The cost of living crisis and employee mental wellbeing

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Stress levels are rising. On Wednesday, 02 November it is National Stress Awareness Day. It won’t come a day too soon. Proactive employers are considering how they can help their most valuable asset – their workforce.

A recent survey commissioned by the Royal College of Physicians found that more than half of respondents felt rising costs had negatively affected their health.

As energy prices, inflation and interest rates continue to rise and are forecasted to rise further, we must look at how money will impact employees’ mental health and as responsible employers, what we can do about it.

When people worry about money they can experience a low mood, anxiety, a lack of control and stress. Ongoing stress results in poor mental health.

There are several ways employers can help. Increasing pay levels, one-off payments, bonuses and targeted financial assistance can go a long way but sometimes that’s not possible.

Encouraging employees to move back to the office can save on household energy costs. Conversely, allowing people to stay at home may save on travel costs.

Let your team know about the government’s tax relief for travel expenses.

Think about car-sharing schemes and facilitating the sharing of childcare costs.

Try to create a workplace culture that supports mental health. If employees are stressed about the cost of living, and mortgage payments then it’s even more important to take action to reduce additional workplace stress.

Address the double stigma of mental health and money through training, open forums and private consultation. Encourage staff to talk about their specific worries.

Consider moving to a proactive employee assistance programme that is designed to tackle issues and worries before they become problematic for both the employee and the organisation. Talking to a trained psychotherapist or counsellor is an effective way to tackle anxiety.

Make sure your team have the skills to spot the signs and symptoms of poor mental health. Just as importantly, ensure they know how to signpost for help. The ideal way to do this is to establish a network of mental health first-aiders or arrange mental health training specifically for your management team.

Recognition for good work should continue, but now, more than ever, we should bolster this by sharing positive client and inter-departmental feedback.

It’s never been so important to be proactive about wellbeing at work.

Journal column from Chamber members, Corporate Personal Wellbeing

Have we got employee wellbeing and resilience the wrong way round?

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Can Michelle Minnikin of Work Pirates shift your perspective on employee resilience? This blog initially appeared on their website.

 

As an organisational psychologist, the number one question guaranteed to set me off ranting… “How can we hire more resilient people?”

So, after taking a couple of deep breaths to stop me actually exploding, I explain that they’re asking the wrong question. The question they should be asking themselves – What is it about my organisation that is breaking people? Because you can hire the most resilient person on the planet, but if you put them into an environment that you need to be superhuman to survive in, they will leave.

Or they will break.

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”

This quote from Alexander Den Heijer can help shift your perspective. It clearly identifies where you should direct your focus when a colleague is struggling to thrive in your company. So, if you’re thinking that you need to bring in someone to help with resilience training or some kind of wellbeing support, ask yourself why your people are struggling to cope.

I love the Health & Safety Executive resources on stress and stress risk assessments which ask some really powerful questions.

  • Is the work environment helpful or harmful? Is the workload achievable? Do the work patterns suit your employees?
  • How much control do your employees have over the way they do their work? Can they do it their way, or do they have to follow strict procedures?
  • How supported do they feel? Do they have the resources to do their job? Are there barriers in the way to achieving their goals? Are they coached by their managers?
  • What emphasis is placed on having positive relationships? How is conflict managed and unacceptable behaviour dealt with?
  • Does everyone understand what their responsibilities are? Do they know how their efforts contribute to the success of the company? Are they confident about who they need to speak to to get their job done?
  • How are changes in the company managed? Do they feel that they have a say? Do they understand the change and how they will be impacted by these changes?

To be happy, employees need to feel that they are supported, protected and that they belong. So before you put the onus on your employees to partake in resilience training, or wellbeing activities, it really might be worthwhile to ensure the environment isn’t causing the problem.

Oh…and no amount of beanbags, yoga or free fruit fridays are going to make up for a toxic work environment.

 

The way we’ve always done things is no longer working. We created Work Pirates, to re-write the rules of work. Find out more here.

 

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Levelling Up Health and Wellbeing in the North East

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In the Government’s outline for Levelling Up the United Kingdom, two of the twelve ‘missions’ concern health and wellbeing. In this post I summarise the missions, their policy programmes, and what they could mean for the North East.

 

Health

The Government has stated that the gap in Healthy Life Expectancy (HLE) between local areas where it is highest and lowest will have narrowed by 2030, and that HLE will rise by 5 years in 2035.

The motivation behind this mission is that there are stark disparities in health outcomes across the UK, and that people deserve to have the opportunity to live long, healthy lives wherever they live. Better health will also improve productivity and wellbeing.

People living in the most deprived communities in England have up to 18 years less of their lives in good general health than the least deprived. The North East has the lowest life expectancy in the country and, in its most deprived areas, life expectancy has been decreasing. This is driven by a variety of factors, including smoking rates, alcohol intake, poor diet, quality of housing, and access to healthier food. Access to and quality of health services are also an issue which can vary by area.

