Ep37: The Watercooler Conference: Key Takeaways for Building Thriving Workplaces

Just 48 hours. 29 experts. 2 hosts. 1 mission: To help you build amazing workplace cultures where people, and businesses, thrive.

Phew! What a week! We absolutely loved our time as the Official Podcast of The Watercooler, the UK’s premier conference and exhibition on workplace culture and wellbeing. 

Join us behind the scenes and with exclusive access to some of the event’s biggest and brightest leaders in the people and culture space. From corporate leaders at FTSE 100s to challenger banks and innovative start-ups, we brought thought leaders together to identify 10 key trends for workplace culture and well-being in 2023 and beyond.

Find out more about:

• Board buy-in
• Outsourced CPOs
• Individualisation in well-being
• Employee insights
• Mental health and suicide prevention
• Line managers are EVERYTHING
• Authenticity in leaders
• Post-COVID trauma
• The outlook for people and culture
• Making people and culture more commercial

Thank you to all the speakers, sponsors, exhibitors and visitors that made this possible, not to mention the fabulous teams at The Watercooler, Make a Difference Media and obo.

Resources

All the links mentioned in the show.

Amelia Wrighton:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelia-wrighton/

Andrew Berrie:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewberrie/

Cass Briscoe:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassbriscoe/

Clare Dare:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/clare-dare-02962b11/

Kate Goodyer:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kate-goodger-phd-c-psychol-7ba6b379/

Lara Morgan:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/laramorgan/

Louise Aston: 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/louiseastwellbeing/

Nick Villani:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-villani/

Petra Velzeboer:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/petra-velzeboer/

Professor Dame Carol Black:

https://twitter.com/damecarolblack?lang=en

Thomas Bell

https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebipolarbusinessman/

Find out more about:

The Watercooler:

https://www.watercoolerevent.com/

Make a Difference Awards:

https://makeadifference.media/make-a-difference-awards/

Mind’s Workplace Well-being Index Report

https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/workplace-wellbeing-index/

Business in the Community Prioritise People Report

https://www.bitc.org.uk/report/prioritise-people-unlock-the-value-of-a-thriving-workforce/

RAND Europe Research:

https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2083-1.html

Petra’s Book

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1398610313/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

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The Transcript

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

Exhibitor 1
I think the whole sentiment of the event kind of chimes with what we’re all about, which is about making work, better experience.

Exhibitor 2
We came back to the watercooler this year after a really successful event last year,

Exhibitor 3
a great meeting place everyone’s networking, they want to talk about topics that we’re passionate about as well. So it’s a lot of synergy in terms of what we care about and what they care about as well.

Leanne Elliott
Hello, and welcome to the truth, lies 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
My Name Is Earl, I’m a business owner.

Leanne Elliott
And we are here to help you simplify the science of people and create amazing workplace cultures.

Al Elliott
We certainly are and we’ve got we’ve come back from hell of a week and we Halloween Halloween Week. We were down at the watercooler last week. We heard if you came down then hello, you probably saw us right in the middle had a little glass pod. Like like I don’t know, it was it was like a kind of mini studio, wasn’t it? We set it up with all our gear in it. And we interviewed people and we did how many? Was it? 32 people in two days, something like that.

Leanne Elliott
And they were just the people in the booth. That’s true. We also talked to people outside the booths recorded some interviews while a roving reporters. Yeah, it was awesome. So this this episode, today’s episode is all about what we got up to at the watercooler as the official podcast.

Al Elliott
Yes. Now, just in case you think, Oh, I don’t care about this. You do. Okay? Because

Leanne Elliott
if Allah says I do,

Al Elliott
move your finger away from that port from that skip button. The whole point of the Oscar is it’s all about workplace culture. So everyone who’s anyone is at the workplace at the watercooler, you would seen huge companies like headspace, Metrobank, Microsoft, and then lots of smaller companies, some really big ones. So really quick, growing ones fast growing, looking for, like culture 15. So anyone who’s anybody was at the watercooler and you care about about workplace culture.

Leanne Elliott
And let’s be honest, if you didn’t care about workplace culture, you probably wouldn’t be wouldn’t be listening to this. So yeah, this is this definitely if it’s if it’s a bar Street, it’s gonna be up your street. Definitely. Yeah, but before we do dive into the episode, I would just like to say a few thank you to the team at the water cooler. Who made it possible for us to be the official podcast we had such a great time. So huge thank you to co founder Simon Berger and Mark Pigou event director Francis barroom Of course, the Global Head of Content, Claire Farrow, who was a fabulous panellist on our recent Gen panel episode. And I’ve also Oh, you know, the rest of the event marketing and PR team as well, including Jasmine Brown, Georgia Spooner, Kate, Jeffrey, and Misbah and patpat. And finally, massive, massive thank you, Gary Howard from OBO. We partnered with Gary to bring our very own pop up studio to the exhibition hall. So yeah, thank you so much. We literally could not have done it without you, Gary.

Al Elliott
Absolutely. So if you if you are looking to buy some fancy, fancy office furniture and you like very well sculpted beards, then Gary is the number one person in the UK that fits those two criteria. So Genesis beard beard is a great beard. Anyway, thank you very much, Gary. So we how are we going to forego and normal Word of the Week new full go

Leanne Elliott
for somebody who’s been back in England too long. Oh, it’s just Tommy. Good, Sarah, we’re going to forego the usual structure of good day. I like cash isn’t expected.

Al Elliott
I’m a little more erudite when I’m back in the UK.

Leanne Elliott
Where did you get that word?

Al Elliott
I saw it. I saw it this morning. I don’t know whether it is right. It might be glow. It might mean intelligent I don’t know. Anyway, so the structure of the show is a little different in that we’re just going to forego or not use if you’re from if you’ve got the language levels of Leann. We’re just not going to we’re not going to do the bit normally where we do sort of go into the Word of the Week and the news roundup because there is so much I think my by my count, we’ve got eight guests on this on this episode. We’ve had to obviously just get the cut little bits out of them, but they a lot of them are coming up later on. So if you like someone you hear then there’s a good chance that is gonna be episode solid with them coming up.

Leanne Elliott
Yes. So today we are going to talk to you about what is the water cooler, why we went and what happened and who we met. We’re then going to take you through the kind of the key themes relating to the future of people and culture and wellbeing, with commentary from many different expert guests, including some of the speakers at the water cooler. We’re also going to tell you kind of who’s coming up on the podcast who twigs back that we’ve we’ve spoken to from kind of senior leaders and big corporates to founders are very exciting startups. And also why you should maybe think of coming next year,

Al Elliott
almost all the audience’s had had headphones. So it’s a you could have like six of these events. Six of these talks go on at the same time. Lots of really cool and nice people. They’re just just a really, really good buzz. So should we go should we start off just by kicking off why the water cooler exists and why MadWorld exists? Yes. So we had Simon burger or Simon Berger, we shouldn’t know how to say that, I think is Berger. As in Bergerac, we had we had Simon on as a guest maybe about six months ago. And he was talking about VC funding. And the story behind the MadWorld was Simon’s very, very successful. I think he’s done it where Mark for a long time, building up events and selling them building events, selling them, building events, selling them, and then there was something to happen with Mark’s daughter and boyfriend I think, Leanne.

Leanne Elliott
Yes, yeah, I, as far as I can remember from Simon telling is, it was Mark’s daughter and boyfriend that said they attempted suicide together. Mark’s daughter didn’t succeed but her boyfriend did. So understandably this, this changed their outlook. I think that’s happened so I’ll just ask there’s so they’re their main events business. So what should have been a very joyous time became one of quite a lot of reflection, which is where the water cooler in and MadWorld came from?

Al Elliott
Yep. So basically, they decided they were going to double down on mental health, particularly in the workplace. And so they’ve set up two events. There’s mad world media, which I think is in November, October, November time, we’ll put a link in the show notes. And then there’s this one was the water cooler, which is perhaps more about workplace culture than mental health, although it does very much combined. So the water cooler goes on on the 25th and 26th of April this year it Edexcel new home for it. Excel is massive. I don’t think I’ve ever been but excel in London, it’s like it’s like I can handle it is it’s huge, frightening place. But so it’s but the Watercolours are professionals who focus on workplace wellbeing, HR, mental health. And the idea is they come together discover ideas, solutions, and they often come up with these practical takeaways that enable them to deliver a healthy workplace culture and wellbeing programmes just so that their employees can thrive.

