Mind Matters: How to Make Work Better for Everyone’s Mental Health
Throughout May, Thinkers50 teamed up with the Silicon Guild to support Mental Health Awareness Month in the US and Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK.
In the first of four live, online events, we focused on how we can make work better for everyone’s mental health. Featuring Rita McGrath, a top 10 Ranked Thinker since 2013, and Radar Thinkers Poornima Luthra and Andrew Barnes, this illuminating discussion explored practical ways that managers and leaders can improve the health and productivity of their workforce.
Rita tackled the challenges of mass scaling systems, nurturing team cohesion, and how ownership can increase motivation. She also drew attention to Zeynep Ton’s work on Good Jobs. Andrew shed light on some of the surprising discoveries from research into the 4-day week, how to banish busyness from business, and the positive results from empowering people. Author of The Art of Active Allyship, Poornima took a dive into the intersectional nature of human beings at work; how mental health and the workplace are not experienced in the same way by everyone.
Find out how to develop human-centric leadership, cultivate belonging, and invest in employee wellbeing for greater productivity. The moderator is Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever.
TRANSCRIPT
Stuart Crainer:
Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to this special series of webinars. Thinkers50 is presenting in partnership with Silicon Guild. During May, we will be highlighting Mind Matters to mark Mental Health Awareness Month. We have four great webinars lined up on Tuesdays throughout the month with some fantastic speakers. The webinars will be moderated by Morra Aarons-Mele, author of The Anxious Achiever and host of The Anxious Achiever podcast. No one is better equipped to guide us through the many complex issues and global best practices of workplace mental health. Today, Morra is joined by three brilliant speakers. We have Andrew Barnes. Andrew is the co-author of The 4 Day Week: How the Flexible Work Revolution Can Increase Productivity, Profitability and Wellbeing. He’s also a founding member of the World Wellbeing Movement, and a member of the Thinkers50 Radar class of 2023. Yeah, it is very early in the morning where Andrew is, in New Zealand, so we especially appreciate his early rising.
Alongside Andrew, we have Poornima Luthra. A Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Poornima is the author of The Art of Active Allyship, co-author of Leading Through Bias, and was a member of the Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2022. And finally, but not least, we are joined by Rita McGrath. Rita is a professor at Columbia Business School and the author of Seeing Round Corners and The End of Competitive Advantage. She’s also co-author of Discovery Driven Growth, the founder of Valize, and a much valued member of the Thinkers 50 Community.
So welcome everyone joining from throughout the world. We really appreciate you joining us today. Please let us know where you’re joining from and share your queries, thoughts and insights at any time during the session. Our title today is How to Make Work Better for Everyone’s Mental Health. There is a lot to talk about. Over to you, Morra.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Thank you Stuart. It’s such an honour to be here with you all. And Stuart, I really enjoyed talking to you about your own workplace mental health on the episode of the Provocateurs podcast we recorded last year. So folks go check that one out, Work and Mental Health. Work actually has the biggest impact on our mental health. More than even our spouses or romantic partners. And as someone who’s been married for a really long time, that statistic is always just, wow, to me. Work is so crucial for our mental health. And the state of work today is both good and bad for us. For those of us who are professionals, work is important to our well-being, actually. It provides our sense of community, often. It provides a sense of mastery, right? We are career-identified people who see our identity in our career, and that can be a very, very good thing.
But work can also be extremely damaging to our mental health. And I’ll tell you what, post-pandemic, the statistics are not getting any better when it comes to people’s rates of anxiety, depression, stress, and physical symptoms caused by poor mental health. Every day my inbox is flooded with stories that I always say would make your eyes burn, of people telling me stories about a boss who the mere sound of their voice can provoke an anxiety response.
Have you ever had that experience? Where you see a name in your email, or you hear someone you think walking down the hall of your office, or these days a Slack pop-up, and you’re instantly anxious? You think, “Oh my gosh, what have I done wrong? What’s going to happen now? Is the other shoe going to drop?” We’re operating in a time of great uncertainty and sometimes that doesn’t bring out the best in all of us.
And so, on any given day, 20 plus percent of Americans are showing up at work – and I’m sorry, I only have American statistics for this, but you can globalise – 20 plus percent of Americans are showing up at work with a diagnosed mental illness. But a hundred percent of us have mental health. And many of us are existing in a state of languishing, of stress, of feeling increased … Especially anxiety.
And so, today I want to really dig deep on some groundbreaking ideas that can help us make work better for people. Better. And the good news is when you make work better for people’s mental health, you make work better for everybody. Andrew, I know you’re going to tell us about that as well. So it’s fabulous to be here with you all. And I’d like to hand it over. We’re going to have a format where each of our presenters gives us their pitch, the best of what they have to say on this topic for about five minutes. And then we’ll open it up for a Q&A. This is your time, listeners. If you have a comment, if you have a question, pop it in the comments. I will get to it and we’ll have a discussion as well. So Rita McGrath.
Rita McGrath:
Hi.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
You are going to start us off.
Rita McGrath:
Okay.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Give us the big picture from a strategic point of view on what leaders need to think about to make work better for mental health.
Rita McGrath:
Sure. A couple of things that I think are relevant to what we know works and what we know doesn’t. And I’m going to draw on the work of a number of different people. And the first person I’d like to invoke is Paul Le Blanc, who is just in the process of transitioning out of his role as president of Southern New Hampshire University. And among his many, many accomplishments there, is he basically took back online education from predatory providers who landed students with a whole lot of debt and not much in the way of credentials.
