Welcome to reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast
Trina Sunday: In this episode, I speak with psychologist Peta Slocombe who has responsibility for mental health. We talk about HR, we talk about safety, we talk about the whole structure and system being broken. So where does it belong and how.
Trina Sunday: Can we level up? Welcome to reimagining HR with Trina Sunday, the rule breaking podcast where we challenge our thinking and our current people practises. This podcast is for time poor HR teams and business leaders who are feeling the burn, lacking laughs and not feeling the love. I’m trainer, your host, and I’m here to cut through the B’s, explore different ways of thinking and create high impact HR functions because happier, healthier organisations are better for our people and our bottom line. So if you are keen to flip traditional HR on its head, hit the follow or subscribe button. So you’re the first to know when new episodes drop. I’m here to help and also to shake things up.
Trina Sunday: So let’s get started.
Trina Sunday speaks with Peta Slocombe from Performance story
Welcome, everyone. For those that haven’t touched base and visited for a while, I’m Trina Sunday from Reimagine HR. We’re all about providing services in consulting, coaching and training to help level up how HR leaders and business leaders can approach how we look after our people and get the most out of their performance in organisations. I’m excited to spend some time with Peta Slocombe today, unpacking a bit of a topic where she gave me a prod on LinkedIn, so we’ll share that in a moment. But Peta’s the founder and CEO of Performance story. She’s a very well regarded psychologist, consultant, coach, the creator of the world’s biggest mental health check in. She is doing a lot of work in terms of publishing in the space of mental health and wellbeing, and through her business is all about helping individuals and teams to perform better and faster. So with specialism in culture and human behaviour and performance generally, there’s a lot of overlap with the work we do at reimagine HR in terms of wanting people to be able to do their best work and creating organisations that can allow that to happen. So welcome, Peta. Thanks for joining me.
Peta Slocombe: Thank you for having me. That was quite the introduction, but I always love our conversations. You’re my go to in terms of thought, leadership around HR and, yeah, it’s fantastic to get the chance for a dialogue.
Trina Sunday: Thank you. That’s very kind of you.
Peter Bennett drops truth bomb on LinkedIn about mental health and wellbeing in organisations
So what happened was at the end of October, Peter kind of dropped a truth bomb onto LinkedIn. Challenging, I guess, the landscape of where mental health and wellbeing fits in organisations and what’s happening in the safety space and HR’s role and some of the perceptions that sit around what we’re bringing to the table. And I thought, from my perspective, it would be great to unpack that a little bit more. I always love to lean in when someone outside of HR puts a lens back on what we do. And I think there’s an opportunity to kind of look at that, but also look at how we can level up what we’re doing in organisations to support our people. So I’m keen, Peta, if you can maybe give me a bit of context around what led up to you kind of sharing your thoughts. You did lead in, in your post saying that you’re normally quite professional in your demeanour, I think you’d said, and that this was you kind of stepping out of that space, so.
Peta Slocombe: Well, thank you. No, I mean, I think the point for me was that I can retain, obviously, an engaging conversation with lots of organisational leaders, but sometimes on the inside I’m going like doing that, the cocker spaniel thing, because I think particularly, certainly as an external provider and company leader, it’s interesting, you get contacted by people trying to solve particular problems and then you’ll say somebody trying to solve a particular HR challenge, for example, even learning and development, mental health, first aid training, EAP provision, and then you get a whole different kind of contact, for example, from a COO or a CEO or a head of safety who wants to know exactly how can we kind of comply with social requirements and things, but actually has no concept or kind of contact with the EaP element of it. And then the EAP element of it might not be at the executive table when there’s a conversation going on around, , risk and compliance and those sorts of things. And, it became quite apparent to me, firstly, that there’s a transition going on. I mean, anytime in mining and construction particularly, I’ll get contacted by heads of safety to say, , there’s a risk here and, , it’s the same sort of end game in terms of people and mental health, well being, , fatigue management, isolated work, bullying and harassment, those sorts of things. So, , you’ll get contacted increasingly by safety for those areas, but then the head of safety will never contact you or even respond or even be on a panel about EaP service provision. But for me, one of the challenges was firstly seeing the drift across the segmentation of it. And, , I think the challenges and I think the, I kind of contemplated the term truth bomb as well because I didn’t mean for it to be a truth bomb, but I think that, yeah, well it is, like it really probably is. And I think that I noticed that for example, having been at an executive level in the resources industry, for example, like, I know who’s at the table when certain decisions are made. I know what the company KPI’s are, I know what the organisational budgets are. If it’s got anything to do with safety, you may as well have a genie giving you three wishes because you’ll get them, , in terms of that sort of budgetary compliance. If you have like HR or , people in culture and those sorts of things, they won’t necessarily, , and I’m not suggesting this is appropriate, but my experience is they don’t necessarily have the same gravitas at, ah, the table in many organisations, certainly their opinion is sought, but when it comes to, yes, you can be having these out of sort of budget costs and those sorts of things, it tends to be considered sometimes more in the nice to have kind of space. So I see safety professionals and bringing in big budgets to people’s solutions that HR was never often given a mandate to do.