Leanne Elliott
It is really cool. There’s more than 100 speakers it’s a completely free conference. So we’re trying to attend as a visitor, it’s completely free workshop sessions as well. And yeah, just a really cool exhibition as well of lots of solution providers. And and you know, covers all the main aspects of well being the key pillars so mental well being physical well being social and inclusive wellbeing, financial well being and environmental well being so from the speakers, to the exhibitors, all of those pillars are covered and this year, it was attended I think by more than 5000 people over two days felt

Al Elliott
like you you walked in and there was even before the visitors came in because we were obvious exhibitors, so we could go to bed earlier, he just felt had his buzz, and the and then when everyone was there, oh, God is brilliant, cuz you’ll hear on the recordings were in almost a soundproof booth. But you’ll hear in the recordings, just how lively It was outside.

Leanne Elliott
It was it was such a nice atmosphere. And I think what was so nice is that everyone seemed the same, seemed to feel the same energy and the same Bose. Everyone just seemed to be this such it’s such a joy of being in the same room with so many people and business leaders and business owners. They’re just committed to the same causes to prioritise people to prioritise culture to prioritise wellbeing. So yeah, it really was a pleasure and a privilege to be there. As I mentioned, the water cooler also hosted the Make A Difference awards on the Tuesday afternoon. So make a difference is the organisation behind the water cooler in the mud Well, events it was delivered in association with the London Evening Standard. And really just to provide an opportunity for us to stop and think and thank colleagues and employees who have really made a difference over the past year. So yeah, launch in 2021. And it is, as I said, a part of the Make A Difference media and events mission to bring more employers to the employee mental health and wellbeing conversation, which we’re here we’re all here for. We love it. So yeah, there is a full list of winners on the website. If you’re interested. We’ll leave the link in the show notes. But some shout outs I think our seems fair. Definitely go ahead, Sophie, the winners, the employer that made the most difference to workplace mental health and wellbeing over the past year. The winner in the large business cap category was village hotels. There was also a few categories around colours that made the most difference to workplace mental health and well being over the past year. In the true leader category. The winner was Johnny Jacobs, who’s director of commercial finance from Starbucks. That’s a hell of a

Al Elliott
name Johnny Jacobs,

Leanne Elliott
it’s like American TV. Assorted

Al Elliott
Jacobs, Eurovision, Liverpool.

Leanne Elliott
Yes, the unsung hero category. We had de geneia, who’s former chair of the disabled and neurodiverse network, and the best integration of workplace wellbeing in Dei, the winner of that was Iris Software Group. Congratulations to you. And finally, the best culture of psychological safety went to something big. So yeah, congratulations to all the winners. We’ll leave a link to the full list of nominees and winners in the show notes.

Al Elliott
Lovely. Okay, so we have 10 key themes that came out of the show. This has basically only ended on his sat down and all of the content for the entire show. She’s sifted through all of our interviews and she’s boiled it down to 10 key themes. This is why she’s a scientist. She’s just brilliant. You got Got it, you’ve got some water in your mouth, a lot of you’re out. So shall we quickly go through these 10 themes, and then we’ll go a little bit into depth for each one. And we’ve got some sound bites from some of our amazing guests who most of whom will be coming up later on in the year.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, so as I said, I kind of went through the conversations or transcripts we had, obviously the feel of others kind of being there and meeting the exhibitors and some of the keynotes 10 themes though, I’ll run through the list. At number one, board level buy in number two, outsourced CP O’s, number three individualization for employee insights five mental health and suicide, six line managers seven authenticity and leadership, eight post COVID trauma nine well being culture is here to stay, and 10 it really is all about the data we need to be proving the commercial and business case for culture and wellbeing.

Al Elliott
So in our most ambitious episode yet, we’ve got 10 guests on this on this episode, Shall we introduce him?

Leanne Elliott
I feel I feel we need a jingle for this.

Al Elliott
Okay, I’ll go and find some music

Leanne Elliott
here the jingle

Al Elliott
so one of our favourites was our first guest Professor Dame Carol black. She’s currently the chair of the British Library, the Centre for Ageing better, think ahead, the government’s fostering training programme. She chairs the NHS improvement advisory board. She’s adviser to the NHSI on health and work and she the Deputy Vice Principal of New College, Cambridge. What is so interesting, as you said, I’ve got about 45 minutes before I have to go back to Parliament. Now that is a power move, isn’t it to say I’ve got to go back to Parliament.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, she was I’m sad that I didn’t get to meet it. I’ll actually interviewed Professor Dame Carol black. So but yeah, incredible woman, incredible guest. Our second guest is Claire deck. Claire is head of healthcare risk and technology at PIB employee benefits, who weren’t the headline sponsor of the watercooler

Al Elliott
our third guest is Nick Vianney. Nick is the co founder of CO team, an organisation that helps teams and businesses incubates thinking and capitalise new ways of working for unprecedented times of change.

Leanne Elliott
We’re also joined by Cass brisker who is a coach consultant and formerly workplace experience lead at Clio.

Al Elliott
Then we’ve got Thomas Bell. Thomas is known as the bipolar businessman. He’s a global keynote speaker. He’s a wellbeing expert and expedition leader who’s on a mission to help individuals and companies be more human. And by the way, he is very human with everything he says. And he makes it very personal. It’s very cool.

Leanne Elliott
We’d also like to welcome Laura Morgan, Laura built her international business Pacific direct before selling her 99% majority share for 29 million pounds in 2008. Today, her investment strategy in wellbeing products is primarily pinned to improving life’s journey.

Al Elliott
We’ll also bring in some snippets from conversations. So you’ll be hearing from Kate Goodger, a chartered psychologist and head of human innovation and performance at Lango. Rock, the I think the largest construction company in the UK, if I remember, we’ve also got Andrew Berry, who’s the head of workplace wellbeing at the charity mind.

Leanne Elliott
We’re also joined by Louise Ascot, she is wellbeing Campaign Director of Business in the community. And she shares some key findings from their landmark research conducted in partnership with McKinsey. And we also have Petra Val de Bourgh, who was an absolute hero. I was interviewing Petra as electricity went. So we had to switch a Rooney and everything but she was an absolute Pro. Petra is a global keynote and TEDx speaker. She’s the author of begin with you that has just been released, I believe this week, although there were some early copies at the watercooler. She’s also CEO of PVL learning and development, she the psychotherapist, and mental health consultant and executive coach.

Al Elliott
And finally, you’ll be hearing from some of the exhibitors that we went round with our roving reporter, which was Dean and Luke. Thank you guys, you are fantastic. So we’re hearing from bit from the likes of Amelia riding, who’s the co founder and CEO of suicide and CO and others. So shall we kick off with the number one?

Leanne Elliott
Yes, theme number one board level buying. So having culture on the board agenda, this first theme won’t be a surprise for our regular listeners, culture and well being has to be on the board agenda. And we’ve known that for some time. If you are listening, and if you have a board, and you don’t have someone in charge of the human side of your business, you are quite simply lagging behind your competitors. And we’re not talking about like an add on like, oh, yeah, Jeff built a business back in 1988. He had people so he can do people, right? No, we’re talking about appointing somebody, an expert, or at the very least an advocate of people to tell us more here is Cass

Cass Briscoe
they have a representative on the board who is there to represent on all quote unquote people matters. But basically the human side of employees and work and he said that’s really important because they’ve got someone there who will bang the drum for them. Use things and when you think about it is the human side of work. So it shouldn’t be an afterthought. We shouldn’t only be just be getting into making it hard baked. Now, it should be something that’s been there since the very beginning. But particularly with tech startups, they start off with a founder who’s got an idea. And then they build out an engineering team to build the product. And they don’t really think about even HR and stuff until quite far down the line. And so I’d like to hope that in the future, that is something that is considered right from day one.

