and studied for an MBA which I did part time. My dissertation was entitled Can Learning the Lessons Ever Become the Norm? Something I know that we are going to touch on further in our conversation. Studying for my MBA made me realize that I am a bit of a research geek. I love the whole element of research, following the trail, following the clues and my only bugbear is that I hate the writing up. Following completion of my MBA I moved into other parts of the constabulary setting up the first ethics committee in collabor collaboration with academia and finally working in program management as a stakeholder engagement manager with austerity measures that all the public sector were dealing with. At that time there was a review of the department I was working in with the aim of cutting cost and the time was right for me to leave. Now, prior to working to the police, I had been living in Canada for about eight years, working in banking. My son was born over there. We bought a piece of land and we built a house which was great fun. I love Canada Bits and we lived on Vancouver island and I do have dual nationality, although I've never gone back there to work. Personal circumstances meant to move back to Bristol where my son was nine months old and he's now 26. Before moving to Canada, I worked for what was then Midland bank straight out of college and worked in Bristol and London before I then emigrated to Canada. I'd like to think I've had a pretty varied and fulfilling life and although there have been some knocks along the way, they have made me who I am and where I am today. Thank you. Thank you, Anita, that's lovely. And I'm sure we'll be drawing on all your experiences during this discussion. And Graham, could you now tell us a little bit about yourself? Yes. Hi there, Anita. You've had some incredible experiences. My side may not be so exciting. I left school at 16 with no qualifications. I moved into property for five years and then I've had a career in the insurance industry for about 30 years. I've always worked for myself. I started on commission only in the 90s when we had interest rates of 15% on a commission only role. But I learned, I would say I learned from the school of life and hard knocks. That's where I've got my experience from. But after that I set up in business with a partner. We had an IFA practice and then I merged my business with another business and then in 2008 when we had another recession, I thought this would be a great time to start a new business. I was in the insurance business as a financial advisor and then moved into medical insurance and I had a dream to. I always wanted to build a company and sell it from scratch and in 2009 started in a tiny little office with a computer, a desk and two clients, my wife's mum and my mum and I built a thriving medical insurance practice over five and a half year period, had lots of staff and reached my goal, which was to retire at 50 and did it at 49. But through that whole period of time, I've been involved with employees, I've been involved in mergers and acquisitions and business as a whole. And the one thing that I learned in 2009, when I'd been in business for 20 years, was I've been chasing the money for 20 years. And I just decided, which was a pivotal moment in my life, that I just wanted to do what I love. I just wanted to be happy. And I knew that the money would be created through that. And after I sold out, I then people were talking to me and saying, you know, how did you do it? What did you do? And I was giving business tips. And everyone kept coming back and saying, well, that worked. That was brilliant. So I decided to pursue a lifelong ambition. And I set up as a coach, set up a business called Passionate About Business, because I just believe that you need to love what you do. And I've been on a mission since then, coaching CEOs of companies. I've been involved in sports, entertainment, film, media, coaching all sorts of people, helping them to become more fulfilled, helping them with their mindset. And I would say I'm probably in my dream job. The thing that's helped me the most is as a hobby, I've been studying human behavior for the last 30 years. So all of these things have culminated into what I'm doing now and helping clients who have been depressed and had psychiatric, had anxiety problems, all of which I have suffered myself and come through the other side. So I'm absolutely delighted to be on this with you and Maria now. It's a wonderful thing. Oh, Graham, thank you so much. And obviously your experience and your life experience, all both of you, goes towards, you know, the learning and the learning you put into business and to other people. But let's start with you, Graham, and ask, do you think organizations are dehumanizing employees? Yes, I do. I remember when I started coaching, I went to a company and I sat in on an ideas meeting and the CEO walked in and said, right, let's hear some ideas. Who is prepared to put their head on the chopping block? And fear surrounded the meeting. And I was shaken, actually by that. What was difficult at the time was that everybody was so into their technology that they had very little training in face to face communication. I think the technology side of a lot of businesses is taking away people's personality and their communication skills with others. And Anita, what are your thoughts? I agree. My experience has made majority been in the public sector and working for the police. I would like to say were a very Caring organisation to work for. At the time I was working with them. My concern is that as society we're dealing with the coronavirus and what that means to a change in people's work habits. My feeling is that people working at home is detrimental to them without them quite realising that. And when I did my dissertation about learning the lessons, what we were looking at was organizational learning. Well, of course, organisations only learn because of the individuals that make up the organization. So if they are not provided with opportunities to engage with each other, they are going to lose a lot of learning themselves learning they pass on to other people. But. But what the organization will learn from them and it's one of those things, you can't