Transcript

MICHAEL WOODS

As we’re coming out of the pandemic, one of the trends we’re seeing is that there is a lasting shift towards remote working. And that can be quite significant. So actually, in 2011, only about 1 in 10 employees in rural Wales worked from home. The Welsh Government now has a target of aiming for 30% of the Welsh workforce working from home.

NATASHA DAVIES

I don’t think it’s ever been more important for mental health and wellbeing to be a priority for employers and within organisations. There’s the impact of not having that in real-life interaction with colleagues, which perhaps makes it more difficult to pick up on somebody who might be struggling.

But I think we also have to be mindful that we’re still kind of emerging from the pandemic. And actually, that had a very real and long-lasting impact on people’s wellbeing, which I think we’re going to have to be mindful of for a good number of years while people just re-find their feet and are dealing with a drastically changing world of work around them at the same time.

So I think within organisations, it’s important that well-being, mental health are reflected in strategies and policies. I think having a wellbeing strategy in place is absolutely important. It helps to make sure that it remains a priority because there’s an accountability aspect there.

I think it’s important to have champions for mental health and wellbeing around your senior leadership tables and on any boards. Some really practical things-- checking in with staff regularly to see how they’re doing, particularly because we’re not just going to be having the chat as we make a cup of tea in the office, necessarily.

Training our leaders and managers to be confident and have the vocabulary needed to have conversations about mental health-- being confident to signpost staff to sources of support, whether that’s support measures that have been put in place within an organisation, but the wider mental health provision and support that’s available outside of work as well.

I think it’s important that leaders are empowered to safeguard staff wellbeing. And that as organisations, we are engaging with the specialist organisations who can offer advice and guidance on how to embed this in our ways of working, because this can’t just be about individuals having to take responsibility for their own mental health and well-being. Because we’re all affected by the situation that we find ourselves in day-to-day.

So it is important that we’re building this focus into the ways of working that we’re deciding to adopt and implement within our workplaces. And I think-- I suppose, the other really important thing is that it’s actually invested in. This can’t just be about the odd well-being webinar. We have to invest in this.

Our staff are our most valuable resource as an organisation. If we don’t look after them-- we just have to be looking after them. So I think it’s important that it is invested in and that, likewise, wider changes in ways of working, we’re open to reflecting on what we’re doing well, what we need to do better, and that we’re looking to adopt new approaches and tools as they emerge that can help make sure that all staff are able to maintain a really good level of mental health.

In an increasingly hybrid space, the reality is, we’re going to be incredibly reliant upon digital technology. And if we don’t take action to address the quite different levels of digital skills and digital competence that we have across the workforce, I think we are at risk of excluding people, particularly if our ways of ensuring good communication, collaboration, management of mental health and wellbeing are increasingly reliant upon new and emerging technologies.

MICHAEL WOODS

As people work from home, they are less reliant on being close to their workplace. And therefore, they’re realising that they have more flexibility about where they may live. And for many, that’s turning into an interest to moving into rural communities.

Now, that has potentially both positive and negative consequences for rural Wales. On the positive side, there is the possibility that it might help to keep more younger people in rural Wales by creating more employment opportunities.

It may help younger families to return to rural Wales, to settle in some rural villages which have become quite distorted in their age profiles. It will mean more people in small towns and rural communities during the day helping to support local shops and services. So those are potentially positive sides of that shift.

However, there are also concerns that a growing interest in moving into rural areas will help to fuel house prices in rural Wales. And that’s already a significant issue. We’ve seen significant increases over the last two years. And that’s added to a pre-existing problem of affordability of housing in many parts of rural Wales, especially for younger people.

So one of the things which have to be considered by organisations who are trying to encourage people from working from home is also thinking about equity of access to that, because another dimension of this is, of course, is that in order to work from home, you do need a reliable broadband connection. You need that accessibility to digital infrastructure.

So there are concerns, I think, in thinking through that. There’s a need at-- how people living in different areas have different ability to work from home. There is a sense that the growth of this may be geographically uneven. It may favour some regions over others.

And organisations and companies which are encouraging working from home might wish to consider that, may wish to consider what support they might need to give to employees who maybe are already living in areas which have less strong access to the digital infrastructure, whether there’s ways in which they can support them, whether they need to, for example, consider rather than working from home, remote hubs or supporting remote access sites.

NATASHA DAVIES

In order to get to more equitable, inclusive, fair work places, there are lots of things that need to shift. And there are lots of actors that can take action to deliver change. The progress we’ve made-- we have made progress, Chwarae Teg, 30 years old. We’ve certainly made progress since we were first set up.

That has been helped with people who have really, I suppose, led the charge, as it were, and acted as role models and smashed down some of those barriers and glass ceilings for others who are coming up.

And I think there are some things that individuals who find themselves coming up against barriers-- there are sources of support. There are schemes and initiatives out there that work directly with underrepresented groups to give them the skills, the confidence, the qualifications to be able to progress.

There are measures within larger organisations, networks, and initiatives that bring people together to work collectively, to identify what the problems are, and demonstrate to senior leaders what the problems are and hopefully push for change.

But I think ultimately what does need to happen is that we need to be fixing the system so it isn’t falling down to individuals to fight hard and perhaps change how they work in order to thrive in a system that ultimately hasn’t been designed with their needs in mind.

