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67: How the BBC and RSPCA handle Trauma in the Workplace

With the expertise of our special guests from the BBC and RSPCA, we explore the various forms and nuances of trauma that can permeate work environments.

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In this episode of “Truth Lies & Workplace Culture,” we tackle the intricate and often hidden issue of workplace trauma, a subject that remains shrouded in misunderstanding and silence.

With the expertise of our special guests from the BBC and RSPCA, we explore the various forms and nuances of trauma that can permeate work environments.

Our discussion opens with a deep dive into what constitutes workplace trauma, examining not only the overt incidents but also the subtle, chronic stressors that can lead to lasting psychological impact.

We then tackle the unique challenges faced in high-pressure sectors like media and non-profit organisations, with personal insights from our guests painting a vivid picture of the reality behind the scenes.

As the conversation progresses, we delve into the critical but often overlooked signs of unrecognised trauma in the workplace, with a detailed exploration of the symptoms employees may unknowingly exhibit and the cultural factors that can contribute to a culture of silence around mental health issues.

Our guests from the BBC and RSPCA share their experiences and observations, providing listeners with a nuanced understanding of how trauma can manifest in different sectors and the importance of acknowledging and addressing these issues.

This episode is not just an eye-opener but a call to action, urging a transformation in how we perceive, respond to, and prevent workplace trauma.

Resources:

BBC guide to trauma: https://www.bbc.co.uk/safety/health/mental-health/

RSPCA: https://www.rspca.org.uk/home

Pirkx: https://pirkx.com/

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The Transcript

⚠️ NOTE: This is an automated transcript, so it might not always be 100% accurate!

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Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 0:00
When I joined the RSPCA, all of our Inspectorate staff, there was a requirement to carry a firearm but actually the need for everybody to carry a firearm wasn’t really there. But there was a contractual requirement for everybody to do so. The problem we had then is of course, anybody with a mental health issue, then has a problem getting a home office license.

Leanne Elliott 0:25
Hello, and welcome to the truth lives and workplace culture podcast brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. My name is Liam. I’m a Business psychologist.

Al Elliott 0:34
My name is Al I’m a business owner.

Leanne Elliott 0:36
We are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace coaches.

Al Elliott 0:40
Yeah, and everyone get the violins out because poorly Anne’s not well again, you’ve got a bit of a cold,

Leanne Elliott 0:47
I do have a bit of a cold um, it’s really frustrating. I honestly went about almost three years without being ill at all. And then 2023 It’s like every couple of months I’ve got a cold or a sickness bug or something. I’m pretty miserable about it. So apologies if you’re watching on YouTube, I’m sorry about this, but this is as good as it’s gonna get today. Alex joins me he’s gonna do some trickery with color correction in post but yeah, there you go. I’m not looking my best. For those on audio. Again, I apologize. I probably sound a bit bummed up. And

Al Elliott 1:21
what usually happens is that I get whatever Leanne’s got about four days later So tomorrow I’m expecting to wake up feeling pretty rotten but anyway, we soldiering on for you listener. Yeah. Because we care about you. We love you. We want to come round and make you cake. Now that’s a bit weird, isn’t it?

Leanne Elliott 1:40
I mean, we can make your cake if you want to cake I make mean lemon drizzle. She

Al Elliott 1:44
does. She does. It is very, very good. Anyway, you didn’t come here to listen to us talk about lemon drizzle.