quantify it until sometime in the future and then you look back and then you realize the impact that it's had. So I think organizations have been dehumanizing individuals, but I think it's more focused now because of the situation we all find ourselves in. I always see this sort of time. I know it's very difficult for people because a lot of people are losing their jobs and it's incredibly stressful. But at the same time, if you can see chaos as the Chinese say, you know, what is the opportunity out of chaos and destruction? There's always something that has to grow. I think man's natural evolutionary nature is to move forward and it's like a two year old in a sand pit, you know, they create a sandcastle, jump on it, destroy it and then start again. And I think that's the opportunity we've got at the moment. But coming back to your point, Anita, about the learning and passing on learning from person to person, they call that the tacit learning and that was attributed to a chap called Michael Polanyi. Polanyi. And it's how craftsmen learn from one another through observation, imitation and practice. And it's not easily expressed through words or as they try to do when they try to codify something into a mechanism through structures. And I know that in certain areas you cannot, definitely cannot, teach people something through technology. And I think the biggest hardship is, as you say, isolation is going to be that I think they're beginning to realize that people do need to have a central anchorage at work to come back to, to learn from. And then they can go and work occasionally at home because then they fit into a system. But what's your experience, Graham, with that? Well, I've been coaching a number of different companies over the COVID over the last last six months and I did a podcast about really depends on the job role of the individual. So I found that a lot of companies, let's say you're an administrator, perhaps working from home, either fearful to go back to the office or actually suit you to go home and work from home. I do agree with Anita that staying at home isn't a great thing. You need to be with people, we need to be around people. And we've lost that sort of social element in the business workplace. But there are certain individuals within a business that need to drive it forward and those individuals need to be in the office or at work. They need, they're part of the team. We're in a really unusual and difficult environment at the moment because of, because of the fear that we have of going back to the office. There are so many different circumstances where people should go back. One of the companies that I'm coaching has now decided to run a virtual business. So they used to have 20 people in an office. Now everybody works from home. What they've done is they've brought in a trainer and there's not many of these around who are now training the staff to work from home, but also running group webinars to try and keep a team spirit. Yeah. And does that work? It has worked. You know, this particular chap wanted everybody to be together because that's how he's always worked and that's the culture that he was creating within his organization. But there were always many employees that didn't want to spend an hour, hour and a half on the train getting into work, didn't want to spend the hour and a half getting back. And a lot of these people that I've spoken to have actually got a better quality of life because the time that they were spending on the train getting to work, they're now in the gym in the morning. They're creating a better lifestyle for themselves, being at home and spending more time with their family. And that's, I think it has its pros and cons. Yeah. So that's from the employees point of view, but is it equally making businesses successful, is it being financially successful or, you know, goal orientated? And I should think that that's the big question that businesses are going to say. And I presume that's the same for the police force, isn't it, Anita, that they are goal orientated as well? How do they, how do they design the goals for the police? Well, when I was working with the police, we had a lot of targets that were sexually driven. You know, detection rates, burglary rates, you know, of how you would drive crime down. So crime figures were a big thing in policing in my time. But one of the things I wanted to touch on with what Graham was saying is that that when you understand how people learn, we learn from experiences. We can talk to people and we can read things, but nothing takes over that. Actually experiencing something and going through it. And I think working from home, yes, it absolutely can be right for certain people. I don't think there is a great understanding of what that impact will be individually on their mental health, but for the organisation, so the productivity of the organisation, but also, especially in the public sector, when the public sector makes mistakes, especially when they're big ones, and talk about the death of somebody and you hear, oh, we're sorry, we're going to learn the lessons. How are we going to learn the lessons if we were all working remotely? And I know we touched on it, Maria, when we spoke before about having a police officer who has done so many years in policing and working alongside one of the newbies and talking to them about their experiences, what they've done, how they would have managed a certain situation. And I just think that is going to be lost if we're not careful, if we're all remote working. There has to be a balance, I think, is what I'm trying to say. Yeah. And how do you feel about that, Graham? Can you. No, I agree with Anita. Look, I'm the sort of person that, personally, I need to get into the office every day, I need to have a routine and there are lots of people that need to have that routine. And without human contact, things are difficult. I was coaching a company yesterday afternoon and we did a group zoom call about what are the effects of working at home, interestingly enough. And the management team came out with a couple of funny things. They said, well, all the office politics have gone because there's nobody there. It's a look with this coronavirus, we have to work with it. And I think