Al Elliott
Now one of the questions we get asked most frequently about culture change or wellbeing, especially from small businesses, is where to start. Now, Claire suggests is here with buy in an endorsement from the board. Here’s Claire, from PIB, I think

Clare Dare PIB
it has to start small, but what’s coming across loud and clear from many of the employers we speak to is, you have to have buy in at a really senior level, because it has to come through like a stick of rock, you know, that whole culture piece from from the top down. And so you really need a board sponsor or someone at senior level, who’s going to get on board with what you’re trying to do. Because we’ve seen great success where there is this encouragement at a very senior level of this is who we are, you know, this is what we’re doing. This is how we are as a business. And people feel that authenticity every day when they come into work. Because let’s face it, we all know something’s being paid lip service to you want to you want it to be real. So even if

Al Elliott
you are a relatively small company, 2030 employees you got you can’t just say, Marjorie, you’ve been here 20 years, you’re in charge of culture. Thanks very much. Let us know next year is going you need someone who at management level, even if it’s only two directors, you need someone who’s going to go yep, we agree this is what’s important. And we are going to do this here here. Theme number two is outsourced. CP o CP has got nothing to do with Star Wars. It stands for Chief People Officer. The idea of a chief people of people officer easy me to say is that you’ve got someone at C suite level who is in charge of the people because let’s be honest, we’ve had Chief Financial Officer Chief Operations Officer, Chief Marketing Officer for years and years and years. So this is something relatively new. Now we asked cast who’s a coach or consultant, a little bit more about this whole idea of an outsourced CPO.

Cass Briscoe
The reason people hire me is because they perhaps don’t have the budget, or they haven’t yet fully fleshed out or like an in house role to do that kind of thing. Ideally, companies would do that. But with you know, a particularly in tech startups where companies making layoffs, they perhaps don’t have the budget to hire someone full time to do that. So they will get me in to come in and perhaps advise on a specific survey that they’ve done. And they’ve got results from an engagement survey, and they want to advise how to move forward with it. Or they want me to run an engagement survey. And quite often with things like culture and well being, you know, leadership teams, they don’t want to hear it, they know that they don’t want to hear it, but they need somebody to be the bad guy, they need someone to take the data, people are unhappy, and they need somebody to come in and be the bad guy and process that data back. And they don’t necessarily want to do it because they have to work with those people after they’ve done that. So it’s quite useful for them to get a freelance to come in, be the bad guy deliver the news and then disappear, which is what I can do for them from one bad

Leanne Elliott
guy to another, Kath, it’s just what’s just what’s needed. By think, again, this isn’t really a new concept really is I mean, how many businesses have essentially an outsourced CFO or finance director is a similar thing, you know, you need to bring his expertise into your business, if you can’t do it full time or in house, use a consultant, you engage an expert, or you or you hire a fractional CFO. Makes sense, Claire also agree is engaging in advisor is a good place to start. And

Clare Dare PIB
one of the things I would say is, look at where you’re spending money and ask someone to support you, you know, any advisor, we’d love it to be else. But you know, we can be creative. Look at what you’re spending, and how can you get more value for what you’re spending? You know, in every area of our life, we lead someone else to say actually have you thought and sometimes just being an independent onlooker, you’ve got no history with the situation, you can just say, look, have you thought about this? And sometimes it’s that light bulb moment of? Yeah, that’s exactly what we should do. So yeah, absolutely. There are amazing providers and support services here. And that’s what’s been so great. I really liked

Leanne Elliott
about everyone that I spoke to who was a provider or a consultant, said exactly what Claire said, you know, I hope I hope it’s me that people engage, but just engage someone engaged somebody to make culture and wellbeing Better make it work for employees. I think that really sums up for me the, the feel of the water cleaner, it’s gonna take an army to drive this systemic change. So yeah, we’re all in it together.

Al Elliott
And if you’re listening to this, and you’re, you’re embracing what we’re saying, just think you are at the very, very started this revolution. In 20 years time, people are like, of course, you’ve got his chief people officer, and of course you do X, Y and Zed, but you’re listening to this and you’re actually implementing it right now, which is really cool. Talking really cool. This we spoke to Thomas This is the bipolar businessman, and he is engaged by organisation to support mental health and wellbeing programmes, but he has very unique experiences which shaped his approach to this Hardy old idea of change and disruption.

Thomas Bell
Generally, people pay me to come in and rile up their staff. It’s the kind of stuff that in the dark ages you didn’t want, you know, going into a group of people, rallying them out. aren’t getting all crazy, it didn’t work out for Oliver Cromwell in the end. But that’s what I do. I get called into businesses to shake up shift the balance. And I guess it’s just about being more real, right? It’s not just about breaking down stigma by talking about mental health, but it’s really about helping people to understand how they as individuals can change, even if they have an extremity of mental health like I do. So I’m on the bipolar spectrum, I have ADHD and PTSD. Coupled with dyslexia and dyspraxia, I’ve got like a folder of certificates for how mental Are you? By I’ve got the list goes on. Right, so I’m qualified, okay, I’ve got a qualification to shake a stick out. But I’m qualified as mental. And so I’ve kind of turned that into a business, essentially, as a keynote speaker and facilitator of events and commentator and this kind of thing. And that came from a frustration I think of being in businesses not being heard or being prejudiced may be for the way I operate. When I didn’t know that I had an extremity of mental health, for example. And now I want to help shift the balance for other people.

Leanne Elliott
I mean, it was a real joy to meet and be around and get bumped him to him somewhere in the exhibition hall at the coffee stand. So yeah, phenomenal, phenomenal guy with the incredible, incredible story and work that he does. Something that Thomas Thomas mentioned, there, as well, as you know, is understanding individuals. And that is the third theme that we that we saw come out individualization, you would have heard back from our Britain’s healthiest workplace episode, that individualization was a new theme coming through and people and culture research especially in relation to hybrid working. So what the data is showing basically, is there’s no one size fits all approach, there is no silver bullet, culture and wellbeing interventions will require individualization. So just to very briefly recap on the research that I’m referring to that came from Rand Europe. What they basically found is that within an organisation there are several types of employees that can be characterised by their workplace behaviours. And these workplace behaviours are associated with well being and on the whole, in periods where people are working a typically and comparisons their normal usual behaviour. This is associated with worse wellbeing outcomes. It’s basically saying that for, for work behaviour to change to improve wellbeing outcomes of employees, we’re going to have to provide individualised intervention in terms of people’s work and life and burnout risk. So Claire agrees, and has seen this trend, both through her work. And at the watercooler.

Clare Dare PIB
It’s been so interesting hearing other employers experiences and sorting out, you know, hearing what people are doing and just giving me to help for when I’m talking to my clients, it’s, we have a variety of different clients that we’re talking to around well being. And it’s really great to see that so many people are working really hard to try and meet their employees needs. And I think what we’re seeing is that it’s much more about demographic, you know, what do individuals need, we’re not all the same, you know, you and I are at different stages of our life, what we need might be very different. So, I’m really excited. I think it’s a great opportunity for us to be here. And we’re really thrilled to be headline sponsor so PIB, probably quite a well kept secret. Actually, we’ve been going for about seven and a half years, we decided to try and create a business that was very much centred on supporting our clients and exactly what they need in terms of solutions. All of our people work really hard to support their clients to make sure that we’re just giving them the right answers. You know, things are complex. We live in a complex world. So how do we support them? How do we make sure that they get the right answers to the questions they have around well being and the wider benefits piece I

Al Elliott
also spoke to Laura Morgan from centred and she agrees that businesses and solutions need to become much more individualised to best meet the needs of each individual employee. Same goes for technology, she shared the example of a wellness app that she’s invested in better space. Actually,

Lara Morgan
I am invested in a well paying app called better space, that is an app that provides a bundle of opportunity to companies. So instead of dictating, frankly, I think quite an old fashioned methodology of meditate, you know, learn to meditate, download this meditation app, where better space and the new service providers for workplace solutions. recognise that we’re not numbers. We’re all human. We all have. I mean, I like triathlon. Not everybody does not everybody’s full bore not everybody wants to wear lycra and go and raise money for the charity of, you know, HSBC cycling team, the good apps like better space do is they offer you do you want to go learn to knit? Do you want to learn family finance? Do you need to know a bit about menopause? Are you in need of just a bit of therapy conversation? That is a private conversation that says I’m not coping at work.

Al Elliott
Okay, so number four was all about employee insights. Now, US marketers have been using analytics for years to measure how well campaigns go with Google Analytics, you know, Fathom lots of different things like that. We literally couldn’t do our job without looking at these metrics. But until recently, we’ve not really been measuring people using metrics. So Cass Brisco. A culture consultant explains a little bit more.