Leanne Elliott 1:50
Yeah, before we crack on with the episode, I would like to tell you about an awesome campaign that our friends at parks are kicking off in December, Pax is ran by Stella Smith, who has been on the podcast before. I think she’s actually the first person to appear on our founder series. She will go right episode go and listen to that we’ll leave a link all that jazz. So yeah, I received a very timely message from Aggie on the perks team and just thought it was brilliant. So I enthusiastically emailed her back and was like, we’re getting involved. And thankfully, she was very happy that that we did want to get involved. And I’ll be honest Alley is right up your street to Nice. Yeah, and also actually very, very much aligned with this episode, which is on trauma in the workplace, and also the rest of the content we’ll be bringing you this month. So yes, parks, they are on a mission to make help a conversation and create a community that thrives on support. They have vision of creating a community, who proudly signpost themselves as allies ready and willing to lend a helping hand to those who need it, whether it’s someone needing work experience or start a new career, or just a neighbor needing an extra hand with the shopping. So we are teaming up with parks in December to spread the message that asking for help is an absolute power move. Now, you may think that sounds counterintuitive, and you know what the research agrees. That is recent research in the Journal of child development showing that children as young as seven years old will avoid will avoid asking for help in order to not feel or appear incompetent. This feeling of incompetence or maybe embarrassment or shame is often why people don’t ask for help even when they need it most. And the funny thing is on the other side of it, being asked to help gives us a rush of endorphins. It’s this help is high that can play a really important role in actually building our own well being our own psychological capital. So our sense of hope and optimism and confidence in our abilities and in term resilience. Helping others really is good for everyone. So stay tuned to all the awesome activities parks will be promoting in December through the hashtag K to help including a series of online webinars, which is quite cool. They’ll be doing them throughout December they’ll have topics such as how to forecast for beginners how to handle HR as an SME, and we’ll also be re sharing our recent webinars on burnout and well being at work. So stay tuned. Thank you perks for asking us to be involved. I think it’s a pretty awesome initiative actually.

Al Elliott 4:25
Yeah perks is a fantastic company we pay for it. We use it is I woke up about about six months ago with like a really bad neck ache thing and I didn’t know what it was I didn’t know why it get why it appeared but went on perks up. Some great exercises followed them was right as rain within a couple of days. So it is definitely worth it and also just a quick one. If you are looking for a GP appointment in the UK, pay your six pounds nothing six quid a month or something’s not a lot. Pay that top of the queue. Anyway, so back to the subject Which again is tangentially chandan congenital. And that doesn’t sound right is slightly

Leanne Elliott 5:04
Timothy genitals on the podcast

Al Elliott 5:07
we just did I think so we’re going to be talking about workplace trauma today. Now when we think of trauma, we tend to think of like frontline workers like maybe the police or ambulance or, you know, armed forces, something like that. But there’s a lot of jobs that actually do involve a fair amount of trauma. Yeah,

Leanne Elliott 5:25
there really is that I think the pandemic really brought this to the fore. You know, we saw the effect of the pandemic, on key workers on NHS staff on teachers. But let’s not forget that during the pandemic, there were people in supermarkets or delivering packages or emptying your bins who were still putting their health and sometimes their lives on the line to keep the world turning. Thankfully, we seem to back to some kind of normality in terms of COVID risk, although I know is still out there and still causing problems. But the pandemic has made us all much more aware that trauma exists in the workplace. Yeah. So

Al Elliott 6:03
today, we’re gonna be talking about three things we will talk about, first of all, what is workplace trauma, then we’re going to say, what are the signs that there might be workplace trauma in your workplace. And then finally, we’re looking at a little bit more into how you mitigate the risk of workplace trauma or traumatized employees. And we have, of course, as always, my wife, my co host, me, the most amazing business psychologist in the world, diverse, highly exposed all of this. And so we’ll be asking her for her opinions. Should we she can’t help but just bought in at some point to tell us what’s going on. But she’s explaining everything. But we also invited a couple of

Leanne Elliott 6:42
guests. Yeah, well, yes, we did. Yes, we did. Before we meet them, I’d like to just go back to our earlier point and make one thing really clear. Workplace trauma is much more common than you might think. If your business has customers, then your employees are operating in an environment where they are at risk of trauma. We don’t have the time in this episode to dive into the nuances of trauma, how it’s categorized, whether it be severe or otherwise, that would actually make a pretty interesting episode. So instead of instead for this one, I’d like you to maybe consider we’ve got trauma with a capital T, and trauma with a lowercase t. So if you are a business leader that isn’t really sure about how trauma could impact your workplace. I’d like to think about trauma. With this in mind, this lowercase t if you have employees working direct with customers. Understanding and effectively managing workplace trauma is critical. To nurture and protect employee well being. The risk of trauma needs to be a key consideration for the vast vast majority of business leaders. We will talk about that more shortly. But first, let’s meet our guests. So today we’re joined by the amazing Dr. Claire Fernandez, the Chief Medical Officer of the BBC, who will be talking about the traumatic things that the BBC have to cover, and also the marvelous Jeremy country Jones, the Assistant Director of employee experience at the RSPCA.

