Now is the time to “Build Back Better”

How we can respond to the change and create the new normal we all truly want?

Now is the time for us all to take stock and decide how we want the world to be. Are we really prepared to go back to the old ways? And is it even possible? The world is ready for change, and that means social justice and sustainability must be at the top of our agenda. 

The danger we face is turning inward, and allowing a culture of fear and threat to pervade. We have discovered that life can go on, without many of the things we considered ‘essential’, and we’ve discovered that there are some things we truly need, and they don’t cost anything – social contact, meaningful work, time with families. 

Since the beginning of the lockdown we have wanted to provide support for key workers – but it has become clear that it isn’t enough. If we are going to be a part of a better normal, we need to Build Back Better, and that means we need to build our entire economy on Wellbeing. 

David Cameron started this conversation, but it was blown out of the water by Brexit. It was a shame that instead of building wellbeing we ended creating division and fear, making austerity an even bigger threat with more uncertainty thrown in.

We know that the mental health of the nation is a major concern, and our research published in February 2020 shows that 46% of public sector workers are struggling with their mental health; generally operating at a low or reduced ‘reactive level of wellbeing’. 

Imagine what will happen to these people if we don’t consider social isolation and the impact of the trauma, stress and ‘pain’ that COVID-19 can literally and physically inflict upon the brain….

And that figure doesn’t include all the people that have now been hit for the first time with mental wellbeing issues as a result of these extraordinary times. Fear and personal safety are extra big factors now.

We need to commit to a Wellbeing Economy

We know that this impacts on performance. What we need now is some certainty. We need to commit to a wellbeing economy, where we measure what really matters, as opposed to abstract things like Gross Domestic Product. Joseph Stiglitz, the ex-chief economist of the World Bank says GDP doesn’t measure the things that matter! *

“So we’ve decided to change everything. To give more. Forever. So public and private organisations can provide meaningful mental wellbeing support to their people for the long term. We are going to Build Back Better – starting with ourselves.

Cari Wellbeing Consultations and Personalised Support Plans are now free of charge forever.“

From our perspective, a Wellbeing Economy works hand in hand with the Gift Economy – paying it forward, giving away ‘free of charge’ the work we have been doing to create Cari over the last 30 years.  By building our own, personal resilience as business leaders we can build the resilience of our teams, and this is an essential first step; because we cannot be creative in designing the new ways forward from a place of fear and threat. 

We all know this intrinsically – we know that trying to solve problems when we are stressed, make decisions under duress, and expectations to be creative under pressure rarely yield the best results – if they yield any results at all.

The challenges of having wellbeing at the heart of your organisation

Putting wellbeing at the heart of your business is vital, but it is very difficult to do this practically when you are struggling with all the other knotty issues of cashflow, business diversification, customer retention and more. 

The same is true for the public sector; how can you put wellbeing at the heart of everything you do, when you are under immense pressure financially, the costs being as yet unknown, and we have been told many times that there is no bottomless pit of resources.

Our commitment to a Wellbeing Economy

For this reason we want to offer some certainty – especially around wellbeing support – and that is why Cari is free of charge for you and your people forever.

Cari is an AI-enabled Wellbeing Super Assistant providing confidential online wellbeing consultations and personalised support plans (more detail below).

Based on an optimal mix of psychology, neuroscience and AI, Cari is one of a kind and the culmination of 25 years of rigorous scientific research. Offering many features and benefits, Cari is super effective and highly efficient in the care she gives. She connects you to the right person, at the right time.

So with Cari on your team, there is no more worrying about budgets or changes of direction or cost cutting. Cari is there for you, come what may.

She can help everyone straight away. She never gets tired. And she can keep helping them as often as needed in real-time.

Our mission at Wellbeing with Cari is to champion global wellbeing. And what better way for us to achieve this than through our unique AI enabled personalised surveys that use intelligent, unbiased algorithms to ethically analyse mental health and provide a feel-good boost at the point of need.

We aim to bring joy for life and to bring happiness into the workplace, building positive relationships because we know that this is part and parcel of enhanced performance; and enhanced performance makes us feel good about ourselves. It is a virtuous cycle. 

We have the means to help you to create the changes you really want to see, the business difference you truly want, it would be churlish in the extreme NOT to give that away. It would be unethical to hold onto something that can, and has, changed people’s lives for the better, and guard it jealously. This is not Building Back Better. 

