The conundrum of how to achieve high performance, in a volatile world, without detrimentally affecting employee wellbeing is one of the biggest challenges faced by businesses today.
It’s such an important topic that we’ve dedicated a Keynote session to this topic – Healthy Performance in an Age of Uncertainty – at the Make A Difference Leaders Summit on 9th October in London. The session is being led by Dr Monika Misra, Consultant Physician and Co-Author of Healthy High Performance; unlocking business success through employee wellbeing. To find out more and register, click here.
News rooms are infamously characterised as one of the most pressurised, fast moving environments that you can work in.
Certainly, there is some truth in this stereotype that award winning Guardian journalist Mark Rice-Oxley recognises, whose experience of pressure and pace in a news role pushed him to breaking point, without even realising he’d reached the edge.
This experience led to him writing Under the Lemon Tree, an autobiography about his recovery from depression, and also to going into workplaces to talk about mental health awareness.
What motivates you to go into workplaces and talk about mental health?
It was such a surprise and eye opener for me when I had a breakdown because I’d always considered myself to be psychologically sound.
People seem to think that they’re immune to psychiatric downturns. But, I learnt through bitter experience, that I absolutely was not. It can be triggered by anything from a shock occurrence in your life to overwork to a financial mishap. So, we really shouldn’t be as complacent as we are.
Material prosperity only goes some way to protecting us. And, in fact, the richer we’ve become as a society, we seem worse off mental health wise.
You started going into workplaces about a decade ago doing mental health awareness workshops. What do you think has changed over the last ten years in terms of workplaces and their understanding of mental health?
Ten years ago employers really started catching on to this idea that if your workers aren’t well, don’t feel secure and aren’t thriving, your business isn’t going to do well.
What’s happened in the last ten years, when we’ve seen the creation of Wellbeing Directors and companies investing in mental health, is that boards are now saying: ‘hang on, people are still going off sick, this doesn’t work! What is the return on investment here?’
The problem is that you can’t always see a clear, measurable benefit from investing in employee wellbeing. So it’s often the first thing to get cut. But employers should remember what counts can’t always be measured, and what you measure, doesn’t always count.
Is there anything worrying you particularly about the modern workplace?
One thing I heard from talking to a business leader recently is that ‘stress breaks’ are becoming almost as common as annual leave. Employees increasingly feel entitled to two or three weeks of stress leave every year, apparently. That’s incredibly expensive. Businesses and individuals need to take responsibility for mental health.
You’ve worked in news rooms for years. Do you think reading the news every day is bad for our wellbeing?
By the end of my career in news I did become convinced that news wasn’t entirely good for our mental health. But it’s tricky, and very individual, and I don’t think people should switch off from news, because it’s too important.
There are ways to create your own social media feeds, or finding apps that only give you a certain type of news. We need to curate our feeds. However, no matter how much we do this, it’s also human nature to click on a headline about a plane crashing rather than a story about how lives are being saved. The human instinct is drawn to fear and alarm. I don’t know what the answer is, if I did I’d be a media millionaire!
My best piece of advice is probably to read longer pieces, more than a thousand words, from media outlets that still invest in journalism like the Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and the Atlantic. That way you get more nuance, more light and shade, and a greater understanding of the state of the world.
But, while it’s good to remain informed, you must switch off from breaking news. It’s terrible for you.
News rooms are portrayed in the media and TV shows as cutthroat, brutal places to work, often. Is that your experience?
They are different places now to when I started out, back when shouting at people and stand-up arguments were considered perfectly fine. It was common for people to be humiliated in public.
There’s less of that but, perhaps it’s hidden under a veneer of goodwill because the industry still struggles with the fact it, by nature, operates under pressure and pace.
How can you keep pressure and pace but not unreasonably impact wellbeing?
The only way to deal with this is to build strong teams. I’ve worked in some newsroom teams and felt totally psychologically safe, and like it’s an exciting place to be.
Do you think individuals have a responsibility to pick careers that suit them, and what they need for their wellbeing? Like, if you’re bad with pressure and pace maybe don’t try and work in a newsroom?
It’s the responsibility of both the employer and employee to you look after mental health.
But if you find the nature of the work is constantly pushing you into stress, you have to leave and find another job. It’s incumbent on us to follow a professional path that takes us into workplaces that are more suited and more congruous with who we are and our wellbeing.
Not every job is freely performable and suited to every person so, although it’s difficult, if a job is making you ill you have to find one that doesn’t.
Mark publishes a weekly, free newsletter on Substack called Headstrong about mental health
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