S3E4 - Creating A Workplace Where Mental Health Comes First

In this conversation, Ewan and Daniel get practical about mental health at work: the real drivers of stress and burnout, the hybrid balance, and why visibility beats the classic “open door policy”. 

You’ll hear how to use the Wellness Action Plan, build manager confidence, and measure impact beyond absence, plus ideas for smaller teams without big budgets.

You’ll learn:
• Visibility vs accessibility (and why it matters)
• Simple early‑warning check‑ins that feel safe
• Practical tools: Wellness Action Plan, HSE stress toolkit, peer networks
• What leadership can do tomorrow to set the tone

If you enjoyed this episode, please follow, rate, and leave a review, it really helps others find the show.

Resources 

• https://www.samh.org.uk/get-involved/workplace/workplace-wellness-action-plans
• https://www.samh.org.uk/about-mental-health/samh-publications/publications-workplace

Follow our social channels where we continue these conversations!

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Transcript

Ewan (00:07):

Hi, and welcome back to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. We are joined today by Daniel Quinn, who is the Senior Workplace Training Manager at the Scottish Action for Mental Health. Daniel Good W with us.

Daniel (00:19):

Yeah, brilliant to be on you and thanks so much for inviting me on.

Ewan (00:22):

No problem. So today we're going to talk a little bit about mental health, how HR can help their teams, but how HR can develop the right strategies to help you with their mental health through work, because it doesn't just affect your work, obviously it affects the whole of your life and the impact is felt right across your life, I guess. So we want to try and work out how workplaces can support people with that, but also how they can create the right environments. And I know that's a lot of the sort of stuff that you work on in terms of the training you deliver and so on. Daniel, listen to

Daniel (00:56):

Yeah, absolutely. This is a big part of what we do is just try to increase that visibility of mental health support in the workplace.

Ewan (01:04):

And so do you want to give us just a bit of background as to your role at Scratch Action for Mental health and just a bit of insight into what you do day to day?

Daniel (01:14):

Yeah, absolutely. So as a Senior Workplace training manager, I overlook the delivery of an award-winning, and I had to get that in right off the bat. Do apologize. An award-winning training program that is specifically mental health. So we deliver accredited programs such as Scottish Mental Health First Aid, which are sort of two day accredited program, applied suicide intervention skills training, which is suicide specific, but again, two day very immersive accredited course. But we always see the most of our workload, about 80, 90% of our workload is actually in the courses which we have developed, researched, and developed ourselves. Now it's incredibly humbling to be able to do that. Sam h as a charity is one that has existed for 103 years. We actually predate the National Health Service. So it's really great to see organizations across Scotland really valuing what we offer in our experience and for us to be able to cultivate that experience where we have been directly supporting people and offer that back into the workplace. So a big part of my role is looking at how we do that at a very strategic level, looking at how we can increase the impact of what we do and provide enough provision or enough resources for organizations across Scotland.

Ewan (02:39):

Wow, I didn't realize it predated the NHS. That is, yeah. Wow.

Daniel (02:45):

I haven't worked there a full-time. You and I should say that. Barely know. I haven't been about since the start.

Ewan (02:51):

No, fair enough. So I guess you're fully immersed in this and obviously as part of the training you have to do a lot of research into this. So I'm just trying to work out what are the most common mental health challenges that employees face in the workplace today, and what's the overall impact in their wellbeing?

Daniel (03:09):

Well, there's lots out there. I think we can configure the workplace and life in general I think has changed dramatically over the past six, seven years, and it's easy to point towards a pandemic and say the big changes there. But what we see in the workplace and what we research are higher disclosures of workplace stress, particularly around relationships in the workplace, particularly around workload and pressures and deadlines, higher prevalence of burnout. And this is pulled out from lots of different research linked into that actually is financial anxiety with the cost of living crisis, financial anxiety. In a report last year by Burnout UK was quoted as the main driver for burnout in the young workforce. So particularly that 16 to 24-year-old really experiencing the financial pressures of the cluster living crisis and then bringing that into the workplace. So there's lots out there, but I'll pick upon one in particular because it's so important to all facets of what we're going to talk about, I guess, and it's just the way in which we work remotely, hybrid working isolation, et cetera.