Cass Briscoe
I mean, a lot of companies, they have one sort of embedded that they will use. Like the Hi Bob might be lattice might be, there’s like a whole bunch of different platforms that they can use. And if they’re a very small company, or very small startup, they might not even use a platform, they might use like a Google form, or like a Survey Monkey or something like that. And they just want to analyse the data. And that’s obviously a little bit more manual. So I can take that data, and I can put it into very simple pie charts and spreadsheets and things like that, that they can present, I can present that to the leadership team. And then I can put that in data into some sort of format that they can present back to staff, because I think with engagement surveys, you know, staff want to know that the information that they’ve given the feedback that they’ve given has actually been taken on board. And quite often, I think companies to pop back to your first point is they do this because they they want to be seen to be doing the right thing. And they want to win an award. And they want to say, hey, we do surveys with our staff, but then they don’t take it any further. And they don’t do anything with that feedback. So I think it’s really important to be able to present that data back to the staff as well.

Leanne Elliott
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, if you’re going to gather employee insights, data from your teams, you need to feed that back, you need to show them how you’re going to use that feedback to make things better. And you know, what, even if you want to take a complete commercial spin, is Claire explains, insights are essential, especially when deciding how to invest in wellbeing to ensure the biggest impact. This is about ROI types of questions.

Clare Dare PIB
Well, I think for me, it’s around trying to understand what is it they’re trying to achieve, because actually, if you’re clever, you can have a look at what you’re spending and maybe re assign some money that you’ve got from somewhere to somewhere else. And so our job is to look at where we’ve got duplication, where there’s things that are not being utilised other things that the business thought was important, but actually employees don’t think is important. And our job is to drill down, you know, what, through engagement surveys, focus groups, you know, what is it people are wanting, because otherwise, why do IT spending a lot of money for something that might look good, but actually from an employee perspective, is, is not hitting the right spot.

Al Elliott
A lot of people we talk to kind of describe some of this stuff as fluff. Now I know that’s a trigger word for Leanna. She’s gonna be really annoyed by that. But I think what it is, is comparing it to marketing, then Coca Cola will spend lots of money on branding stuff, there’s got no real traceable direct return on investment. And I think that’s what it is like, what what Claire was just saying there is that if you just go off and you get off, put, you know, pull table in the break room and go Well, that’s not really done anything is because that’s the same as running an advert with your name on it, and then going well, that’s not really done anything. The whole idea, there’s a you need to see ROI, you need to have this data and just with this data, it proves that investing in people and culture is simply good for business. Here’s clear again,

Clare Dare PIB
it really is. And I think particularly when you use the data, I think the key part that it can sound fluffy, but actually utilising the data you get you know, what is happening with your people and actually using that to be agile, you know, looking at what is the ROI? What’s the return on investment here, if you’re reducing your sickness absence, you’re increasing productivity through encouraging people to be more physical in terms of walking meetings, or doing more to be active, that will impact positively on how they are when they come to work. And we were talking yesterday, Ruth Potts was talking yesterday around how they’re encouraging people to, you know, go out even just for half an hour, because they know people are more productive when they’ve done exercise. And so it’s looking at all of those aspects of well, being the physical, emotional, psychological, social, financial, I mean, there’s so much to think about, but actually, it’s about the whole person, you know, how can we help people be as whole as possible? And that is very fluffy. But actually, the reality is, you’re spending money as an employer, what are you getting back for it? And that’s hopefully where we

Leanne Elliott
can help. The fifth theme that came out of the water cooler was a real focus on mental health and suicide prevention. alumni have been comfortable talking about suicide for more than what 15 years. And as regular listeners will know, we met volunteering for suicide prevention charity called Samaritans. So we’ve kind of been at the forefront of change in this area for a while and in trying to shift suicidal ideation from a taboo subject to a very common part of the human experience. But of course, change is slow and especially in area that that can be underfunded. We, we used to fundraise for the Samaritans and it’s not as sexy sell compared to to other charities. At the watercooler suicide was very much on the agenda. You know, whether it be from the the unacceptable state of men’s mental health that we’ve talked about before on the podcast, to underrecognized psychological impacts of menopause, and more generally, that the huge pressure put on people today to perform. There was an incredible talk that people were just buzzing about when they everyone ever mentioned it to us, from Clark and character Lyle Clark is a former Premier league footballer and his work Harry is a journalist and mental health advocate. You might know Clark from presenting a couple of documentaries for the BBC is football racist and the critically acclaimed football suicide secret, the latter being an area he has personal experience with having attempted suicide twice. While we did have an interview booked in with Carrie Clark, their busy schedule change very last minute, so we have arranged to speak to them. Again, very soon, many of the speakers and exhibitors also shared their personal and professional experiences. And the opinion was unanimous poor mental health is a significant problem in the UK, as is access to timely, impactful support. Here’s Thomas,

Thomas Bell
long story short, I was in a networking meeting. And I used to do a lot I used to do about a two week so I knew hundreds and hundreds of people I was in the Surrey area. So it was all sorry, in London connected. And a mental health charity stood up there was a charity worker there trying to raise some money and she stood up and she said, you know, 19% of men talk about having a mental health issue. And only 2% of those 19 will put their name to it, right. And I looked around the room and there were 40 or 50 people in this room. And I thought at the time, all I cared about was money and what people thought of me, because I was born on council statement canes, and we were tragically poor and all this kind of stuff. I always thought money meant happiness. And if people think that everything’s okay with you, then you’re going to be fine. And you’re gonna be happy. And it was at that point in that meeting where I looked around the room and I thought would anybody here be there for me? If I was stood on that train track again, waiting to take my own life? Again? Yeah, so I there was a point in my life where I was dead on about 15 years ago now sit on a busy railway intersection and Guilford station. Juggling with traffic effects you might say. And I was just at the point where I just wanted to die, right? I’ve suffered for many years with suicidal ideation after I left home. Ultimately, I just, you know, when I grew up, there wasn’t all this stuff were that, you know, crazy events all the time and things for wellbeing, but there wasn’t this stuff, even as much as eight years ago, let alone when I was growing up and going through it. So 18 When I left home, and there wasn’t lots of noise, I was sat in an empty apartment on my own. It was only then that I started to feel extreme sadness, and depression and anxiety. And I didn’t fully understand who I was or what I was going through. The term depression wasn’t even something that people talked about, I’d never heard of depression. At that point. We didn’t talk about school, we didn’t learn those that kind of language. Now we talk about every everyone’s got depression, at some level on some level of anxiety. And so I’d kind of just not really known what to do about that. How do you explore something if you don’t have some kind of symptom or, or focus of understanding? It wasn’t until I was maybe 2122, that I was diagnosed as being on the bipolar spectrum. But that came off the back of attempted suicide doctors, hours and hours of analysis in hospitals and things like that. And I think it’s a miracle I made it to that point. It wasn’t ever that I wanted to die. I just wanted everything to be quiet and calm, and I didn’t want to feel sad anymore.

Al Elliott
I didn’t want to feel sad anymore. What a killer line. He was such a great guest. I’m sure we’re listening. We’ll be hearing more from him throughout the rest of the year. We also spoke with Kate Gajah at the watercooler and Kate is a chartered psychologist and a head of human innovation performance at Lango rock I think I might have mentioned before, it’s an international engineering and construction company. Okay, it’s also got background with them. I believe the team UK I think she worked with in the Olympics, she highlighted suicide as a critical issue that needs addressing in the UK, especially given its prevalence in the construction industry. Here’s Kate,

Kate Goodge, Laign O’Rourke
the margins in construction are so narrow. So the killer things are always programming cost. And as a consequence, people are working ridiculously long hours. And also some of the technology that we are seeing advancing elsewhere, it hasn’t yet transferred to construction. So it’s hard for that. And then very simply, culturally, there is a metro culture still. So it’s difficult to talk about well being mental health is just shocking. In construction. On average, two people commit suicide each day in our country that are working in construction. But it’s beginning to move and people are starting to recognise that blokes need to talk about stuff too. But also alongside is the challenge of diversity, not so many women. So we’re trying to re address those balances. So lots of puzzles to solve.

Leanne Elliott
I would encourage you to go back and listen to our men’s mental health episode with Jim Young. It’s called the heartbreak of male leaders, where we talk a lot more But about men’s mental health. And yeah, it’s not surprising to hear from Kate there, there’s still a macho culture and in construction that she’s contending and within. And I think also just around suicide in general, there’s a lot of, of feelings that it’s weakness, or it’s attention seeking. But you know, as Thomas really explained there, it’s not always about wanting to die. It’s about wanting something to change. We’ll be bringing you more from K in the next few weeks, as we’ll explore a whole range of of leading edge strategies that are currently underway in the corporate space. We also spoke to Professor Dame Carol black about mental health, and how it’s being talked about more openly, especially amongst younger generations, she feels that this generational shift is critical. And over time, business leaders need to recognise that mental health is as important as physical health. Here’s Carol.

