Navigating Psychological Health & Safety in Content Moderation

Unknown speaker

So welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining this webinar today. My name is Dr. Pamela Lennon, psychological well-being consultant. And I’m delighted to have today with us Dr. Jackie Wilhurst, who is a psychological health and safety consultant among many areas of expertise with us today, and to talk about a very important topic of psychological health and safety in the world of trust and safety.

Unknown speaker

We have seen both progress and challenges in workplace well-being generally around the world. And we will discuss some of those today. So that those watching, hopefully, can understand better how best to support content moderators in their work.

Unknown speaker

So Jackie, thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure. Now, Jackie, I always love having conversations with you. You always bring, you know, a refreshing perspective as well. So I’m excited about our conversations today and where we’ll end up talking about us as well.

Unknown speaker

So first, yeah. So first of all, how does you become interested in psychological health and safety? Big question. So it back in, I think it was around 2012 I had finished being an academic. I’d done a PhD that was around the psychology of risk, actually, and resilience.

Unknown speaker

But that had been in a different context. I was working around natural hazards, but it was still around how people, individuals and groups and communities understand risk, but also behave and manage risk.

Unknown speaker

But I’d originally had a learning and development background in the workplace. So I left my period of time as an academic at that stage and was back to being a consultant. And I was asked whether I would be happy to take on a role as a freelance training consultant, really, but working with people who go to what we call hostile environments.

Unknown speaker

And that was a combination of journalists, but also humanitarian aid workers. And the reason I was asked to do that, funnily enough, it wasn’t. about my psychology background, it was because I’m ex-military.

Unknown speaker

And it was at a time when there were not very many women involved in the training and of course, loads of women amongst the customers. So there was a real imbalance of all these ex-military men and sometimes military, but also emergency services, particularly fire service, sometimes police, but you know, very male dominated field.

Unknown speaker

And so I was asked whether I would come in and teach more around the security awareness, things like weapons awareness and vehicle checkpoints. And the kinds of things that if you’re going into conflict zones, you’re going to encounter as very real physical risks.

Unknown speaker

Part of that, however, was a session on post-traumatic stress disorder awareness. And it was fairly, it was pretty short. It was a quick sort of like, these are the signs to look out for. If you do get PTSD, these are the symptoms and this is where to get help.

Unknown speaker

Whereas the whole rest of the time that we were spending up to a week on a residential training course was all about risk. It was about identifying hazards. identifying risks, assessing those risks and finding appropriate control measures and really where it came out was me scratching my head because of my psychology background and saying, why is it we’re spending all this time understanding and managing risk upfront and trying to stop these bad things happening and stop people getting injured physically.

Unknown speaker

Why are we not even trying to do that psychologically. And so that was the beginning of my own journey of saying, because I have, because I wasn’t coming into the clinical psychologist who’s used to treating.

Unknown speaker

I was coming in with my risk lens, it meant I started asking the questions that’s the way I am, I said I don’t want to teach this this way. I want to have a go and straight away of course people were saying but how can we do it properly how can we do it as a health and safety and I was like, I don’t know but I intend to find out and that was 12 years ago.

Unknown speaker

So that was the, that’s the short, that’s the shortest I can manage for how I got into it but that set me off on a journey whereby I started to do that on those training courses and the more I did it, the more people were recognizing the value of looking at it that way and the more I was finding that I was being approached by others.

Unknown speaker

Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a similar way that I became interested in psychological health and safety was observing. I worked in many different roles while I was studying to be a psychologist.

Unknown speaker

One of them specifically was quite, you know, occupational health and safety, was high on their priority and you score around every day with checklists to see if there’s wires or trip hazards. And there was one little paragraph on stress in the whole enormous, you know, procedure document and it was just high level stresses there sorted out, you know, reduce your stress and off you go.

Unknown speaker

But you could see that it was such an enormous impact and risk to people’s physical health, whether that was accidents in the workplace, where it was stress related illnesses and high absenteeism. So, that’s where I started focusing my research and my doctorate into the whole area of like, okay, what can we actually done and how can we, you know, prioritize psychological health and safety.