He basically rescued that whole sector with his team. And he has a brilliant new book out called Broken, about large systems, and one of the observations he makes is that when you try to scale any system … So you think about workplaces, right? It’s easy to make mental health a central concern when there’s just four or five or 10 of you, right? But once you get to a hundred thousand of you, a million of you, goodness knows. Once you get to scaled systems, you kind of lose the humanity of those systems.
And as you would argue,scaled systems hate humanity, right? We love precision, we love replication. We don’t like messiness, we don’t like variation. And so, one of the things that he recommends is that we observe some of these principles of how you keep humanity in a scaled system. And so, it’s things like make sure that you have humans at critical touch points so that when there’s an issue, the humans can intervene.
So as an example, at Southern New Hampshire University, the heroes of his story are the counsellors. These are the people that are trained to say, “Well, if a student asks about next semester’s tuition, are they just asking about next semester’s tuition? Or are they worried that maybe they can’t pay it?” So what you’re doing is you’re replacing really expensive, high-priced talent with people who are more affordable, but you’re putting them in various touch points within the system.
So I think it’s scaling systems, but recognizing that you want to accomplish messy humanity. I think that’s really great. And you want to standardise what you can, and standardise the hell out of everything that you can. But then, use humans for the rest. Okay, so the first point is mass scaling systems, but keeping humans at critical touch points.
Second thing is some work that’s been done by Keith Ferrazzi and a number of others, which looks at this whole kind of, “Do we need to be in the office? Do we not need to be in the office? Where are we?” And what Keith’s work has done is he said, “On a five point scale, if you measure the question of team commitment to one another.” And the questions like, “Does my team have my back?” That left to its own devices, humanity gets about a 2.8 on a five point scale, left to their own devices. Now in the pandemic-
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Of “have your backness.”
Rita McGrath:
Have your backness, right!
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Wow.
Rita McGrath:
But in the pandemic, that dropped down to about 2.3. So what a lot of leaders did, and I think this is a grievous mistake, and this is something you can take action on right away is … So the answer for a lot of leaders is, “Oh, if we just get everybody back in the office, things will be fixed.” But the fixing is going back to 2.8. It’s not going to the threes, the fours closer to fives, where you actually have real team commitment, real team cohesion.
And I know Morra, you’ll relate to this, which is, what you have to do … And it doesn’t matter whether you’re remote or whether you’re together, is you have to be very intentional about building in team processes, making teams cohere better. And some of it’s surprisingly simple. For example, once a month you stop everything, you take an hour and you just go around your team and you say, “Okay, how’s your energy? What do you have energy for? How are you feeling? What’s going on with you?”
Because the fact that my mom’s in the hospital, you may not know that. All you’re observing is I seem to be really distracted and I’m not delivering the way I should be. You don’t know why. So just taking those kinds of breaths and pauses can help a team cohere much more vigorously. Whether you’re together or whether you’re apart. I mean, I think this whole return to office thing is kind of the lazy person’s way of saying, “Oh, well, if we just get everybody together in the same space, things will magically work out.”
That’s luck. Maybe if you’re lucky, that’ll work out. That’s not being intentional, and it’s not taking control. Then we have the theme of ownership. And we know that humans are very motivated when they either have actual ownership or feel that they have ownership, feel they have pride, feel they’re aligned around something that’s common and important. And a great example of this is what Pete Stavros is doing over at KKR, is that when KKR, which is a private equity firm, buys into a company, they actually create ownership stakes for the employees, frontline employees.
So a great example of this would be C.H.I Overhead Doors recently got acquired by New Corp. And the average payout for an ordinary line worker in that situation was $176,000. Can you imagine that? And money doesn’t buy everything. It doesn’t buy happiness, it doesn’t buy mental health, but not having enough money is actually kind of a detriment to any of those things.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Actually, and when it comes to the workplace, we know money as a financial insecurity is probably the largest driver, certainly, of anxiety in the workplace. And that makes sense.
Rita McGrath:
Absolutely. And that actually ties to the next thing I was going to bring up, which is Zeynep Ton’s fabulous work on Good Jobs. And then Zeynep is a member of the Silicon Guild. So you can definitely look her up. And she’s fascinating to me because she basically got into this by accident.
She’s an operations researcher. And what got her started on this tack was she was studying these workforce management systems where you provide just enough labour at just the right amount of time so you have no waste of labour. But it turns out the human toll of this is absolutely terrible. And so, she’s written two great books. The first one is called, The Good Job Strategy. The second one is called The Case for Good Jobs. And what she talks about is what we know constitutes a good job. And her main theme is stop thinking about human beings as centres of cost.
Start thinking about human beings as centres of revenue, as centres of growth, as the ability to raise the top line. So in short, what makes a good job. Focus, simplify, standardise and empower. Cross-train, so that if I’m normally a fruit and vegetable person at Trader Joe’s, I can actually go help you out in frozen foods if you run into a crisis, because I sort of have enough knowledge to do that.