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, it’s an interesting observation because I think it’s consistent with where from a reputational perspective, HR have had some challenges around, , weight at the table and there’s a lot of talk about getting a seat at the table. And I’ve said before, you don’t need a seat, you need the influence and people, , because there’s a transformation that comes from you being credible and being able to kind of influence and persuade people to give you money for initiatives and projects and coming off the back of that translating into results. Right. And so in the safety space, executive, CEO’s and coos and CFO’s, in my opinion, there’s a lot of acronyms flying around at the minute. So I might sort of. But , there’s a lot of executive roles where we have really hard numbers that drive results, that drive decision making. And I think that safety underpins the legislation it has. And certainly in mining resources, construction, you have different KPI’s around safety. Zero incident, zero harm. There’s lots of really hard numbers that drive performance. And so when there’s a rationale to say if we invest this amount of money, we’re going to reduce that number and we’re going to not only look after our people, but we’re going to look good. That is seen quite differently than if an argument’s coming to the table, which often is where HR is coming from, sometimes where there’s not. The quantitative data, it’s seen as the fluffy people stuff because you can’t always pinpoint the return on investment. And I think that’s a challenge in mental health, more so than physical health, because there’s a whole different element around trying to overcome societal stigma around what mental health is, what it means. We see someone with a broken leg at work because they’ve had a trip hazard. We can see it, we understand it, managers can deal with it with mental health because we can’t see it or people can’t necessarily relate to it. It’s harder to translate what’s happening and where that investment’s going. What does the conversation look like differently when safety are talking about it?
Trina Sunday: What kind of happens differently in those conversations, from your perspective?
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a really good question. From my perspective, the positive around it is going to say the positive of the shift for me. And what it looks like, let’s say, if you talk about it, is, it is, you’re right, it’s metrics, it’s ltis, it’s specific metrics or specific outcomes. And it recognises that this is not a soft science anymore. It recognises that this is about, obviously, sustainability and risk and performance and so forth. So it’s always, as you said, metric based. And it’s often in really clear elements such as, obviously, audits and assessments and risk mitigation strategies and constant reviews and risk matrices and those sorts of things. I think that one of the challenges is that when, as you said, when HR talks about it at the table, it is more around, wraparound service for the organisation. Sometimes I think historically there’s been the risk element of it in terms of the importance of Eaps. But I think the numbers and the metrics, you look at that and what is a metric? Is it eap utilisation? And therefore, what does that mean? So I think HR. Sorry, the challenge with safety is that it’s audits and reviews and risks and matrices and things, as I said, but they don’t necessarily have the skills to then do the conversations that change generative piece, the change management piece, the fact that this is innately, at its core, a human variable. So everybody gets excited and it’s all incredibly sexy when we’re doing audits and compliance and things, surveys but when you are talking about, okay, now we’ve got the risk matrix and those sorts of things. Now, how are you going to get people comfortable to speak up in a meeting where there might be negative consequences? How are you going to get people to speak up or to intervene or to change behaviour around sexual harassment? That change, the generative piece always gets turf back to HR and learning and development and some culture sort of statements. So it’s just really interesting, the front end at the moment, what safety is picking up on.
Trina Sunday: Yeah, I think so much is coming up for me in that, even from an EAP perspective. So, employee assistance programmes, right? And I know from my career in senior HR management roles, procuring an EAP provider to provide counselling support for people. Now, controversially, I would sit here and make a very brutal statement that I probably don’t think eaps are very effective. That could be a bit alarming.
Peta Slocombe: I could not agree with you more.
Trina Sunday: Offend the psychologist on the call, but I think it’s the whole framework and the structure that sits around it, right? Like, we’ve got this finite number of sessions that people get and you’ve got to beg to extend it for more. Or people feel like they do.