Unknown speaker

workplace and that’s why I was delighted when the ISO 45,000 entry then came out and which expanded just this little paragraph in stress and made it more I suppose feasible for people to be able to use a framework to protect you know mental health in the workplace.

Unknown speaker

So yeah this thing is and again coming from different disciplines beyond psychology but using a psychological perspective you know to yeah and actually my research whilst it was risk psychology was the kind of the field of application for want of a better way of putting it like we’re looking at risk out in the world actually what I was drawing on was health psychology, social psychology and environmental in that case because that was natural environment but actually environment in the sense of the places in which physical places in which we find ourselves and so I love watching how now more and more people are finding their way into this with really valuable,

Unknown speaker

diverse. knowledge and skill sets like us and why we have so much to talk about. And collaborating cross-discipline as well which is always really good. Yeah and vital. Yeah and there’s often quite confusion around what psychological health and safety is and I’ve seen psychological safety, Amy Edmondson’s version being even mentioned in research papers and just tends to be the two of them get confused.

Unknown speaker

Can you tell me a bit more about the differences, what they actually are and how they apply to the workplace? Yes, yeah completely understandable why it would get confused. At the most basic level psychological health and safety is health and safety meaning it’s legislated, it’s regulated, it is a way of looking and assessing at risks up front and having proper evidence-based control measures for whatever those risks are.

Unknown speaker

So it’s a whole piece of health and safety like manual handling, working from height, hazardous chemicals and substances, it’s all part of health and safety. Psychological safety was a term that came out of a piece of research that Harvard University did with Google and again to be uncharacteristically brief for myself.

Unknown speaker

It was about effective teams and it was looking at you know highly teams made up of highly qualified, highly skilled people who’d been hired on the basis of being like the best individual that a company let’s say Google could find to take on that role and hiring five of those all with different technical skill sets and putting them together in a group, a team and recognizing that when you’ve got five of the best technically experts in their field they don’t necessarily work well together and therefore the team is not necessarily effective and for some people coming from psychology you might kind of go well yes but the great thing is is that Google and Harvard sort of decided to start again looking at it rather than just pick up on what was already known about human relating and that’s I think there’s a real merit in that sometimes people say don’t reinvent the wheel but sometimes it’s good to take a fresh look And ultimately what happened is they were looking at all of the things that make a team effective and there were five main things you can you can look up the work there’s a TED talk but they named the number one thing psychological safety.

Unknown speaker

It’s cultural it’s relational it’s between people. It’s based on the idea that we can bring all of ourselves it was really targeted around innovation and productivity first but of course it affects well being that you bring yourself, not every single last thing on your mind.

Unknown speaker

You know we’ve all got work to do, but you can be yourself and that the safety between people in a team environment was the number one indicator of effectiveness. It had to be backed up by accountability.

Unknown speaker

It had to be backed up by meaning in the work there were a number of factors that if they weren’t there and you only had psychological safety then probably no one would get anything done. Everyone to be chatting.

Unknown speaker

Yeah, but that safety often people say is that not the same as trust and it’s very similar but the real premise is that trust is something that if I’m working with you. I choose to trust you or not trust you.

Unknown speaker

And your behavior will play into that, but the trust is me, I might not trust anyone. And that’s me. Safety is created by everyone. It’s created in the middle of the relationship. And when you have that safety, it is like a bubble around you in which mistakes can be made, but actually people can bring their best work.

Unknown speaker

So if you look at that, what they meant by psychological safety at the level of team effectiveness, it is cultural and relational, but it’s a vital part of looking at psychological health and safety because one of the biggest risks to our mental health at work is the relationships we’re having.

Unknown speaker

And if they’re not good and they’re not supportive. So they’re very different things, but they very much, really psychological health and safety is the whole approach. And psychological safety as Amy Edmondson means it is a component in that.

Unknown speaker

It’s one of the things that needs to be there for us to be able to create psychologically healthy and safe workplaces. Yeah, and then for people who think they can just rise, I’m going to come to work and be psychologically safe.

Unknown speaker

You need the right environment, the right culture and work to be that, to have that contract there and those good relations as well. So, yeah. And it doesn’t mean that we put, when we say people talk about bringing your whole self to work, the reason you have to have accountability very close behind the safety is, we know how it can be if people come to work and we all have horrible things happen in our personal lives at times.