that you touched on this earlier, Maria, that there are opportunities in a crisis. I think we need to find what the opportunities are. This particular company are going to be closing down their office and they're going to be taking a sub office where they're going to be inviting employees to come in at least one or two days a week just to have some human contact. And it's strange, what came out of it yesterday was most of the people that they thought would want to stay at home and actually had pushed to work from home, wanted to come into the office and have human contact. And some of the others that were in the office every day wanted to stay at home. So I think it's. We can't use a general rule, but in relation to what Anita said, I believe that people need people. And although we're more connected than we've ever been, there's such a great disconnect now. And Anita's point of what the mental health situation will be later on is a worry. Yeah. Because what you're saying is these companies are saying, come in for a couple of days. It's almost like this is your anchor, this is where you're going. Let's meet, greet and take that back into your separate units, which is your home. But how do they assess success? What are they going to put into place to determine that success? So it has to come through the technology, you know. So I worked in a company where, as soon as I walked in, it was quite a, you know, sort of a mentally aware company, but nobody talked to each other and I would log in and that was like the old clocking in thing at work. That was when I started my work and they knew that I was working. And then when I clocked out, that's when they knew I finished work. And everything was sort of determined by my. Their experience and my experience on my computer. Technologically, they could see everything and everything had to be reported and you put everything in writing and surely that's going to be the same means. They're going to deal with their individual employees. How will they assess success, do you think, Graham, what did they come up with? Well, they've come up with measures. I mean, there's. I was a friend of mine, works for a Lloyd Syndicate, Lloyd's of London. And when the coronavirus came, they all had to work from home and they. They set up an opportunity for everyone to work from home within 48 hours. And they had something like 400 staff who all suddenly were working at home. Their issues are that although productivity is strong and in fact they're doing. I think they're doing more business now than they've ever done in the sector that they're in. They're just concerned about the people that work within the business because there's no cohesion and there's no interaction. So what they've started to do is set up individual group zoom calls with different departments so they can all talk to each other. Yeah, I think we're just trying. I think, look, this coronavirus thing, we're hoping that maybe it'll be over in six months. You know, it might Be going on for two or three years. We don't know when it's going to end. But I think companies need to provide as much access to their employees so they can communicate with each other. But it's all over technology. No one's actually making real phone calls and nobody can really meet up. Yeah. Because it's different to have a telephone call or, you know, we're having a Skype and, or zoom than it is to meet with face to face or just on email. What about you, Anita? Do you think the police force, what are they going to do? How do you think they can handle this? Because they, they have their targets, they've still got to stop the crime. Do you think it's going to impact particularly the police force and people who are on the front line like that, you know, like the firemen and so on? I don't think the front line because they are, they are, they are front facing. They have to provide the service that they're providing. I think it's more the back office staff and the back office staff that support the front line is a bit like, I would say it's a bit like an iceberg. You know, all of these people behind the scenes and they are the police staff and I know that a lot of them are working from home. I think it's a bit difficult when you're in a. When you're in a public sector service industry that relies a lot on human contact. For the police officers, you can't get away from that. They have to turn up and do what they're doing. I think it depends on what crime is being committed at the moment. I don't know with coronavirus because I've been out of policing for three years now. Whether crime has gone down, I don't know. Or whether they can't really see who the criminal is until it's obvious. Yeah, must be, you know, so many people must be hidden because they're at home dealing with all this and then you've got all the mental health issues of people being at home stressed because they're not working or not working effectively. Sorry. I think I remember reading when we were in total lockdown those first nine or 10 weeks that I want to say burglaries were down. Like you wouldn't believe how much they were down. Yeah. But everybody was in their homes, so their homes weren't empty. So that was quite interesting from that point of view. But then of course, other crimes, domestic violence, you know, that increase. So, you know, you went from one to the Other. But, sorry, Maria, I think that's a really good point because, you know, sort of there is a certain stress that comes through the technological system, you know, and when you do, the negativity of that they've talked about, sleeping habits change if you're, you know, on the phone too much or on the computer too much, and you're totally focused on that part of your world. And then are you achieving what you're meant to be achieving? And is somebody in your home distracting you from what you're meant to be achieving? And if the children are around, how do you cope with that? And then, you know, if the husband is expecting you as the wife who is working or the partner who's working to deal with the children, how do you focus on the home life? With children that are very small, I think that's when it becomes too far too stressful, and that's when abuse can start happening because the expectations