Dr Claire Fernandez 7:59
My name is Claire Fernandez, known within the BBC is Dr. Claire, but Claire’s absolutely fine. As you’ve said, I’m the Chief Medical Officer at the BBC. I’m a practicing Occupational Physician, so medical doctor as well. So what I do within the BBC is I’m the head of the health team, and in charge of strategy, governance, and promotion of health and wellbeing within the BBC.

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 8:26
My name is Jeremy Goldstone’s, I’m the assistant director employee experience at the RSPCA. I’ve been with the RSPCA for three years. And what I’m famous for, probably within the RSPCA is leading are quite flexible, hybrid working strategy. So let’s

Al Elliott 8:42
start with what constitutes trauma in the workplace. Trauma

Leanne Elliott 8:46
at work can manifest in various forms including acute trauma from a single incident, like a workplace accident or violence, chronic trauma from ongoing stresses like harassment or high pressured environment, and vicarious trauma from exposure to distressing situations or stories, which is very common in caregiving or law enforcement roles. For example, causes range from organizational issues like poor management, lack of support and toxic workplace cultures, to specific events like workplace bullying, discrimination or witnessing traumatic events. It’s important to understand that trauma is not only about the events themselves, but also how individuals perceive that trauma and how they are affected by these events. As

Al Elliott 9:30
we answered, there’s lots of different types of trauma for example, in 2019 is the study from the States I think, a workplace violence accounted for 9% of all fatal work injuries. In 2020. There were 392 workplace murders, and an amazing 37,000 non fatal injuries resulting from intentional injury by another person in that workplace. Now I’m sure we’ve all seen those videos on Tiktok YouTube, whatever your platform of choice is where someone kicks off in a McDonald’s wherever. But what about those people have a job that puts themselves directly in harm’s way. The BBC in the UK, certainly, but I think around the world is a trusted source of news. And often the news is pretty upsetting. So it’s pretty reasonable to assume that the journalist covering these events are gonna experience some kind of workplace trauma. But as Dr. Claire explains, it’s not just the journalists who experience this.

Dr Claire Fernandez 10:29
So when I think of the BBC, I think about, you know, the guy on the telly reading the news, or the girl, or them. And we don’t often think about, the people say that might be editing the footage that I spent three years to get on. I don’t know, the African ant, black spotted ant, I don’t think that’s real thing. Or we don’t think about the people that are the producers, or the people behind CBGBs, or children in need. We don’t think about my colleagues in Nepal, perhaps that are bringing in information to that part of the world, who might be the cleaner of the office, there is a huge spectrum of people. And because we know, well, good wellbeing strategy is not a one size fits all, this sort of theme is something that I get asked about a lot. And so the first thing I want to say is that what the BBC does is more than just the people going running towards the the traumatic situations while everyone else is running away. We are also people making content for online, for example, which is really popular Jean COVID, to natural history programs, where you see our beloved David Attenborough in different places, but also to how those things all run in the background, all the tech behind it, or the people administration. So what’s the journalists tend to be the employees that people focus on when they’re talking to me the most, there’s a whole heap of other people that are just as important that are behind the camera, the hidden talent, if you like, but going back to your question, so how do we support our employees that are facing trauma? So it’s actually quite a large question, because going back to what I said about how many people and whom we have within the BBC, we have people facing primary trauma so actually being involved in the traumatic events, for example, our our staff, sadly, in regions of conflict, for example, or natural disaster, but we then we then have journalists that are going towards the places that people are pulling away from. But then we also have our teams back within different countries within the UK, that are editing that footage that are making those programs that are archiving that footage, that uh, you know, human resources, for example, that are listening to the stories of our employees when they come back, if there’s challenges, there’s a lots of different people that are involved in that traumatic experience.