Unknown speaker

And it’s absolutely right that we bring them in the sense of being able to say that we’re going through something that we are struggling. This is why we have EAPs, this is why we have all these great benefits.

Unknown speaker

The accountability bit is the bit that says, I’m still at work, I signed a contract. If I can’t be in work, I have to look at the fact that I may be on sick leave or however long that goes. But the accountability is the bit that says, psychological safety doesn’t mean I bring all of me in the sense that I’m not actually getting my work done over time.

Unknown speaker

And that’s, I think we’ll talk about it a bit more later, but the relationship between employee and employer, there’s a very, there’s a very, I wouldn’t say. fine but there’s a balance to be achieved, a real sweet spot to be achieved and I’m seeing more and more businesses realising what that looks like.

Unknown speaker

And that’s really what Psych Health and Safety achieves is it’s like what in any individual organisation what does it look like to have that balance right where everybody’s got the right accountabilities for who they are.

Unknown speaker

Perfect yeah and kind of moving more specifically to trust and safety and content moderation work before we talk about how we can apply this framework of psychological health and safety. What are the unique stressors, psychosocial hazards in this type of work that we need to maybe look at from a health and safety perspective?

Unknown speaker

Yeah so health and safety, certainly UK and Irish legislation is very much almost identical. I appreciate a lot of companies are working globally and that’s why the relationship between the legal and the moral and the good to have in the business case it’s what it is we can come back to that when we talk about some other things.

Unknown speaker

I raise it here because in the UK and Ireland the law is very clear in what it says which is that there is a legal obligation for the employer and who inside that we come back to but the employer as an entity has a legal obligation to assess and manage all foreseeable risks in the workplace and it’s any foreseeable risk to the health of your employees it doesn’t say only physical it just says health and we know that our psychological health is absolutely as important as our physical health and I raise that there because it’s sometimes there’s a confusion which again when we talk about application it’ll become clearer it’s a bit theoretical at the moment but all of the things that can damage my psychological well-being in my life at home my past who you know all these other things relationships all those million things this is where benefits packages have become better than they’ve ever been and there are all those things where an employer can recognise that I am going to have things that will impact on my well-being and an impact on my ability to be healthy at work and helping me to address those things is a brilliant part of like HR benefits and a good thing to do that is not psychological health and safety because an employer can’t possibly foresee my relationship breakdown or my child going through a terrible patch my mother dying me getting a health diagnosis that I may or may not want to share like my workplace doesn’t foresee that and where a lot of people miss is to go it’s it is only what’s foreseeable and so to bring it straight back to the content moderation now there are lots of other foreseeable things at work but content moderation has come into sharp focus because if there’s a need for trust and safety which is a lot bigger than content moderation I appreciate but the need for trust and safety is the trust and safety of the users the safety of the users includes being able to to use these platforms,

Unknown speaker

whatever they are, and there are many, in a way that doesn’t harm. If I’m a user, I don’t want to be harmed by what I’m looking at. And if there are moderators required to remove stuff that might harm me, then as a human being, there’s an acknowledgement that that content, if it got onto the platform and stayed on the platform, could harm me as a user.

Unknown speaker

If there are human beings inside the company needing to look at that, read that, absorb that, work with that, then if it could harm the user, then it could harm the employee because we’re all humans.

Unknown speaker

What’s different is that inside a company, there is, there are different considerations. Being a human who can be harmed by it is one thing, but there are different structures, there are different laws.

Unknown speaker

So with content moderation, one very obvious thing that comes under health and safety law would be to say it’s entirely foreseeable in the work that a content moderator does. That they’re going to have to be exposed to things that have already been agreed to be harmful or they wouldn’t have to be removed off the platform.

Unknown speaker

Now I know that policy violations are in there. There’s a load more having worked in that field. But we are talking about material that could be visual. It could be image video it can be text based. We are talking about things like graphic violence and hate speech and child abuse, but it can come in a lot of forms and it can affect people in a lot of ways.