Operate with slack so people have time for learning. People aren’t so strung tightly that they are going to snap at any moment, and predictable wages, living wages. Predictable hours and alignment with values. And if you create good jobs, it can actually drive your top line. And then, the last thing that I’ll touch on is what we know about burnout. And I know, Morra, you’ve done a ton of work on this. But we know what drives people to be burned out. Too much work, no control over what you work, toxic bosses. No recognition, no rewards, a lack of a supportive community, a lack of a trustworthy environment. A sense of unfairness, and no great match with our values.
So each of these things to me are … We’ve studied this. We know this. This is not some giant mystery. I would argue that we know how to create great, supportive mentally safe workplaces. We just for some reason, don’t regularly do it as much as we should.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
2.8. Rita, what I don’t hear you saying, and I’m sorry, I’ve been told my jacket makes noise, so I’m trying to hold my arms, although I want to gesture. What I don’t hear you saying is invest more in a meditation app, do more yoga on site. I hear you talking about fundamental human agency. Dignity, listening, connection, fairness as so key to mentally healthy work.
Rita McGrath:
Well, and what I would also add, just one last thing, is a lot of the solutions you need to think about are structural. So we know that human beings have very evolutionary mechanisms for how we relate to one another. We tend to like and gather people who are similar to us. We tend to flock to people that we already know. We tend to empower others who are similar to ourselves. And so, if you’re going to break that, you actually need some kind of structural mechanism.
So I’ll give a quick example. There was an investment bank that was basically sued by women for exhibiting gender bias in how they assigned roles and tasks to people. And therefore, under the guise of this lawsuit, these researchers were able to get ahold of the bank’s data. And what they found was that women were indeed systematically assigned less attractive, less lucrative accounts. But that when you measured the … And the excuse the bank gave was, “Oh, well, they didn’t perform so well last year, so they didn’t get the pick of the crop when it came to the good accounts.”
But when the researchers actually matched the women to the men on accounts of similar quality, the women actually outperformed the men. But what was happening was it was an old boys club. So the best accounts were given to your best friends. If you want to break that kind of thing, you actually need structures. So what the bank was forced to do by the courts was to use an algorithm to randomly assign attractive accounts across their employee base and voila, overnight being biased managed.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Wow. Intentionality. Thank you so much, Rita. Andrew, I’m going to hand it over to you. I’m sure much of this is resonating. Having read your wonderful book. Tell us how we can work four days, please.
Andrew Barnes:
Well, thank you, Morra. Look, you’re absolutely right. There were a lot of points that Rita made which resonated with me, but I’m a complete fraud, right? I mean, I started this not on a work-life balance kick. I was trying to work out how I make my company more productive.
And the heart of the four-day week movement was this piece of research that said that people were actually only truly productive for two and a half to three hours a day. And in fact, if you’re a Canadian, it was one and a half hours a day. And I thought, is that happening in my company, and can I do something about it? So my thesis was that there is a lot of busyness in work. And if we eliminated the busyness, the overlong meetings, the … I love the statistic that if you get continually interrupted at work generally every once every 11 minutes, it’s the equivalent of working under the influence of marijuana.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
I’m sorry, say that one again for the listeners.
Andrew Barnes:
Apparently it’s … The amount, when you are interrupted, continually interrupted at work, because it breaks your thought processes and you statistically are interrupted once every 11 minutes, takes you 22 minutes to get back to full productivity. The impact on cognitive ability is the equivalent of operating under the influence of marijuana. There you go.
Rita McGrath:
And a lot less fun.
Andrew Barnes:
A lot less fun. Absolutely. So the idea was quite simply with data, no research, no nothing that I thought that I would set a challenge to my people that said, “Look, if you can deliver the same amount of productivity in four days rather than five, I will pay you for the five days. I’ll pay you for output what you normally do. You work less, but I need to get the same levels of productivity. I need to get the same levels of customer services.” It’s what we call the 180, 100 rule. And we just gave it a go.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Can I ask you a question? You didn’t have everybody just work Monday to Thursday, right?
Andrew Barnes:
No, we didn’t. So what we’re talking about in the movement, some people do that, but we can’t. We have a retail outlet. We have retail branches, 17 across New Zealand. We have to work normal business hours. So I have people, and this is quite key to how it works. I actually have people who will take a day off. I have people who take a couple of half days. I will have working parents who will work five days a week, but compressed hours.
And the compressed hours means that they can do the childcare, right? Now, this was not how it started. How it started is we just sat there and said, “Hey, we’ll rotate days off every week and you can have a day off.” And we were lucky enough to run some research alongside that from Auckland University. Auckland University of Technology. And what we found was empowerment, enrichment engagement scores went up 40%. They went up to the levels the researchers said they’d never ever seen in New Zealand. Stress levels dropped. More people said they were better able to do their job working four days rather than five. And we found that sick days halved.
Now, none of this was me going, “Hey, I want people to have better work-life balance. I want people to be better able to do other things other than work.” It was really just a very simple experiment. But what became very clear, and this is then morphed into the four-day week movement. It’s not rocket science. Healthier, happier, more engaged employees are more productive. Who’d have thought?
It really is not rocket science. And so, what we’ve done is we’ve now created a thing called Four-Day Week Global, which operates in about 30 countries now. We’ve run these pilot programs for small, medium-sized companies,a six month pilot. We have local researchers from leading universities that work alongside them. And what they do is they analyse the impact on employees and on business. And what we’re finding is, and this was the results from the US trial and also the UK trial. Revenues went up 33% over a period when people are working less.
