The Wellbeing Hour #36 What way is up? Understanding perspectives
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Amy: This is the Headtorch Podcast. Welcome! Our mission? To create a mentally healthy culture at work. Keeping the conversations alive, our podcasts bring you great presenters and stimulating discussion on mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. Enjoy!
Amy: Welcome, everybody, to the Headtorch Wellbeing Hour with me, Amy McDonald
Angus: and me, Angus Robinson. We’ll introduce our guest, Chris Abbey, in a few moments. As you settle in, we are recording this and you will be able to listen to it as a podcast on all the podcast channels including Spotify. At Headtorch we work to develop mentally healthy cultures and the Wellbeing Hour is a really important extension of our work
I’ll be back later to field some of your questions to our guest.
Amy: we look forward to hearing those questions and your thoughts, do add those to the chat, those of you who are joining us live. Before we take a look at your thoughts, I’ll also be asking some of my own questions of Chris.
So I’ll be asking him things like, what was the life changing event that happened to
you?
How important is it to re evaluate? And preventing attrition and improving attraction to your workplace is vital. So how does a mentally healthy culture help to drive this? Today’s session is called What Way is Up? Understanding Perspectives, and for this conversation, I’m delighted to welcome our guest
Chris Abbey, who is Senior Vice President, HSE, UK, Ireland and Nordics at ALTRAD.
To put everyone in the frame, the ALTRAD group is a world leader in the provision of industrial services delivering in industries including oil, gas, nuclear and renewables in more than 50 countries with approximately 52, 000 employees. Chris we’ll hear more of your story in due course, but before we go any further, let’s share the question that you have posed for our listeners today.
And here it is for you now. “How do you avoid lip service to make conversations at work about mental health and wellbeing authentic?” And that will go into the chat, so for those of you joining us live, do write your responses down there and any comments and we’ll pick those up a little later on. We are super happy that you are our guest here today Chris, continuing this relationship that we have between ALTRAD and Headtorch that’s been ongoing over, over some years actually. We’ve worked with a variety of leaders and managers at ALTRAD, and most recently we played an integral part in the delivery of your senior leadership conference with its focus on mental health, physical safety and wellbeing.
And it was at that point, wasn’t it, Chris, that you and I first met, and Chris, he has been working in health, safety and wellbeing for a whole 25 years, in fact over 25 years, and in a wide variety of sectors including waste management, construction, oil, gas, petrochemicals, and nuclear. Along the way, he’s worked with organisations including BIFFA, Alstom and the Weir Group.
And he’s been part of the ALTRAD team now since 2012, and most recently he was promoted to the giddy heights of Senior Vice President, HSE, UK, Ireland and Nordics. Chris, do share your mystery object and introduce yourself.
Chris: Hi, thank you, delighted to be here. Yeah, as I said, I’m Chris Alley, and I guess I’ll just share, my mystery object today, and I’d like to introduce Dave, I don’t know if you can see that on the camera. I’m an amateur beekeeper, and Dave is a Buckfast bee, so I looked at an object which I could identify and associate with of which I and I thought the humble honeybee. They’re very hard working, they’re very committed to the cause, have an overwhelming sense of community, and there’s a bit of a sting in their tail sometimes when we get them riled, so I thought, you know, looking at something that I could, resonate with and put an object to, so, yeah, the humble Buckfast honeybee.
Amy: Fantastic. And what does the humble Buckfast honeybee.
did you call it?
Chris: Yes, it’s, it’s a bee from the Buckfast Abbey, one of the oldest, indigenous bees, in the UK.
Amy: What does it do for your wellbeing?
Chris: I bought them, a couple of years ago. I’d seen them in the garden and I just thought it was absolutely amazing going from flower to flower collecting the pollen, and then absolutely one of the modern marvels is how they create that pollen into honey, the whole concept of it. But watching them, there’s very different jobs and specific traits that the bees have, from nursery bee to the queen bee to the drone who regulates the temperature, to the housekeepers clearing out the hives. So just watching them flutter around, they’re super intelligent, they feed off your body language And you can hear that within their wings, if you’re a friend or foe.
So, yeah, it’s actually really quite calming to look at them flutter around.
Amy: Is Dave still there? Could we have another look?
Chris: He is he’s, getting fairly active, so there he is. I’ll let him go into, back to do his duties.
Amy: And I believe no animals were harmed in the process of
Chris: No, he’s fairly resilient, minimal training required to, get him on the stage today.
Amy: fantastic. Thank you for sharing that Chris. So what way is up understanding perspectives? As I said, folks, do jot your thoughts, questions, responses to Chris’s question into the chat, and we’ll come back to those a little later on. You’re talking there Chris, about honeybees and you know the incredible system that they have set up.
In terms of mental health, what are they getting right, do you think?
Chris: I think there’s this, overwhelming sense of their greater good, it’s a sense of community. that, I suppose if you correlate that and look at where we should be as a species, is we should have that overwhelming sense of community, that we’re mindful of our actions and our behaviours influencing people, and we should take an interest in other people, and understanding how they are and how they’re working. There’s 10 to 15, 000 bees in one hive, but they’ve all got a collective purpose and that’s to produce honey and that’s to protect the Queen.
