Susan Gee is Yorkshire Water’s wonderfully straight-talking Group Occupational Health and Wellbeing Manager. She’ll be joining us as a speaker at the Leaders’ Summit at MAD World on 9th October. Ahead of her session, she gives us a flavour of the wide-ranging experience she’ll be drawing on — and reminds us why true employee health, wellbeing and safety require proper investment, as well as why employers will increasingly need to take more notice of workplace health and wellbeing in the years ahead.
What do you think is the main challenge facing Workplace Wellbeing?
Confusion. There’s been a lot of confusion about what workplace wellbeing actually means. There’s a wealth of difference, after all, between benefits or perks related to wellbeing, and understanding the health risks of your employees. But these two very different aspects can get mixed up, which is where the confusion arises.
You’re 64 and have worked in Health and Wellbeing for over 40 years. How much progress do you think we’ve made?
I don’t think we have seen as much progress as we should have done.
Anita Fatchett wrote a book in 1997 called Modern , Dependable , The New NHS about the changes and the challenges that were required in order to improve societal health.
Fatchett, A. (1998). Nursing in the New NHS: Modern, Dependable? Edinburgh: Baillière Tindall and the challenges remain the same today.
If you look at where we are with workplace wellbeing now, the health issues affecting employers are largely the same as when I started in this career: mental health, coronary artery disease, diabetes, obesity, musculoskeletal problems.
Specifically, regarding Blue Collar workers and reaching them – which is the topic of your session at MAD World – what progress has been made?
Again, not as much as I’d have liked. With Blue Collar workers in particular it’s spectacularly difficult to engage people in changing their habits. There’s got to be a lot of motivation and need to do change.
It’s even more difficult today, than when I started, because we live in the age of complete immersion and overstimulation; people are bombarded with information and it’s overwhelming so this can stall action rather than promote it .
So, what’s the answer? How do we engage people in health messages?
We’ve got to make it enough about them to get their attention. A lot of the work in this field is too generic and broad brush.
But surely technology presents a big opportunity for personalisation?
Absolutely. We’ve now moved into a time when that personalisation needed is going to be more achievable because of tech like AI and wearables.
There are going to be so many opportunities to engage people in different ways, which you have to do when you’re targeting a multigenerational workforce.
What’s one of the biggest differences you notice in the younger generations?
When I started out working as a nurse on a ward I would never have dared to challenge a consultant. We barely even looked at them!
There was a bigger, clearer hierarchy back then. Now, I see a lot more confidence in younger people especially in challenging authority.
Your session at Mad World is about engaging blue collar workers. To what extent does it help you relate to those blue collar workers that might be experiencing financial distress that you have experienced this yourself?
Yes, I’ve had periods of absolute eye watering poverty and worry.
We’ve got financial crisis now, but I experienced it too in the seventies and eighties. Ultimately, I understand what it’s like if you haven’t got money and then you haven’t got choices, and how hard that is.
I think that lived experience does help me do my job better, as I can relate to how others are feeling .
What would you want your listeners at Mad World to take from your session?
The message that if you take the lipstick off the pig, this is about business sustainability and business is not sustainable without employees.
Employees have got to be motivated to do meaningful, good, safe work, which is what Carol Black’s report said back in 2008. They also need to have a ‘fair’ day’s work for a fair day’s pay, with psychological safety.
True employee health, wellbeing and safety cannot be achieved by putting a single duvet on a double bed and pretending it fits.
What do you mean by that analogy?
It’s got to be invested in properly otherwise you’re only covering half the ‘bed’ and spreading resources too thinly for them to be effective.
Yes, you can do a lot of things for free around things like psychological safety and workplace culture. But if you’re going to do this properly, you’ve got to invest in your people and that means spending money but spending it on the right things.
That might mean some financial pain. It will mean interrogating your data. It will mean understanding your people and the region you operate in.
What do you predict will happen to workplace wellbeing in the future in terms of its status in the workplace?
Employers are going to have to take more notice of it because there’s inevitably going to be more responsibility placed on them by the government, irrespective of which party is in power.
And that makes sense if you think about it: the ‘health capital’ of an individual, both their mental and physical health, is being used every day by the organisation.
If all goes well and health is looked after, there should be no detriment to health during employment and beyond. Ideally, people should come out of work ‘enhanced’ in terms of health, ready for another working environment or retirement.
But if that health capital is damaged in the workplace – either physically, mentally or a mix of both – at the moment it’s society that predominantly picks up the pieces. We, as in all taxpayers, end up paying for it. So, it makes absolute sense to me that the government wants employers to do more, but there has to be better incentives available to get employers interested in doing so.
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