(04:22):

Prior to the pandemic, there was a report done by flexible working by, I forget the name of the organization of me, but there was a bit of research done that said that one in six people felt that flexible working was a normal part of culture in the workplace before the pandemic. Now when it came to the pandemic came to March 20, 24 out of five workers in Scotland that hadn't been furloughed were working remotely. So you've got this almost overnight transition of people being parachuted into their home to build workspaces in their home to without the support mechanisms or the considerations there. And there's some research that goes alongside that and can be pointed towards in terms of how valuable our social connections are, not just at home, but in the workplace as well. There was a study conducted by Mental Health Foundation uk, and they looked at relationships in the 21st century. So you think about people in your household, people closest to you, but also what colleagues, and they found that these people that are closest to us are as big an indicator to our mortality as to whether we drink or whether we don't. There is big an indicator to our mortality as to whether we smoke or whether we don't. And these people are better indicator of our mortality than our diet or exercise regime.

(05:55):

It blows my mind because it means I could dedicate my life to really paying attention to what I'm eating, what I'm drinking, how much I exercise, and the people that are in my workplace as well as in my household, have just as much a say in how long I'm going to live. I guess the pivot point we're at is starting to look at, and what we're trying to do in workplaces is really recognize workplaces as not just a place of function and performance, but workplaces as being a place of really valuable social connections and really valuable support mechanisms for our mental health and wellbeing.

Ewan (06:33):

That's fascinating actually, and again, this isn't a question we had in here, but just to touch on that, I think there was a general consensus as obviously we got through the pandemic and obviously we do a lot of recruitment and people are asking, is it flexible? Can I work from home? And so on. And there was a general consensus that actually working from home makes me more rounded. I've got more, I can think about my lifestyle, I can think about going to the gym at lunchtime or whatever it might be, or picking up the kids from school and there was a feeling that made people feel better and more, I dunno, maybe more rounded, but actually you're making a good point there that actually that connection, that social connection is actually just as important as going into the workplace and not for presenteeism, but just for engagement with your work

Daniel (07:21):

Colleagues. Yeah, I think it's balance, isn't it? I think what we find out is that anything to excess is not really, I do flexible working as well, and I work remotely and I love the balance that it gives me,

Ewan (07:36):

But

Daniel (07:36):

I do recognize that sometimes you get through a full day or a couple of days and you're like, I actually haven't seen a lot of people. So it is not about saying one or the other is better. It's about finding that balance and everyone has a different gauge of what that balance is for them, but just recognizing that anything in excess is probably not great for us.

Ewan (07:56):

So how can HR teams work with organizations like Sam H to create that culture that prioritizes mental health? I think sometimes it's, I thought of, and certainly for a long time we've been talking about it in the podcast and talking about it in other areas in terms of the content we've got that mental health is such an important thing. And for a long time it was starting to grow, it was growing in importance. And then I think it's definitely shifted, and I don't know entirely why, but I think it's so important to try and create that culture where we still do prioritize mental health for people at work. How do HR teams go about working with organizations like yourself?

Daniel (08:39):

Particularly for us, we work on a commercial basis to work with organizations to deliver really bespoke and accredited training. So some of the training which we deliver is of course, I kind of mentioned Scottish mental health aid and assist. The ones that we have developed, which are most popular are courses around management of mental health problems in the workplace. So we have a course called Mental Health in the Workplace, A Guide for Managers. So this is really looking at how do managers create visibility and how do they create a proactive culture in the workplace. Now, a lot of frameworks for mental health are great, but a lot of them are reactive in their nature. They're based on the assumption that people will access that support or look to access that support. And we know that simply isn't true, that many people will be hesitant to reach out and get support.