differ. When you go to work, you can get away from that. You have that break. And I know parents with children are finding it incredibly difficult to have children working from home, because very often a number of parents didn't even want their children to work from home. Just said, I can't be bothered, because it means that the parent has to monitor the child. So there's all this impact of stress. Did they think about that, Graham, when they were talking in your company? Not so much. In fact, you've brought something to my mind. I remember when I first had kids, a friend of mine had. Had. I was a bit of a late starter. A friend of mine had four. Four kids. And he made the point to me. He said, you. You go to work to relax. I never really understood what that meant until I had a couple. Yeah, it's. I just think it's a difficult situation. You know, my daughter, she's. She graduated from Bristol. Did you say, Anita, you were at Bristol? You lived in Bristol? I live in Bristol and I. I work at Bristol University on contract. Oh, okay. Well, my daughter just graduated from Bristol University, and the effect of all of this has been quite detrimental, I think, for a lot of the youngsters that are going into the workplace and she's applying for jobs and all of the interviews are over Zoom. And, you know, zoom's a funny thing. When we're all at work and we're talking to each other, we can focus on the person that we're talking to. But when we're on Zoom, we see ourselves. So we're looking at ourselves and looking at the person that we're talking to, which I find incredibly strange. You don't have to look at yourself. Well, I just. I can just see myself in the corner. But if I don't have to look at myself, that'd be even better. I think even for the youngsters coming into work, they can't. They can't go to work. So even if they get a job, they still got to work from home. So they don't. Taking Anita's point, they don't have any of those experiences of being in an environment, you know, she wants to work in, music and pr. They're not going to experience any of those things that we all, and lots of others, other people that we know experience. When you go to work and you have the atmosphere and you're having meetings and you're socializing with each other, all of these things are going. Yeah. And all the. Also the excitement of something that has gone well or the disaster of something that's gone badly. And it is on the, you know, sort of. It's like in the 60s, they used to call it vibes because it is on the. In the parasympathetic nervous system that you pick it up, you know, by somebody's body language, that somebody's gone well or gone badly. And then you can pick it up and run with it and move forward, and it inspires you or enhances you. And you just do not get that through technology. No. And a lot of my coaching is about failure, and it's about driving through failure to get to success. Yeah. Because we're not always. We're not good the first time, the second time, or the third time. And it takes a few mistakes and a few experiences that Anita touched on to get better at something that's very difficult to do at home, very, very difficult to do outside the workplace. You need to fail. So you can maybe be criticized for it or you can learn from it. So I think we've got a big problem coming. Yeah. And I was thinking, you know, the whole dehumanization of technology also means. And I think this happened with education, where everybody had the door open to education. They were assuming that the, you know, sort of the psychological attitude towards education was that if I'm educated, I don't have to worry, I don't have to become a handyman or I don't have to clean up anymore. All those tasks, those skills are, you know, sort of given to somebody else. They outsource it. So we've outsourced a lot of those skills. And instead of doing university teaching along with various skills that has all gone. And so now young people and adults are left with, oh, well, I've got this education so I shouldn't have to sort of clean my own home or I can't put up a shelf so I have to get a handyman in. And they can't do the stuff that everybody used to do in their homes. And that is a new thing that people have to start learning. And I think it's quite dangerous that young people and people generally are not engaging on that level because if you're at work they will always call somebody in to fix the computer or fix your desk or you know, fix the coffee machine. But you have to do everything on your own. I'm not surprised people are getting more stressed because if your computer goes wrong, as you know, very often it does. And we had this discussion before we started, didn't we Graham? About can you use this microphone and what works and what doesn't work. If you're doing it in an office, somebody comes to help you at home. It's crazy because you then get stressed because you've got to be ready for a specific time and everybody. There's this expectation that the individual can learn everything, but they can't. Something naturally to one person, a techie, and some things come naturally to another person that is far more capable. This sort of work, you know, when the lockdown came, I was dealing with, I deal with a lot of business owners and you know, different sized companies. When the lockdown came, a lot of them didn't even know how to use their own laptops because they had everybody else to help them do it and had IT departments to help them do it. A lot of people didn't know how to get onto Zoom. They hadn't even heard of Zoom, never quite. Or they'd heard of Skype and suddenly they had to do all these things on their own. And it took, you know, it took two or three weeks for people to get used to doing things on their own. So from that point of view there was unity there. I think a lot of people have become a lot more self sufficient and a lot of the things that people been putting off, they've started doing again. How do you feel about the, the family side and going back to basics with this coronavirus? Do you know, I think that during the summer days and I live in a lovely part of London, I went to the park and there were lots of families together and I found that, I personally found that joyful. I enjoyed watching families