Peta Slocombe: Right?
Trina Sunday: So it’s the human experience in it. It’s not trusted because of trust or a lack of trust in organisations, people don’t feel like their information’s not going to be used against them. It doesn’t feel like the organisation is sometimes they want the organisation to help them and the organisation just says, I’ll call Eap.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And sometimes it’s the human connection of the person, , that’s four cubicles over, who’s your manager or line manager, that you need them and they don’t step in and because of their own lack of capability or leadership, kind of curiosity or even empathy, they flick it to Eap because it’s easier. I don’t want to mess it up. And so I think EAP is a really big challenge. I find, and most HR, I find it a point of tension between HR, safety and exec because execs feel comfortable that they can say we’re all over it because we’ve got an Eap.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, totally. Which is one of the most ridiculously unhelpful statements in organisations.
Trina Sunday: And so it’s a cop out.
Peta Slocombe: Right?
Trina Sunday: Like, I think it’s so much more complex than that if we’re truly looking after the mental health of our people. And I think part of the challenge from a HR perspective, for me, as well, is, I think, about. We’ve had codes of practise come in this year in terms of psychosocial hazards in workplaces. So the big shift for those that haven’t followed it, and it’s massive and I think HR underestimated it, did not prepare for it, and organisations have therefore not looked at the safety HR connection on how to manage it. It’s a shift away from bullying, harassment, and stress in the workplace being responded to when it happens to a requirement for positive duty, which means you’re going to prevent it, which is what the whole safety legislation is built around, right? It’s prevention of hazards and you have an obligation now in legislation to actively prevent bullying, harassment , those kinds of things from happening in the workplace. I feel like there’s a real lack of understanding around the depth that goes with that. And I feel like it is an absolute mess between responsibilities, between HR safety and industrial relations, noting that all of which, depending on the size of your organisation, industry, a lot of the time, all of those functions are actually in HR, even if it’s called people and culture, in larger resource construction, facing organisations, or where you have strong technical, high risk work, safety will be separate because a lot of time there’s a technical training element that goes with that. But a lot of the time that workplace health and safety focus is on the technical safety risk, not on the mental health aspects.
I’m curious about the importance of measurement of mental health in organisations
And so I’m curious to know kind of, , what your observation is around, , what shifted in the conversation and is that code of practise and that part of what’s leading to this transition, or.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, look, I think you’re right. Absolutely. I think it’s at the heart of what’s leading to this transition to sort of head back for a second. employee assistance programmes really haven’t shifted from the seventies up until now. They were brought in when there was a sense that, , people might get sick or suicidal and you should have a card that you can flick people. And what we’re looking at now is a really tight, results oriented, performance based partnership that we need with this. And so eaps are not really set up for that in many respects. As we know, you’ve got more than 30% in clinical ranges at any point, not to mention the worried well, who are not necessarily clinically or diagnostically unwell.
Trina Sunday: Can you say what that 30% was? Can you say 30%?
Peta Slocombe: In terms of the general population, literally 30% of us in any given year will have a diagnosable mental health disorder. Now that doesn’t mean we always need an intervention, but we will fall into clinical ranges in terms of mental health significantly impacting on functioning. And then you can add to that people who are getting separated, divorced, bullying, life transitions, , all of that sort of stuff. And so to say that you really would have certainly more than 50% of people who struggle, not to mention the current financial challenges, and you’ve got an average of 4% nationally of people using employee assistance programmes. So that is ridiculous. Who does not use a service that’s worth literally 13 $1500 in a year by your employer and has difficulties and still doesn’t use the service? And that’s not the fault of the sector that the EAP, the employee assistance programming. That is really just the fact that it’s been set up to be arm’s length, , high volume, low margin, kind of, , it’s not set up to have the level of people or consultant and or responsiveness that, for example, if a head of safety had an issue, and Covid’s a classic example, the head of safety is going to be on the phone to chief medical officer or the occupational physician or the, , every five minutes getting updates on things. So EAP is definitely at arm’s length around that. As , I have a history of being passionate about the importance of measurement of mental health. So the measurement of mental health