(09:37):

But it's also important to think about for us as managers, HR leaders, wherever we are, if we are positioning ourselves just to react to crisis consistently, one, we're coming in too late, but also we're putting ourself in a very vulnerable position because emotionally we're not really cut out to handle distress from people consistently. We can be impacted vicariously. So a lot of our courses is about how do you create visibility because visibility can create access. So how do we make this a normal conversation? How do you embed it into team spaces, one-to-one spaces? How do you speak sincerely about mental health problems? How do you tackle generational attitudes? How do you understand what people's barriers are to access and support in the first place?

(10:29):

So working with us, we work very bespoke with organizations to look at, we'll sit down, have a meeting, what is it you feel you need? And then we'll be able to signpost and develop sometimes specific to those needs. But a lot of the stuff we see in the big part is managers training, peer support networks, developing them and the workplace being trauma-informed as well, or aware of suicide prevention, for example. We do a lot of that as well. I guess how we work with organizations is just very dependent on what the organization needs. And the first thing that we always do is try and sit down with people and have a talk about what it is they feel they need.

Ewan (11:12):

Yeah, I guess you want to put those practical steps in. Don't you want something there that avoids it? Getting to that point where it leads to long-term sickness, you want to try and put these practical steps. So it's prevention rather than cure, I guess. And I appreciate nobody's curing this, but it's that preventative steps and actually having that conversation. I would assume that sometimes when people talk to you, they don't necessarily know what the problem is, so it's hard to say, well, we need this or we need that. And I guess that's part of what you can pull out for people.

Daniel (11:43):

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I guess what a lot of organizations feel is needed isn't always what is needed from our perspective. Of course, we trust that the people that come to us know their organization a lot better than we do, but what we certainly can do is provide options of maybe things they haven't thought about before or maybe steps that they can look at before they even look at training. And that could be something simple is have you spoken to people in your organization? Have you done an employee survey about what they feel they need rather than jumping in and spending money on or lots of money on training. So sometimes it's about taking a step back before taking that step forward, isn't

Ewan (12:26):

It? Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. And so what sort of role does leadership play in this? So is there a role for leadership to reduce this stigma and to encourage the conversations? Again, a lot of this strikes me as open communication is such an important part of, I suppose, every facet of work, but particularly here where there is an issue and allowing people to have those conversations. Does leadership have a vital role to play in that?

Daniel (12:52):

Oh, absolutely. Leadership sets the tone, and from all elements of leadership, it's one of the most common things that we hear when we go into the classroom. We train managers and managers will say, this is absolutely great and we love this, but our managers doing it because if senior leadership's not buying into this and we are going to be held to performance metrics, well being expected to be more accommodating. And there's a disconnect sort of there. I think for leadership, it's about really setting the tone and having that buy-in and just being aware of how leadership is often perceived as well. Deloitte done a survey in 2023. They'd done a survey called the Wellbeing at Work Survey. And what they wanted to prove or what they wanted to bring into focus is that leadership and particularly senior leadership, how senior leadership, and I'm within that bracket myself. So how we view yourself is sometimes different to how people at the ground, floor level viewers. So one of the things they've done was they wanted to look at what they call C-suite executives. So this is your CEO, your COO, your CFOs. And out of the 3000 people that they interviewed, they found that 72% of those really senior executives said that they share information on their own wellbeing sometimes or often,

Ewan (14:17):

But

Daniel (14:18):

When you ask staff, only 16% of people not in managerial positions felt that their executive leaders showed that level of transparency. So that's a massive gap, isn't it? Saying, yeah, we do this all the time and 16 saying, no, not really. No, you don't. Yeah, yeah. Or more. Well, 16 saying they do, the vast majority saying they don't.