Professor Dame Carol Black
First of all, we didn’t talk about them. And if we did talk about them, I suspect you’d talk to a friend, I don’t think you would talk to your manager at work. I don’t think we might go to your GP. But if you were a young person, I suspect not. And I think we put up with a lot. And we just thought that somehow, if you had a mental health problem, you were a weak person. And we’ve had to change that. It is not true mental health is just as important as physical health. And fortunately, I think there are a lot more things to help people. Now

Al Elliott
speaking of things that can help people, our production assistants, Dean and Luke spoke to some of the incredible providers exhibiting at the event, one that we’re really thrilled to see was a registered charity called suicide and CO, which supported those bereaved by suicide. We had a quick chat with the organization’s co founder and CEO, Amelia Ryan,

Amelia Rylan
my name is Amelia ration. And I am the co founder and CEO of suicide and CO we are a charity that support people who’ve lost a loved one to suicide across England and Wales, I’ve been really surprised that sort of because our name is first letting go. We’re breaking down that stigma, we can get some like shock when we come out of our like day to day. But people’s response has been really positive. It’s been really validating. We’ve had a lot of people talking to us about their lived experience and about how difficult it is navigating suicide bereavement in the workplace. So it’s been really good and very positive for the 16

Al Elliott
was, it’s down to the line manager. I’ve learned this from Leann, if there’s one thing you have to get right is having leaders and line managers who know how to both lead and also support. So Leanne spoke to Andrew from mind the mental health charity in the UK, who’d been measuring the impact of line management for seven years,

Andrew, Mind
our workplace WellBeing Index, it’s our benchmark of best practice across the UK, has been operating there. For seven years, we’ve had 384 different organisations participate. We’ve got a ridiculous number of data points, something along the lines of 45 million data points through individual questions. And each year we have about 50,000 employees answer various questions about mental health in the workplace. So every year following that kind of cycle of surveying and benchmarking, best practice, we produce our index insights. And that really says year on year, what are the trends that we’re seeing in a workplace setting? And what are some of the recommendations that we might have for different organisations based on some of those, and some of the key things that really come out this year are about culture and about line management. So the key statistic that I’ve been talking about today has been the fact that only 52% of employees who completed the workplace WellBeing Index would say that they feel supported by their organisation. Now, that is a 6% decrease last year. To some extent, we think that is related to a bit of well being fatigue. And we also know that those employees have also said that they’ve seen a reduction in the amount of promotion from their organisations around employee mental health and framed wellbeing, signposting to support services. So there’s been an 11% reduction in the number of employees who have also said that they’ve seen that level of promotion. But that does mean that there’s 48% of employees who do not currently feel supported in their business. So we know that’s a significant number of employees. Obviously, there’s a number of wide ranging factors in the workplace and outside of the workplace that are impacting on pupils mental health at the moment. But another kind of important statistic that’s come out of this year specifically, has been looking at the significant impact that line managers play in that level of support. So thinking about employees who say that they have supportive line managers, they’re twice as likely to report good mental health outcomes compared to those that say that they don’t have support in flight managers. And similarly, when looking at employees who say that they have effective working relationships with their line manager, they’re three times more likely to report that they are happier at work than those that don’t. So we know that line managers have a really important part to play in satisfaction at work, how productive they are at work, and their mental health outcomes at work. So that’s been a lot of the narrative that we’ve really been talking about today. About how do we take those find things and recognise the importance of Land Management and translate that into some practical action. Oh, that gives

Leanne Elliott
me shivers. That gives me shivers as like, I’m thinking back to my time as a manager, if I’d have heard that statistic, I’d be going through the people, my team going, Are they okay? Are they okay? Are they okay? They, okay, it’s just unless you are all over this unless you have, you know, dedicated training to align managers coaching for your line managers, then there is a really, really good chance 50% of your employees do not currently feel supported. And in terms of that practical action, we are actually currently putting together a line manager training with our friends at ride the wave coaching. So if you are interested in that, and it really is a cool course, if you are interested, get in touch and we’ll, we’ll have a chat with you about kind of give you an early preview of what we’re putting together.

Al Elliott
We’re going to be hearing a lot more from Andrew from Mandy, an upcoming episode. But in the meantime, we will leave the link to this mind WellBeing Index in the show notes.

Leanne Elliott
So we’ve heard some really compelling data points there from from Andrew. But as we’ve said before, you know, often data doesn’t induce the empathy, we need to step up and support our people. So let’s hear from Thomas and his candid thoughts on the difference it would have made him to have more support with his mental health and well being. It’s weird.

Thomas Bell
Like, I classify myself as speaking for what I call the silent majority. And I think the silent majority of people really just want the tools to help themselves out of the woods. And that’s what I’m trying to achieve for people. And that’s why I’m trying to give them as quick simply and as easily as I can along the way. I don’t think that you can inherently change how people operate. If they’re an enigma or a bit of a dynamo. Well, I think you’ve got that in your you haven’t is that X factor, let’s say like not that I’m at swap. I don’t think I’ve got the X Factor function else for a decade. Right. So it’s not about like, I don’t think you can change it. If someone has the X Factor or that energy you see all the time, right? And Britain’s Got Talent, their grandma have died, or their dogs had a bum leg and they still get a record deal. Right or sad story, boohoo. But at the same time, I think that everyone deserves support. And I think that I would have certainly been more stable and being able to find my fit more readily had I been given the tools and support at that stage. And I’d probably be a professional actor at this point, kicking ass on stage or in a movie or something. So I think it Yeah, I wish I’d had that support. It’s a shame that I had to deal with another layer of trauma on top of that childhood, before I got to this stage where I am now. And people started sitting up and taking notice.

Leanne Elliott
Cas also believes that the starting point to level up line managers is pretty clear. Educate them. I’ve worked

Cass Briscoe
with some of those leaders when I was in sort of salaried roles. And they are, you know, leadership teams that have been there for many, many years. And they’re still learning, right. So I think the key is education and making sure that those people understand exactly why you’re doing the things that you do. So as well as doing all the public facing stuff, and also asking staff for their feedback. I think there’s a really important education piece. So training staff on things like unconscious bias, training staff on things like well being diversity, inclusion, and making sure that everyone, including leadership, board members, senior level, are educated as well, and that they are also doing those training courses because then they can, you know, they’re the ones you need their buy in, to be able to action, anything. So I think educating those people is, you know, the starting point.

Al Elliott
So Nick from Cote also agrees that great leadership in 2023 looks quite different. These so called soft skills that we were talking about five years ago, and now essentials. In fact, he started coat him exactly to help businesses upskill managers in these essentials of soft skills. Here’s Nick,

Nick Villana
I’ve spent about the last 10 years or so working in the space of digital transformation. So working with lots of leaders trying to understand the sort of pace of change that digital is enabling and how to respond to that attitude towards risk, organisational agility, and coding was born out of the pandemic, I noticed a lot of the sort of soft skills that we were talking to leaders about staring in the face of digital, we’re actually super relevant to many different people working in different organisations. We also combine that with a real focus on wellbeing stuff well being, understanding why people burn out but also importantly, what leadership or management should be spotting for that doing about it. Why the notion of leadership or management has changed in 2023, the the idea of empathy and vulnerability, these types of things. So it’s very much what we do at coating we run training programmes to help managers be better managers and look after their peoples one of our big clients is h&m group. And not to generalise but being a Swedish company, I feel like there seem to be a lot more forthcoming in the way that they will. Their leaders do show a lot of vulnerability. They really do show up with their full selves. They’re not afraid to have difficult conversations. So I’ve seen some fantastic work happening now. We’ve been Working with them on several different project streams, but most notably one of their leadership onboarding programmes. So we run seven components of that for them, where we get leaders into a room to firstly reflect and think about who they are and what’s important to themselves and what they want from work, and then start getting them to think about the people that they manage, and how they might manage them more effectively. It’s interesting, actually, on that programme, we always get comments, things like, you know, I thought this programme was gonna make me a better manager, but it actually improved my relationship with my wife, you know, so it’s always a nice feeling when you when you sort of feel like you’re, you’re contributing to someone’s own sense of satisfaction. So suddenly, suddenly, they have been maybe more progressive than some other clients and I won’t name and shame

Leanne Elliott
we did ask if you’d name is Sherman, he refused.

Al Elliott
Quite right to quiet right to so what’s number seven Lee?