is really where the legislation has bought in and aligned it more to safety and ops, because they’re now saying, not, okay, that’s lovely. You’ve got an employee assistance programme. They’re now saying, as you said, what are you actually doing to prevent it? And so people are saying, I can’t just point to a policy. I have to show what I’m doing in terms of constantly assessing and reviewing and mitigating and looking at data coming in and recalibrating our interventions based on culture, surveys and engagement, interviews and exit interviews and things. So the metrics are a good shift, I think, in terms of mental health should not be a soft science, it should not be in the background. It’s critical, as we know, to performance and functioning. The question really is the difference between risk mitigation policies and processes and measurement, and how do you change mental health and how do you change culture? Which I think the second part really kind of comes into organisational HR people and culture kind of functions. But the measurement, the metrics end of it is coming under safety and I don’t see them working that well together. I don’t know what your experience is around that.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. I think part of the challenge, I find, is that the metrics and the measurement, or what shifted with the code of practise is we’ve gone mandate over motivation. And for me, from a change perspective and trying to drive and make really positive people change happen in organisations, it’s tapping into the human element and this is where you can go, oh, HR is all fluffy because you keep talking about heart and stuff, but it’s like. But at the end of the day, people don’t change behaviour unless they buy into whatever the change is. Right. The perception that measuring it, which is the same with employee engagement surveys and other things, which I call the happiness indices, because what you go from 94 to 95, is your performance going to change? Does it really tell you what the truth is in your organisation? No. If you read the qualitative, it might, but a lot of the time we don’t because that’s not easy to put in graphs. But the science and the reporting of it, I think, takes away from where people are viewing it as a compliance exercise, not a compassion exercise.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: I think it’s how you get that balance of. I completely agree that you have to measure it to know if you’re doing better. Right. Like, all performance needs some base of measurement. But I think that, , for me, a lot of it comes down to great safety outcomes. A lot of the time comes from really great constructive cultures. I think we’ve got a lot of work to do in most organisations and then this stuff would naturally solve itself.
Peta Slocombe: It’s that easy. I completely agree. I think there’s a. Possibly an argument that you and I could consider about whether this is a developmental moment in time that we’ve gone from a pendulum of fruit bowls and patting people on the head and sending them a therapist card over onto auditing and mandating and metrics and that we might not. This might be a moment in time where we come back to the middle and take the best of the best. That is my experience of how a lot of things go. And I think certainly with Eaps, it was suicide and substance use that brought eaps in initially and then we kind of went, hang on a minute, maybe. Let’s be real about where people are at. I think the core of change here is really messy stuff that HR is a much better place to manage, which is things like fear and belonging and those sorts of things which safety would not actually love to spend time around. In my experience, they’re just like. Just, , give me the metrics, give me the policies, give me the changes. If there’s fear present in a culture, people aren’t going to speak up, people aren’t going to work collaboratively, people aren’t going to perform well if there is a lack of belonging in a culture, that same sort of thing. And I think people in culture, that is their ground zero. So I think that working with things like the absence of fear and belonging and thriving and those sorts of things is, , is, as you said, absolutely going to ripple through to all those other changes of people being able to have dialogues and make changes. But I think it’s a long way off right now.
Trina Sunday: I think I would agree and I think there’s a big gap in the capability and the boldness to move forward and take a leap of faith because we have fear in organisations where people don’t feel like they can experiment. Yeah, of course we’ve got to blame orientation and insecurity that’s happening in our workplace cultures, then the people that could probably break through and help us to cut through to get better solutions in terms of mental wellbeing and safety and improving behaviours in workplaces. It takes boldness and courage and to be honest with you, I’m not seeing it from lots of exec teams.
Peta Slocombe: I’m not saying it, I’m not seeing it from boards up and down.
Trina Sunday: And I think, and that’s part of the problem, right. Because straight away you’ve got this visible message. It’s the cultural symbol in the workplace where it’s like, well, I’m not showing up in that way, but you should, , like, and everyone calls B’s on that. Like, our employees are clever. Right?
Peta Slocombe: Yeah.