(14:41):

I think what leadership does and what we should be trying to do as leaders is create visibility. A lot of managers will talk about being an accessible manager to say, open door policy, come to me anytime you've got my number, you've got my team's chat, reach out if ever you need any support. And again, that is based on the premise that people reach out when they need support. And we simply know that that's not true. That many people don't reach out due to stigma. They don't reach out due to maybe not knowing that there's a problem or just being uncomfortable with that conversation. But it's not really about building accessibility. It is very easy to make ourselves accessible to people, but building visibility is about harder. Building visibility is about embedding this conversation in a team in one-to-one spaces. It's about sharing our own experience in a safe way, and it's about being proactive rather than reactive. And if we can become visible, then it can normalize the conversation. And if we can normalize that conversation, it creates access. So it all feeds down into that accessibility. I guess for leaders, it's about focusing on visibility. How do I become more visible?

Ewan (15:59):

How does that look? I mean, I appreciate you can't go into detailed examples, but what does that look like in terms of trying to create a visibility for your team? I guess a lot of people will have in their mind, oh, as you've just said, I've got an open door policy, come and speak to me whenever you want. But how do they practically do that? Is it about sharing their own experiences or what does that look like?

Daniel (16:21):

Well, what I would say is wanting to be careful in how we share our own experience. Our own experience is individual to us, and what we might feel is an adverse experience someone else might find very, very triggering. So we need to be aware of that, that creating visibility needs to be done in a safe way. I guess it's more so about having that conversation as often as possible and being proactive and checking in and people, organizations, you can have organizations that invest thousands of pounds in frameworks and policies and a tremendous amount of effort. But if at a ground level, people are hesitant to have this conversation or the culture is we just don't speak about this sort of thing, we don't know where these policies exist, we don't know where these frameworks exist, we don't know how they support us, it's just business as usual, then they don't really mean anything, do they? So it's about peeling it right back and going, actually, what we need to get better at is having that conversation consistently at a ground level, having regular check-ins with staff, having debriefing with staff, having regular performance supervisions, et cetera, and just really focusing on performance and wellbeing to the point that this becomes a normal conversation to have so that they can then utilize those frameworks.

Ewan (17:44):

Yeah, okay. Yeah, I suppose that goes on to, because one of the questions was about early warning sites and how signs of mental health struggles and without breaching privacy or trust and so on, is it having to build that culture of an open communication so that people don't feel like your prying into my life because we have these conversations on a regular basis? Would that be right?

Daniel (18:12):

Yeah, it's a bit about that, isn't it? I mean, trust is such an important element there. Having trust between employee and manager and having that relationship where we can speak openly about things, we all respond differently to distress. So what you might interpret as distress and me might not be, that might just be a different sort of behavior. There's a great toolkit called the Wellness Action Plan, and one of my favorite toolkits, you can get it from the Sam h website or if you're listening south of the border, you can get it on mine's website free resource. And what it is, is it's a conversational toolkit, a voluntary conversational toolkit that looks at how you preserve positive mental wellbeing in the workplace. So this is stuff such as what do you enjoy about this job and how do you take care of yourself? What are your hobbies, interests?

(19:09):

What do you do outside the here to make sure that you're, well, again, you discuss that in whatever context you want to discuss it. What are your early warning signs? What are your triggers? How would you like to be approached? If I want to check in on you, how often should I do that? What's your communication style? So it's really why I really like it is because it's a proactive toolkit. It's designed to prevent people getting to that point in a crisis. So it's not used as a crisis response. It's looking at getting an action plan in place in case we ever do need to support you. What does that support look like? And it's not specific to people with a mental health diagnosis because we've all got wellbeing. So to give you a wee bit, an insight into this works, this might sit between an individual and a manager.