Unknown speaker

Now I’m kind of going into the detail, but that’s the most obvious part of content moderation and understandably is, you know, social media companies and those who provide content moderation on their behalf have been really concerned to look at that and address that and I celebrate that and I’ve been deeply involved in that myself.

Unknown speaker

What can then be missed is a whole bunch of other factors workplace and in the work that are also foreseeable that can be really impacting on people’s psychological health and aren’t being addressed.

Unknown speaker

And so we’ve got to make that’s why the need for psychological health and safety means you start from the very beginning and say what are all the hazards that are foreseeable. How is it they affect people classic risk assessment and only then can we say that the control measures we’re putting in place are actually appropriate.

Unknown speaker

If we don’t do that systematically then we’re throwing anything from benefits packages to resilience training which we’ll talk more about but we’re throwing things at people hoping it’ll help. And that has been, I would say if I’m being very gentle with businesses that that’s a very understandable start.

Unknown speaker

If you haven’t had the right expertise to advise, and we are where we are with it and what’s happened has happened. But we I’d say there’s a, we’re at a really critical point now where a phrase I quite a quote I quite like is do the best you can until you know better and when you know better do better.

Unknown speaker

Yes, yeah. But the reason I mentioned that is to say, I fully understand that a lot of businesses genuinely haven’t had a clue how to do this have realized the need and have gone in with the best will in the world with the best thing to do.

Unknown speaker

they could find. And I think that’s all well and good. But now, there are people like me telling them, this is how you do better. And so as businesses learn how to do it better, we need to help with how to implement that.

Unknown speaker

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve even found working with various companies that each workplace has different problems, different issues, different benefits. And in some cases, their content moderator teams do not work with egregious content, they’re not affected by content, they seem to be, you know, working really well, they’re more impacted about more, you know, the cognitive work or the cognitive demands or other applications that they need to use,

Unknown speaker

or the monotony of the role, having to read so many different bios and videos where nothing really happens. And if you’re, you know, taking some time, you know, taking some time, you know, taking some time, you know, taking some time, taking some time, taking taking some time, taking some time, taking some time, taking some time, taking some time, taking some time, taking some taking some time, taking some time,

Unknown speaker

taking some time, taking resilience training off the shelf and applying that there, it’s not necessarily being smart and cost effective by targeting, okay, maybe we need to invest in better tooling or maybe we need to bring people together if social connection is a bit of an issue as well.

Unknown speaker

So I think it even makes sense to use a risk assessment to identify, look, what are the challenges in this team or in this workplace specifically? Is it, you know, the impact of content or is it workplace stressors and high work demands and performance expectations as well?

Unknown speaker

So as you said, it can be more than the impact of content itself that very much so. And relationships as well and work. Yeah, but still foreseeable in the sense of you don’t have to know exactly when a high stress period is coming or exactly when some bullying may occur, but there are things like a culture where there’s discrimination and harassment and that’s foreseeable if the culture is clearly one in which that’s happening.

Unknown speaker

There are reporting, there’s data available for those things. And, you know, deciding that you tackle that by giving people help lines is treating the harm. And so what I do is I keep bringing people back to what health and safety is.

Unknown speaker

And one of the reasons we are where we are, I can see having worked in big global complex organizations is that physical health, so health and safety departments in companies are geared to physical health and safety because the people who are in them who are experts are highly trained and experienced and qualified to manage what is understood to be health and safety.

Unknown speaker

And it is those things like manual handling, like working from height, depends on your own construction into its industry. It’s a lot more of working from height, but it’s area pillars within it that are very well understood with the right experts to give the right advice on how you control those risks.

Unknown speaker

And then at the higher level, it’s understanding how you put in a full system that in which you record your risk assessments, that you support people to do the meaningful. that you make sure that they are not trained to do this for psychological risks.

Unknown speaker

So quite understandably, many of those professionals have just said, I don’t think this is my remit. I think it’s over there with mental health and wellbeing, isn’t that HR? And then HR find themselves going, well, we don’t know how to do health and safety.

Unknown speaker

We don’t have access to the systems, the policies, but also, so they fall back on benefits packages because they haven’t had the right guidance. And I see why it’s happening, but we have to now stop saying it can’t be done differently.