Leanne Elliott
So number seven is authenticity in leaders. So we’ve talked about line managers, this is about leaders. Increasingly, the the line between effective leadership and management behaviours is blurring. And research continues to show us that traditionally, more transformational leadership type behaviours are effective at motivating teams, and driving performance at all levels. But given the need for board buying this theme was the one that seemed to dominate any conversation that we had about leadership, authenticity, leaders can no longer pay lip service to culture and well being to stay competitive, both in business I mean, in the talent market, a new leader is needed in 2023, a leader that genuinely cares about people his neck, I think

Nick Villana
the there’s a sort of notion sometimes that leadership is still Mel Gibson splattered in blood, and a rising one sawed up and corralling the troops into battle. And there’s times when that type of leadership is required. That’s how I feel as leadership. But for the most part, you know, we want to create competitive attractive workplaces, we have people want to come and work wants to come and give their best, and want to work with us to be disruptive, you know, rather than a disgruntled employee who’s just going to disrupt in a negative way. So I think any leader who is questioning, you know, is this soft and fluffy, I think needs to look at the state of the workforce at the moment. There’s loads of great reports out there. They’re really looking at engagement of employees. And and there’s some pretty alarming statistics. But I think, yep, it’s one of those things that if you want to continue to ensure that your business remains relevant, you know, coding we say happy people, productive teams, successful companies,

Leanne Elliott
also believe that the most engaged employees, the ones that feel leaders genuinely care about them,

Clare Dare PIB
one of the things we do is work alongside employers to look at how are they looking at wellbeing, how they’re looking at reward and benefits, and what is it that we might need to do to support them, because all of the employees here are on a journey, and we’re trying to help people get to the next stage of that journey. So whether that be through employee assistance programmes, proactive health screening, looking at the way they’re offering private medical, maybe looking at the way long term sickness is handled, or sickness absence, there’s so many different ways that we can help employers, and actually what the employee we hope, what they will feel is that they are cared for genuinely. And what we’ve heard a lot over the last day is about it being an authentic experience, it’s got to be real, because otherwise people spot when it’s not. What we hear

Al Elliott
sometimes is one of the biggest reasons that leaders are reticent about running sort of engagement surveys or audit is the breadth of challenges and opportunities that do come up. Because for example, if you’re getting feedback on what to improve from 50 or 500, people, you couldn’t cover scores of things that should be changed. So how do you authentically ask for feedback, but not get overwhelmed with responses, Leanne always says it’s what is better to not ask at all than to ask them do nothing. Claire’s got some really good advice on this. And she actually stresses you can’t deliver everything at once. But even if you could, you probably shouldn’t.

Clare Dare PIB
And I think part of the problem is that you ask people questions, so you might survey your employees. But the problem is, you might not be able to deliver on everything they come back with because all of us will have different things that we think are really important to us, depending on our stage in life and circumstances. So I think there’s a thin line for employers, which is, we might want to say what do you want, but actually, we’ve got to be realistic and say we can’t actually give you everything but what we might be able to do is give you things in little chunks. And our job you know certainly for prb is about to look long term around what you want to do over the next two to three years because it’s not an immediacy, you can’t do everything in one go and actually even if you did, employees might change their mind or you might lose a whole tranche of people you know, how do you look after your later life people as they’re approaching retirement? One of our clients is doing some amazing work around training the younger people who are coming into the business and you know, asking the older people with loads of experience to train the newbies while preparing for retirement. So It is really clever, you know, it’s just, it’s just about adjusting, isn’t it to circumstances.

Al Elliott
And of course, authenticity starts with leaders being open, vulnerable, and perhaps most importantly, honest about their motivations. Nick shares his own very personal story on his motivations behind co team.

Nick Villana
I think I mentioned earlier growth mindset. And I think that’s something that’s really driven me. I suffered a very big loss about eight years ago, and my fiance passed away very unexpectedly. And for me, that was very much a catalyst that life is incredibly short. And to grab opportunities that excited me, I’m certainly not doing this. I’m not an entrepreneur that is necessarily chasing financial reward. My companies are all built around personal interests of things that are really relevant to me and my co team is about well being, you’ve got a sunglass business, which is all about sustainability and circular economy in a festival, which is about helping adults discover their inner child, you know, it’s these are things that are important to me, I’m not just going to invest in things because I see a cash cow, I want to do things that make a difference, and leave the world a little bit of a better place than the left hand side.

Leanne Elliott
From what we’ve seen so far neck, you certainly are leaving the world a better place. So a little while ago, we shared some early insights from our own leadership research, and that increasingly, employees are looking to work for leaders to invest in their own well being. Nick agrees that this is the key trend, especially in high change environments,

Nick Villana
if you go through a change management programme that really makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable, which we tried to do, I think a big part of change is pushing people into that stretch zone, getting them to understand how what a growth mindset is, and why it’s important to be there. And then you wonder talking, like completely break them down here just by holding them cry, don’t make them cry, always, but getting them to hold a mirror up to themselves, and think about their own well being and why they get out of bed every day to come to work. And what happens, what do they do when they’re in stress mode, and when they go into a fight or flight response? I think when you do that, you know, and of course we do it in the lens of a professional context, I think there’s inevitably going to be some of that, that you’re gonna apply in a personal context as well. And maybe the next time you’re having a fight with your partner, some of these tips and techniques, you know, breathing exercises or sort of reflection type activities that we try to instil into our programmes might actually come into effect.

Al Elliott
Okay, Leah, rolling into number seven, I believe is the C word. You can’t say that

Leanne Elliott
these times. Now, yeah, our seven that theme was is posed COVID trauma in a COVID was the most disruptive event the workplace is seen since the Second World War. And we’re still working our way through the aftermath of it. The summary challenges caused by COVID. And so many trends accelerated. And this really was a topic of conversation across the conference, you may have heard mental health and people and culture leaders talk about how since the pandemic, we’re all living with trauma, and over time, if not managed that may lead to an epidemic of poor mental health, including burnout is a business leader, you might be rolling your eyes at this one, you know, rolling your eyes at the word trauma, thinking, Come on, guys, it’s not that bad. Or maybe you know, it’s just Gen Zed overreacting again. So is Petra, our leadership expert, what her thoughts were, and how she’d respond to leaders who may think the concept of post covered trauma is a stretch. Are we really all traumatised post pandemic?

Petra
I think many of us are. And of course, they they talk about trauma, like big T little T, right. So like there’s a whole continuum of of course, more extreme things that could happen for somebody that could impact them, you know, I’ve got PTSD because of some pretty extreme things that have happened. And there’s this whole scale, right? So to be emotionally abused, to be put down to not feel safe, right? All of those things are little T trauma. Right. But But what I think it’s important, rather than labelling it, it’s like, our nervous system has been affected. Right? So being in isolation, coming back into the world, many people are still in survival mode. So if we think fight flight freeze, right, so if a freeze could be depression, you know, some of those like, I’m just switching off, I can’t my body says no, right? We see lots of the leaders in fight mode, right? Like, we got to solve this. And it’s like, immediate decisions. And what we know is that when you’re in survival, you make worse decisions, like you’re unable to focus or actually reflect. So the skill at the moment is take a step back and go. Let me get into what we call social engagement is the healthy kind of zone before I make some decisions, right? So our nervous so the practice, I guess, and I give some tools in the book is that Like, how do you check in with your own nervous system, right about triggers. And everyone’s slightly different for me, I feel like my hands start to shake a little bit or I start feeling shortness of breath or you know, and you’ll feel different things. But it’s learning to just stop the noise for a bloody second and listen to your own body, and then experiment with what works for you. It’s not a perfect formula,

Leanne Elliott
we will be hearing a lot more from Petra in an upcoming episode. Her story is so interesting. I mean, she burst over there that she’s experienced with trauma. To give you an insight, Pacha actually grew up in a cult in America for coming to the UK. So yeah, she’s since since you changed psychotherapy, she’s an incredible consultant, executive coach, I would definitely recommend pre ordering her book, as I have, I tried Petra, every time I had five minutes, like I’m gonna go and get patches book, and I’m gonna go find petrol gas could find it. And I didn’t, but I have now pre ordered it. Well, I’ll leave a link in the show notes, it is well worth checking out. And we look forward to speaking to Petra again, very soon.