playing with the children, men and women, grandparents sometimes. I thoroughly enjoyed that. It was almost like a work of art, watching families together because we have become so used to them not being together. However, there was this big fear. So when I had my birthday, my daughter was so fearful, she sat in the front of my flat and we had my birthday outside. And it's. The fear factor has crippled so many children, so many mothers with children, that there was a fear from young people going into school. And even schools are trying to make sense of how do we respond to the organization, how do we respond to children who are afraid? Do they wear masks? Do they not wear masks? Do they wear masks in the corridor? Do they wear masks in the classroom? Does the teacher wear a mask? Do the students wear a mask? Can you hear a student when they wear a mask? It's just mental because there's no guidance anywhere because this virus is an unknown quantity and I think people are trying to make up rules. And the worst part of this is that they read a lot on television or on computers and none of it is coherent. It doesn't come from one source. It's from such disparate sources that you're not quite sure what you're meant to be thinking. And people are now beginning to attack each other on Facebook, you know, trolling on YouTube. There's a lot of people that are giving different ideas and you're trying to make sense of that at home. And inevitably that internal stress leads to more drinking. And, you know, for one moment I thought I'd read that Scotland was going to clamp down on people drinking in their own home. And I thought, well, that's going to be interesting. But I don't think they did that. But, you know, as we can see, people are going sort of, what the hell? It's that sort of, we're in a war so let's live before we all die sort of approach. It's going to be quite an interesting time. Anita, what's it like in Bristol? Well, just thinking about what Graeme said about those first few weeks. Well, I keep saying the nine weeks because that's how it was in Bristol, but it made me very reflective and I did go back to basics. So it was quite joyful being able to come cook food from scratch, shop and literally shop thinking about the food. I wanted to cook, try different things. I became incredibly house proud and I was cleaning house and I painted and I mended things because, of course, people couldn't come into the house to do anything. And you had the time to do it because the only Time we were going out, obviously was buying food and exercising. So when I look back now, I felt that I was nesting almost. I was looking after myself, my son who lives with me and my home. And I quite enjoyed aspects of it, really. I had a wobble right at the beginning, but after that I actually enjoyed the being at home. It didn't feel as though there was any stress because I left nothing else to do. Yeah. I think particularly living in London, what cheered me up no end was to know that I could park my car and I wasn't going to get a ticket for about three months. Do you know, or, you know, you wouldn't get a speeding ticket or somebody wasn't watching you from inside and outside, you know, that everything was on hold that could affect your life. Just that sort of, oh, where's that going to come from? Have I forgotten to pay something? You know, everybody was a little bit more relaxed and a bit kinder. I remember, I think one of my best memories, I know it might sound quite small, but I remember thinking, are those birds really singing that loud? Yeah, I just seem to remember hearing the birds sing. Yeah. Did you experience that? Yeah, definitely. I had a robin that came into my kitchen. That wouldn't, you know, that wouldn't have happened because I wouldn't have been here. So it came in and I had a conversation. But I had the most profound conversations with people because I'm also in the entertainment industry and I was having profound conversations with some people that I'd known for years, but also they were reflecting on their own lives and the meaning of life. And I think that those conversations were very, very powerful. And I started doing the Zoom Speak youk Mind, which I had started before, which was a live, live sessions with psychotherapists so the public could ask questions. And I started doing them on Zoom. And that opened up the mental health questions that people wanted to ask, but it also made them reflect on their lives and what was important. And they didn't mind me being a psychotherapist as well as in business, which I like that because they didn't see it as, oh, my goodness, what am I going to say? What's she going to notice about me that I don't want her to see? But having said that, I did feel that the whole area of kindness, not so much on a day to day basis of kindness, but I think the systems were less onerous. And I come back to organizations and the systems they use. So, for example, I went to the forecourt to get some petrol and I Tried to pay the chap, couldn't take it on my card so I had to pay again. But I've recently got a letter to say that I didn't pay. And if I don't pay they get threatening me with 1000 pound fine. That type of thing wouldn't have happened during the lockdown, you know, because these people were all at home, they weren't feeling threatening and their attitudes, they started changing their attitudes to the individual person and now it's sort of almost reverted back again. We've got to make as much money as we can, so we're not going to go and find this person and say, by the way, did you mistakenly not pay or was there a system failure? They attack you. And that's the sort of system I absolutely cannot, I despise because it automatically assumes that you as a customer intentionally did something wrong. And if you go through it and you phone them up, they're very sweet and they say, oh no, that's the system. I don't care whether it's the system. This is how you make people feel. And I think that's the part of alienation and organizational structure where technology kicks in and actually kicks people into the world of stress and beyond. Because there were so many people equally that were trying to commit suicide during that time. And I think that's the hardest thing. I