Now, there’s an interesting experiment in Japan from Microsoft, they did an experiment on this. All they did was eliminate unnecessary meetings. They got a 39.9% improvement in productivity. So when you stop doing unproductive stuff, your productivity goes up. But the key part of this is that I have the right with my business, and we apply this model to the whole program. That this is a gift. It’s not a matter of right.
So in other words, there is mutual responsibility between the organisation and the employee. Now, this comes to the points that Rita made. I am actually treating my employees as adults. There is, they are responsible for rethinking how they do their job. Because actually they know their job better than you do. And they know the things that are stopping them being productive. Now, equally, they know the things that are stopping their colleagues being productive. And the way this works is it’s not just an individual goal, it’s a team goal.
So if the team doesn’t deliver its outcome, I have the right to say to my people, “Guys, I need the productivity. You didn’t deliver it, we’ll have to go back to five days a week.” Now, I’ve only ever had to do that once in six years.
And that was right at the start. Because suddenly an employee says, “Actually, I’m getting this fantastic thing. I’m having a chance to spend time with my granddaughter. I’m able to work out. I’m able to do some exercise. I’m able to care for family members. And so, people are getting experiences they can’t put a price on. They’re sharing that with their colleagues, and their colleagues recognize that they get the time off important to them only if their colleague can get the time off that’s important, in turn, to the other person. It’s got to be a mutual win-win. So what we find is team creativity, team cohesion goes off the scale.
People feel empowered. Stress levels are dropping by 40, 50%. You are also finding, and this is the key bit as a business person, that people value the time off far higher than you are prepared to pay for it. So in the U.S. trial, 15% of people said at the end of the trial, “You couldn’t pay me enough money to go back to five days a week.” Another 15% said it’d have to be 75% more salary.
And about 50% said, “Really, it’s going to have to be in the order of about 50%.” So what this tells me is that the real issue here is we don’t have enough time. We often try and put things like, let’s have free lunches at work. Let’s have ping pong tables. Let’s do this. Most of those are a ploy to keep you in the office. And that’s what’s deemed to be good.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Right. Face time.
Andrew Barnes:
Absolutely the Googleplex, all of these things. But when it boils down to it, what people actually need is they need time. They need time to reconnect to themselves. They need time to reconnect with their families, and that is the thing that puts the stress often into work. Now, again, Rita’s, right. There is some appalling leadership out there. We have masters of business administration. I’d like to think we should have masters of business leadership. Because this is really about empowering and leading and rethinking what leadership is. And it isn’t about dictating how people do things. It’s about empowering them to rethink. Now-
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Can I … Oh, sorry. I was going to ask you a question, but go for it.
Andrew Barnes:
No, no. Carry on.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
We got a fabulous comment from Aleksandra Walicka. And she says, “You present great stats and it all makes sense. Are people in positions of power just not having the same issues that we all are?” And you’re a leader. You’ve written about your own mental struggles and those of people around you when you worked in the City of London. What was the aha moment for you that bridged the disconnect between probably what staff are feeling and what leaders are feeling? As a leader, how did you make this connection?
Andrew Barnes:
There’s a fabulous book by a chap called Nick Hornby called, Fever Pitch, which is about soccer. Sorry, I have to translate that for our American audience. And he’s talking about Arsenal football club in it. And he has this phrase, and I apologise for the language in advance, “Is life shit because arsenal are shit, or the other way around?” It’s an extraordinary profound statement because actually your mental attitude is coloured often by the environment you find yourself, rather than the environment being colored by your mental attitude.
So really, what was this about for me was I recognized that I was not performing well because of the environment that I was in. And if I could change the environment a little bit, then that would change my own mindset. And what that would do, I thought would be, produce better outcomes. But the problem is, and I’ll leave it at this point, is most people are like me.
I’m an old white guy. I’ve lived/worked in the City of London. I’ve been trained to think that working longer equals working harder. And what I’m arguing for, and it doesn’t matter by the way … People doing four-day week are in manufacturing, Lamborghini, Panasonic, Volkswagen, all doing reduced hours work. Or the police department, the City of Golden, fantastic. They’re doing a four-day week. All of these things. We can be in health, we can be in logistics, we can be in any business you like. My personal favourite is a fish and chip shop in Suffolk which has gone to a four-day week. But the real issue here is that you can rethink how you work by empowering your people. And when you empower your people, you get better performance. And actually the biggest issue here is not, not doing a four-day week. Your biggest issue is your biggest competitor does it first?
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Yeah. Thank you. There was just a study out in the JAMA that actually measured decreased correlated, decreased rates of anxiety and depression with greater work flexibility. And so, this stuff has a profound effect, no surprise, on our mental health. Thanks, Andrew. Poornima, over to you.
Poornima Luthra:
Hi Morra. Hi everyone. I’m going to build on what we Rita and Andrew have talked about, and Rita brought up bias. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Andrew, you brought up how much the environment has an influence on our mental attitude. So let’s take a look at that topic. So when we look at the theme for today, it’s make work better for everyone’s mental health.
And it’s important for us to keep in mind who everyone is. We know that work isn’t experienced in the same way by people who come from marginalised communities and groups. And this is across a range of intersectional identities. Across gender, sexual orientation, disabilities, neurodiversity, age as well. Race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic background, class, caste parenthood choices. So when we look at the intersectional nature of human beings at work, we know that the workplace isn’t experienced in the same way.