Covid-19 has made these disparities even more stark, with hospital admission, mortality rates, and ‘long covid’ higher among more deprived groups. Access to healthcare has also widened in deprived areas, with waiting lists in England having increased by 55% in the most deprived areas. This is compared to only 36% in the most affluent. Ethnic minorities and people with disabilities have also been disproportionately impacted.

The government’s policy programme to improve health focuses on:

  • Improving public health
  • Supporting people to change their food and diet
  • Tackling diagnostic backlogs

 

Improving public health

The key points:

  • Recent launch of the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities
  • A new White Paper on Health Disparities in England will be released this year
  • The 2019 NHS Long Term Plan
  • The Core20PLUS5 Initiative
  • Rollout of social prescribing
  • A new 10-year Drugs Strategy was published late last year
  • A new Tobacco Control Plan for England is due to be published later this year
  • The Government is investing £75m in weight management services and support in England in 2021-22

A closer look:

The new White Paper on Health Disparities in England that will be released later this year will set out a strategy to tackle the core drivers of inequalities in health outcomes. It will have a strong focus on prevention and disparities by ethnicity, socioeconomic background, and geography. It will also include new ways to ensure that business plays a part in improving health.

The 2019 NHS Long Term Plan and the Core20PLUS5 initiative each look to level up healthcare. The latter focuses on improving cardiovascular disease, cancer, respiratory, maternity and mental health outcomes in the poorest 20% of the population, as well as ethnic minorities. In the North East, this will particularly benefit Middlesbrough.

In rolling out social prescribing, the aim is for at least 900,000 people to be referred to social prescribing by 2023-24. Social prescribing promotes a holistic approach to people’s health and wellbeing. NHS England has also commissioned an evaluation of this rollout to ensure that it meets people’s needs. There are several social prescribing projects across the North East region, including Ways to Wellness and Zone West. More specifically, the Government has invested in a £5.77m cross-government project aimed at preventing and tackling mental illness through ‘green’ social prescribing. This will look at how to increase connection to the natural environment and will be focusing particularly on communities most affected by health disparities.

Finally, a new 10-year Drugs Strategy was published late last year and outlines a whole-system approach. The most deprived areas in England face the highest prevalence of drug-driven crime and health harms associated with drug use. The Government has stated that they will invest £780m to create a treatment and recovery system to break the cycle of problem drug use. As of 2020, the North East has had the highest rate of drug misuse of any English region for 8 consecutive years. We also have the highest rate of drug misuse deaths.

 

Food and diet

The key points:

  • Upcoming Food Strategy White Paper
  • New approach will be launched to assure compliance with school food standards (in collaboration with the Department for Education and the Food Standards Agency)
  • Government to invest £5m in ‘school cooking revolution’
  • Government to invest up to £200,000 to pilot new training for school governors and academy trusts on a whole-school approach to food
  • Aim for every child leaving secondary school to know at least six basic recipes
  • 3-year pilot of a Community Eatwell programme (GPs will be able to prescribe fruit and vegetables and food-related education)

A closer look:

The Government states that their upcoming Food Strategy White Paper will attempt to ensure that everyone can access, understand, and enjoy the benefits of a healthy and sustainable diet. This includes looking at how consumers access information about food. It will support eligible children and families in some of the most disadvantaged areas to learn and improve their knowledge of health and nutrition.

While the project launched between the Department for Education and the Food Standards Agency will engage with multiple local authorities, it does not appear that any will be in the North East. The project aims to promote accountability and transparency of school food arrangements by encouraging schools to complete a statement on their school websites. It is the Government’s intention that this will become mandatory when schools can do this effectively.

 

Tackling diagnostic backlogs

The key points:

  • £2.3bn of Government investment to improve access to vital diagnostic services and tackle the diagnostic backlog
  • At least 100 Community Diagnostic Centres to be established in England by 2025
  • The People at the Heart of Care White Paper published late last year outlines planned reforms to adult social care in England

A closer look:

The majority of the Community Diagnostic Centres will be based outside of London and the South East, boosting diagnostic capacity in areas that need it most and offering a range of services tailored to local needs. The centres may include imaging, cardio-respiratory, pathology, endoscopy and general consulting equipment to allow several tests in one visit, improving the accuracy of diagnosis and overall patient experience. It is said that the Community Diagnostic Centres rolled out this year will deliver nearly three million additional scans in the first full year of operations. Over the next three years, they are projected to increase scans by an additional eight million tests each year, providing the equivalent of 23,000 years of improved quality of life.