Amy: Nice, a sense of community, how lovely. Yesterday, we were delighted to be delivering at the Women in Nuclear Conference in Manchester, and there was a a real drive there, Chris, you know, talking about preventing attrition, improving attraction to your workplace and how vital that is. How do you think a mentally healthy culture, like bees have, that sense of community, how do you think a mentally healthy culture can drive that?
Chris: I’d probably state the obvious, but everything is impacted by, you know, we’re human. A happy person is a healthy person in body, mind and soul. You know, if we’ve got the right formula and the right environment for our people to thrive, then the world is your oyster in productivity, commercial, safety, everything. I think people, you know, we spend more time at work than we do at home, and we don’t live and work in a vacuum. There’s lots of external factors that influence us, and if we’re cognisant of that, and have that sense of community within the workplace, then you know, it affects every facet of the organisation, whether it’s turnover rate, whether it’s the morale, and we’d probably look at that locally. If we ask one of our colleagues to do something for us that’s above and beyond what their job description or remit is,
you know, a healthy workplace, yeah, sure. Can’t do that today but leave it with me and I’ll have a look at it as opposed to somewhere where the barometer’s not working or not really my job, and I’m not really going to do that. So, line managers, take note
Yeah, yeah. So it’s that healthy, happy, content, actually driven, that kind of desire, if you like, a sense of purpose is what I’m hearing you say there, and so important. and of course you’ve had an incredible career up to now, and I know it started way back. If I can take you back to the beginning of your journey, you initially joined the military didn’t you?
Yeah, I did, straight from school. My family, were lawyers and psychologists, and I thought, academia is not really the path for me. I had a particularly difficult childhood in the early years, and I guess I wanted to join something with that community. You’ll hear me say community all the way through this because that’s, from my life experience, that’s all I’ve thrived and cared for, in that sense of community, that sense of belonging.
And the military seemed that ideal choice, although halfway through basic training, I wasn’t really sure it was the right choice. But, nonetheless, the military are very good at creating that sense of community, camaraderie, and that sense of belonging. You’re fed, you’re clothed, you’re watered, you’re given a script, you’re given a pro forma, and I needed that, I needed that discipline, and I needed that resilience in my life.
Amy: Yeah. And after leaving the military, you then went into road haulage business, didn’t you? So tell us what was the life changing event that happened to you? Where were you working and what happened?
Chris: Yeah, I, I realised that my skill set in the military wasn’t really placed for, in the real world, civilian life, and, the life changing event is, It is really one, when I look back, of stupidity, poor choices, influential behaviour, mirroring other actions. And I was involved in a fire and explosion which, was quite significant, which resulted in eight hours worth of surgery and three weeks convalescence in Whiston Burns Unit, and it was nothing more stupid than burning waste, confidential waste out within a yard, and watching other people do that.
It became my turn to do that, it was a particularly wet day, and on that particular day, I didn’t know that thinners that I use as an accelerator to get the fire going, burns with an invisible flame. And as I decanted five litres of thinners in a sparingly moment, I still remember now the hairs on the back of my neck, hearing that metal tin grow by 50% and the noise it made, uh, and then that’s when the tin exploded and the contents, uh, covered my upper body, and, uh, yeah, it was, uh, plenty of time of self-reflection. And when people talk about trauma and events, I’ve first hand experience of going through that. That trauma curve of grief, sympathy, self loathing, guilt, because of what I’ve done to not only myself, but friends and family. When I evaluated that, the first book I read in health and safety, was the Five Steps to Risk Assessment, I read it, that’s not rocket science.
And so when we look at layers of protection, I was the last line of defence for that organisation and for me for self preservation. And it’s always that last line of defence which is the decision making process. So, I made it sort of my mission to prevent that from ever happening to anybody else. I don’t really share that story wholesale, but that’s what drives me and that’s what gets me it gets me agitated, gets me excited when we’re trying to learn, bring that sense of community in and try and put these events, the work situations through the eyes of the end user, because not always everything’s obvious.
Amy: Yeah, absolutely. So just thinking about the culture, then, the mental health culture within that organisation, what was It like at that time? How would you describe it?
Chris: It was non existent, and I’ve come from the military, so I’m bulletproof, you know, I’m, confidence is in abundance. The last thing I ever thought that I would be in an accident, or a life changing event. And the military at that time, in the early 90s, mental health and wellbeing wasn’t really spoken about,
particularly when you’d been in active theatre, wasn’t a thing. You know, you’re soldiers, you don’t talk about that sort of thing. People expressed through other means, usually alcohol within the military, as a pressure release. Coming into this organisation, when I reflect on it, there was no culture.
It was Darwin. It was survival of the fittest. And if you spoke up about something that wasn’t right, the ultimate stick or deterrent was your pay check. So, you made a real life decision. Do I get paid and do what I need to do to survive? Or do I do this? So you’re constantly doing that threat analysis in your own mind and behaviour is a function of life experiences and consequences.
But in my case, some lessons can only be learned once.
Amy: What was the sense of community in that workplace?
