What was the challenge you were trying to address?
When I took over my new position and became responsible for around 1,500 workers across the two ship building sites in Govan, I began to see more and more people stressed at work. At an organisational level, we have a wellbeing strategy and a policy, and to a degree, we give teams the freedom to look after individual wellbeing. However, I felt at the time, and still do, that there remain lots of wellbeing issues we don’t know about. When I joined the Fellowship programme we had a speaker, Geoff McDonald, join us, and he spoke about wellbeing and mental health at work. He really brought the issue home and provoked me into thinking I needed to do something.
When I started to explore the issue, I recognised that people were having to come to my level of seniority to get permission to help someone who was dealing with a mental health or wellbeing issue. There was no empowerment, we weren’t giving people the ability to deal with their situations.
How was the issue of wellbeing showing up within the workplace?
We were seeing a lot of people taking sickness, but we couldn’t understand why. With numbers depreciating in teams, I started to dig into it and spoke to team leads on the shop floor. It was then I started to get a real sense of what was going on. I spoke to around 50 of the managers, and at least 30 of the managers had a team member who was dealing with mental health issues, or someone in their family was affected. We simply weren’t seeing this at higher levels, and even today I still don’t think we have full visibility.
I spoke to around 50 of the managers, and at least 30 of the managers had a team member who was dealing with mental health issues, or someone in their family was affected.
Covid certainly had an impact on the issues we were seeing. I think it helped bring the issue to the surface and enabled the business to admit there was a problem, but actually it was very real before that. In response, the business said we’ve got to think about people’s health and wellbeing, but their strategy mainly focused on things like getting people to hybrid work. It wasn’t dealing with the 1,500-1,600 people working manually on site. Govan, where we operate is a very deprived areas and our teams often live within 20 miles of the site. We are a billion- pound company and yet we weren’t in touch with the economics on our doorstep. We’ve had to bridge that gap.
What did you do to address the challenge?
Geoff McDonald’s talk really brought the message home to me – we rely on the energy of our employees and if their wellbeing is affected, we wouldn't be productive. I went back and met with my HR director and team to tell them how Geoff’s work had given me a completely different stance on mental health. I felt there was a clear message and rather than just continuing to send out our wider corporate communications, we needed to do something more ambitious. I wanted to bring Geoff to our sites and brief a single coherent message and strategy which all senior leadership and managers could use.
The team agreed to host the sessions, and we organised Geoff to join us. The message really landed. By the afternoon, we were due to meet with middle management and Geoff asked if we wanted to tailor the session, but I said not to, and again it really landed. Having let it sink in overnight, I came in the next day and was absolutely overwhelmed by the number of positive emails and comments I received. People were asking for the message to be brought down the line and so, with backing from my HR director Richard, another Fellow, we brought together a few of our HR and safety team and within the next week we build a clear strategy, focused on how we were going to make a difference and create autonomy.
We spent the next phase going down into the lower levels of management and again focused and reiterated the message of autonomy. We told them if they needed to send people home, they could. We asked them to let us know exactly what they’re dealing with and involved them in case coaching and HR support. We also focused on getting them help, as some managers were giving an enormous amount of support to their workers, spending all weekend on the phone alongside their day jobs, and we had no idea.
It’s had a real effect. We’re about 60% way through our plan and I think the business has changed its approach. When we spoke to a few of the individuals after implementing the new plan, we learnt people felt more confident to deal with situations and started to get a real appreciation for how many people were struggling with not just their own mental health but more widely in their family circles.
What's your focus now?
My focus now is how we report and measure it accurately, my measure is ‘how does the workforce feel?’. We have different councils who give us feedback and tell us how the message is landing on the shop floor. We heard about one supervisor who noticed an individual walking into work and he said he just didn’t look right, so he stopped him to check in. The individual was having a really hard time and it was sad to think he couldn’t phone up to get support. When he did come in and have the supervisor see him, he felt empowered.
The supervisor sent him home, asked him what support he needed, and straight away told him to take the full week off. He knew what to do. He got HR, case coaching and charities involved. 2-3 weeks later the individual came back a completely different person. The supervisor felt he had autonomy to deal with the situation and we were able to keep his situation private and out of the workplace. I dread to think how it would have been if he had come into work and we hadn’t known about it. I genuinely think if we had run that situation four months prior, we wouldn’t have seen the same outcome.
When you reflect on the principles and practices you have picked up from the Fellowship programme, is there anything you’ve done differently?
Coming from a military background and then into a civilian environment with the demands of a huge programme, your head is always down in delivery. But one thing I’ve picked up from other Fellows and the programme is carving out time to reflect, and the need to stand back and recognise people’s values individually rather than collectively.
In my discussion group in the programme, I’m with leaders from the charity, finance and justice sectors. Just listening to them, and hearing how their teams tick, how they are motivated was thought provoking. I thought everyone in a delivery role just wants to deliver, but I’ve learnt that’s not the case. As a result, it has changed the way I lead and listen and operate. I’ve treated my first line very differently to how I did before I was on the programme. I’ve always given them autonomy, tried to empower them, but I didn’t always sympathise about what was going on in their world and what their values were. Ultimately, it’s changed me as a person, it’s changed my style to an extent, and has changed how I appreciate who people are and how they think.
I’ve ran three sessions this year with about 55 senior managers, replicating and stealing the session content with pride from the Forward Institute. It has been hugely powerful. Many of these managers have been on the job longer than I have, they’ve known each other for years but when I grouped them together it forced issues to come to light. There was no corporate strategy or forced fun, it was three to four hours each session of just reflection, and it’s really worked.
When thinking about tips to other Fellows, is there anything you think would be brilliant for them to think about?
My advice would be to take the time and listen. When you first join the programme and see the time commitment, you naturally think ‘I really should be at work’. However, you have to submerge yourself and you’ll get something from it. I’m a huge advocate of the programme. You may not agree with every session but there’s something you can take from every one. You need to look after your people, so many Fellows on the programme are responsible for thousands of people and whilst you can’t know every person individually, what you can do is you can set the tone, time and environment to make sure they can lead properly.
Having allies in your organisation who have been through the Fellowship is also helpful. It means when you’re trying to make change, you’re not banging against a closed door and you’re coming from a coherent background. There’s one or two of my senior leadership team where it is easy to feel the message isn’t landing. But those who have also been through the Fellowship programme have just got it straight away and that’s hugely powerful.