As part of the Government’s commitment to build 40 new hospitals by 2030, Two hospitals are to be delivered in the North East by the end of the decade. These include the rebuild of Northgate hospital and a new hospital to replace Shotley Bridge Hospital. It is also said that 725 more doctors and 1,552 more nurses will be working in hospitals in the North East between September 2019 and September 2021.

 

Wellbeing

The Government has stated that, by 2030, wellbeing will have improved in every area of the UK, with the gap between top performing and other areas closing.

This ‘mission’ is considered an overarching, outcomes-based measure of success for levelling up. The report states that wellbeing captures the extent to which people across the UK lead happy and fulfilling lives, and consider it the very essence of levelling up.

Wellbeing is affected by a multitude of things, from physical and mental health, jobs, community relationships, quality of housing, and the environment. The report found that even the most productive and prosperous of places have some of the lowest levels of life satisfaction, which persisted even after controlling for personal and economic characteristics. They considered this a powerful illustration that wellbeing goes beyond income and that other factors are just as, if not more, important.

While the North East had the most significant deteriorations in happiness and life satisfaction from April 2019 to March 2020, the most recent investigation on personal wellbeing from the ONS found that the North East was an exception to increases in anxiety and decreases in happiness the feeling that the things done in life are worthwhile.

The Government states that, over time, it will be able to expand its use of new and administrative data through the ONS and the Integrated Data Services Platform, and that this will improve estimates of factors such as wellbeing.

 

Freya Thompson

Knowledge and Research Executive

@NEEChamberFreya

 

Photo by Andrew Tanglao on Unsplash

Retain staff by tackling the menopause taboo

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Today (18th Oct 2021) is World Menopause Day, and in this blog Karen Lobo-Morell, Director of happy workspace co, explains why its an issue businesses need to take seriously, and outlines some practical steps to take.

Menopause affects us all, it’s not just about women, it has an impact on everyone around them, their work colleagues, managers, families and partners and while ALL women will go through it, why does it still seem to be a taboo subject?

A third of all workers are now over the age of 50 and menopausal women are becoming the fastest-growing workplace demographic, so it’s never been more important to include menopause awareness in corporate wellbeing strategies.

Companies are losing hundreds of thousands of experienced women every year as they struggle to cope with sometimes debilitating symptoms. This loss of skill and knowledge can have a big impact on businesses, not just from a productivity point of view, but also the direct costs of recruiting and retraining new staff.

The average age for women to go through menopause is 51, however, the journey to that stage (known as perimenopause) can begin for some women decades earlier, last for up to 10 years and result in a diverse range of symptoms that can dramatically affect the way they work.

Anxiety, depression, brain fog, memory loss, lack of sleep from constant night sweats, fatigue, mood swings and muscle and joint pain can lead to some women feeling like they just can’t function in the workplace, and are too embarrassed to ask for help. But with the right support and empathy from managers and colleagues life can feel a little easier during this challenging time.

According to research by Vodafone, 62% of women surveyed felt their symptoms had negatively impacted them at work and 64% thought there should be more workplace support for menopausal women.

With the number of job vacancies in the UK reaching a 20 year high, and some industries fighting to get skilled staff, it makes sense to do what you can to retain the people you have.

Male-dominated industries that are trying to attract more women into their ranks, such as construction, could potentially be missing out on a large pool of experienced and talented employees in a market where workers are already in short supply.

Whilst many industry-leading organisations have recognised the importance of diversity and inclusivity in order to retain experts there’s still a need to create workplace cultures that encourage women to seek help when it comes to menopause. But for this to happen, managers, both male and female, should be given the training they need to understand what menopause is, how to feel comfortable discussing the topic and know what support they can put in place to help their female colleagues and support co-workers.

All workplaces have maternity policies, but not all women will become pregnant, there’s a growing recognition of the need for mental health support in the workplace but menopause can also have a big impact on workers. Companies such as ASOS and Vodafone are leading the way by offering staff flexible working, paid leave, staff training and access to help through employee assistance programmes.

There are a number of strategies companies can put in place to create a working environment that offers women the confidence to seek help, such as:

  • Openly discussing the topic internally
  • Running training for managers – there are companies who specialise in this topic
  • Allowing flexible working for women experiencing symptoms
  • Setting up a weekly confidential women’s support group
  • Providing women who are experiencing hot flushes with a desk fan or seating near a window that opens
  • Including counselling around menopause in employee assistance programmes
  • Running regular mindfulness and/or meditation workshops to help ease anxiety

Teams are stronger together, when everyone has the support and tools they need to carry out their role to the best of their ability everyone wins.

Karen Lobo-Morell, Director at happy workspace co

happy workspace co help companies design dynamic workplace wellness strategies so their people and business thrive.

This article also appears on happy workspace’s website here, and you can find out more about the business here and on LinkedIn.

Photo by CoWomen on Unsplash