Chris: There was no community. It was a team, a team of 20 people, and it was a team of 20 individuals that there was no conversation. There was no discussion. It was at best, did you watch the football last night? You were either a red or a blue being on Merseyside. So there’s no place being a Leeds fan for myself, so I wasn’t in the conversation. And as well as being a new guy to that, that business, there was no rapport established or an opportunity to talk. So there was no, there was no outpouring of, what I call community within the organization at that time.
Amy: Thanks so much for sharing that story. You, you later went on, didn’t you, to join BIFFA you studied HSE, you became their safety rep. What were some of the big learnings when you joined that organisation?
Chris: So coming from an organization where I had that life changing event and to not having a sense of community, so, I’d forgotten my purpose in the sense of, I wanted to join the military because I wanted to be, I wanted to be part of a, part of a brotherhood, for instance, I wanted to be part of something, I wanted to, to be valued.
And when I joined BIFFA it’s a very, very macho, strong, robust environment, and some of the, the working environments, the waste, refuse collectors are exposed to is very demanding, physically and mentally. Once I’d reflected and acquired a set of tools to analyse and look at that, we quickly realized that the success was actually bringing people together to talk and share.
Chris: So, on a very, very simplistic term, hazards and near misses would only sporadically be reviewed or talked about because there wasn’t a feedback loop. There was no feedback, there was no conversation, so therefore, the mindset of the end user, the guys on the tools, what’s the point in raising a concern or talking about something when nothing happens?
So, we quickly established that feedback loop, and yes, we’re not going to boil the ocean over the night, we’re simply not, and there’ll be things there where there’s capital expenditure to be required. But, what we saw to bring a sense of community together, a sense of learning and purpose was giving feedback to the originator.
You said, we’ve listened, this is what we’re going to do about it. Now, please bear with us, but we’ll give you regular updates. That for me, as an end user receiving that, I felt valued and I feel committed and part of the the team.
Amy: And it ties in very much to the importance of always getting to the root causes of stressors and having that two way conversation to enable that to happen, right? That’s what creates that mentally healthy culture, I
suppose. So talking of, yeah, re evaluating, if you like, you’re a scuba diver,
right? It’s quite hard to say that. and in fact, that’s where the title for this event, arose from, didn’t it? What Way Is Up? Tell us a bit more about that.
Chris: I guess I use that analogy Which way is Up because, you know, from the skills that I learned and the resilience from the military, you know, to be very industrious, to building a toolkit within my mind to understand and recognize the warning signals of where that pressure is. I think pressure is good,
it’s healthy, it gives you that sense of purpose. But what is the trick is to manage that pressure and to recognize the signs early enough where it doesn’t become, a blowout valve situation. The scuba diving connection. I’m a very competent scuba diver, if I say so myself, in the sense of when I’ve been on holiday, fortunate, I can’t lie in the sun since the fire.
It’s a gift that keeps on giving for me, I can’t be in direct sunlight. I have to have total sunblock, and that’s just one of the things that I’ll pay for, for that life choice. So I went diving because it interests me, and it’s actually very calming. For those of you on the call that don’t scuba dive, one of the happiest places ever is when you’re 30 metres below the surface, looking at that different world.
It’s absolutely fantastic, if you get it right. In my career, I fast tracked my career. High pressure, high demand, self induced pressure to make a difference. I take it really personal when people have incidents in the workplace, or their mental health and wellbeing is not channelled effectively. And I guess, there’s a time in my career that I didn’t listen to my own advice, I didn’t see the warning signs.
And like all good scuba divers, when you become disorientated, just watch the bubbles. The bubbles will get you safe. And I guess at a point in my life, in my career, I couldn’t see the bubbles, but I was still motoring on. Didn’t listen to my own advice, didn’t listen to my voice, didn’t seek help or guidance, whether it’s through my team or people or even acquaintances, just to offload.
And I’m still driving home and to the point where I can feel the pressure. I can feel the pressure in my ears, so I’m coming up to my level of capability. So as a scuba diver, 40 meters. So it was really getting that sense of perspective and going, do you know what? Time out. Let’s have a chat. Let’s, let’s get involved.
Re evaluate my position. I could see where the bubbles were going now. Now I can have a controlled ascent and get a sense of reality.
Amy: Yeah, yeah. And so important that we’re, we’re able to do that, that we, that we’re creating that psychologically safe workplace where we can reevaluate what’s, what’s happening on a day-to-day basis.
Chris: It’s massive, it’s massive for any organisation, and I’ll probably just say, where we think as individuals that we’re equipped with the tools and the toolkit to do that, you know, it’s important that businesses, organisations, boards, management boards and leaders allow us that capacity and that area of safety to convey that.
So it’s still fine. We’ve done lots of good work as a species, as a community, as a society, but it’s a constant, got to kind of keep it under the constant fettle because it’s a perishable skill base, and if we don’t practice it every day, we’ll lose the practice of it.
So that, that power of encouragement and creating that safe environment is key.
Amy: So a perishable skill. What do leaders need to be doing then in order that it doesn’t perish?