Al Elliott
We also spoke to Professor Dame Carol black, about the pandemic. And she’s saying the trauma that people are feeling because let’s be honest, Gen Zed, this is the large percentage of their working life has been during a pandemic or after a pandemic, or just before a pandemic. But she said, one of the biggest sort of groups of people who are in their 50s, or over 50s, saying, there are huge numbers of people who are in their 50s, who are just not going back to work his name, Carol,

Professor Dame Carol Black
we have until recently been living longer, which is wonderful. So you could see decade on decade, people are living longer. And fortunately, we were also until recently living in better health. So that would mean we could be in work longer. Sadly, that has now come to a halt. And what we call our health three years, if you will, well, yes, you’ve got in good health, have almost stagnated and are reducing. And that, of course will affect whether you can be in the workplace. So recently, excuse me. With the COVID. And after COVID, you’d have seen a lot in the paper of people leaving the workplace, they were mainly people who were 50, plus our experienced workers who we need in the workplace, they were leaving. And probably the most important reason is long term ill health. So chronic conditions, you know, their diabetes has got worse, their arthritis has got worse, they perhaps would need a knee replacement. But it means they can’t be in the workplace. And that has caused an enormous problem. Everywhere you look there vacancies, people are looking for skilled people.

Leanne Elliott
If you listen to our Gen panel episode, you’ll know that we can reach the conclusion that each generation is more the same than it is different. And while we may experience the world in slightly different ways, the ambiguity and pace of change causes anxiety for all of those next shared two key disruptions we’ve seen recently, and how shared understanding and empathy will be the key to maintaining well being and keeping us and our teams engaged in the job in hand, his neck, first of all, talking about Gen Zed, and then AI,

Nick Villana
I think COVID was a big wake up call. For many companies, I think that I mean, pretty COVID The Competitive Advantage probably looks very different to what it looks like now. And particularly when you look at new generations entering the workforce. I mean, most companies are just playing catch up with what Millennials on Gen Z, stepping into the workforce. Now there are various different different set of values, very different set of aspirations, very different set of requirements of the type of businesses that they want to work for. And you’re seeing things like well being things like sustainability, things like you know, flexibility of work environment as well. These are all burgeoning trends that are only going to get further exemplified in compounding way over time. If you’ve got kids, so you know who anyone that sits in Gen Z, or alpha Gen alpha, which I learned about the other day, I mean, 10 years, we’re going to really be in trouble me myself, personally, I’m really interested in the impact of AI. I think it’s a burgeoning space. I think a lot of companies try to adopt it in small pockets, but it’s from I think it’s a culture challenge. I think it’s a people challenge. People just discovered chat GPT and think, oh my god, I’m not gonna have a job in six months from now. And I think leaders need to consider the anxiety that that’s probably creating in teams and really addressed like, not banning the use of AI but thinking about strategically where it’s gonna sit within their business and how they’re going to lead On the appropriate protocols, so I think that’s gonna be really interesting space, particularly when we look at sort of development of corporate strategies in the next few years, the impact of AI and and how that impacts people.

Al Elliott
regular listeners know that I’m a huge fan of AI. I don’t understand it, but I love it. It’s like a dog, look at the television guy.

Leanne Elliott
I mean, psychology live, don’t always understand that love it.

Al Elliott
So I think AI is going to have a massive impact.

Leanne Elliott
So number nine is the fact that culture and well being is here to stay, regardless of the changes or remote work with hybrid work with the economy, postcode recovery, the list goes on. There was one thing that everyone agreed on a focus and investment in culture and well being is here to stay, it is essential to a sustainable business. Let’s hear more from Claire.

Clare Dare PIB
I think the well being journeys, very interesting. We’re seeing a lot of new people coming into the market, new opportunities, new solutions, but I think it’s more for me, it’s interesting, where wellbeing sits in an organisation, you know, is it HR? Or is it health and safety. And I think many employers are grappling with where that fits. For me, it’s more around how we can support employees more my my worry is around mental health. But I also have a worry about a skills gap between, you know, as we, I learned my craft from listening and looking at other people. And, you know, hybrid working is an interesting challenge, because we don’t necessarily have the opportunity to learn in the same way or look after our well being in the same way. So I think we’ve got to be quite agile in the way ahead. But I love the way this is going. I think it is all about the people that you employ, because that’s what makes you productive and successful, isn’t it as well as

Leanne Elliott
caring for your employees. And I think again, this is why it’s so important to have one person, the senior leadership team that is, is leading all of this to bring all these different things together and to encourage that type of collaboration. And as you know, we’ve talked about before, you know how we see a really important integration point between people and cultural or business psychology and marketing and communications. It really is becoming a whole of organisational effort. So theme nine culture and well being is here to stay with a caveat, which is our theme 10. Culture and well being is fundamental to sustainable businesses moving forward. But only if people and culture and wellbeing interventions are evidence led and supported by data that they are evaluated. We have been banging on for more than 35 episodes now about the importance of evidence led practice when it comes to people culture and well being. And this was a huge theme at the watercooler. Now from the keynote speakers that we saw people like Petra and Andrew berry research reports that were launched, to even have providers should be evaluating the impact of culture and wellbeing interventions. So we’re not seeing this, this claims of well washing, it was all very clear. We’re all on the same page. The fight against wellness washing starts now. Let’s start by hearing from Professor Dame Carol black.

Professor Dame Carol Black
So let me say straight up front, Zumba classes, water bottles, and fresh fruit. A mindfulness training is nice, nice to have. But it is plastering over the cracks, says the fundamentals are really empowering leadership from the top who show they care and who talk about it. It’s a board that is interested if you have a board in your organisation or your top managers really talking about this taking it seriously being interested in the health of your workforce. And thirdly, and possibly most importantly, have you given your managers the support and training they need to be a people centred manager? If you can’t do those three things, do not get out the fresh fruit?

Al Elliott
Oh my god, I think we love Professor dem Carol black. She I mean, the fruit away from the way that we’re gonna get a lot of T shirts done for her just called put the fruit away. So that’s all of this is just emphasising this point that the board support and train line managers are fundamental to culture change and well being. So thank you Professor Dame Carol black. We’ll be hearing much more from her about mental and physical health in an upcoming episode. And of

Leanne Elliott
course, any science behind culture and well being requires research. So there were a number of research reports launched at the event. But perhaps the biggest one was from business in the community and their landmark report, prioritise people unlock the value of a thriving workforce. We sat down with Louise Ascot wellbeing campaign director at business in the community at the water cooler, and learn more about the incredible piece of research. I’m really

Louise Ascott
excited about this report. It’s a real landmark report. It’s the first time ever, that all the aggregated data that support OLS thriving employees has been analysed in one place, we’ve been fortunate enough to have the McKinsey Health Institute as our research partner. So basically, they have actually analysed that data. So that’s the first in terms of looking at the benefits of prioritising thriving people. But also, what’s very special about this report is we convened an advisory board of chief financial officers. So this is they’ve very much shaped the report, along with business in the communities leadership team, and obviously, with the support of the McKinsey Health Institute, and what the report highlights, which is super exciting, is the size of the prize for getting this right, in terms of truly enabling thriving employers. So the research shows that actually, the UK economic value of improved employee wellbeing could be between 130 to 370 billion per year, or that six to 17% of UK is gross domestic product, but that’s the equivalent of four, between four to 12,000 pounds per UK employee. So think of that size of the prize. This could solve the cost of living crisis. I mean, it’s phenomenal. So this is really groundbreaking. And, you know, historically, the focus has always been looking at the cost of poor mental health. And we’ve turned this on its head,

Leanne Elliott
it is a really interesting because there’s two interesting aspects to how this research has been conducted. One, it has an advisory board of CFOs. So they’re the most commercial people in our businesses that need convincing that hold the purse strings, and also the fact that it is flipping from a focus on poor mental health, to what what what would happen if we were all thriving, if we’re all living our healthiest, mentally healthiest lives, what would that mean for businesses, and it means a lot, it means the billions of pounds actually, and I think that’s what makes this report different, you know, in demonstrating a compelling business case for putting people at the heart of organisational purpose and business strategy. It’s specifically been developed by CFOs. For CFOs. In partnership with business and the community’s well being leadership team, and support and research from the McKinsey Health Institute, it really is a compelling piece of research. Let’s hear more from the weeds. The other thing

Louise Ascott
I’d like to add, I suppose why another reason why this agenda cannot be ignored is basically is there’s growing anticipation that investors are going to be demanding that businesses report on social of ESG as they do on the environmental and governance dimensions. So businesses, whether they like it or not, are going to have this imposed on them at some point down the line. So this isn’t a great opportunity to anticipate and respond to this trend in investor pressure by proactively investing in employee health and well being and treat the kind of concept of a thriving workforce as a critical capital asset on balance sheets, and in turn is to publicly disclose. So the primary audience for the report are CFOs. As I said, they’ve shaped the report. And why CFOs? Well, obviously they hold the purse strings, but also CFOs are really interested in creating value. And obviously to do with ESG and putting the s the social into ESG. That is all about creating value. And people are the most critical assets. But also human capital is a really important part of enterprise value.