Al Elliott 12:54
So that’s why Dr. Claire comes in. And I would just wanted to be clear, what is the difference between what Claire does and what say a GP does? So I asked exactly that question.

Dr Claire Fernandez 13:04
So a doctor, somebody that treats, diagnosis and treats people or patients as lots of different specialties, from your neurosurgeon to your heart surgeon to your GP, to your sexual health doctor. So my specialty is occupational medicine. So the medicine of workers so I’m a consultant, I’m a specialist credited doctor and like, you know, you know, kind of the top level doctor within the within the the NHS, I’m pretty privileged to say, and I look at how we keep workers healthy and safe, basically, in a nutshell. So that might be from working within Occupational Health Department, where we follow various legal protocols, and work with employers to help advise on medical health conditions help managers to manage people in light of the conditions that they have. But I do it in a non clinical way within the BBC. So I do not see patients within the BBC. I work to use my medical knowledge to help the organization to decide how they manage health and well being.

Leanne Elliott 14:10
regular listeners will know that we are huge dog lovers here at truth and lies and fat Pina, our little rescue Palenko is sitting next to us while we record. He Yeah, he’s sometimes causes trouble but usually is actually pretty good. The RSPCA is an organization in the UK that protects animals and prevents cruelty. But this means that inspectors there have to see some pretty awful things. Jeremy is in charge of employee experience at the RSPCA. And he explained that the job can be tough, but one

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 14:41
of the challenges we have is that a lot of our staff, our frontline, they’re working out and about in animal centers in one aspect for it and it’s about identifying areas that we can support them in their well being and they do very stressful jobs. See some really not very nice stuff sometimes around animals and of course people passionate about animals when you’re seeing animals that have been neglected can be really hard. So supporting them is really important. Looking at ways that we can provide flexibility around them in terms of future rosters, roster designs and how they work is important, as well. But you know, one of the things we’ve done recently is we’ve introduced trim trauma resource management, which actually supports people who come across traumatic events in their workplace, and it helps them talk about those issues with appear and prevents a spiraling decline in their mental health.

Al Elliott 15:35
Now, Jeremy just used a term trim that I’d never heard of is the first time I’d heard of it. So I said, I asked him to explain a little bit more about what trim was and what it does. We

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 15:45
didn’t design it something that exists in the emergency services and was in the military as well. And we’ve taken that idea and brought into the organization and it’s really popular working well. It is aimed around people witnessing traumatic events. So I mean, depending, you know, the there are lots of different jobs that that potentially could apply to. So yes, I would encourage any employer who has staff that could witness such events, to actually look into trim, trim

Leanne Elliott 16:15
or trauma risk management, it’s a really interesting framework. And it’s basically a way to help staff when they’ve been through something really tough or traumatic at work. The idea is that after a disturbing event, people might struggle with their mental health, maybe even develop a serious condition like PTSD. Tremors were organizations like the police used to try and reduce those risks. The program was created in the armed forces by Captain Pete Roberts and major Norman Jones, and it specifically talks about survivors, not victims. One interesting thing about trim is that it recognizes that everyone reacts differently to stress. So while the program is there to help, it also put some responsibility on the individual to speak up and ask for help if they need it, especially if they’re feeling stressed. So basically, it’s a support system of people who’ve seen or experienced something pretty unpleasant at work.

Al Elliott 17:09
Unsurprisingly, the BBC also uses trim, it’s

Dr Claire Fernandez 17:14
not just me, I have a team of health, health and mental health experts. We work with employees, teams, managers HR to try and reduce those impacts. So for example, to allow people to look after themselves when they’re working in these environments, shift length, support, check in days. And then we also have a network of peer support, which is called trim, which is one of a number of other support networks, other support networks are available. So trim our practitioners, my colleagues are there to help triage people that have symptoms, and signpost them to the right places and provide that health promotion to keep people well. So those who are suffering, get signposted to people like myself to clinicians, to psychologists, and to get the support that they need. But also then that health promotion again, around keeping yourself healthy, keeping yourself well, things to do for those that don’t need that support that are struggling, because even if you don’t have and that sounds quite trite, doesn’t even you don’t have the mental health problems that come with facing trauma, it’s still a horrible thing to do. It’s not a pet, it’s not a walk in the park. It’s not unicorns and rainbows. So that in our in a nutshell is how we do trauma within the BBC. So

Leanne Elliott 18:37
it’s all about normalizing that not feeling okay, really is okay.