Chris: One of the most addictive things. there can be is your own company and a sense of solitude and being on your own and what I mean about particularly leadership, being a perishable skill and being authentic. There are natural leaders out there, and we’ve seen celebrities and presidents and world leaders that just ooze authenticity, their leadership shadow is opaque.
It’s genuine, it’s comfortable. And there are other leaders that are more introverted that struggle to have a conversation or to interact, and that doesn’t make them a bad person, but they’ve got to constantly do that. So I really believe that proactive and authentic leaders are the people that are visible, that are actively communicating, actively listening, because if you don’t practice that, when you do have an opportunity, your best intention, you could be the best actor in the world, but if it’s awkward and clunky the recipients of that interaction or that engagement, they’ll think that you’re not being authentic, you’re not being genuine, and therefore that relationship becomes transactional.
And that’s, that’s where the dangers are, because then the recipient of that interaction will go away with a perception of, he’s not really listening to me, they’re not valuing my opinion, and he’s only doing it because there’s a transaction there and he needs to do that. So that’s what I refer to as a, perishable skill. We’ve got to constantly practice it.
Amy: Yeah. So it’s about speaking with integrity is what you’re saying. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, very much. If the success of any organisation, the nucleus is trust. If don’t have trust, we’re struggling then to gain that proaction and, if you consider like a fire triangle, you need a source of ignition, fuel and oxygen. If you take one away, you won’t have a fire.
That’s fact, that’s physics. If you consider trust, you need to have a sense of clear unity, that everybody’s equal, everybody’s safe, that, that sense of community. You look in a 360 approach, we look the same, we dress the same, with regards to PPE and brand, and everybody is part of that same unit.
And then we got to have, clear communications. And sometimes I think we miss a trick. We talk to or talk at, when actually, subtle difference, let’s converse with. We’ve lost the art of conversation and perhaps because of digital, you know, where we’re all, we’re all shrouded around our black boxes of iPhones and tablets and things, but, you know, make it personal.
And then finally, visibly felt leadership and engagement. I see it so many times when I see leaders with the best intentions, walk onto a project site or facility, and they don’t converse with the people that’s the most important. And that’s the people, on the tools, doing the trades, interacting with the, in an accounts, in a head office building, just that one conversation of “Hi, how are you? How’s things today?” I actually see and observe people lift and go, do you know, that’s the Chief Executive, he’s just said hello to me, you know, it’s about, it’s that integrity and it’s that authenticity.
Amy: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s that, which creates that sense of belonging, right. When leaders are out actually walking the talk, interacting, making sure that there is that sense of team.
Chris: It’s the most important thing for me, the ingredient is what do we all want? You know, people on this call, we’re all individuals, we’ve all got different life experiences, we have different perceptions of threats, of risk, of hazard. But we all want the same thing, we all want to, to be loved, we all want to be part of something,
and we forget that. We probably recognise that in our home environment. Why should that be any different in work?
Amy: I know you’re very keen on the power of storytelling, as are we. And, I just wondered if you could share a little bit about the impact of that role model that you had in, in BIFFA that you told me about in a previous conversation and the difference that he made to you.
Chris: Yeah, he was a really inspirational character. and he told me a few things that people who know me more now say less is more, give me a thousand words of positivity and I’ll hang you by it and create a paragraph of negativity. But it was a case of just making it personal.
And we all respond, one of the key learnings for me, and we’re trying to do this where we are now, in the sense of move away from a dictatorial, here’s the rule, here’s the consequence of a rule breaking, but to paint a picture, to paint a story. We all like movies, yeah? We like movies because we get 90 minutes, 2 hours of escapism.
But why are they so popular? You’ve got moving pictures and there’s a story. There’s a backstory there’s a start, there’s a middle and an end. And he told me that that’s the way we should be because we are natural storytellers. Before we had technology, we would while away the hours around the campfire, telling tall stories about our life experiences, and we’ve missed that.
I think we have missed that, and I think in some areas where artificial intelligence and technology has evolved, we’ve almost devolved as a species, because we’re very receptive on that storytelling, so yeah, it was a, it was a really life changing moment, because coming from a young guy at 16 in the military, there’s no storytelling there, you’re told.
And you’re told within an inch of your life that this is what you’re going to be doing. And there’s no right of reply or questioning mindset that you can employ. But recognise within people, like I said before, yes, we’re individually different, but collectively, we want the same thing, we want a sense of community, so why not tell that story?
and get people engaged in the conversation because I think people are far more receptive. And plus, if you read a book or watch a telly or watch a movie, you’re far more keen into taking the synopsis of that movie and you’d be able to recite it. Whereas if you’re just given a script, very difficult to articulate that to other people.
Amy: yeah, yeah. Storytelling. And we love to do that as well, to tell stories. I think helping an organisation to develop that mentally healthy culture is about engaging heart as well as head, right? And that’s why the power of the story is
phenomenal in that respect.
So that’s why we go about creating that fictional employee to engage people at a different level, a different sensory level. How important do you think it is to find those different ways of getting people to think differently around the mental health culture?