Unknown speaker

Cause I’ve heard that and say, the reason it’s been happening the way it has is understandable. It’s fragmented. It’s different departments with different expertise, psychological health and safety is falling down a gap.

Unknown speaker

But there are people like me, people like you saying, we’re telling you, we know how to help you do this differently. And that’s why we really need to, you know, appeal to businesses, say, don’t mistake benefits packages for health and safety.

Unknown speaker

Because if someone’s working at height on a construction site and someone asks them. how you’re protecting those workers from the risks associated with their jobs, the foreseeable risks associated with their jobs.

Unknown speaker

We’re not told they’ve got a great benefits package, including resilience building, because being physically resilient, of course, is going to make them probably heal quicker if they fall off a building, but no one would say that was health and safety.

Unknown speaker

They’d say no, no, you have to stop them falling off the building. If you’ve given them resilience training as part of the kind of package of how you develop your employees, physical resilience, psychological resilience, that’s a wonderful thing to do.

Unknown speaker

All of us have got skills to learn around becoming more resilient as individual people in a messy world, but you can’t make someone resilient specifically for that job and say it’s health and safety.

Unknown speaker

It doesn’t work. I’ve watched it not work, demonstrably doesn’t work. So we have to stop and equally, if somebody’s working from height and they fall off, they don’t get told they’ve got a benefits package that allows them access to a height.

Unknown speaker

You say, how have they had all the training that’s specifically for working from height? It’s not resilience building. It’s training for working from height, the awareness of the risks they face, the equipment, clothing, the harnesses, how to use them, how to watch out for each other, how to always have the right number of people on, and so on.

Unknown speaker

And all of those control measures are matched to the thorough assessment of the risks. And so when you put that across on psychological, I fully understand that at first it’s like how on earth do we do that when it’s all going on in here?

Unknown speaker

And it’s not as easy or straightforward, but it’s doable. I’ve watched it be doable and there’s more and more evidence coming. And I’ve heard, for example, one last thing to say on that, that one of again understandable, because it’s often coming from a place of overwhelm and fear is to say, but we haven’t got research that specifically says how content affects moderators and go, you don’t need it because there’s loads of research on how material like that affects human beings and their human beings.

Unknown speaker

And so even though they’re at work and you’ve got to look at the whole picture, we don’t need any more evidence of how that type of thing hurts humans. What we need to do is get on with it. and protect them or reduce that exposure as well in whatever way.

Unknown speaker

Well, that’s because risk management is avoid me to get response when you understand you do your very best to stop the harm occurring in the first place first. And looking at the cost of, you know, not having psychological health and safety and not protecting content moderators as much as you can and training them and having them prepared.

Unknown speaker

Like some of the, you had discussed before about differentiating what hazards and risks are and, you know, applying health and safety to the psychological world or to people’s mental health can be tricky.

Unknown speaker

So what, for example, would be a hazard as opposed to a risk as opposed to an outcome of poor health and safety. Yeah. Yeah. So the how that is a thing in the environment that the humans being exposed to and it’s another again.

Unknown speaker

When people are trying to do this without any training, no one’s expecting people who’ve never been taught this to get it right the first time. But what happens therefore, is people dive in with the best intentions.

Unknown speaker

And one of the things I see a lot is where the hazard is named as trauma or stress. Because it’s what the company is worried about. We’re worried about trauma. We’re worried about stress. So that’s the hazard.

Unknown speaker

That’s the injury. That’s how someone gets hurt. That’s the type of hurt. So in the same way in health and safety, with a risk assessment working from high, it’s not back injury, that’s the hazard. It’s a fault from height.

Unknown speaker

Or a faulty harness, or it’s the thing. And so with content, for example, it’s the material that somebody’s got coming into their brain. That’s the hazard. Or it’s the poor relationship they’re in. Or it’s the way they’ve been treated by their boss.

Unknown speaker

Or it’s the pressure. They could be pressures. So yes, ultimately there are things that can cause chronic stress. And there are things that can cause trauma. And there’s some overlap, but those are different injuries.

Unknown speaker

But we mustn’t get hung up on the injury type. Because the first thing we’re supposed to be doing is stopping the injury happening in the first place. Yeah, yeah. So much of it’s geared towards treating the injury.