A lot of organisations are contributing significantly to mental health issues in our workforce
Trina Sunday: But when I think about the mental health aspects, because I think what alarms me as part of this conversation, when I have it with some of my HR clients and peers, is around the fact that they think psychosocial hazards and we think about bullying, harassment and the extremes. And I talk about, but, , a psychosocial hazard because it’s lots of wanky language to me. A lot of them. Anything that’s legislated becomes so not normal language and just becomes annoying. But I think, , for me, it’s like, it’s all the things that create stress and reduce your ability to cope with stuff. So when you look at it, it’s not just the extremes of bullying and harassment, it’s like, so not having role clarity.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah. Not having resources for. To make the demands.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. Unrealistic expectations over the work volume and so we’ve had this historical argument, around people arguing, like work volume and then there’s performance management and you can’t put workers comp stress claim in if you’re being performance managed. But there’s this reasonableness test but it’s so subjective in terms of the fact that if you look at the culture of some of the work organisations, that people are really struggling and losing their ability to cope with what’s happening in that environment. A lot of organisations are contributing significantly to mental health issues in our workforce, but we managers and our senior leaders are too scared to make that connection because of liability. And so I feel like keeping it at arm’s length is kind of convenient. That messiness that you talk about is the same messiness that’s compromising our diversity, equity and inclusivity objectives. So if you talk about belonging, and I think that’s at the core of , if we have inclusivity in workplaces and people feel a sense of belonging, that’s kind of the magic bullet for culture. Like, if you’ve achieved that, then the rest of it is probably on track because you’ve created the safe space for people to belong. It’s very messy and I think there’s a lack of understanding around all the levers and inputs that go into that. And I see lots of those pointing into HR functions, the enablers for that change. But I’m, um, then also seeing a big capability gap. And I don’t say that disrespectfully. It’s why I do the work I do to try and help teams level up. People are struggling, it seems like it’s an evolving new thing. Yeah, it feels like a new thing and it feels like it’s an add on, same as. I don’t have time for Dei. Well, if you say that to me as a senior HR professional, then you probably don’t understand your role.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, absolutely.
Trina Sunday: That’s kind of some of the things that come to mind.
What do you think HR is doing to not help itself on mental health issues
When I hear you talk about the mess.
Peta Slocombe: What do you think the task is for HR and. Or what do you think HR is doing, if anything, to not help itself.
Trina Sunday: In this debate, the mental health debate specifically?
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the space about where mental health and well being fits right now?
Trina Sunday: Yes, the conversation is not happening and it’s really interesting because. Why is that? And this is why I think that HR, like lots of other areas, are bunkering down and taking the safety of not putting their head above the parapet in some respects because they’ve just been caned. I think that fatigue and an actual critical burnout and I don’t say that because I’m like, oh, poor HRP. But it is significant, the COVID impact for HR teams, teams then being lined up so much they didn’t have the resources now being expected to do 50,000 things with five people. And this is another transition, a new lens, a new kind of strategic lens to put on things. And I think, to be honest, I think there’s a tiredness and a fatigue because the mental health impact for the people that need to help influence the mental health agenda. So I think there’s some real challenges in that when people are tired to step up and put energy into a space of change and innovation is really hard. And I think the other element where we’re probably not helping ourselves is just not having proactively built the networks to have advocacy across our organisations and exec tables. So the lack of credibility, not because we’re not competent, but because we’re not visible in terms of contributions to business outcomes, not the HR agenda, but business performance, profit, revenue, productivity, innovation, agility, the things that the exec team cares about. I do feel like there’s a commercial acumen, business acumen, strategic acumen gap there in terms of some of the connections. So to have the influence over this space would require you to be able to step quite boldly into pulling those skills out of your toolkit and wheeling them pretty hard.
Peta Slocombe: Agree. Because technically speaking, it should be like, HR should be able to lead this stuff. Right. There’s sort of across all elements of it and yeah, I think you’re right. The visibility kind of piece is, , compared to what a CEO, a CFO, , a coo, expects to have their final decision at the table. Hr seems to have a background or reputation of being more, , I’ll just get it done, I’ll just do, , rather than I will speak up and I will be heard and. Or at the table over the other voices. , I think you’d need to know that you were getting backed and that you had those relationships. And that. Yeah, at the table.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And I think you’ve got to build that out. Like that’s something that has to be strategic. And so, , what I’m faced with a lot is I don’t have time for networking or I don’t have time for training or podcasts or spending management.
Peta Slocombe: Really? Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And that’s because of the firefighting. It’s like. But at what point do you make a notable shift in the way you work to stop firefighting? , like even our, our firefighters are not out fighting fires all the time. There is a lot of preventative work that’s happened, a lot of development work that’s happening. , there’s a lot that’s happening in terms of the maintenance of what we do to kind of then avoid the fire. So it’s kind of we need to change the way we work. And I feel like there’s an entrenched kind of system around the just do it and get it done and otherwise the heat’s going to come where it’s kind of a turning point for HR to be able to step into that space and say, I know we need to do things differently. This is what’s not going to happen for a while because we need to change direction and put energy over here if we’re going to get XYZ. But the X Z has to be translating to business outcomes. But this is. Even when I hear myself talking though I kind of then come back to all those business outcomes. And the irony of that’s what it’s going to take for HR to get a voice and support for a human problem.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: Like, it’s not lost on me, the irony of playing the commercial game in order to care about people. And I find that that makes me feel a bit sad isn’t the word, but it’s just it can take the wind out of your sails a bit when it’s kind of like, got to play this really strong commercial game to get people to care.