Chris: I think we’ve got to break down the barriers. We’ve all got a story. Every single one of us, we all have a story. We all have different views of the world and, why should that be any different in the workplace? We can’t just come in and take away our personality, put it in a locker, be autonomous. We’re not robots. We don’t live and work in a vacuum. So it’s important, particularly the work that we did at our conference there, that storytelling. There’ll be little nuggets within that story that will have affected directly and indirectly the audience. And if they can go away with that thought process, I can see that.
I can see how they dealt with that and processed that. So it’s a win win for me, because after that conference and after those interactions, people are conversing about it. It was the talk of the town. It was there. And because of that power of that story, it’s etched into the back of their eyes, into the back of their mind, so it’s there, and so people can relate to it.
And that’s going back to that leadership, authenticity. You know, people have got to be thinking that’s genuine, you know, and that’s real world, rather than some script, or fictitious, or where it’s dictated to somebody.
Amy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Fantastic, Chris. Well, I’m sure that people have been putting things into the chat and responding to the question that you posed earlier on. There it is for you again, folks. How do you avoid lip service to make conversations at work about mental health and wellbeing authentic? Angus, you’ve been looking through the chat there,
what are folks saying?
Angus: We’ve got a nice comment there from Janet Archibald and she’s saying that she could use the diving decompression stages as an analogy about stress. How do you think about that, Chris?
Chris: Absolutely, because it’s about pressure, and it’s about being able to control that. As a scuba diver, you’re taught week one, day one scuba school, the, the hazards and dangers of pressure, but more importantly, you’re not reckoning the signs on how to deal with that and how to cope with that in a proficient manner.
The analogy I use with scuba diving, yes, there’s an air concentration, but there’s also a pressure point of view. You come up too quickly, then you’re going to be in a world of pain with the bends.
Amy: And Chas is here. Hi Chas. Chas Howes. He’s commented there Chris, that leaders need to give permission to talk, need to give everyone the language to use, and that they must realise everyone’s perspective is not the same. He thinks that to achieve that, some training needed to be done in for example, emotional intelligence.
What’s your thinking around that?
Chris: Absolutely. It’s a great comment. Our culture, our sense of a community within the workplace starts, rises and falls with our leaders. You know, I talk about leadership being authentic, visibly felt and bags of integrity. The permission thing. Absolutely. We’ve got to create that safe environment for our people.
They’re talking. It’s good to talk and actually you want to share some of your burdens, absolutely. It’s a God given right. It’s not a permission in regime. It’s a God given right that we should encourage that, but it’s a really good point that all of this starts with our senior leadership. And they should go on a journey, and certainly, working with my team and organization with Headtorch, we’re working on tools, given the leadership team a, a toolkit that allows them to be more, more in tune of their surroundings, shall we say.
Amy: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Thank you.
Angus: I’ve got a kind of follow on question to that Chris. So there’s lots of organisations talk about doing this and they’re not really walking it. So how would you encourage people to get off the fence and make the decision to take strategic and serious action?
Chris: I guess later on we’ll share some of my top tips, but I think one of the most powerful things is the power of the people. Keep talking. Keep raising it on the agenda. Make it irresistible for leaders not to get involved with it. Make it almost socially unacceptable that it’s not being spoken about at the highest levels.
So, keep pushing, keep talking about it, is what I would say there. And sometimes, don’t give up just because the leader is not expressing that. This is not something that we want to force leaderships on. Our journey is to train them and educate them and show this is the right thing to do.
Because if you do this, if you show compassion, and if you show a genuine interest in the people within the organization, you’ll get far more out of them.
Amy: Yeah, 100%. And Kathleen Harkins. Hi, Kathleen. She’s agreeing with you, we’ve lost the art of conversation, so just start talking to people again. Show an interest in people as individuals. Make people feel valued. When we get to know each other better, we’re more open. We’re more likely to open up when we’re going through tough times.
Chris: Absolutely,
I made a conscious decision today myself, every day this week, and I shouldn’t need a week to do this, I phoned somebody every day, that I don’t normally talk to. And given my position, when I picked up the phone on Monday morning, Hi Jim, how are you?
Well, what’s up Chris? What’s up? What’s happening? What do you mean? Well, you’re the head of safety. Something’s gone wrong. No. just phoned up to chew the fat with you. How are you doing? I’ve not spoken to you. And, and this weekend I’m still lucky enough to have a, a grandparent and, got a handwritten letter in the post.
How amazing was that? Imagine, when was the last time we got a handwritten letter in the post? Just means that you just put a thought into something, and again, comes back to that caring, caring community element, and I think we’ve just got to get back to that. Yes, digital’s fine, it’s great, but put a bit of thought into it.
Amy: Yeah. How did it make you feel receiving that handwritten letter then?
Chris: Well first of all, I’ve not spoken to her for ages, and I know she’s had a tough time, and I thought to myself, do you know that, I was smiling, I was grinning like a Cheshire cat, and there was nothing particularly, in there, it was just a quick note to say hi, how you doing, not spoke to you for a while, you know me and technology, I hate me mobile phone, I can’t see it, so, er, Give us a call and say hi.
So it was a nice little nudge. It was a polite nudge to say I’ve not spoken to you for a while, but the fact that she put pen to paper, ink to paper, and did it the old fashioned way, I was smiling ear to ear. I thought, you know what, that’s really nice. It made my day.