To Build Back Better is to collaborate more, to listen more, to share more, to benefit everyone more.This is enlightened self-interest for us because  we know that if we are fair to you, you will be fair to us. 

But someone has to get the ball rolling, and it makes sense that we do this, using our years of experience and development. It’s quite simply the right thing to do, and the reason I developed Cari in the first place!

How Cari helps you have wellbeing at the centre of your organisation

By Cari joining your team as a scientifically proven, AI-enabled Wellbeing Super Assistant, she can help you to really boost your wellbeing and resilient culture programmes forward.

• After Cari has asked questions in a confidential, online consultation, she provides you with a personal support plan. 

• Cari can read the most subtle of nuances in your responses and see behind a brace face (in a way that even a human can’t). So her report gives you an understanding of your real-time emotional and psychological state, (including recommendations about when you should seek additional 1-2-1 coaching support). 

• Plus she advises on specific  BEND recommendations that are right for you – these are 2 minute movements that are scientifically proven to produce the necessary chemistry in the brain to make you feel immediately better. 

Ultimately Cari is helping everyone increase their happiness and performance.

We can help you to promptly set up Cari. Then all you have to do to get started is send out a link to all your people. 

To give even more help to individual team members and organisation leaders, we are giving an extra package of products and services free of charge for up to 4 months. 

For example, Cari’s support plans will include:

• A 21 Day Happiness Plan as a special added extra. There are specific tailored versions for key workers, those in isolation and people returning to work.

• A direct connection to inspiring and practical workshops or one to one coaching support provided by neuroscience qualified practitioners

• Signposts to your existing wellbeing initiatives and any other additional support necessary.

• And we’ll provide you with a detailed review too. So you can really analyse the benefits your people and organisation gained from collaborating with Cari. 

Councils and schools are already taking advantage of this and we’d love to help your business/organisation too. Find out more at …….

I feel I am blessed to have a happy life full of wonderful friends, colleagues and family. I want to do everything I can to help you feel positively energised and happy too. 

Interesting references for more reading about the Wellbeing Economy and the importance of wellbeing globally:

• Wellbeing Economy Alliance https://wellbeingeconomy.org
• GDP is not a good measure of wellbeing – it’s too materialistic – by Joseph Stiglitz – https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/dec/03/gdp-wellbeing-health-education-environment-joseph-stiglitz. Nobel laureate in economics, University Professor at Columbia University, and chief economist of the Roosevelt Institute. He is a former senior vice president and chief economist of the World Bank. He is an author – including Measuring What Counts; The Global Movement for Well-Being (2019)
• OECD – The Economy of Well-being: Creating Opportunities for People’s Well-being and Economic Growth
• Cambridge Journal of Economics – Towards an economics of well-being https://academic.oup.com/cje/article/41/4/1123/2327835

By Maria Paviour – Founder of Cari – Connect with me on LinkedIn.

Join Wellbeing with Cari on Social Media:

LinkedIn – Twitter – Facebook – Instagram – TikTok

In these troubling times, with so many employees working from home, it is more important than ever for an employer to ensure that the proper, and appropriate, support is available to their workers at the right time, in the right way and accessibly.

For many HR Directors this may mean leaning heavily on their EAP (Employee Assistance Service) to provide that support. But is this the right thing to do, is it what the EAP was designed to do? And does this ensure that workers are able to perform to their best as well as provide a return on investment?

There are two important considerations here:

1. What is the EAP designed to do?
2. Do EAPs fulfil evidence-based, best practice models for delivering mental health and wellbeing support?

The role of an EAP

An EAP is fundamentally designed to provide support when all else has failed. There are two reasons why this is true.

On the one hand, in terms of mental health, they provide a counselling service. This assumes that the individual is already in trouble, suffering with mental health issues. This does not mean that one cannot use an EAP at any time, for any reason, but if you look at the engagement levels, which are frequently around 5% , and survey people as to why they are using it, when it comes to mental wellbeing it is usually a ‘last port in a storm’.

This means an EAP does have great value to those employees who are in a very bad way, who may feel as though they are on their knees and cannot see a way forward by speaking with their colleagues or line manager at work. From that point of the ‘last port in a storm’ is a very important port!

However, an EAP alone has some issues in terms of the neuroscience.