Dr Claire Fernandez 18:42
We can’t reduce the the exposure, those things are happening. We as the audience needs to be seeing those things that we can learn and understand. So what we do is, we try and prepare people well start off with so information, education and training on how to look after yourself, recognizing those negative impacts that can occur, reducing the stigma of putting your hand up and saying I’m not okay, because of course, everybody you know, it’s competitive environment, everybody wants to get the next story. And we do that also behind the scenes to thinking about secondary trauma, vicarious trauma, for people that are out there looking at the scenes, but also people that are hearing the footage, editing, and producing shows archiving, again, what vicarious trauma is, so the negative mental health impact on people by having that second hand exposure, what it is, how it can affect you, the fact that sometimes these things are normal in the human spectrum of emotion, but what to do if you’re not okay, where to go for help. What

Al Elliott 19:51
I’ve really not thought about before was that there are certain people who can’t say that they’re not okay, some of the inspectors who do go out have to carry firearms, which makes sense because they have to deal with tough situations. And unfortunately, sometimes, you know, with animals things can go wrong. But in the past, these people carried firearms would find it very difficult to say that they were going through something difficult when

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 20:15
I joined the RSPCA, all of our Inspectorate staff, there was a requirement to carry a firearm, but actually the need for everybody to carry a firearm wasn’t really there. But there was a contractual requirement for everybody to do. So. The problem we had then is, of course, anybody with a mental health issue, then has a problem getting a home office license. So that therefore meant we were then dismissing staff for mental health issues. Now you can imagine sort of culture that creates when we’re encouraging people to talk about mental health these days. And yeah, if someone talks about mental health issue, then of course, suddenly the spotlight can be turned to them. And they then wonder whether they’re going to be able to continue in that in that role. We change that we could see the there was more danger versus organization, with people not talking about mental health issues. So we identified the need that only a certain number of people needed to carry firearms, and therefore, then, hopefully remove the stigma around talking about mental health issues.

Leanne Elliott 21:15
There is another side to trauma, and especially common in jobs like carers. It’s called compassion, fatigue, and RSPCA workers and partners like that are really aware of it.

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 21:26
I mean, tremors are talked about helps people with traumatic events. But one of the other things we’ve identified is compassion, fatigue, people who are constantly looking after animals. Animals are really distressed, and maybe putting them down is it can be really hard on a person’s psyche and compassion fatigue is is an area which is not a lot has been known about until last few years. And actually, we’re learning from other colleagues in the veterinary profession around that, about how we can support our staff. So we do recognize, for example, that the veterinary profession has the highest suicide rate in in the UK. And we’re keen to ensure that we learn from what other organizations are doing around that. And we’re looking at what we can do around compassion fatigue for our staff. If you’ve

Al Elliott 22:16
listened to the podcast before, you’ve probably heard us talk about the Samaritans, which is an organization in the UK, which is designed to listen to people who are in distress or despair. So it’s anonymously, you can ring up and you can basically say that, whatever you like, you can talk about death, suicidal feelings, or just if you’ve had a really rotten day. Now, what’s interesting is that when we were there, we discovered or we saw that there are certain people who found it very difficult to leave things at work, who were who just started, who just took home all the things they’d heard. Now, what the Samaritans are really good at is something called what I call dog fooding is something I think is a term where you eat your own dog food, or the idea is that you basically use your own system. So each volunteer has someone in the Samaritans that they can talk to basically, like they can have a Samaritans call.