Unknown speaker

We’ve got businesses investing loads in having therapists to stress, therapists for trauma, treatment for trauma, and saying you do need treatment because accidents happen. But if you’ve done this properly, you’re reducing the chance of the harm in the first place by understanding what the hazards are.

Unknown speaker

And you can’t meaningfully risk assess without thoroughly identifying the hazards. It’s a whole process in itself. And I’ve seen again where people are diving in with the control measures. Yeah, it’s a mindset shift as well.

Unknown speaker

Because you’re like, how can I reduce stress? How can I reduce risk of UT? But that’s so interesting to look at what’s causing it in the first place and where to actually focus on to reduce. Yeah, what’s the exposure?

Unknown speaker

What’s actually happening that’s going into people’s brains? And there’s plenty of psychology out there. I try and match me because I’m not clinical background. I’m not coming in from a point of treating injury and illness.

Unknown speaker

I’m coming in from a perspective both as a risk psychologist. academic who says there’s all this stuff in now on internet libraries but you know used to be on dusty old shelves it’s like it’s not getting used because I like to be a bridge to say there’s so much already known that only needs a bit of a tweak to be brought into a new context but what we do have to do is go right back to basics with what’s actually hurting people and how what is it that they’re exposed to can we reduce the exposure and some stuff is done on that which I do know we’re to talk about but yeah just on that given all these specific hazards and risks and injuries how can psychological health and safety be supported in in with content moderators in their work how can it be applied from like corporate well-being to an area with with these risks yeah so basically by where it sits does it does it sit with hl does it sit with health and safety is there actually an occupational health and safety that has the right people in it but it’s whether it’s inside expertise that’s hired in or whether it’s external expertise whatever it is it’s getting the right expertise that says we need to look at the role and the environment so everything about the work and the workplace and we need to systematically list all the identifiable and foreseeable hazards you’re not supposed to find ones that you can’t foresee you look at all the foreseeable hazards and you list them as hazards the things impacting on the person stress-related factors trauma but you don’t need to name them as that when you’ve done that you need guidance on how does being exposed to that actually if i was needing training on working with acid we have to know how it burns my skin and what type of gloves to stop it you know we have to know what we’re dealing with so there’s plenty of well there’s a growing amount of expertise available yeah to say if those are hazards and they’re systematically understood and recorded here now are how we know they impact people and how badly and how likely you know it’s all in the work given that the control measures that first you look can we avoid exposure any more than we already are if we can’t how do we mitigate against harm caused by exposure because we’re not saying no one can do this job same as people still work from height but you say you avoid as much of the risk as you can by identifying it up front looking at ways of working ways of organizing the work those are very organizational things that reduce the exposure so much i could say about that because i’ve been inside the company looking about workflows and how people work in the role and then and you look at mitigate some of which comes from the business but plenty can be equipping and empowering the individual to understand themselves in the role their unique way of meeting that material and what is it that bothers them more than somebody else we’re all different that’s true and then the respond bit when most of the resources says things still happen people get hurt it happens but if you’ve done a thorough thorough risk management plan it’s a lot fewer people and it’ll happen a lot less severely and less of the time.

Unknown speaker

And of course you still need the response. It’s not an EAP, that is a benefit. It is specialized support for when people have been harmed by the type of thing that is not your everyday stresses and strains of life, which is what EAPs are for.

Unknown speaker

So is that, and in terms of understanding what benefits there are, and again, I think we’re going to talk about that, but is you look at health and safety, it’s like, how do people understand when health and safety is going well?

Unknown speaker

Well, it’s an awful lot of measuring what didn’t happen, which is not a very exact science, but there has to be quite a lot of looking at the evidence out there that by doing these things, you will have averted an awful lot of harm.

Unknown speaker

And how does that translate into business benefits as well as just obviously not hurting people? And there are ways to look at that in structured approaches. It’s fully exact science because it isn’t, for a business on a construction company to keep saying how many people didn’t die, isn’t that easy?