Amy: Yeah. Fantastic. We particularly like, Claudia Hammond’s book, I don’t know if you’ve come across it, Keys to Kindness, and she was part of one of the largest global, bits of research into kindness. And there’s something like 60, 000 people participated in it. And one of the top things that, that came out was that actually the recipient when they’re given something, feel good as a result.
But actually the person who gives, the longevity of that sense of wellbeing is even longer. So it works both ways. Really lovely.
Angus: It’s a nice comment there from Sarah Cave. Hello, Sarah. Good to see you here. Make time to listen and be totally present. Don’t try to fix things What do you reckon to that, Chris?
Chris: I say to people, I suppose I was trained by, Her Majesty’s finest about reading body language, there’s a bit of NLP with this, but if you consider yourselves on that comment, when you’re conversing with somebody, making contact with the eyes, you’re there, you make them feel they’re the most important person and that shows class, shows respect. But when you finish that conversation, you’ve got this instant rapport, you know what, they get what I’m saying and it’s that connection.
Yeah, it’s very powerful. Active listening is a really good skill to have in your locker, because we’re all busy, we’re all challenged, me no more than most, hundreds of emails a day, but what I try and do is when I’m present with somebody, is they’re the most important person in the room or on the team or on the Zooms, because you’ve got to listen. Listening, it can be in some areas and it’s another top tip we’ll talk about later, listening can be more powerful, more potent than actually can talking. Sometimes we don’t know when to shut up, me included.
Amy: Yeah, thanks Chris. Janet Archibald she’s asking, did your accident make it possible to show how you are not perfect and permit others to show that too?
Chris: Yeah, if you look at our industry, health and safety, you know, people are taking an interest for whatever motivation. I am the shining example. I’m the Senior Vice President of HSE. Nobody would really think that I would do something so silly as to do what I did. I share that story with you because I’m not perfect.
And perfection doesn’t exist. We’re human. We make mistakes. We’re influenced by things all around us, whether we’ve got mortgages, wives, girlfriends, boyfriends. Credit cards, loans, the car’s just failed an MOT. We should all be cognisant if we bring it back to mental health and wellbeing, that we don’t live and work in a vacuum.
So if I can make that decision and I can share that with other people and me in my position, this is what motivated me to do what I did. At least then I can share that with leadership teams when they’re struggling to understand why people make a decision they do. There’s many, many factors as to why people make that decision.
Amy: Yeah, I think. Because, you know, what I’m hearing, I think you’ve said it a couple of times is, you know, why did I make that stupid decision.
But actually, we all work within a system, right? So it wasn’t just you that made that decision, there was lots and lots of things happening and not happening, it sounds like, that influenced that decision.
Chris: Oh, absolutely. I observed other people. I observed other people doing the same practice, and they did it without event. They did it without incident. So automatically, your psyche and your subconscious is, the payoff, it works. You got rid of confidential waste. The business is saving money rather than paying that.
So they’ve done it many, many times. And after about three weeks, it was my turn to collect the waste. I didn’t know that thinners burns with an invisible flame. It had been wet, the drum was wet. So there was a slight flame. I poured it decanted it. I’ve made the ultimate mistake and on reflection, at the time it was the right decision to do because the motivation was I needed to get rid of the peer pressure, the social pressure to get it done.
Would I do it again now? No. Would I intervene with people doing it? Yes, and I have done.
Angus: We often describe mental health in the workplace as a journey. And it’s a journey that takes time, it takes investments, it takes energy, it takes commitment, and we often compare that to the physical health and safety journey. If you think about physical health and safety 10 years ago, 20, 30, 40 years ago, it’s transformed. And it’s taken a lot of all those things I described. Where would you say we are on the workplace mental journey at the moment?
Chris: Great question. I think, not to drop a shoulder on this, I think there’s pockets of excellence around the industry, around UK PLC. I think the first thing, the starting point, is to respect that everybody has a level of physical health. And that can change daily, it can change hourly. Think about when we get up out of bed in the morning, if the back’s gone or your leg’s gone, and yet the next day you get up and you’re fine, you jump out of bed.Our mental health is the same. And the message really that I would say to our team is we need to respect that mental health is equal to physical health. And that capability could change by the day, could change by the hour. And one of the things I’ll say to the team, there’s no emotion in text.
And what I say by that, when we send an email, and we might have sent the email with the best intention. You don’t know what the recipient’s going through. I’m all for please and thank you on an email, best regards, hope you are well. And yet some people don’t do that and just write to the point, and so when you receive that information you can’t legislate for what that person’s receiving. So we should be mindful of that and that’s the starting point for me and then that needs to be cultivated. Yes we’ve done a lot of good work.
We have, and the fact that we’re having these sessions and talking about it is great. We perhaps wouldn’t have done that 10 years ago, five years ago, so there’s a lot of cultivation there and it’s constant gardening to keep it up there, but we can do it because evidence is here now, Angus, that we’re talking about it. We’re having seminars and where businesses are trying to get involved. One thing I’ve experienced with my career is the reluctance to progress it and cultivate it because there’s a fear factor. We need to demystify that, you know, like I said before, just by picking up the phone to somebody that you don’t normally speak with verbally, and ask how they are.