Leanne Elliott 23:05
Yeah, it was a really great structure. So we’d also have shift supervisors who would check in at the end of every shift and see if there had been a traumatic call. And if there had been, if you had a call with somebody whose life was pretty terrible, and perhaps you’ve listened to them for 3040 minutes, and in many cases, just talking about it has made the caller feel a little bit better. But that story is still in the Samaritans head. So after each shift, if a volunteer did have a pretty traumatic experience, then another Samaritan would call them up and encourage them to talk about it. We call them the Samaritans, Sam. In most cases, that would help massively. Of course, we couldn’t discuss the specifics or real identifying information. But it did mean we were much less likely to keep it in our heads, or worse, talk about it to somebody outside of smartens. Confidential confidentiality is the golden rule. And that’s how it works. Martin’s a pretty good system and one that I definitely benefited from Yeah, and

Al Elliott 24:03
as part of the Samaritans, I volunteered to work in the prisons, the jail if you’re from if you’re from the States. And you might think that will be like one of the most dramatic places that you could work, but actually, it was kind of not because in the prisons in the UK, there’s usually volunteers themselves who are like Samaritans in the prison, they call them listeners. And it’s really interesting, because what will happen is then you’ve got volunteers within the prison, who will be a Samaritan to someone and as you know, you know, suicide rates and self harm rates in prisons are massively high. And so they would talk to people and but then they don’t have anyone to talk to back you know, this idea of dogfooding where you go up the chain and you kind of like, pass the the story on to someone else. So that’s our that was our job. So as Samaritan volunteers, we’d go into the prison and 90 names at the time we’d be talking to the listeners, and they’d be telling us the stories that they’d heard to kind of get them off their chest So there’s this idea of kind of diluting this trauma in that if someone in the present, for example, has gone through something really traumatic and listened to a really traumatic story from some from an inmate or CO inmate, then they have that in their head. But then when they talk to us, who are one step removed from him, that trauma is much more diluted when it comes to us. But the person who’s heard the original stories, or has had the chance to talk about it, and that’s probably a really good way to approach these things. So if you do have someone in your workplace, who is experiencing some trauma, just having someone sit there and listen to them, and just using this emeritus technique for going, how did that feel? And did you get angry, kind of those kinds of questions and just shutting up and listening allows that person who’s experienced the trauma to kind of almost like push it up the chain, and then hopefully, it makes the trauma a little bit better, a little bit easier to manage. Now you couple of days with clear job roles, and also allowing people to speak up when they are struggling and implementing things like flexible working, and all the other stuff that really makes a great workplace. And you end up having a huge impact on the well being of your teams. As Jeremy found out at the RSPCA, pre

Jeremy Gautrey-Jones 26:09
preta COVID, we had a pretty poor wellbeing score with our staff, and we’ve just conducted a mivue survey. It’s an engagement survey. And we’ve seen a huge rise in the in the score around well being, especially around our staff who have been working in a hybrid manner. We continue to see engaging with them about how it’s going, how they think, and also how managers are managing in this particular new world. But the evidence so far is that huge 20% engagement score we’ve we’ve seen, since 2019. The

Leanne Elliott 26:44
most important thing I think to take from this is that there are nurse superheroes, everyone struggles at some point. And in fact, if someone in your workplace does appear to be superhuman, then maybe you need to keep a very close eye on them. Not being able to admit you’re not okay is one of the major symptoms of impending burnout. There are no superheroes, we will all have problems, except maybe the Blue Peter duck.

Dr Claire Fernandez 27:09
We all have the same problems. So there is no difference in my mind. And to be honest, I think that’s why I do what I do. Because everybody’s everybody’s important. Whether you see them on the TV where the you know, listen to them on a podcast, people hear I’m starstruck by James Carroll black, legendary. As as legendary to me as some of the people that I have the privilege of working with within the BBC. Just as a name check, my favorite, the favorite most favorite Snapchat I’ve met is a Blue Peter dog. He’s gorgeous. He’s so gorgeous. So yeah, everyone’s same. We’re all the same. We’re different, but we’re the same.

