Sarah Churchman OBE is a well known name in Health and Wellbeing Circles and, with a wealth of corporate experience behind her, is brilliantly placed to be a panel at MAD World Leaders Summit discussing ‘Strategic leadership through change and uncertainty’.
She’s speaking alongside Stella Gavinho, Group Head of Wellbeing at Entain and Dr Sabrina Robinson, Essex County Council’s Wellbeing Lead, facilitated by Tom Kegode, Lloyds Banking Group’s Future of Work & Culture Strategist.
To find out more, and to register for MAD World Leaders Summit on 9th October in London, see here
We spoke to Sarah ahead of her appearance at the summit to find out more….
You stepped back from your role as Chief Inclusion, Culture and Wellbeing Officer at PwC about a year and a half ago. Tell us what you’re up to now….
Yes. I’ve been ‘retired’ nearly two years now, but I’m still working in Health and Wellbeing. I’ve got a non exec role, and I’m doing a bit of consulting. And I’m finally doing one of the things I said I’d always do – read for leisure! Having said that, I still read loads of books relevant to inclusion or wellbeing or both…
Are there any books on this sector you’d particularly recommend that have inspired you?
The book that really helped me, and my organisation, on the wellbeing journey and developing a real preventative, proactive approach to enhancing wellbeing, as opposed to just supporting people when they were unwell, is Tony Schwartz’s ‘The Energy Project’.
The revelation for me in that book was thinking about energy beyond just physical energy and looking at mental energy and capacity. In professional services where I worked, it was all about brain power, judgement and decision making. When your mental energy is depleted, that really impacts your performance.
Ultimately that was the focus that we had in terms of some of our interventions and the sources of support that we were providing people.
Was it a conscious decision to move from HR into Health and Wellbeing and Inclusion?
I started out focusing on workplace culture back in the late 1990s, when nobody else was really talking about it. And, I guess, what we were actually talking about was work life balance and the challenges of a working environment – like professional services – where time is literally money.
Work life balance was out of kilter, so that was the ‘in’ I had because I was asked to look at this issue in the organisation. Back then, there was little in terms of things like flexible working, except for mothers who needed to work on a part time basis and few of them were able to progress their careers as a result.
You’re talking about strategic leadership through change and uncertainty – and there is so much change that professionals in Health and Wellbeing are having to navigate, do you think it’s a unique time?
I think it’s a time which is going to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Most organisations, including PwC where I worked for many years, had got to the stage where the direct positive link between wellbeing engagement and productivity and performance was proven. They had got to the stage, too, where mental health had been identified as a key issue costing many organisations a huge amount of money.
Where we are now is that all organisations are facing enormous change, whether that’s driven by global forces, or the economy tanking or technology. And everyone is facing worry, it doesn’t matter where you are in the organisation, whether you’re at the top or the bottom. The implications of change might be different but they are still a source of stress and anxiety.
Therefore, it’s crucial that organisations remind their employees that there are ways to deal with that worry, so it doesn’t tip into adversely affecting productivity and performance. This is especially important in white collar, cerebral organisations where people use their brains, their judgement, like professional services because they are paid for their judgement, which is adversely affected under stress.
So stress must be proactively addressed in the workplace or it tips into mental health; we know that people who go off sick with a mental health condition are more likely to be off longer than those who have something more physical.
Tell me more about how you’ve seen stress impact judgement in your career…..
A real epiphany for me was about a decade ago, I got heavily involved with an organisation that’s now called Mind Forward Alliance. It brought together senior people from across a number of city institutions, like financial services, professional services and law firms.
I always remember hearing a senior partner from a magic circle law firm talk about his own mental health journey and experience of ill health. The big thing for him was how it impaired his judgement, which was terrifying as your ability to make decisions is affected. That was a turning point and got a lot of engagement from our people and encouraged them to tell their own stories.
This experience showed me the power of someone senior talking about their own experience of feeling the pressure and dipping into anxiety and stress; it legitimised and normalised people’s sense that they could talk about it.
How can you help people deal with the underlying anxiety of AI, which many people in ‘thinking’ jobs are living with, when we don’t know what’s going to happen?
The most important thing is to make sure your people know where to go for help. So, there must be good signposting. What support does your organisation offer? What is available outside your organisation?
There must be clarity and ease of access.
Then it’s about making it a bit more personal. One move that worked really well was identifying, particularly senior people, who were willing to act as sounding bounds and made themselves available. We called them mental health advocates at the time. And I think it’s important at this point in time when the robots, to a certain extent, seem to be taking over that employees feel an organisation cares. Having someone senior willing to talk to them and give time to those conversations shows that.
But surely it’s hard for senior people to find this time to have these conversations?
Absolutely it is. But it’s so important now more than ever that we treat people as human beings and not superhumans. We need to slow down, show empathy, show understanding and give people tools.
What tools do you recommend?
We found a consultancy that suited our high performance culture very well called Cognacity and we worked with Dr Rob Archer there, who was wonderful. We did a number of live streams with him and he took us through his approach to sustainable high performance.
He used to talk about how sustainable high performance is only achievable if we have high performance routines. He held a mirror up to us – talking about unhelpful habits like getting straight on our phones when we woke up, blurring boundaries between work and home and not ‘warming down’ after work.
Words that stuck with me are that this is not rocket science – it’s discipline that can be hard to instill but can be life saving if you want to maintain and sustain your high performance.
Sustainable high performance is one of the key themes under discussion at the forthcoming MAD World Leaders Summit on 9th October in London. To see the full agenda and register, see here
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