(19:59):

It could sit between an individual and a trusted colleague. We all use them in my team and the workplace team in Sam H, and I've got one myself, which sits between almost at a slip of the tongue there. And I do apologize, sits between myself and my manager. And one of the connections is What am I looking out for on you? And my manager spoke to me about a concept when I came into Sam h called Unenjoyable Wellness. Have you ever heard of that concept before? No, no, no. It's an interesting concept. So the concept is that there's little tasks littered throughout our day and throughout our reach that really deliver no practical value to us. They're actually quite unemployable to do,

(20:43):

But the long-term payoff, the sense of accomplishment that we have when doing them is good for our mental health. So if you think the easiest way to think about this really is tidy house, tidy mind. Nobody like getting down and cleaning the floors and doing all the washing and all that, but it's nice to sit in a nice clean house and go, oh, I can relax now. I find man enjoyable wellness. Wellness was Ireland. Ireland delivers me no practical value whatsoever. It's a needlessly pointlessly complex job. And it just, anyway, when I'm going into the workplace, I'm working from home today, but when I'm in the workplace, I usually got up and iron the shop. I don't have the ForSight to do them in a batch, but when my wellbeing becomes impacted, it's the first thing that goes. It's the thing. I look for ways around. So

(21:33):

I get too much on the day. I just can't be bothered doing that task that I hate doing. So I'm going to look for a long sleeve top, which I'm wearing today. I promise. I'm okay. One sleeve top, a t-shirt, a jumper, a hoodie, whatever it is. Now, a few years ago I came home and it was a hot summer's day and I was in a three piece suit. I've got a toddler at home, but she was a baby at the time, and my wife was bathing or baby in the bath, in the living room. And she said, can you enter that bath down the sink? And I said, absolutely. So I picked it up and I pulled it down the sink, I should say. I took the baby out first, just any listeners lifted there and I kind of threw the bath in the back cupboard, just not really paying attention, just a bit agitated, throw the bath in the back cupboard and it hit the iron board and it was quite an old iron board and the legs came off it, and that was good enough and excuse for me to go, you know what?

(22:27):

Until next payday, I'm going to ignore that. I'm just not going to do it iron. And that's a good

Ewan (22:31):

Get.

Daniel (22:33):

So I was coming into the workplace and I was in long sleeve tops, tee-shirts, et cetera, and I was presenting absolutely fine, I was, but my manager brought to me and she said, you've told me to look out for this. I'm looking out for it. I'm just checking in and making sure everything is okay, right? Yeah. And whether we laugh about it, and I told her, but it was really good feel that I'd given her permission to do that. It'd been done. It was in a very safe, very caring way, and it was good to know I just had someday looking out for me in the workplace.

Ewan (23:02):

It's fascinating, isn't it? That is these little triggers that you, and that is really good just to give that confidence to somebody else to say, listen, you told me to look out for us. Just checking and make sure. And it is quite an unintrusive way to go about just checking in with somebody and everybody will have those little triggers. I'm not a fan of ironing myself, but that's interesting. Yeah, okay.

Daniel (23:29):

This kind of gives me the autonomy to build my own roadmap, to support as an individual to say, this is exactly what I need from you, rather than my manager trying to guess. So that's why I like the wellness action plan. And again, your listeners, I would absolutely encourage them to check out framework, just Google it, wellness action plan. They're really great toolkits that you could adopt today in your workplace.

Ewan (23:50):

Yes. We'll put that in the show notes actually and be able to share them as well. So we'll send that. We'll put a link to your website to that. So just thinking about, I suppose progress with this, how can organizations measure the effectiveness? I appreciate it's you have to measure, are we doing this right? Are we doing this? Do we have a problem? So I appreciate that. Obviously absence rates and so on are probably a key metric, but are there other things that teams could be looking out for in terms of the mental health of their team?

Daniel (24:21):

Yeah, that's a great point. I think traditionally we have viewed mental health through the lens of absenteeism, and probably rightly so. On average, we lose about 2.3 million working days every year in Scotland to poor mental health in the workplace. And that's an absolutely astounding statistic. So I wasn't even aware there were 2.3 million working days. I know we're record in the middle of January and it sort of feels like we've hit it already. But one of the things, particularly Scotland, if I can speak about Scotland in certain parts of England as well, Scotland is an industrious we nation that has been built on the back of coal works, steelworks mine, works ship building. And we are very guilty of that presenteeism being in work when we shouldn't be in work.

