“To thine own self be true,” said Polonius in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. More than four centuries later the advice is still as valuable and still as out of reach, especially it seems in the workplace.
At least that is the reality for many women on this International Women’s Day. And, a wider conversation on diversity and inclusion has led to the realisation that mental health is linked to all employees’ ability to be themselves. This in turn is increasingly taking its toll on workers’ mental health, men and women.
But now there is a new alliance aims to change that reality, tackling the stigmatised topic of inclusion and mental health. The Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health has been launched with six founding partners BHP, Clifford Chance, Deloitte, HSBC, Salesforce and Unilever.
Emma Codd, Deloitte’s Global Inclusion Leader, sat down with Arabian Business, to unpack the issue.
AB: Mental health, a conversation whose time has come? Discuss…
EC: So I’m the global inclusion leader for Deloitte, we are over 300,000 people around the world in 150 countries, you know, and we only have our people. We have some very clever IP but actually it’s about people, engaged people, happy people.
Mental health has long been an issue. I, prior to my global role, had a role where I was leading talent in the UK for six years and that was around 18,000 people and mental health was a big priority for us. When we embarked on a big change journey what I saw was some of the incredible things being done, but actually, the pandemic showed us very quickly, that there was no consistency.
AB: Do you have hard data that shows how coronavirus has impacted mental health?
EC: We publish a millennial survey every year and last year, fortuitously, we put very detailed questions in there on mental health. Now, this survey goes out to 18,000 people across multiple countries. It’s really just trying to gauge where are millennials and Generation Z are? The mental health findings were really stark. Almost half millennials and Gen Z, feel stressed or anxious most of the time, it is their number one or number two priority in life, the only thing that beats it is their physical health. So, that’s over and above all the things that are thinking about as priorities. When you look at what contributes to that anxiety there’s a lot that they tell us that contributes to it.
It is things as you will understand, it is climate, the environment, financial stability, family, welfare, all of those things. But there are two things in particular in there that are, very much I believe, within the gift of the employer to do something about. And the first one is work-life balance. The second one is the inability to be one’s true, authentic self. Now, that’s despite all the efforts of businesses for many, many years on diversity and inclusion, I say this as someone that’s passionate about this, and has led a lot of change around it. But clearly, it’s not enough.
And, then I’d say the final piece of data, which is absolutely, very depressing, is around stigma. While quite a large number of the respondents said that they did believe that stress, anxiety was a genuine reason to take time off work, which obviously is great, but a number of them gave a completely different reason for it. And that brings us to that stigma, and workplace culture.
Now more than ever, it’s needed. I’m living in at home, I’ve got a very busy job, I work very long hours, and it’s very easy to become completely overwhelmed. I have two children, homeschooling in different parts of the house, I’ve got a husband, that works, I’ve got unruly pets, I have to feed everybody, all of that stuff. I personally got to the point where I said, I’m stopping for four hours a day, I’m going to go for a walk, I’m going to just spend a bit of time just thinking, and I feel so great for it. I think we need to be mindful of ‘if I’m feeling like this, this is what we’re all going through at the moment’.
And, I think it’s the responsibility of employers, and particularly the leaders, if you think about that stigma data. Who sets the tone in an organisation? It’s the leader. And that’s really the rationale for the GBC, the Global Business Collaboration, to say ‘we’re better together, we’re better collaborating’. We are large global businesses, we can make a difference here. Whether you’re a teeny tiny business in one country or you’re a larger business in multiple countries. It’s been a real passion of all of the founding partners, we’re really determined to make a difference.
AB: You talk about the research with the millennials and the Gen Z’s, if you were to do the same research with the Boomers, the Gen X’s, what you would find?
EC: That is a really good question. I’ve be waiting for someone to ask me that question for about six months. I think I was a millennial before my time, I have always wanted to be my true authentic self, I’ve always wanted a work life balance.
I think in my generation, and I’m Generation X, when I came up through the workplace you just couldn’t talk about this, the stigma was so huge. I remember various moments in my career, particularly one time, where I got to the point where I had non-stop working, I had a huge project, I had real worries and concerns about it, and I literally ran out of the building crying, and that sort of little mini meltdown, which in hindsight was much needed, would have been better dealt with if I’d been able to have a conversation with somebody, five weeks before to say, ‘Look, I’m really worried, this is all becoming too much’.
I think we all have the same anxieties, mental health is on a spectrum. I think at the moment, there are probably more people being exposed to stress and anxiety than ever before. And, I think those survey findings would be just as relevant with the other generations to be honest, if not worse.
AB: How important is it for everyone, regardless of age, to have this conversation?
EC: I think it is really important. One of the reasons why we’ve got leaders signing the pledge is we want people to talk about it. Our pledge, talks about promoting an open culture around mental health. It’s a very simple pledge, it’s not really detailed, it’s just very simple things that a leader can commit to.
In the millennial survey data, one of the interesting things is we looked pre-pandemic, then the pandemic happened, so we did a pulse survey during the pandemic. Now, we expected to see that stress and anxiety levels would go massively up during the pandemic, and they didn’t, across the board. However, they did fairly significantly actually increase for women and working parents.
The only way we start doing something about the stigma, is to have these have these conversations, and for leaders to be open about their own challenges.
AB: Research shows the more companies embrace emotional intelligence and mental health, the better the company performs in terms of the bottom line. Has that been the Deloitte experience?
EC: Absolutely. It comes back to culture, it comes back to workplace environment. You can have one that’s toxic, that’s typically where a leader may behave in a certain way, because that’s the leadership they may be experienced. Or you can have one that is very open and inclusive, and I think it’s down to everyday actions. A lot of organisations will have the right policies, and almost feel the box is ticked, but it’s down to what people actually experience in the moment. When they’re in a meeting, when they are talking to colleagues, are they treated with respect, or disrespect, are they heard or ignored? All of those things, set the tone on the culture.
AB: If you’ve got a leadership where the abused becoming the abuser, if that’s at the top, how do you change that?
EC: I can only talk about what I’ve done in my own organisation. When I was in my UK role, I identified that that was one of the biggest causes for attrition. So we were losing in particular women, we were losing a far higher number than we really should have been, at particular levels in their career. And, it was for two reasons, work life balance and culture. Many of us, as leaders, grew up in a place with an entrenched, some hierarchical nature of things and entrenched cultures.
So we calculated the cost of business, it was a huge cost to our business by getting this wrong. And I always say, there’s two strands to this, there’s the ‘Show me the money’ and the ‘Show me the human impact’ bit and show me the difference we can make.
One of the first things, our first step, is educating leaders, and getting leaders comfortable and making them understand how this needs to be a priority and how important it is to walk the talk. I think if you don’t have that, I think it’s very difficult to make meaningful change. It’s the same as wider inclusion. So many organisations frankly haven’t made as much progress as they should on inclusion from the widest perspective because there’s been less of a focus on everyday culture.
AB: Do you think that companies that don’t embrace emotional intelligence and mental health now are actually going to be punished by the market down the line when they won’t be able to retain and recruit the successful talent they need to compete and thrive and grow?
EC: I do think those companies that don’t listen to their own people, and look at wider research about the expectations of the large part of our workforce, will be the loser in the long term.
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