Leanne Elliott
Louise went on to explain that the report has also been developed with SMEs in mind.

Louise Ascott
Yeah, we were very mindful about the reports and our actions being relevant to SMEs. And actually as part of the process of developing prioritise, people report. We actually involved a handful of SMEs to ensure that basically, it was accessible and relevant. And in terms of the tools that we’ve got coming down the line that will be launched into September, again, they will be relevant and accessible for SMEs. So, you know, I would say we would say that prioritising people unlock the value of a thriving workforce is relevant to all organisations, regardless of size or sector,

Leanne Elliott
I would be very interested to know how many business owners or leaders listening, if this change was made, if these data are around people and the social aspects of ESG is our you know, you’re you’re forced or mandated to disclose this publicly, how comfortable you going to be with that your retention rates, your absenteeism raise, how you invest in train developer matches how you invest in well being and mental health support. That’s that’s a that’s a big ask. I think, particularly for SMEs, that’s something that if you start thinking about now anticipate that this change might be coming, then it’s always then becomes part again, you flip it from this thing that you can might be afraid of coming into, into play one day to actually being a fundamental part of your employer brand and winning the fight for talent.

Al Elliott
Exactly. I mean, let’s be honest, employer brand is all about getting building a place where people want to come and work. Retention is about making sure that people who have decided to come and work with it want to want to do their best work. And then empowering people is just finding those people who are superstars who want to progress their career, and given them all the support they need to progress their career. It’s not rocket science.

Leanne Elliott
It’s really not I said this so many times I had so many other people say to me during the water cooler, like it’s not rocket science,

Al Elliott
there really isn’t. Now we’re going to be diving into reports a little bit in an upcoming episode. There’s loads and loads of stuff in that interview was only quite short, but it was packed full of really cool stuff. So we will leave a link to the full report in the show notes and we will come back to that at some point over the next few weeks. Lea that said, Shall we quickly run through those 10 outcomes themes?

Leanne Elliott
Yes, we should. So our first theme, board level buying and coach and wellbeing is absolutely essential.

Al Elliott
Number two was outsourced CBOs they aren’t going to be a thing they are a thing now but they’re gonna be a bigger thing coming up Am I gonna be a thing your thing? Now so see ya, you are you definitely a thing.

Leanne Elliott
Number three, individualization unfortunate there is no silver bullet, we do need to take into account people’s individual behaviours, demographics, and match interventions around them,

Al Elliott
talking of personalization and individualised individualization. That’s not an easy word to say, we need these employee number five was employee insights, we need this employee insights because we can’t do literally can’t do without it.

Leanne Elliott
Number five, mental health and suicide prevention is becoming increasingly part of the have an open and honest conversation about people’s experiences in life and in work, and we for to champion it that continues.

Al Elliott
Number six, it’s the line manager stupid to paraphrase. It’s all about it’s all about the line managers.

Leanne Elliott
And number seven, if you’ve if you’ve got your line managers down, it’s probably because you have authenticity in your leaders. If you are a leader, it’s no longer at lip service, you have to genuinely care about your people.

Al Elliott
Number eight, we can’t shy away from the C word COVID. It’s affected all of us and we just need to accept that it really has.

Leanne Elliott
I just quit your job from before the C word. I didn’t get it. I wasn’t quick enough. Anyway, number 10.

Al Elliott
I think you missed number nine. Number nine. This is going well.

Leanne Elliott
Number nine coach and wellbeing is here to stay but with one caveat out.

Al Elliott
That is that it has number 10. It has to be evidence backed we have to have some data to support this, which luckily, there’s plenty that about now.

Leanne Elliott
Indeed there is indeed. So as you can see there are so many awesome and interesting people at the watercooler and we’ve just scratched the surface of the amazing people that we met. We have planned out our episodes based on some of the people that we’ve met and we’re running through to the beginning of September now. But I think some of the really cool episodes we’re excited to bring you on. We’re going to bring an episode all about kind of corporate lessons, we’ll be talking to senior leaders from Langer rock from Jaguar Land Rover, and from Accardo. It is mental health awareness month here in the UK. So we’re bringing you a very special episode on that towards the end of May. And loads more honestly, we’ve got people from Microsoft, we’ve got the SVP from headspace. We’ve got the global well being made from Dentsu and the list goes Metrobank Metro Bank, honestly, it’s just it’s phenomenal the people that we have coming up for you. So yes, if you haven’t subscribed yet, now’s the time friends, you don’t want to miss this.

Al Elliott
Definitely it’s him. It’s kind of cool that if this had happened 10 years ago, there might have been like a call ought to attempt as many people in the room and they certainly wouldn’t be all the big names that we’ve, we’ve managed to manage to interview. So this is a thing guys, if you can be listened this far, you know this is a thing. If you want some help with this, then there’s lots of experts who will be in the show notes. There’s also an expert who’s sitting opposite me who is my wife, my Kelowna, in co host and she is a business psychologist, she is amazing, she will probably wouldn’t say it’s because she’s very, very humble. But if you’re looking for a sick Chief People Officer, she’s definitely someone you need to speak to.

Leanne Elliott
Or, as always, we’ve learned if you’re not going to engage me, engage somebody. So we wanted to leave you with a bit more of a taste of what it feels like to be at the water cooler. Why come next year, we spoke to speakers we spoke to exhibitors, sponsors visitors all about why they chose the water cooler, and why you should consider coming next year. We are going to put some of our favourites from now through to our theme music. So enjoy. We will see you next week where we are joined with a very, very exciting guest our would you like to do the honour? Yes. So

Al Elliott
this was not water cooler. This was an interview that we did before a guy called Oliver Yan Chev. Such a nice guy, you’ve probably heard of him because he was one half of social chain, along with Steven Bartlett, who’s got the diary of a CEO podcast, you can’t help but have heard of that heard of that. And then both of them are going off and study flight story, which is really interesting company. But you know what, the guy is just genuine and lovely and made us because he’s Northern. He is what authentic. He’s authentic. So we’ll look out for that next week. Oliver, you and Jeff. And it’s just it’s the most genuine and authentic interview. Can you tell? I’m fanboying a bit I was really nervous when I interviewed him.

Leanne Elliott
Yeah, it was it was it was such a great interview. You didn’t You didn’t show any nerves. It was really well done. So yeah, really interesting conversation that we will bring to you next week. Until then, everything we’ve mentioned is in the show notes. If it’s not drop me a message on LinkedIn, because sometimes I forget to put something in. We will see you next week. But for now, we will leave you with some awesome people talking about the water cooler and why you should consider coming next year. Thank you again, to all the team at making difference media and the water cooler event for helping us make such a success of being the official podcast. We loved it.

Al Elliott
Loved it. See you next week.

Hi there. My name is Kay. I’m one of the founders of the Zen project. Oh, it’s such a fab event wewere with watercolour last year as well.

My name is Faye, I’m from the community massage project.

My name is Georgina, I’m director of kindness B Corp and charities at oh three.

Hi, I’m Helen from brown paper packages. And it’s great to just come and network with people that are businesses that are focused on wellbeing.

So I’m Larry Ellison,

I work for CO t, we went to the sister conference last year as a visitor not not as an exhibitor. And as I say, we saw a lot of companies who were doing quite similar and good, good work on like an app sort of basis.

My name is Lucia Eden, and I am the founder of being your element, which is a well being events company. So I attended the watercooler last year actually, as an attendee blown away by the content and the speakers. And I really thought it was amazing that under one roof, you had all of these providers solutions. And it’s just a great community to everybody being on the same page to be obviously helping people with their well being and their strategies in the workplace. And

my name is Matt Johnston. I’m Business Development Director for sironen health. So I think it’s a great opportunity to have the exposure to other like minded individuals.

I’m Lucy Cheatham, I’m Head of Marketing for high 360 I think the whole sentiments of the event kind of chimes with what we’re all about, which is about making work a better experience.