(25:15):

So when we are coming into the workplace in a state of poor wellbeing, it's having an impact on our colleagues, it's having an impact on our performance. We might not be taking time off, but we might see an increase in accidents and injuries. We might see an increase in employment, tribunals, dismissal, performance management issues, and these are all great metrics to measure the effectiveness of what we're doing if we're seeing an increase in any area outside absenteeism. One of the things that we support organizations with that is part of our advisory services is supporting organizations to really establish a wellbeing committee. So thinking about a group of people across the organization, right from your senior execs right through to the person that's just walked in the door from all different disciplines, looking at how we increase the visibility of wellbeing and how we take autonomy of the wellbeing of the culture of wellbeing in the organization. And this is really great if you are perhaps a local authority where you have loads of different services and wellbeing is going to look very different to a tradesperson, to it does to someone that works in a skilled canteen to it does to someone working in hr. So really trying to get a diverse spread of people who are dedicated and committed to this area and carving out time for them really to pay attention, giving them that protected time to come together and say, what can we do here? Well, what do we feel is needed?

(26:46):

I think beyond that, and the core of all of this is sometimes we jump the gun and we jump to a solution that we think is a solution. And sometimes we overlook the fact that the people are who are in the organization experience the culture directly and talking to them is by far and away the most valuable thing we can do. So just opening up those communication lines between HR, be that monthly surveys or quarterly yearly surveys and wellbeing, but just really trying to establish that communication between the ground floor and what's happening in the back office is so incredibly valuable.

Ewan (27:24):

Yeah. And do you find, again, just nipping back to that leadership piece there about, I suppose convincing some leaders that this is vital, this is really important, and there's a business benefit to this, and it shouldn't be about facts and figures, but ultimately you're running a business as well and you have to be successful as a business. And so do you find yourself having to convince leaders that, look, there's a real bottom line business benefit to this as well. As you mentioned, 2.3 million sick days is obviously time that people are losing and so on, and I don't want to be too back to money and so on, but ultimately, some of these guys, it's businesses and they need to be convinced that there's a value in spending time in this other than the benefit to the individual, obviously.

Daniel (28:14):

Yeah, I mean, there is a huge, obviously legal, moral, ethical case there, exactly important people, which is hard to overlook. But if you want economically, Scotland loses about 2 billion every year to per mental health in the workplace. It's 51 billion across the uk. It's a massive, massive amount of money. Deloitte recently published a statistic that for every one pound invested in mental health provisions in the workplace does a return of about four 60. So that's some massive return on your investment if you're thinking about decreased absenteeism, decreased presenteeism, decreased tribunals, decreased accidents and injuries. I think what our courses are designed to do, they are very facilitation heavy. And when we do get in front of leaders, it's not about us bashing the Bible as such and telling them all of this stuff. It's giving them the space to recognize that themselves and actually asking them, well, what do you think would happen if you didn't invest in this area? What do you think is likely to happen here? And the common things that come out? Well, relationship fractures, increased absenteeism, accidents and injuries as I've spoken about, reputational damage, damage between relationship between provider and customer.

(29:30):

So we don't need to, I guess we don't try and come in there and spread the message about that as such. It's more about giving people the space to come to that conclusion themselves. And I'll say the majority of work we do is in the private sector. So the private sector is seeing real, particularly energy, oil, gas, construction, seeing real, these male dominated industries, seeing real value and having those conversations and bringing it into the classroom. And I think, I know I've battered on a wee bit here y, but I really want to point out that with those male dominated industries, really important, we can get men speaking in the workplace, men tend to communicate the stress through behavior. So in Scotland, one out of four or three quarters of all suicides unfortunately, are male. Two three drug deaths are male. And for every one woman that goes into prison in Scotland, 19 men go into prison in Scotland. So these are the consequences of not being able to speak and not having the avenues of support, not having those mechanisms in place. So really important. Of course, it's not gender specific in terms of workplaces, but really importantly provide those mechanisms for people to get support.