First of all, the impact of stress or anxiety and depression on an individual tends to reduce their capability, and prevent them from being able to act proactively. It also prevents people from being able to recognise their own needs.

We probably have all experienced that at some point.

The time you would really benefit from asking someone, ‘Would you mind helping me, I’m not coping well’ is often the time we cannot see how we can do anything to improve our situation.

This is not wilful or stubborn (although it can seem that way when we have a difficult member of staff who seems unprepared to accept that they need help). This is a function of the brain under stress.

What does this mean for an EAP service?

It means that there are 3 issues:

1. A service that requires you to self-identify at a point when you have probably already lost much of your capability, will struggle to connect to the people who need it.
2. Secondly, due to the unfortunate stigma around seeking counselling, unless you are cool with the idea, you may steer clear earlier in your struggles; in other words, when you could maybe receive a little support and be back on track quickly, counselling is not often the ‘go to’ intervention – even if it is free!
3. Thirdly, EAPs do not provide a preventative solution, they are reactive, awaiting a call, not making a call. Again, a very useful service to have in the wings, but the sub clinical mental health issues that are causing presenteeism and poor performance will not be identified until it is too late.

Best practice for managing positive mental health – and how to attain a 10 x ROI

In 2020 Deloittes[1] evidence-based model for delivering positive mental health described four key characteristics of successful wellbeing interventions (that provide a 10 times return on investment when used together). These are:

1. Preventative – the service must identify and prevent mental health issues from arising – nipping them in the bud with the appropriate level and type of support
2. Organisation wide – a the service must reach everyone, EAPs do achieve this criteria, but only on a reactive level – we have to self-refer and make the contact ourselves. To make the service truly effective a proactive process is best, because, we are less likely to recognise the need for support in ourselves
3. Tailored support – one size does not fit all in mental health, and the best support packages are the ones that ensure the right support is delivered to the right person in the right way at the right time. EAPs are certainly omnipresent, and that is one of their big advantages, having the support 24/7. They also provide one to one service, which is personal, and that is also a big plus for the EAP. The question here is whether, with 43%[2] of workers at a low level of wellbeing, does a 5% average engagement rate with an EAP help? For many struggling to continue to perform it is not the answer (which is where this links back to the need for preventative solutions)
4. Technology – the service needs to utilise technology to enable accessibility. Can technology really solve the problems of employee wellbeing? That is a question that I will answer in another blog shortly…

EAPs are not preventative

In conclusion, the brain science suggests that, while an EAP has great value as part of an employee benefit package, and in providing support for those when they are at a loss to know what to do and where to go – the importance of which cannot be underestimated – they are simply not designed to provide a preventative solution.

In the current mental health climate, with £42billon being lost to UK industry each year due to poor mental health at work,[3] we need to be thinking about driving much more benefit out of an existing EAP service, so that it can proactively support employees, not only reactively.

Proactive mental health intervention – Cari

Over 30 years ago I started to tackle this problem, and this is the reason that Cari was born. She is an AI-enabled mental health and wellbeing super assistant who can help everyone in your organisation right away. She addresses all four of Deloitte’s success factors for wellbeing interventions (published January 2020).

Cari’s job is to help all your people proactively with confidential online wellbeing consultations and real-time personalised support plans, at any time, and immediately boost their wellbeing and improve their performance. She will connect them to right person at the right time if they are displaying a need for more support.

(Cari is now free for everyone forever, because we need to help more with the impact of COVID-19. Plus we have a package of additional benefits free for organisations and individuals for 3 months.)

Does Ai work for mental health?  That will also be covered in the blog that is coming soon – find out how controversial I may be on this subject (or not!)?

References and Additional Help

Contact Cathy Strudwick at WPA for more information on their EAP and other private medical services on 07769 969797 – she is the nicest insurance person ever!

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By Maria Paviour – Founder of Cari – Connect with me on LinkedIn.

www.wellbeingwithcari.co.uk

Join Wellbeing with Cari on Social Media:

LinkedIn – Twitter – Facebook – Instagram – TikTok

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[1] https://www2.deloitte.com/uk/en/pages/consulting/articles/mental-health-and-employers-refreshing-the-case-for-investment.html

[2] https://www.cariwellbeing.co.uk/public-sector-wellbeing.html

[3]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/thriving-at-work-a-review-of-mental-health-and-employers