think we have a fantastic opportunity coming. I know that there's a lot of bad news and I know, I understand all the things that can go wrong, but I think we have a opportunity over the next six to 12 months. And the reason I say that is because a lot of people have lost stuff at work, work, home, they've lost the ability just to get on a train and go to work. And sometimes you don't realize how valuable something is until you lose it. And my view is that if we can look at this as an opportunity over a period of time where people can start to go back to work, they can start to be a part of the team again, they can communicate with each other without the use of technology so much. I think people would relish that. The people I've been speaking to have said, you know, this new normal, we want to get back to the old normal. We want to get back to how it was. We didn't realize how good it was when it was there. So although there's been a correction, I think if we look at it from, from an opportunity side, when we all do start going back to work again, and it will happen and it this will pass over a period of time, I think the human connection will be stronger than it was before. So do you think that I was talking to somebody and we were talking about the HR departments, do you think they will change? Do you think that by organizations outsourcing to HR departments that it stopped the human interaction because it was like as a manager or as a company owner, they don't have to deal with issues so they can just give it to somebody else to deal with. And on a board you always have the HR department but they never go into detail, they just go into oh yes, well, you know, we've had so many people leaving or so many people starting, but they never go into the detail of what's wrong. And because of that system are the company owners and the people that are higher up in corporates, do they miss the trick of remaining in contact with their staff? What do you think, Graham, if you want to speak first. Okay, just brief. I'm sorry, Anita. I think that a lot of business owners have had a very, very nasty experience in that many who have had a very established businesses and have been in business for 25, 30 years, it's all fallen off the cliff within six months and a lot of these businesses have gone. Now these individuals are experiencing things that they've perhaps forgotten about from when they first started and I think the human instinct is to, is to shun all these things away when it's busy and everyone's making money. A lot of the people that I've spoken to are more interested in the people now because they've had those bad experiences themselves. Yeah, I think we're heading for a slightly new world in the way that we communicate with each other. And yes, there are a lot of people that suffer from mental illness and this was all shunned under the carpet years ago, but now it's out there and it's something that's real and people are talking about it. I spoke about all my anxiety that I suffered on the radio six months ago and how I've overcome it. So I think it's normal now. I think if people can talk more, we'll have a better working environment. So do you think the. Anita, do you think in organisations that the HR department should be localised to each department as opposed to a separate entity? So thinking about the way the police worked, we had a central HR department that was very process driven. So it dealt with your salary queries, your payroll, your recruitment pension queries, making sure all the paperwork was done if somebody was being who was leaving or being Made redundant. But it was the supervisors who were the people tasked with looking out for people having those conversations, knowing their people well enough, so knowing where welfare might be needed, knowing when somebody wasn't perhaps working to their full potential or they were the ones who were expected and I think quite rightly to know their people and look after those things. Whereas our HR department were very pro self and it worked, it worked in policing. I'm not sure, I can't say whether that would work in the private sector but for policing it worked. I think that's such a powerful position. It's like a matron that used to be on a ward. She was the one that made sure it was clean. She was the one that made sure that every bed was made and that all the nurses were in line. And the nurses that I know that were in charge, the ward sisters were fantastic, fantastic, incredibly organized. But the matron was taken away and that individual overseeing was almost again put into a system and the reporting had to be made and you know, according to ascertained the detail of the report, they decided whether the nurse was successful or did her job properly or his job properly. I do think that that needs to change where as you're saying here, Graham, that people need to come back to the floor and look at each other and talk to each other. I'm going to ask something controversial and I'm a psychotherapist, so this is controversial to say, but do you think that we're allowing too many people to just over spill their emotions that their emotions that they take over during the day instead of. Right, this is my work, I need to focus on that they will bring too much to the workplace. Is that a danger? Well, my philosophy is that you bring your home life to work and you take your work life home. And if there are issues on either side, personal or work, you need to talk about, just depends who you talk to about these things. Because it's important that you talk to the right people. Sometimes you can talk to somebody about your problems and all that happens is they end up telling you about their problems. Yeah, they're trying to, they're trying to explain to you that they've had the same problem. So they feel that if they explain their own problems they have some sort of connection, but that's not what somebody wants. I did a thing, I did a talk years ago about, and this isn't a true story, when I was 14 years old, I was walking along, not feeling particularly good and I walked into a lamppost and I said sorry for the lamppost. It's a little bit like Castaway, you know, Wilson with Tom Hanks. And I spent years just talking to a lamppost. I was 14 years