Ewan (30:55):

Yeah, no, I was going to mention that when you talked about men, just the growth in terms of male suicide and so on, and it is more often than not about that communication, the opportunity that they just don't feel that they've got to speak to someone and that opportunity to speak to someone can make a massive difference. Can it? So we've got a range of listeners on here, obviously from large businesses to small businesses. So what about the smaller businesses, the HR teams who maybe in smaller organizations that don't have massive budgets, what sort of things could you suggest for these guys to put in place that might help with this?

Daniel (31:36):

Well, I think for the smaller organizations, again, it's about opening up communication lines. We work with lots of different organizations, and we always try and work specific to the budget if we can, which is where a sort of advisory service comes in. And an advisory service would be working directly by leadership teams, small or large, to look at what kind of things have you got in place just now and just signposting them and directing them towards appropriate support. So that might be looking at reviewing a return to work process, or I might be looking at supporting 'em and creating a wellbeing policy. I appreciate that. Not every organization has the funds there to go out and get training. Some of the things I would point people towards are a CAS, so acas can provide support, free support for organizations and advice on employment issues as well as a whole host of things, but specifically workplace issues.

(32:36):

And they run lots of free webinars throughout the year as well. So I always encourage people to link in with them, and I've got loads of templates on their website for specific issues, as I mentioned, the wellness action plan, free resource, and you can go on the health and safety executive site and you can look at the stress risk assessment and the stress talking toolkit. These are specific to how we facilitate disclosures around stress and what kind of support we put in place with small organizations. I think again, the big thing is just creating that communication and transparency among staff as to what have we got right now and what do we feel we need beyond this? And yeah, communication is the bread and butter of all mental health support.

Ewan (33:23):

Absolutely. Absolutely. And so just looking ahead, just finally, what trends do you see kind of shaping the workplace mental health support for Scotland? Is there the things coming down the pipeline you see are going to guide in certain directions or in terms of how we go about supporting these organizations? There's certain things you think are going to shape that.

Daniel (33:46):

Yeah, there's lots happening there, but we're having upcoming changes to the Employment Rights Act, which is going to provide greater focus on or greater flexibility around flexible working and certainly parental protection as well, both male female moms and dads and expecting parents. I guess what we are seeing, to start off in a more negative note, I guess, or perceived negative note, a less inviting statistic would be that employment tribunals over the past 40 years since 1970, have increased by 185%. So what we are seeing are people holding our employers more accountable for how they're treated in the workplace, mental, physical health, all of that. But the good news is that we're seeing organizations, certainly we are working with a lot of organizations that are recognizing this and recognizing that the workplace has a massive impact in our mental health and wellbeing,

(34:49):

And we do have a duty of care and responsibility to try and cultivate a positive working environment, not just for the moral and ethical and legal cases around it, but also for that economic case that I mentioned earlier. So there's many ways in which you could be inspired to really invest in mental health in the workplace. I think going forward is going to be more of that the workplaces are seeing across the board themselves as a really valuable support mechanism and recognizing what they can and can't do to support people. So really just that ongoing investment and increased visibility in mental health support in the workplace, I think is a really positive,

Ewan (35:33):

And that's a really important part, isn't it, that workplaces seeing themselves as part of that process. I think for a long time it was, well, you're at work and then you go home and that's you. Whereas workplaces are seeing themselves as part of that whole process. It's the whole individual. I think we talk a lot, and we've talked a lot about this, and we advise clients, you want to bring the whole person, the whole person wants to come to work because that's where innovation comes from. That's where you get the best of the individual if the whole person can come in, not if they have to hide part of their life or do this or do that. And actually, if that's the case, then workplaces need to recognize where their role is. And it's not to say you're responsible for the whole thing, but just being part of the whole person and recognizing the value you can bring because spend a lot of time at work, so it's a key part of your life.