Unknown speaker

If you see what I mean, having effective health and safety and the measurable that the metrics need careful consideration. Just on the topic, you know, boosting resilience in the workplace, specifically for content moderators, is a buzz word, and the focus is often on, you know, training general resilience to content moderators, and making sure that they’re able to withstand.

Unknown speaker

It’s kind of an opposite way of looking at it as you’ve discussed. What would you think about that approach? It’s back to what I said before, even though learning and development, especially around well-being, is not benefits as such.

Unknown speaker

This is all things to help your workforce in life. It’ll help at work and it’ll help outside of work. It’s not work related specifically, so nutrition and sleep and all the brilliant trainings and webinars.

Unknown speaker

Building resilience is a good thing. You’re going to get a return in your business of more resilient individuals who can bounce back well, who have good skills, who can deal with conflicts and life’s ups and downs, they might be more likely to navigate personal problems and stay in work, or actually might be likely to take time off when they need but come back, you know, resilience is not robust,

Unknown speaker

it’s about recovery. So building resilience is a wonderful thing to do in your workforce and it has its place. It can be part of well-being, part of L&D, part of personal development. It is where it is.

Unknown speaker

I teach it, I love it. What it’s not is health and safety for content moderation. It is not a control measure against being exposed to graphic violence, child abuse, etc. It isn’t that. It will play into that when you’re looking at your whole workforce, development, learning and development, well-being.

Unknown speaker

It’s all pieces of an overall big picture, but I keep seeing resilience building being slotted in as a control measure for an unidentified risk. Lotted in, I like that. You’ve also done some work, some research on observing what we learn from animals.

Unknown speaker

with regard to resilience. What were your key findings there? Oh, I’m still doing it. It’s right in the middle of it. I am back at university alongside my consultancy practice and I’m looking at working with wild animals.

Unknown speaker

I run a sanctuary myself. So I work with wild animals who are injured, ill, orphaned, traumatised, and I help them in whatever way I can back to recovery. But they have very, I know, very powerful ways of recovering with my support, but they have incredible resilience.

Unknown speaker

I actually work particularly with grey squirrels. I have to have a license to do so with corvids, but they’re very intelligent creatures. And some of the things that I’ve learned through working with them are, have brought home lessons to me that maybe theoretically I knew.

Unknown speaker

I’ve read them somewhere or been on a webinar. Like it’s not things I didn’t know. It’s things that hadn’t landed in a way with me where they changed my behaviour. working with these animals has done that.

Unknown speaker

And therefore I actually do now do work around saying, how do we notice some of the ways we’ve forgotten our animal natures that we are animals? We’re very, very advanced in some ways, incredibly advanced in some ways, but we mistake that sometime to what is very simple and evolutionary in how we’re responding to the world.

Unknown speaker

And also very importantly, how, what we mean by resilience and how we recover when we need to. And what do you think are some of the key learnings from squirrels? How, what makes them that bit more resilience?

Unknown speaker

What are we denying in ourselves that are, is our animal selves that we could focus more on? Well, one of the biggest things that I love and I do, as I said, I have to create the safety in their environment is that if they’re injured or ill and they’ve got medication they need, and I get them in a warm, dark place on a heat pad in a corner, don’t bother them.

Unknown speaker

They’re wild animals. There’s nothing I can do to stop them resting and recovering in their own, like resting, real, real, deep, deep rest. And yes, I sometimes have to stick a syringe full of liquid food in their mouths, but they’ll drink it.

Unknown speaker

They don’t say that, they may be so desperately in need of the rest that they can’t even crawl out. So I have to help them, yes. They have to receive my help. So one is they receive help even as wild animals.

Unknown speaker

It’s incredible. Their instinct to survive means they receive help off a great big, furlus mammal, but they’re terrified, so they receive help. But I’d say the other thing is, and I’m deliberately slightly lighthearted in that, I don’t know what a squirrel saying sorry sounds like, but I’m pretty confident that no squirrel I’ve ever had has ever said sorry for resting and felt that they were meant to be like squiggling around doing something else.

Unknown speaker

Squirrels are beautifully hyperactive when they’re well, and they will zoom around all day. But when a squirrel needs to rest, off they go. And I can’t get them out from under that blanket until they’re good and ready, and when they come out.