And there’s decades of research that shows us that when people are chronically treated unfairly, when they’re chronically experiencing discrimination, it has a huge impact on stress levels and stress disorders like anxiety and depression. And then we also see lots of data points out there that would show us that, for example, women and particularly women in senior leadership roles are more burnt out.
We see a rise in quiet quitting. We see a rise in the great resignation that we saw post the pandemic as well. But what we also know is that there’s an inequity in the mental health support that people get. So one thing is talk about the organisation and the environment, but also the kind of help that people are getting when it comes to addressing mental health concerns is varied. And we know that there’s sufficient data out there that shows us that marginalised ethnic communities as well as the LGBTQ plus community, they don’t get the kind of support that others are getting.
So we know that there’s an inequity and we know that there’s this discrimination. So then we come to the question, well, then what can we do? How do we then create spaces where work is actually better for everyone and not just some people? And that requires us to look at it from a more intersectional approach that mental health isn’t experienced and the workplace isn’t experienced in the same way.
And that requires us to put equity on the table. To create and nurture spaces that are fair, where everyone is able to show up as themselves, that they’re not covering a part of who they are. They’re not hiding or masking a part of their identity just so that they’re able to fit in with the dominant norms. And also that they feel that sense of belonging. Because we know that when people feel that sense of belonging, we know that they then have those reduced impact of stress and anxiety that we do see when people don’t experience belonging.
So then it comes to question, well, what is causing this, right? And what is causing these factors for those who are part of marginalised communities? What are they experiencing? And it comes down to what Rita, what you brought up. It comes down to bias and discrimination, right? And the bias and discrimination that exist in our system structures, policies, practices in the culture of our organisation have a tremendous impact on the decisions that are made, who we’re favouring, Rita, as you talked about earlier.
But also in our interactions with each other. So when we think about, well, what do we need to do differently? One of the core things is to make sure that our organisations are truly inclusive, that they’re truly fair. And that means getting down to the core of both the system side of it and the cultural side of it. And that means looking at system structures, where is bias embedded across the entire employee life cycle in hiring practices.
And a really good example here is we know that neurodivergent individuals who form about anywhere between five to 15% of the population, depending on how we define it, are actually very reluctant to apply for jobs. Because the very idea of going for a traditional interview, sitting across a panel for a good 45 minutes to an hour, needing to make eye contact, that’s so stressful that it prevents neurodivergent individuals from even applying for a job.
And so, we’ve really got to rethink some of these practices that we have in our organisations that actually open up for both attracting talent in and then retaining talent as well. Now, we talked about the … Andrew’s, of course, talked about the four-day work week, thinking about flexible working options, parental leave, gender-neutral bathrooms. It’s things like that that actually create spaces where intersectional identities feel like they don’t need to cover up, and that reduces the stress that people are experiencing. Faith or meditation rooms, quiet spaces as well. So very practical things that can be done to make sure that we’re creating spaces where we can show up as ourselves. And I’ve got one more …
Morra Aarons-Mele:
… I just have to jump in really quick with a connection about disruption, which is I know from working with many leaders, specifically with ADHD, that the modern workplace where we are, Andrew, being interrupted every 11 minutes, although it feels like it’s way more, is almost impossible to manage. For example, if you’re working with something like ADHD, you’re set up to not be able to do your best work because your Slack is on.
Poornima Luthra:
Yeah, absolutely. And creating those spaces. I think there are lots of organisations, at least here in the Nordics where I am, who are actually starting to pay a lot more attention to what kind of workplace environments do we create so that we’re able to then make sure that neurodivergent individuals are able to thrive in that environment.
And that means that work looks different. It doesn’t look like it’s from a nine to five kind of setup, it looks different, it looks flexible. It’s working from home for part of the day, or part of the week and coming in for a certain period of time. It’s about having those quiet spaces, noise-cancelling headsets. Booths where you can do your work in a space where you’re comfortable, where you don’t have that sensory overload. But it’s creating these options. And the thing is, we often think about these things as, “Oh, these benefit people from marginalised groups,” but it actually benefits all of us.
Introverts, to be honest, all of us could use a little time out in the middle of the day with all the sensory stimulation that’s going on, and take a moment. It has this positive impact overall. Who doesn’t want to have some quiet time, perhaps in a quiet space? Gender-neutral bathrooms benefit not just the trans community, but benefit so many women as well with menopause and all the changes that are going on in women’s bodies. So there’s a lot that we can actually enable to happen by making these small changes. They’re not big changes, but they create environments where we’re being inclusive. And that actually brings me on to one of the last things that I wanted to put on the table is culture.
Because I think culture is such a big part of nurturing spaces where we all feel that we can thrive, where we all feel that we are not experiencing that levels of anxiety, stress. And this is not embedded in a strategy or a roadmap. This is embedded in our day-to-day interactions with each other, right? At the coffee machine, by lunch, during meetings. This is where what is commonly known as microaggressions. I’m not the biggest fan of the term, microaggressions. Micro somehow suggests that it doesn’t have as much of an impact.