Daniel (36:25):

Yeah, absolutely. And we play so much of our sense of achievement and accomplishment on the workplace as well, and we want people in the workplace to feel valued, achieved, and accomplished. So yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Just recognizing that is really important.

Ewan (36:43):

So we always finish with just three top tips for people that are listening. So if we're looking to implement some of the things that we've talked about today, what are the three top tips you would give to an HR team or a business just looking to try and improve the mental health in the workplace?

Daniel (37:00):

So my top tips, so yeah, I guess the first one would be check out the wellness action plan. I'm not selling it. I know I've came across a bit like I'm selling timeshares, but as a free resource, so please do check out. That would be a really good starting point if you're just looking for a quick takeaway from that. The second one would just be thinking about how you differentiate visibility and accessibility and really prioritizing visibility as a way to increase accessibility. So thinking about how do we embed that mental health conversation into the workplace? Are we asking people during supervisions regular one-to-ones? Are we asking them, are we giving them space to really decompress and direct their own support? I guess the third one, and I didn't get to touch on this, but I'll end. I'm a bit of a storyteller. You and Yeah, go for

Ewan (37:56):

It.

Daniel (37:56):

Yeah, yeah. I'll end with a little story here because this is important as well when we're thinking about how we support and mental health in the workplace.

(38:04):

Towards the end of my late twenties, I had the opportunity to travel a little bit, and I don't mean to brag, but I worked in a beautiful part of the world called Ton. Now that's a broad specific for your Scottish audience. Briton's nice under Glasgow, it's awfully worked down for a long time, and I worked in probably the most stressful job that I've ever worked in for reasons that I won't bo you with. But I remember just getting really to that cusp of burnout that I just really wasn't functioning really not well. And I went to my manager and I said to her, can I get a word for you? And she said, absolutely. We went into this little side office side of our main office, and before I even closed the door, she said, are you looking for a solution or are you looking for a space?

(38:48):

I just stop and think about it. And she said, if you're looking for a solution, I've done this job 20 years, you are not going to tell me anything that surprises me, and I'll try and use that experience to support you in whatever problem you've got. But she said, if you're looking for a space to tell me how stressful this job is or how overwhelming this job is, and she used much more colorful language than I used today, she said, because I know I've done the job, and if you just need me to grab a coffee and you just need to get off your chest, then we can do that for 10 minutes. And I was surprised by the amount of times I went in there and kind of knew what I had to do, but I just really needed that space to vent. I just needed someone there to say, that sounds really tough and I can see you're doing your best. But yeah, that's pretty tough. I just needed that validation, and it's something that I've carried into management that's just struck me right away is that the lack of a solution is often the solution. It's often just giving people that space and recognizing distress and not jumping in with, you should try this or that, or don't go here or phone this person, but just recognizing and validating people. So I'll leave that as my third one. Think about creating space before you create a

Ewan (40:01):

Solution. Yeah, no, I love that. And I think that's so important because having the opportunity, there isn't always a solution, but sometimes it's just a case of having somebody to talk to about it. So I think that's a really, that's a great way to finish. But I really appreciate your time today, Daniel. It's been a great discussion and hopefully there's some takeaways for people. And yeah, we'll look forward to building, improving people's mental health across the workplace.

Daniel (40:25):

Thanks, Ian. Thanks so much.

Ewan (40:39):

Thanks for listening to the Recruitment and Beyond podcast. Hopefully there was plenty of insight for you to take back to your teams, so don't forget to subscribe and never miss an episode. And if you can leave us a review, we really appreciate all the feedback and support we get. It makes a massive difference.