SHARON MALLON

Employers can be really aware of the impact of isolation by having a kind of individualised awareness of what the circumstances of their employees are. So for some people who have quite large families or are well-connected socially, it might not be such an issue to not be connected with work colleagues. They might be engaged in other social networks that are kind of fulfilling that need.

I think it’s important for managers to have those delicate kind of questions with people. How much contact are you having with somebody outside of work, or would you like more contact, informal opportunities throughout the day to perhaps connect in rooms that are not work-related? There are also the opportunities to arrange regular catch-ups.

ELISE LOCKYER

I think regardless of whether you’re working hybrid, remote, or in the office, mental health and well-being has been a huge topic and will continue to be a huge topic in years to come. Especially when working in a remote or hybrid setting, I think the only thing that you can do is provide the right environment and an open environment, a trusting environment where the hope would be that they would come and talk to you if they needed to. Or talk to a member of my team, or talk to their manager.

Everybody, regardless of who you are and what you do within an organisation, will have had some level of mental health issues. It may not be them individually, but it may be a member of their family. Everybody carries traumas, stories that they bring with them on a day-to-day basis.

And so, absolutely, mental health wellbeing, imposter syndrome, doubting yourselves, being able to have the conversations where that’s acceptable and we support you through a period of time, we will absolutely do what we can to support them.

Now, at times, we can’t. We’re not the people that have the expertise to provide the individuals what they need. But at those times, that’s where we rely on our external resources and our external professionals to do that, because we are not best placed then to support somebody. So we make sure that we use the tools that we have internally, the skills, the collaboration, and the communication internally absolutely partnered with the resources that we have externally. Because you need absolute experts to be able to solve some of the kind of deep challenges that some individuals have.

MATT WINTLE

We are seeing that we have to tell people that you don’t have to do that in your spare time. We have to find a way to get that balance right. Because the other problem with being at home is the always-on problem. And we’re dealing with that as well and encouraging people that-- have a separate space. Make sure at the end of the day, you leave that space and go and do something different. And don’t go back to that space until you’re working again.

And we really have to encourage those behaviours, and it is creating a bit of a two-tier system as well. Because I’m fortunate enough that I can do that, because I’ve got a room that I can dedicate to doing it. Not everybody is that fortunate. So we’re quite focused on making sure that we’re aware that some people may not be able to do that. They’re working where they live, and that’s their only option.

So as a manager in that situation, you really need to be tuned into that and encouraging people to end the day in some way and making sure they’re not carrying on into the night and that they’ve got that break.

The wellbeing of our employees has always been really important for us at Admiral. Before the pandemic, it was something that we’d put front and centre of the way that we run our business. People have always been at the forefront of our business, and we pride ourselves in that as part of our culture.

That said, obviously, we’ve been very aware that the last couple of years have put particular strains and stresses on people. And therefore, we’ve had to react to that in a certain way. My opinion on that is, the best way to deal with that is to educate our managers in empathy, understanding that everybody’s different.

People at home might have different situations, and the way they react to that may be different. And you can’t assume because often, wellbeing issues will bubble up under the surface. It might be things that you can’t see, and maybe it’s too late before you address it. So we’ve rolled out training packages, for example, to our managers that help them understand more about how to spot these things, have the right conversations with people. And like I say, understand the differences with how people might react to the strains and stresses that we’ve been under.

NICK BARRATT

We have tried to take an evidence-based approach. So just thinking about the unit that I look after, Learner and Discovery Services, we’ve run a series of pulse surveys, just checking in with our folk on a regular basis. As each particular phase of the pandemic has either started or we looked like we’re coming out of it, we just wanted to see how people felt.

Are we doing enough to support their wellbeing, for example? And there are a range of data sets we looked at. So we looked at our sickness totals. And we noticed that initially, short-term sickness had dramatically decreased. And then we started to see that some of the well-being issues were linked to mental health.

So we realised, well, OK. Maybe people aren’t getting the coughs and colds you get in an office. But they’re now working harder and longer and suffering from some of the signs of isolation. So we tried to make sure that we were exploring what was causing that, provided opportunities for people to come together in COVID-safe environments on site to get that and commonality and human interaction, if they were suffering from a withdrawal from the support that they get from work which they might not have at home.

So we were trying to take an evidence-based approach, and that’s now pulled through into some of our forward planning. So we are looking to retain some of the benefits of off-site working but bring back the benefits of on-site and just test and evaluate what works, whether that’s the use of different space, evaluating how people engage with it, not just in terms of whether people feel more productive, but also how they feel about themselves and whether that then pulls through into some of the wellbeing statistics that we monitor. So we’ve created a really robust people plan which will change over time as we go through different phases.

We are looking at how we check in each year with our teams, just to make sure that they are linking their activities with a very deliberate-- what’s our why? What’s our purpose? And so they can then start to think of the right environment, the right support they need. That’ll be different for different teams across my unit and, of course, across the university.

We’re then starting to collocate teams that possibly were working in silos, separated across the campus, and seeing whether they’re seeing different benefits from being put together. So everything we do-- I mean, you’d expect this as a university-- is based around research, data-led insights. But also, let’s not forget there is a little bit of intuitive experience that we’re bringing to bear.