Well it pays dividends
Angus: How would you overcome the fear factor?
Chris: By reassuring leaders that it’s okay to not be okay and bring their life experiences into it, because they’re not impervious just because they’re a chief executive an F. D. a managing director, director, whatever their job title is, they’re no different to you or I. They’re no different to the janitor picking up litter off the street.
We all have our story. We all have our issues. And it’s important that we recognize them and celebrate and embrace them and say, do you know what? It’s okay not to be okay. Here’s what we can do to help. Within Altrad, we’re just finishing off our five year strategy within HSEW, Health, Safety, Environment and Welfare, and the strapline for the culture is Creating that Culture of Care.
Amy: I think the other big thing for us is, a lot of people don’t reach out to someone if they’re struggling for fear of what they might receive, and for fear of not being able to fix it. So one of our big drivers is letting people know that actually unless you’re a medic, you’re not there to solve it.
So, actually this is just about being kind, it’s about being human, and it’s about connection and engagement with others, but often, as a manager leader, you’re used to fixing things. And so you actually have to unlearn that need to fix. And I think people struggle with just with that notion in and of itself.
Chris: Yeah, high pressure, high profile jobs and positions, yeah, they’re tasked and paid to fix things, to remedy, to offer solutions. And so their own anxiety, and we should think about that now in the sense of just because you are a leader doesn’t mean to say that you’re equipped with a toolkit to be able to resolve.
But then that’s why there’s organizations out there to help and guide and support. Our job is to signpost. You said it quite well, we’re not medics, we’re not clinicians, we’re not psychologists. But you know what, we can show kindness, we can be authentic, and how often have we had a problem that we’ve built it up in our minds, we’re almost engineering that environment of negativity because we’ve built ourselves up, and yet when you share that problem with your friend, a colleague or acquaintance or even somebody you’ve never spoken before with an EAP. Problem shared, problem solved in a lot of cases because we can’t help but to dwell on the negativity, we thrive off it.
Amy: Yeah. Expressing anxiety or whatever’s we’re finding difficult to handle tends to always be a helpful thing for us. Thank you so much everyone for putting your thoughts and opinions into the chat. Let’s have a look now Chris, at your top tips for us.
If you could just talk these through for us. So be authentic is your first top tip here.
Chris: Yeah, that’s the headline. We’re all key influencers, we don’t need to have a status with an organisation, we really don’t. we can break down those social barriers and misgivings. What I mean by being authentic is showing kindness, showing genuine interest in people. think we as, people, as colleagues, as friends, as family, if you are authentic and genuine, you get a better response out of people.
Amy: Absolutely. Develop people,
Chris: Yeah, constantly saying, people who work in the team, we need to develop people, we need to give them the skills, and it starts with awareness sessions of what some of the challenges we face within the organisation or the wider world. So yeah, constantly develop and invest in people to give them the insight of what’s going on, rather than people painting by numbers and which removing the odd numbers that, that leads to improvisation.
And I speak from bitter experience when I’m improvising, doing something, I add the event.
Amy: Keep the conversation going.
Chris: Sounds obvious, doesn’t it? Sometimes it can be challenging, but let’s keep talking about it. Let’s keep going, keep the conversation going. We’ve lost the art of conversation.
Amy: Yeah, yeah. And be an active listener. You’ve touched on that already, I think.
Chris: Absolutely. Listening is sometimes, in a lot of cases, far more important than talking.
Amy: Yeah, definitely. Keep health and wellbeing on the agenda. Love that.
Chris: Yeah, I think that’s the case of a look at my team within the organisation, that we’ve got dedicated occupational health and wellbeing team, and every time I’m conversing with the board and the executives, Occupational Health and Wellbeing,
it’s on the agenda. We’re talking about it. There’s some really committed team members in ALTRAD that really want to drive this, and so my job, to help them, let’s keep it on the agenda. I’m trying to make it almost sociably unacceptable not to keep it on the agenda and talk about it.
Amy: Nice, nice. Yeah, I mean, we always talk about the fact that there’s a lot of organisations that see this mental health and wellbeing as something over here that, is a nice to have, whereas actually, of course, it’s absolutely integral to who we are and how we show up. So why wouldn’t it naturally come into the agenda on an everyday basis, if you like and claim back your lunch break. Yeah.
Chris: This was a personal, and I’m guilty of this, so hands up. How many people do we see and notice having their lunch break sat at their desk, either doing emails or doing something passive, but it’s work related. We need to claim that back, for our own sanity, just stretch your legs, go home, walk your dog, change your scenery, claim it back, it’s important.
And then if we do that ourselves, that will rub off onto other people. Go have a break here, go and have a chat about the football or cooking recipe or bees. Go and do that, get that changed, and I’m guilty of that sometimes, I don’t always do that, but when I do it, I do actually encourage other people to do that. Claim your lunch break back, it’s important.
Amy: Yeah, great. Chris. So, some quickfire questions for you then. Are you ready? Okay. So, Chris, what does vulnerability mean to you?