Peta Slocombe: Yeah.
Trina Sunday: And that’s really hard.
Peta Slocombe: I agree. I think there’s a despondency in that. If you look at AI and all of those sorts of areas that are going to be automated, the heartbeat of an organization’s success, the only thing we’re not going to branch off at some point is actually people, is actually what makes them come, stay, thrive, grow, connect, belong, collaborate, all that sort of stuff. It’s really all we’re going to have left at some point in time. And. Yeah, I think you and I would both agree that if we sat down today and designed organisations from scratch, we would not build what we have.
Trina Sunday: What would you build?
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good question. It really goes right into the core , units of like what is a CEO’s core responsibility? Right. I mean, I think it’s people in leadership and culture rather than shareholder value and stock prices and risk mitigation. So I think we would go back and say what are the most critical elements to success? And let’s put those people and positions and KPI’s around the table and then the other things become ways to achieve that. I think, as I said, we know that the metrics of success now are different to the metrics of success a long time ago. ESG, people, culture, psychosocial stuff, stress, burnout, corrupt behaviour, like all the sort of the human variables that it’s not how many widgets the factory generates. Right? Because no one’s going to care. I mean, you take PwC, for example, the quality of x, and not to get political about that, but just because it’s played out in the media, who would have thought that, , that one person’s behaviour and or , then starts to become something that undoes a multi billion dollar business?
Trina Sunday: Yeah, but I think what an amazing thought, though, if the CEO’s role was restructured around people and leadership and culture, because at the core of it, right, if you get that, right, yeah. All the other stuff comes from your individual outcomes, your team outcomes, your organisational outcomes which are your profit, your revenue, customer experience, , like all the things that are positioning organisations to be successful, they are the outputs of having good leadership, good people and good culture. I think that would blow a lot of CEO’s minds because I think my observation is that our leadership capability gap is widening.
You should be able to have a CEO without technical experience, right?
I’m not sure what your observation is. Obviously you do a lot of work in the executive performance coaching space and helping really senior teams and boards to kind of look at their own performance. But do they see a gap or is that just me sitting there? Judging from the outside, I’m happy to be.
Peta Slocombe: No, I mean, I think they do. The litmus test for me is you should be able to have a CEO without technical experience, right? Yep. Hypothetically speaking. Great. They know the language and they can relate and. But ultimately , you should be able to bring a CEO in with no technical experience and just say, what? If you’re blind to ABC and D, then just be exceptional at ah, looking at motivating people, good decision performance, lack of fear, alignment, not sort of, hierarchical control, your measurements, it would change absolutely everything. And then I think when the technical kind of comes in and then the shower and the risk and those sorts of things, , everything else becomes something that you feel like you can potentially outsource to a leadership programme that middle managers are going through, they’re not going to do if the CEO is not right on that in terms of their priorities. Yeah, I just think we’re trying to rely on things that don’t really naturally align. So, yeah, I mean, I think the whole thing, I mean, not to be too doom and gloom about it, but I do think it is as you said earlier, we have to be having conversations about this. There is way too much riding on it. And I like the fact that it’s now not some sort of thing on the back burner that, well, gosh, could we do better? Could we have a little retreat and work on our wellbeing programmes versus actually, let’s reboot what the critical sort of strategies are. The biggest to an organisation of people, the biggest asset, an organization’s performance people, the most predictable challenge in any workplace from a health and safety perspective, mental health. Like, , if you kind of have a look at all of those, it’s really a no brainer to say, why aren’t we looking at the chain of command there? But circling back to the beginning of the conversation, safety doesn’t talk to Eaps. HR don’t necessarily talk to safety unless somebody’s being disciplined or there’s a termination or those sorts of things. And yeah, it’s all, , learning and development are probably different to diversity in terms of responsibility. They shouldn’t be separate, they shouldn’t be different. We throw around all these terms, but they’re all really trying to meet the same ends.