In fact, in my book I write, I call them termite biases, because they’re very much like termites. They’re so subtle. You don’t know your beautiful wooden cabinet is infested by termites until it’s too late. And that’s what these day-to-day, non-inclusive behaviours feel like. They’re hidden in compliments. They’re hidden in humour. They’re hidden in casual things that we say to each other. And that’s where actually there’s so much stress that happens. And people feel it, and it’s so gradual that it creeps up. And when you are from a marginalised group, you don’t even necessarily notice it when the first instance happen. You may not notice it at the second. You may make a mental note, but you’re like … You might brush it aside, you might even gaslight yourself.
But over time, the stress that it adds to feeling included, to feeling excluded in that space, that is a huge mental load that people from marginalised groups take on. And I think that’s something we really need to put on the table and really think about, how our actions … We might mean well when we say something, a compliment for example. But reframing ourselves to thinking about impact versus the intention. And for me, that’s super important because I think when we’re trying to nurture inclusive spaces for intersectional, for different people, we often think we’re doing the right thing, but we don’t realise the harm or the impact that it has on others. And that’s where really my work on active allyship comes in. We’re really enabling those behaviours so that we’re creating spaces where not just some groups thrive, and not just some groups where work is better for their mental health, but everybody gets to thrive, and everybody gets to have an environment where their mental health is protected.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Can you give us an example of active allyship that is beneficial to mental health?
Poornima Luthra:
Yeah, of course. So one of the behaviours that I talk about, so in my book I’ve got seven behaviours. And they start off with more individual behaviours and then build to more team and organisational behaviours. And one of the behaviours, empathetic engagement. So when we live in a world, cancel cultures out there, and we’re also fearful of addressing each other’s bias and discrimination that we might witness or experience. And to be honest, my current research is actually focusing on fear. We have a lot of fear when it comes to nurturing these environments. And for many of us, we actually are passive. We stay away from it because we’re like, “Yeah, okay, inclusive workplaces sounds good, but I’m not really feeling up for engaging on bias and addressing something that I’ve noticed or something that I’ve experienced.” So empathy is so important, and I’m a big believer in asking questions in the right tone.
And so coming from a place of empathy, knowing that today it’s someone else’s bias that you might be engaging on, tomorrow it could very well be my own, right? As I write in my book, “If you have a brain, you’re biased.” Everyone has biases. And these show up, and they show up in such a myriad of different ways. And we don’t even notice it. So many of them are unconscious. So using questions is very, very powerful. So the next time you notice someone at lunch saying something that could be harmful to a particular community, it might be your own community, it might be another community, but you just notice it, have that conversation.
Take the person aside, have that one-to-one conversation. “Tell me where you’re coming from.” Open-ended questions to engage in that dialogue. I think we’ve created an environment around us where there’s just so much toxicity associated with creating these inclusive spaces that we’re all very scared. And actually what it takes is actually very simple things. Simple open-ended questions, sharing how someone from a particular community may have experienced that comment that you made or jokes that you made. And the person might just say, “Gosh, I’d never thought about it that way.” But we’re not creating spaces where we can have these nuanced conversations that are safe, in safe spaces, to take those risks. To admit when it didn’t go quite as I planned or it landed differently from how I thought it would because my intention was good, but the harm was done.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
I’ll never forget when I interviewed Amy Edmondson, who will be a member of this series in the last Tuesday of May, I said, “What’s the number one thing that you could do to create a more psychologically safe environment?” She just said, “Ask good questions.”
Poornima Luthra:
Exactly.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
And listen.
Poornima Luthra:
And listen without needing to respond. But listen with wanting to understand. I think we live in a world where we are listening to respond. We’re so quick to jump in with defensiveness, with justification. But listen to understand, to understand a different viewpoint. To understand how someone might experience the very same environment that we’re in, in a different way that causes them stress but doesn’t cause you stress. There are ways in which we can have those rich conversations and it brings teams closer together. It makes us appreciate the environment we’re in, and it helps us to nurture a better space for each other.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
I think the thing about listening, and before I answer some wonderful questions from our audience, is really your point, Rita and Andrew as well, about consideration of others. And sometimes the best way to create a more mentally healthy environment is to stop assuming that the way you do things is the way that’s good for everyone else on your team. Just because you like to send emails on Saturday morning, or you love a lot of meetings, or Slack is your best friend, that has effects for other people.
Andrew Barnes:
Yeah, look, I think you’re absolutely right, Morra. The point is that often as leaders, I think that we naturally assume that everybody wants to climb to the top of the greasy bowl. And actually, they don’t. Most people want to have a decent job. They want to have time with their family. They want to have a good life. And a lot of people are quite happy with that.
But if all we ever do is we judge everybody by what drove us, then that means you end up with that culture where I think it’s okay to send an email late at night. Now, I will know that when we shifted the four-day week, my biggest problem – actually my board were the biggest problem – but the second-biggest problem – I will say, I fixed that by announcing it on national television first – but the biggest problem actually is the leadership team. That the leadership team has to rethink, re-change how they approach … and the only people I made it compulsory to work a four-day week was my leadership team. And they had to walk the talk. And that’s to your point, you’ve got to change the culture, and you’ve got to change it so it reflects what everybody wants in the organisation.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Rita, we got a good question a while ago that I want to start with you, because it’s something that we know makes humans anxious. And this is uncertainty. Anna Nielsen writes, “There’s a lot of neuroscience that shows that people benefit greatly from certainty. In my work, it’s crucial to create a sense of certainty for employees about how they’re expected to approach and handle conflict. What does the panel think?” And I’m going to start with you, Rita, about certainty and mental health at work. And again, how can a leadership team try to create a sense of certainty when it ain’t there necessarily?