Chris: Terrifying experience, personally, but now, Vulnerability to me is about having the strength, having the courage to share intimate details about yourself without fear.
Amy: Yeah.
And when organizations do that, it’s hugely powerful when people feel able to do that. Thanks, Chris.
What little thing do you celebrate every day?
Chris: Great question. I guess what do I celebrate each day, going home to what’s important. my dogs, my chickens, my bees, that’s what’s
important.
Amy: What message would you give your younger self?
Chris: I can’t really broadcast that on a public channel, but I think, take time, reflect more. We’re too young. There’s a lot of pressure when you’re young to make a decision. Procrastination, root of all evil and all that, but no, if I could have gone back in time and give myself a pep talk, it was take pause, take a reset more often.
Amy: Nice, to understand perspectives, right? And what message would your younger self give you?
Chris: Practise what you preach.
Amy: Lovely. What do you think is going to revolutionise workplace mental health?
Chris: I think, in simple terms, everybody talking about it. It’s on the agenda. People respecting it, that it’s equal to, physical health. And I think once we have the confidence to keep it on the agenda, then it’s here to stay. Similar to what we did in 1974 with the Robens Report, the Health and Safety Work Act.
People talked about it, people were happy with it, we made change, it became legislation. This is what we need to do for mental health and wellbeing. We shouldn’t need legislation to help that, but I think that’s what will revolutionise it. We’re seeing it now with the regulator, talking to organisations and politely pressurising them to make sure it’s on the agenda.
Chris, fantastic. Thankyou you so much.
I am going to hand over now to Angus. Thank you,
Angus: Thank you, Chris. That was, that was fantastic. I really love the language that you’re using, you know, the sense of community, a sense of belonging. We all want to be loved, to be part of something. Where people thrive, the world is our oyster. The nucleus of success of every organisation is trust, that visibly felt leadership. super powerful messages that, one of the great things about doing the Wellbeing Hour is we get to broadcast these messages. And these are super powerful, and they sum it up in such a great way. The nucleus success of every organisation is trust. And your authenticity shines through. Yeah, so thank you from all of us at Headtorch, everybody who’s here and everybody who’s going to listen to this, we’d like to thank you very much for being on the Wellbeing Hour.
It’s been a great pleasure. Thank you.
Thank you. And give our best regards to Dave. I hope it wasn’t too traumatic.
Chris: He’s gone.
Angus: He’s gone. Grand!. OK, so dates for your diary coming up. Here we go. The next Wellbeing Hour is, Ollie Folayan , MBE. Ollie is Head of Process at Optimus Plus, and he’s also a visiting professor at the University of Dundee. He was a co founder of AFBE UK, which is an organisation which helps ethnic and black people to enter engineering. That’s on the 26th of June at 12 noon, and I’m going to struggle with this, the title of it is Ubuntu Speak Up and Speak Out, Challenge Inequality. So join us for that. We first saw Ollie speak at a Scottish engineering dinner and he was really, really inspiring at that.
So join us for that. Other dates for your diary we have an open webinar, this is Confidence in Supportive Conversations. It’s with Amy and myself, it’s via Teams on 20th of June at 12 noon. then 26th we have Ollie there for the Wellbeing Hour. And then on 23rd July we have, Adrienne Kelbie CBE. She’s a leadership coach and non exec director, former head of the Office for Nuclear Regulation and the first woman patron of Women in Nuclear UK.
That’s at a different time, it’s at 2. 30 in the afternoon on the 23rd of July. Please stay in touch with us, follow us on LinkedIn, you will see these free events popping up there. And, you can register for them there as well. There’s a QR code there if you want to scan it, that’s for a free consultation, and it also gets you into the webinar for Confidence in Supportive Conversations. We’d love to hear more from you, so please get in touch with us. We do have, solutions for senior leaders, people managers, direct and indirect staff. So we’d love to hear what are you doing in mental health and can we help you. So I think that’s it from the Wellbeing Hour from today. It’s a great honour to run these. Thank you for all giving your time and we look forward to seeing you at the next Wellbeing Hour. Thank you very much, everybody.
Amy: Thanks for listening to the Wellbeing Hour. We hope you enjoyed the conversation. These events take place regularly, so do join us for more. And, if your organisation would like to develop a mentally healthy culture, we’d be happy to work with your senior team, people managers and frontline staff. Please get in touch at headtorch. org. We look forward to hearing from you.
Chris Abbey is the Senior Vice President HSE at Altrad UK, Ireland & Nordics.
After leaving the armed forces, Chris got involved in Health & Safety literally, by accident.
A life changing event, involving fire and an explosion changed his perspective about risk, behaviour and people forever. Now working at senior levels and internationally, his experience amplifies his clear mandate – to prevent loss, damage, and physical or mental injury at work.
Promoting this accountable culture, he believes, only happens when we can ask questions in a psychologically safe environment, to understand perspectives and learn.
Both mentally and physically – we’ll hear how Chris has shaped his purpose and drive towards a healthy workplace.
Guests on this episode

Chris Abbey
Senior Vice President HSE at Altrad
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