Trina Sunday: And I think that’s at the core of kind of, if you developed good people strategy, it’s not about the HR deliverable. And I think you said in your posts, it’ll always just look like a bunch of projects and initiatives, , and it does feel that way. If you have these operational plans, I won’t call them strategic plans because most of the time they’re not strategic. But it’s just all these actions for people to be able to show their relevance at the end of the day. This is why I’m here, because I’m doing all this stuff. And I think at the core of that, for me, it’s just because we’ve lost that human connection. And I think it requires really strong, great HR leadership to hold those functions that you talked about together in terms of DEi and L and D, or the acronyms, but diversity, equity, inclusion, your learning and development, where you sit with industry relations, because it’s an important context where you are with workplace health and safety, whether it’s in your team or outside your team, wherever there are people who are dealing with your people, then you need liaising with them all the time. And it’s the same with marketing if they do internal comms. Comms often alienate people because we’re driving an exec message that’s lost its human voice. And so there’s an irony in that because the consumer experience and the employee experience have so many parallels. But I think, , a lot of the time I just keep thinking around the responsibilities for these things. HR can be an enabler and empower and create structure systems and try and build capability and leadership things. But at the end of the day, if the CEO and the leadership team aren’t driving a passion for having a constructive culture, for having a safe workplace , diversity, , like if that’s not lived and breathed in the organisation, everything else is lip service, right? And people don’t care. But what I find in the mental health space, that is super exciting though, if we pretend that CEO’s and execs don’t exist, if we pretend they don’t exist. I see mental health as the most phenomenal landscape and perspective to create a groundswell of change.
Peta Slocombe: Oh yeah.
Trina Sunday: Every single person that we know, there’s not one person alive. I’m sure if there is, that could say that they do not have someone in their family, their sporting association, wherever they are, their team, their workplace, that is not having mental health struggles of some description. And whether that, , in the 30% or the 70%, , in terms of it impacting their ability to function, we’ve all got something that should give us skin in the game because somehow there’s people we love where we want to get better at this. And I feel like there’s something in that for us to be able to talk about this at a different human level, like in the work that you and I do, obviously we want to influence the structures, like, especially for you, in terms of what you’ve done with, , the biggest mental health cheque in and other measurements, but also the influence that you’ve done. And I’m doing it in terms of work with business leaders and HR leaders around how we integrate these things better so that we’re looking at people, the whole person, no matter what our stupid structures are, because they don’t care about the structure, they care about their human experience. Right. What part of the puzzle. But the puzzle has to make sense. And I think there’s a real capacity for us to tap into the storytelling and the human element, to be able to make massive changes where the care, compassion and support is really going to come from, not from leaders, in my opinion.
Peta Slocombe: Absolutely. And then the final thing I would add to that is that even above and beyond the fact that everybody can relate to and be the groundswell of change around mental health, the psychological performance of your people, obviously at the below the line end in terms of mental health challenges, but the psychological performance at, ah, the above the line end is the most critical element of performance, right? If you want good results, if you want people to perform well and be productive, their ability to sleep well, to focus, to communicate well, to come up with ideas, to work together with teams, all of that sort of stuff that is about exceptional psychological health, right? You can’t have an organisation thriving, so it’s not even just about how do we all get together and have a dialogue. I have this little fantasy that if he said to HR, come around the table, tell me the top three things about our people. You said to the coo, tell me the top three things about our people. You said to the leaders, people would all come up with similar things, right? They’d all kind of go, people are struggling with change or. And yet they don’t bring that intel to the table. They’re just so busy siloing them. So if you pull everyone together and say, who in this organisation, in terms of leadership or executive presence, has a stakeholding in performance, like mental health and wellbeing, not again, just in the absence of it, but in terms of performance is the biggest differentiator. It’s the fastest way to get people safe performing all that stuff. So, I can’t remember the last time that I had a mental health discussion with psychological health, high performance discussion, and had all of those stakeholders at the table, you go onto sites and they’ll do something. You go to the HR team and they’ll do something, they’ll do something like, why isn’t everybody in the same room together?
Trina Sunday: Yeah, it’s interesting, and I think it is interesting because there’s some work that I do with Michelle Dorr. She’s a community psychologist with Braveheart. Wellbeing in terms of, we go through an exercise with organisations around, , what they’re doing from organisational health and then the impact on family health at home. And when you bring leadership into the table across all areas of the business and you start talking about things from different aspects of what do about your people and how you kind of bring that together. It’s a pretty big gap andnlike, I think that it’s rewarding, but it still feels like the start of these conversations. It’s kind of the. So you can open the eyes to it. But then I feel like there’s a lack of support around the. Yeah, but what next? And so when there’s HR leaders that I know that are sitting there saying, I know, I know this is the biggest, but what do I do first and do I do next? And I think that that’s the challenge because all of it’s nuanced by your organisation, the culture, the industry, the leadership, that kind of thing. But at the end of the day, you’ve got to do something, though. You do anything, nothing’s going to change. So if we know that it’s a problem and we want to be change agents, then we’ve got to do something. What do you think some people can do.