Rita McGrath:
Well, yes and no, right? I mean, even in the most certain of times there’s always the unexpected that can happen. So one of the things I encourage senior leaders to do is what I call absorb uncertainty. And what I mean by that is you spell out for people your view of what the world is as best we can today. So that they’re not wrestling with this just sort of unfathomable uncertainty.
So let me give an example that might make that more clear. So I was working with a team that was launching a new product in the insurance space in America. And what you need to know to understand this example is that in the United States, insurance products are regulated state by state. So how many states have approved your plan is how many you’ll be able to access on launch date. So that’s the big uncertainty.
And so, I’m witnessing this conversation between the project manager who was the leader in this case, and the operations chief who was responsible for pulling this off. And they’re having this conversation about, “Are you ready?” And the operations guy is like, “well, I’m not sure …” Just blah, blah blah, just not getting anywhere.
So I kind of pulled the project manager off to the side and I said, “Well, have you told him how many states you expect him to be ready for?” And the project manager looks at me, he says, “Well, I don’t know.” I said, “Yeah, but that’s not an excuse. You are the leader in this situation. Your job is to put a stake in the ground and say, this is how many states you think we’re going to be dealing with, and then ask the operations guy whether he’s ready.” He says, “Well, I’m not getting anywhere as it is.”
So we went back in the room, said, “What if I told you, I think it’s going to be 15 states on launch day, and then maybe ramping up to 20 in a couple of weeks after that. Could you tell me whether you’re ready or not?” And the change in the conversation was electric. Operations guy, like, “15, oh, absolutely. This is the plan. This is how I do this. This is what …”
Now what I want to point out to our listeners is not one single fact changed from the first conversation to the second one. It was exactly the same data, but what the leader had done in that case, was he lifted from his people the burden of possibly being wrong, possibly failing. Back to Amy Edmondson, right? Possibly having to say, “Yes, I’m ready,” and then maybe it’s 40 states and absolutely no way would he be ready for that. So absorbing uncertainty I think is an absolutely crucial leadership challenge when you’re in states of high flux.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Poornima, Andrew, want to say anything about that? Or …
Andrew Barnes:
Yeah. Look, I will do it in a different way. And one of the things is I hate gig. Hate it with a passion, loathe it. If you look at-
Morra Aarons-Mele:
You mean the gig economy?
Andrew Barnes:
Yeah. So the Foundation for Young Australians has done a lot of very interesting research. Everybody under the age 25 is the most stressed generation there has ever been. Serious incidences of mental health. Most of the … about 25% of the jobs that are being created down there are gig jobs. Now, why I dislike gig is because there is no emphasis on training.
There’s uncertainty of hours. There is actually quite often people getting round … We’ve got very strong laws in New Zealand as it would be the case in Scandinavia around minimum wage, sick pay, holiday pay, et cetera, et cetera. Nobody cares really in the states, but that … And so there, we gig coming in and they get round our employment laws. All we are actually doing is we are building up problems for the future. We’re building up people who haven’t got skills, haven’t got training, haven’t got security. And actually we have got to recognize that convenience doesn’t trump everything else.
And that’s why I like my model because I give people the flexibility that they are craving. But I don’t lose the hard-fought-for employee protections. I shouldn’t be saying this as an employer. But employee protections, which a century of struggle in my home country, the UK, gave us these sort of protections. We cannot lose those. And yet, we are creating an economy where we actually think it’s okay to make people not work when they want, which is what they think. They work when I want them to work. And that’s the gig economy. And thus endeth the lesson.
Poornima Luthra:
I can weigh in with, there is a lot of research that shows us that inclusive organisations are more resilient. And they’re resilient because inclusive cultures mean that we are creating psychologically safe environments. Of course, the work of Professor Amy Edmondson, but also thinking about a culture of growth and learning, and unlearning, more importantly.
And we know that change is the only constant, which means that in an inclusive environment, we’re creating space for taking those, making those intelligent failures that Amy Edmondson talks about, but also creating opportunities where we’re unlearning and learning constantly. And so, it’s in these kind of environments where there is that resilience that’s built into it. And in moments when there’s flux, when there’s uncertainty, when there’s rapid change, we see that these are the organisations that actually pull through and come through on the other end with employee morale and employee mental health more intact than when they don’t have that inclusive culture.
So you could think of inclusive cultures as the foundation. And no matter what is changing on the top of it, it is this foundation that is pulling the organisation through. But I think we have a misunderstanding around what inclusive cultures actually are and the role that they play. We assume that it’s meant for just the marginalised communities to get a role in the organisation. It’s a pizza pie approach to looking at it, that if we provide something to one group, we’re taking away from the other. And this actually stems from misunderstanding around what actually it means to nurture an inclusive workplace. Because it actually, if we do it right, it weathers the storms.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Okay, my last question is going to be a speed round and it’s going to build on a question from Deborah Hagar. What three things … You don’t have to say three, you could pick one, can leaders do individually to develop a culture of equity as Dr. Luthra envisions? And I’m going to expand equity to include mentally healthy consideration for people’s need to be seen, to have agency, for people’s need to have a life and have time. For people’s need for their whole self to be recognized and not treated with bias and injustice. If you all were coaching a leader who said, “I really want to do this right,” what would you tell them? Whoever wants to can go first.