old. I didn't have enough time, I didn't have any money to go and see a therapist. And 40 years ago, it wasn't particularly acceptable. I think people just need to talk sometimes without getting a reaction. They just need to get it out. Yeah. And people do feel better when they get it out. So I think I would encourage people to talk as much as possible to the right people. To the right people and also balance it with the work that they need to do. Yes, because people give you a view from, they give you an answer from their view of the world. So whoever you're talking, talking to, in the main, they will give you a reaction based upon what they think, but it's not necessarily about what they think. It's about the individual who's doing the talking or what they think. Do you think that's correct, Anita? Yes, I do. I think there is a balance, but I think in a working environment, you want the best out of the people who are working for you. And I think as a supervisor, manager, you need to understand what is going on in their lives so that you can take a proactive approach in that and understanding and just, just you don't want, you don't want those people to go off sick. So you do need to be able to tailor some of the working practices. But if you don't know what's on, going, going on at home, then I think you're in danger of alienating the employee and causing more damage potentially. I think, you know, sort of what we've. And you've highlighted with the word supervisor that perhaps every department should have somebody that is a sort of supervisor, a more caring figure that understands what's happening to the individuals within a company, company and can look after them and know how to adjust their working progress system so that they can work through it, plus not losing their working capability because. And I don't think you can do that through technology. You know, that comes back to the tacit knowledge. You can only do that by watching being with somebody and, you know, sort of imitation and practice and sitting with somebody and noticing what's happening there. I mean, I've been talking about psychotherapy. Could it possibly go through technology? And I have this discussion with somebody all the time. Can you create artificial intelligence in psychotherapy? And I'm not sure if you can because I think that sort of, again, it sort of Distances distancing you from your problems and sometimes distancing you from your problems can be useful because you can then observe, step back and say, oh, right, am I making too much of this? On the other hand, distancing it can alienate you and you feel isolated. There's got to be an emotional connection somewhere to make it worthwhile. So do you think therapists should be. I've asked this before and it's still something I believe in. Do you think therapists should be part of the workplace, Graham? Now there's a question. Yes and no. I'm going to sit on the fence on that one. Look, depends on the size of the company and what the company is about. Going back to your previous point, I think technology is extremely useful in mental health, especially if you can create a product that can help help tens of thousands of people all at once. Perhaps can't get access to individual help. Yes. So from that point of view, I think, and a friend of mine runs a company that does that and they literally, they're getting involved with all the universities, all the local authorities and they are helping hundreds of thousands of people who can't get to this help. So from that point of view, I think it's worth it. Do you need to have a therapist in the company? As a business owner and running a company, the hard truth is that a lot of companies don't really want to start concentrating on their employees problems. They just want productivity and results. I think depending on the type of. I mean, if you were running a sales organization or a call center and you had a therapist working there helping them, nothing would get done. Everyone would be talking about their problems the whole time. It depends about the environment you're working within. That's a really difficult question. I would say depending on the organization. But coming to you then, Anita, I'm sure the police and frontline workers absolutely must have some sort of need to get certain stresses off their chest, because I know people in the police force that have encountered such crippling behavior, you know that they have been threatened with knives. I know police women who've been raped. I know there's so much that they have to deal with. Surely a therapist or counseling has to be part of the system, is it? It's certainly is in policing. And that goes back to Graham's point. It depends on what your subject matter of the organisation is. Policing with everything that. And it's for police staff as well, not just police officers. We have a dedicated force, medical officer department, so we have a doctor and nurses we have trained counsellors. We can get outside counselling as well if we need to. I mean, it's not unlimited and you have to show why you need it. But that comes back to the role of the supervisor. If your supervisor is looking after their staff, which is expected of them, they will know and be able to facilitate employees going to access the help that is there. But of course, policing is very hierarchical, which is why we talked about supervisors. So we have a very rigid structure, which means that you are never on your own in policing. Explain that a little bit more. Does that mean that your work is overseen? So that could happen. For example, when I was running my comedy club, that could be seen there, because when I trained people to do the bookings in clubs and I would oversee that and make sure that they were on the same wavelength that I was and I could see where the comedians were going and we would talk together. So that was hierarchical. But you're meaning something else, aren't you? Yeah, I'm meaning somebody else. So, yes, police. Police officers and police staff have a great deal of discretion to deal with the issues that they're dealing with. But I think there is a feeling, and I felt it certainly, that you never were on your own. I mean, when I was working in the police, certainly in the areas