Al Elliott 27:54
So there you go. I hopefully we’ve covered workplace trauma, we have explained what it is, how it manifests, and then the ways in which you can potentially sort of mitigate it and potentially deal with it. I would encourage you to think about your people. And I would encourage you to think, are they okay? And if they’re not, can they put their hand up and say I’m not okay.

Leanne Elliott 28:17
And this is where I think as well, it’s really important that leaders think about the hidden trauma. If your job is to collect overdue invoices or deal with customer complaints, then that can be traumatic. And in fact, this is a significant area of research in psychological and behavioral science. To give you a very brief overview, emotional labor, it’s a term used to describe the process where employees have to manage and sometimes manipulate their emotional expressions as part of their job. Customer service is a perfect example of this. So customer service officers are often required to display specific emotions like cheerfulness or empathy, regardless of how they’re genuinely feeling. So this act of portraying emotions that might not align with their true feelings leads to what’s called Emotional dissonance. And it’s this gap. It’s a gap between felt and displayed emotions, it can be really taxing. Why does this matter? Well, consistently having to suppress or alter genuine emotions for work can significantly have an impact on employees mental health. It’s linked to increased stress, burnout, even physical health issues. And this emotional dissonance can also create a sense of inauthenticity and personal conflict, and that directly affects job satisfaction and overall well being. It’s not all doom and gloom, though coping strategies like deep acting, where employees try to align their genuine emotions with those that they need display can help. And also organizational support is key. As we’ve heard, workplaces that recognize these challenges and provide a supportive environment, proper training, mental health resources, and regular breaks can mitigate these negative effects. So for those in customer services, not just about handling the customer’s needs, but also navigating their own emotional landscape in a way that’s healthy and sustainable. And there are so many other examples of job roles where the same can happen. Understanding the nuances of emotional labor and dissonance is really vital for employee well being and performance. As Dr. Claire just said, it’s not just people at the front line who experience trauma, every job has a potential to be traumatic and trim is all about how you react to it. Everyone’s different, but we’re all the same underneath.

Al Elliott 30:33
So there we have it. That’s a wrap on another episode. Next week. We’ve got I teased it last week, and we’ve got the amazing Chris savage such such a business crush on this guy. He’s so incredible. And he started a company called Wistia. Yes, you’ve probably heard of it. Yes, that Wistia to him and his co founders continue to bring to build this amazing workplace culture. And you can see all over Twitter you can see all over YouTube. And as you can imagine, it’s documented perfectly in video, and I’m guessing the videos hosted on Wistia itself, which is the best place to host your video. I’m not being paid to say that. Anyway, so that’s what’s coming next week. Leo, do you have anything else to add before we say goodbye?

Leanne Elliott 31:13
Now? Not really apart from Be sure to follow us on LinkedIn on Instagram on the check chuck on Twitter. For all the updates for videos of our guests interviews, if you’re not watching the podcast on YouTube, then there might be a nice way to dip your tippy toe into the video format. And of course of go and follow perks and hear more about the campaign they’re running in December. It really is I hope we’ve underlined this at this point in the episode asking for help really is a power move. We will see you next week. We’ll

Al Elliott 31:48
see you next week and before we do go if you are if you are struggling with trauma if you do have a pretty tough work and you’re in the UK then seriously look at the Samaritans is totally anonymous service. We’re not involved anymore. We wish we were but we don’t live in the same countries we come and they’re definitely worth a chat because they will just listen to you non judgmentally and they’re the amazing organization

Leanne Elliott 32:09
they are and actually if you’re not in the UK they do have an email service as well so I’m

Al Elliott 32:14
pretty sure there’s a similar thing in most countries so don’t suffer alone. Right we will see you next week. Bye bye

Al Elliott 32:30
unsurprisingly trim is also used by the BBB the BBB BBB Baba,

Leanne Elliott 32:35
Baba,

Al Elliott 32:36
Baba Baba.

Leanne Elliott 32:40
With a lower T. It’s especially common on us isn’t my bet sorry.

Al Elliott 32:46
It allows them they they’re not so clever. And we’re doing that again. So there we have it. That is yet another episode. Be

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