Poornima Luthra:
I am happy to go first.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Go for it.
Poornima Luthra:
For me, number one is be aware and consider the impact of your actions. Always give that pause/thought to, my intention might be, okay, what is the impact that it’s having? How can I understand that more? Number two, check in. Check in with your colleagues. Check in with your team members.
I know what works really well with some of the leadership teams that I work with is where at the start of a meeting, it could be a weekly meeting, it could be a daily meeting. At the start of it, just having that couple of seconds saying, “What frame of mind am I in right now? What’s happening in my life? How am I showing up today?” I think that quick check-in is so important so that we build that understanding that we’re all humans. And as human beings, we’re not always working at that level of productivity. There are moments where we’re going to have ups and downs and to create an environment that is more humane, that is more about humanity. And the last one for me is always ask ourselves, “Whose perspective, whose voice is missing? Who’s not being heard?” Those are my three.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Amazing.
Rita McGrath:
That’s great. I can go next.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Go for it.
Rita McGrath:
I think the first thing you want to do is try to introduce what the people at Amazon call mechanisms. So human beings are flawed and inconsistent and messy. And if we intend to do a good thing, want to lose weight, right? Eat less, move more, how complicated could that be? But when it comes to actually doing the thing, it’s much harder. So I’m a big fan of what I call mechanisms. So one mechanism is introduce a no interruption rule. So if you’re debating or discussing something, let everybody have a minute or two to get their opinions out before they get interrupted by others in the room. So that would be an example of a mechanism. Second thing is definitely give yourself a little checklist for diverse points of view. And I don’t mean that in a politically correct sense.
I mean diverse schooling, diverse backgrounds, diverse upbringing, diverse functions. Because we know that when it comes to unknown and unfamiliar tasks, diverse teams actually perform better than homogenous ones do. And then the last thing I think we want to be very mindful of is giving and getting really rich feedback. And it doesn’t have to be a whole big thing. It could be just in the moment. And making that normal so people … I mean, the last thing you want, right, is your boss to come to you and say, “I have some feedback for you.”
I mean, the instant response it creates is this flight fright reaction. So make it part of everyday conversation. Say, “Hey, that didn’t go so well, I don’t think.” And maybe make it with a little humour, right? There’s no reason feedback has to be this horrible thing. So I think getting rich … And feedback’s really just a way of confirming learning. So if you think about human learning, I have a theory about how the world works. I go see what happens. If my theory is wrong, what I expected to happen didn’t happen, I need to understand that better. And so, getting rich feedback is super important to learning in those kinds of environments.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Thank you.
Andrew Barnes:
Well, I guess the first thing is, don’t kid yourself that people go over the top for a flag or a mission statement. We quite often whack those things on the wall and assume that everybody is going to buy into that. They don’t. It’s a complete waste of time for most of the time. Because what you are actually doing is you are actually often dictating down rather than listening up as to what is actually important to people.
So I think that’s number one. Number two, communication. We’re rubbish at it. You’ve got to understand that communication as a leader comes at lots of different levels, and you have to pitch that communication. It could be anything from doing the town hall, to actually just sitting down with a bunch of your employees at any point in time and making sure that the message is understood.
And that means that it’s not just being communicated by you, but it’s being communicated by your leadership team. And finally, because it really is what I’m standing for at the moment, just put in a four-day week. It’s not a silver bullet. But actually it forces you to question what your leadership team works like, how well you are empowering people, how well you’re listening to what they are wanting to do. And you’d actually be amazed that by giving people more time, by giving people authority and accountability to change how they work, what that leads is a more empowered, more engaged workforce. And that is a very powerful thing.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Thank you all. I am always reminded of one of my favourite quotes from Dr. Angela Neal-Barnett from Kent State who says, “Work is school for grownups.” And we bring our whole selves messy and flawed as they are, but ultimately we want to go to a place that sees us, that respects us, that teaches us and gives us something important and valuable to do for our time, and make friends and have some fun along the way. And so, I think that the fundamental basics of what we learn about how to be good people, and listen, and see are so important. And plus, we should pay people fairly, right, Andrew?
Andrew Barnes:
Yeah, absolutely.
Poornima Luthra:
Absolutely.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Thank you so much for your time. I’m going to hand it back over to Stuart.
Stuart Crainer:
Great discussion. Thank you everyone. Respect, dignity, treating people like responsible adults. Listening, ask whose voice is missing? Say no to interruptions. None of this is rocket science. And if you want to change things, announce it on national TV first. So thank you to Morra, Poornima, Rita and Andrew. And thank you to everyone for joining us. We really appreciate it.
You can check out Andrew’s work at 4dayweek.com. Four, number four. Rita is at ritaccgrath.com. Find out more about Poornima’s work on LinkedIn, or at the Copenhagen Business School website. And Morra can be found at Morraam.com. We hope you’ll be able to join us next week at the same time when joining Morra will be Sanyin Siang and Lenny Mendonca from McKinsey. Thank you very much and we’ll see you next week.
Morra Aarons-Mele:
Bye.
Rita McGrath:
Bye everyone.
Andrew Barnes:
Bye.