that I was working in, we had a couple of issues which were very, very difficult to deal with as a police staff member. And although I felt a little bit isolated from the team, I was working with the managers of the team. The fact that I could access help from the counseling department just meant that you felt that you had someone who could. You could talk to, who would help you through that process. I mean, we also had. I mean, obviously the police officers have, the police federation, we had Unison, so we also had unions involved. If you're a union member, it was just knowing where to go to. I mean, it can be a nice. Policing can be an isolated place if you. If it can be. But it isn't. It isn't. In the majority of times, it's not. So you're saying that somebody who is on the beat, let's say who goes out and encounters crimes and so on, always has somebody to turn to if they're unsure about something, to catch sort of that backup of understanding, is that correct? It is, but I'm not sure it's now. It's now the case in real time. So, you know, in years gone by, you would have a sergeant and a certain amount of PCs that would fall under that individual. But because of the reductions in police officers and the large geography of where we live. Yes, you could go to somebody. You know, if you've got a worry, you could go to somebody. But I wouldn't say that you had them there on tap, because I don't think that. I don't think that's the case anymore. So if you're isolated and working from home, and even if you have zoom calls and connectivity, when you have a problem, coming back to your discussion with your various business owners, who do they turn to when they have a problem? Well, it actually starts from a different place. So what we try and encourage, especially my coaching with a lot of the companies we deal with, is a culture. So a culture is created within the company and everybody works to that mission and that culture. And when they deviate from that, that's when normally the problems start. So if there's a strong culture within an organization to. To deal with issues that people are facing, personal issues, if the culture is there, then there'll always be somebody to speak to and talk to. So I think when people go and work for a company and they understand what's available to them within an organization and who they can go to, sometimes that mitigates a lot of problems in the first place. So what you're saying is organizations now have to be much more clearer in telling their staff, many of whom are working remotely, of what's available to them, that I always call it the safety net scenario, the what if, because things are always going to go wrong, always bar none. And you've just got to know what can go wrong and what the safety net is when it does go wrong. Yes, a lot of companies. A lot of companies have something called an employee Assistance Program, an eap, and that gives them an opportunity, because a lot of people don't want to talk about their problems to perhaps somebody within the organization. They want to keep it private. So a lot of Companies have these EAPs where they're given a telephone number and they're given a product, and if they're feeling. They're not feeling particularly well, they can speak to somebody completely independent from the company, and they're given a group of sessions. Who is that person? Because I said, do they need a psychotherapist? And you said, that's going to be very hard. Who is that person? What qualification? So the employee Synths program will hire a group of trained individuals who are able to help within the space that the employee needs, whether it's mental health, health, whether it's a psychotherapist, Whether it's a therapist, they will have a team of people that are. That are on the end of the phone that can help and then who may refer to having individual face to face or telephone sessions. Right. So. Absolutely. So I think what we're learning here is the extended help has to be a physical contact. Not physical, but a mental contact. Some sort of somebody you can create relationship with. Yes. And then because a lot of people who have problems at work, they don't want to talk to the people at work, they want to keep it separate. Yeah. I mean, there might be some instances where they need to, but in the main it should be private, it should be separate. Yeah. Do you agree, Anita? Yes, I do. And part of the police, they had employees program, so, you know, once you were referred there, you could deal direct with those individuals and the organisation didn't know anything about it and who paid for. Was paid for by the constabulary. You were allowed six sessions to begin with, but then if the person on the other line deemed you needed more, then they would go for another six sessions. The EAP were the ones you could speak to them direct, but they were the ones ones who made the decision whether you needed to be more involved with them. So do all organisations have this or is it just in the public sector or companies that are aware? Well, you can. I mean, I used to be in healthcare, so we used to. They either used to be part of a group medical insurance scheme or there's something called Group Cash Plans. And part of the Group Cash plan was. Was an eap. Alternatively, some companies would just purchase the EAP and it's very cheap, it's very low cost, but it just allows a company to turn around to their employees and say, look, we've got this. This is part of the culture. If you need to use it, it's available to you and just by having it makes people feel better. Do you know, that is the perfect ending to this program, Just to know that there are people outside that can help, not only in business, but when you're on the front line or the individual at work and when they're at home. So if I can just say, I would really like to thank my guests Anita Smith and Graeme Godfrey for their input on a subject that is so vast. But I think we've come up with solutions that may be very helpful for anybody that's listening to your Mind Matters, which is on women's radio station and. And men's radio station. I'm Maria Kompinska, always striving to keep the world mentally healthy. Thank you for joining us and look forward to you listening to the next program.