HR and business leaders need to work together to solve mental health challenges
Peta Slocombe: A bit of a bright light for me was getting a recent quotation from an executive team a request to design, like, how would you design? Like, no limitations. How would you design us to solve some of these challenges? Which was super exciting just to have asked the question, not within an EAP realm or my performance work realm. So, I think the first thing to do is to kind of redefine the goal because I think that’s always motivating for people. And then when you redefine the goal and you break that down, what the components are, then, , we need to make sure that those pieces are in place. So say, for example, with the psychosocial stuff, it does seem to be battered firmly under safety at the moment in most organisations. However, the minute it gets through all the auditing and it goes back down to the whole behavioural change, it’s going to go back to HR faster than you can possibly imagine. So I think HR need to be able to say, look, we’re really key stakeholders in this change and we need to sort of start working together. But ultimately, I think even just having the conversation to sort of say if we mapped as a team or as an executive team, where this stuff fits at the moment, how does that look and what then does that represent? How does that set us up for an outcome, if this is how it looks? Because I think if people mapped it at the moment, they would be quite sort of shocked as to how the whole can become greater than the sum of the parts for as long as it’s also sort of siloed off and bolted on.
Trina Sunday: Yeah. And because that disconnect means that you just have. No, it’s a lack of information sharing as well.
Peta Slocombe: Right.
Trina Sunday: Like, you can’t come up with great solutions when you’re in a vacuum and having the siloed functions and working, that’s what’s created. We’ve got all these different teams with the kind of insight and intel that we need to bring together if we’re going to kind of innovate. And I think I would love to see HR leading, leading the way for kind of bringing all those people together to have these mental health moments of like, what are we doing in this space? I love the idea of mapping kind of what’s sitting in what areas that have mental health impacts and understanding the perception. I think it would be a super interesting thing to do because I think there’d be a lot of gaps. Like, I think a lot of things that people don’t say. I could be wrong in that, but I think there are a lot of organisations where safety and HR are completely separate. Right. And safety will have a direct line into the COO and HR can be buried down under a CFO which tells you everything. If HR is under a CFO. Yes, it does the opinion of it, but I think that, , so a lot of it’s trying to look at, well, I think you’re right. Mental health and if someone doesn’t take ownership and accountability, nothing’s going to happen. We know at the moment that CEO’s aren’t going to be driving this from the front. Some, some exceptional ones will be similar with what they’re doing in the DEI space and culture generally, but a lot aren’t. And so I think it’s kind of stepping into that space and then bringing the people together to see where things are at. Do you have any recommendations for resources, tools, places for HR and business leaders to go to try and level up their knowledge?
Peta Slocombe: Yeah, look, I’ll send some through and you could maybe pop them in the link. I think that there’s some really good sort of foundational papers and as we said, even if they can sort of start off by mapping that, I think the problem will be one that there’s a lot of people keen to solve. Yeah, absolutely.
Peta: There’s perceptions that HR is underutilised
Trina Sunday: Ah, awesome. Well, thank you as always for your time and insight. I think my reaction to this being heaps and fruit bowls, we’ve taken our conversation to a really deeper place. So be about that. And I know that wasn’t the assertion that you’re making. People can read Peta.
Peta Slocombe: There’s perception there that it’s underutilised, so. Right, yeah.
Trina Sunday: And I think it is. And I think that we’ve got a gap in our knowledge. I think that. I know you and I are both passionate about this, that’s why we’re chatting. But it’s. There’s a gap in knowledge that I think we can help. I think there’s resources we can connect people with. But most importantly, I think it’s people kind of leaning into the issue and then looking at, well, what can I do and make a change? And I will be encouraging and certainly have been HR teams that I work with and business leaders I work with to do that. But thank you for your time and.
Peta Slocombe: We’ll be up on an important conversation and helping that to get the attention it needs.
Trina Sunday: No worries.
Trina Sunday: Thank you. Thanks for tuning in and leaning in to this week’s episode as we look.
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