Unknown speaker

And I can think they’re dying. They’re so still, they’re so… in that deep, deep, deep rest, that nothing will stir them till they’re ready. And as long as I support them physically and create the conditions for them to continue to feel safe, when they pop out again, their full steam is brilliant to watch.

Unknown speaker

And you mentioned that importance of safety, of feeling safe, I think, as well, which is important for humans, humans at work as well. I also had a similar experience last week with my own cat fighting with my neighbour’s cat, and it was quite vicious and quite fight and flight.

Unknown speaker

And a few moments later, she hides away under the wall, you know, just kind of, I suppose, recovering from that nervous system activation. And then 10 minutes later, she is curled up in a ball, happy asleep, and doing that important recovery work.

Unknown speaker

So I think animals know how to navigate those physiological responses better and adapt to the environment as it’s needed. Always on like humans are Yeah, there was on I think we’ve got to a point where our incredible ability to think and analyze our cognitive abilities and they’re very advanced and look at the things we are able to do, but we mistake that and think that we can think our way out of deeply physical things and one of the things we’ve done is separate mental health and physical health and we are what we are,

Unknown speaker

whole different professional fields, there’s a lot to unpick there, but actually luckily those things are converging where we’re recognizing that yes we can look at mental health in one way and physical in the other, but in the end we are one great big joined-up system of mental physical, we know how we think affects our guts and our guts affect our brains and there’s beautiful neuroscience on the vagus nerve and but the reason I mention it here because it’s such a huge topic is that we because we are so busy being cognitive and thinking we will decide somehow that resting is a nice to have once we’ve done everything and it’s something to be almost ashamed if not ashamed of certainly sorry about like we’re letting someone down somewhere because we’re not doing the work that maybe someone else or will be judged for not working fast enough hard enough and the bottom line is we are animals and if we stay in,

Unknown speaker

you just mentioned about the arousal, if we stay in what’s termed fight-flight which it can only be just over the line but if your system and we don’t even recognize it as arousal anymore because we just it’s what we’ve become normal, if our bodies and minds stay over that line even a little bit for periods of time we’re not in what’s called rest and digest not only are we not resting but our actual whole parasympathetic nervous system the whole part of our system that digests food that gets us back into rest and recovery that brings down the levels of all you know the hormone shooting around our bodies it cannot do its work and so that’s why people wonder why not only is there quite profound burnout that’s physical as well as psychological but massive incidents of irritable bowel syndrome and unexplained conditions where doctors and not finding a disease,

Unknown speaker

they’re saying your system and actually, not all of it, but a lot of it can be explained by long-term arousal because our systems just cannot do what they have to do because we’re busy thinking that we can, you know, we can think our way out of it.

Unknown speaker

And similarly with stress and trauma, that arousal, it’s very, people become bored when they’re in this relaxing environment or relaxing state because they need their nervous systems to change to be able to enjoy and relax and restore as well.

Unknown speaker

Yeah, there’s a lot that goes on around in your addiction to some of the internal, rather than taking drugs that can be addictions to the internal, essentially the drugs that are kicking around your system and therefore needing the fix and not recognizing it.

Unknown speaker

So some of the less healthy, thrill-seeking and risk-taking behaviors, yeah, they can all be trauma symptoms. So yes, we need to recognize our systems as being both Thank you. beautifully complicated, but actually some aspects, the solutions to our problems are really simple, but we’re not giving ourselves permission.

Unknown speaker

And that’s important because we’re not giving ourselves permission at an individual level often, back to accountability. If I don’t take care of myself as an individual at work and make sure I am not drinking two bottles of wine every night, because I can’t seem to come down and then about to coffee in the morning, I could be being irresponsible with my own individual health and that’s not my employer’s responsibility.

Unknown speaker

However, if the culture I’m in and the job requirements and the ways in which my performance is measured and never allowing me to take care of my animal body and self either, that is on the employer.

Unknown speaker

So this relationship has to be one of the right accountabilities in the right place that I look after myself as far as if I’m gonna sign an employment contract and take home a salary, I have a duty of care towards myself that isn’t my employer’s responsibility, but the employer has the one that says what we’re not gonna do though is make it impossible for you to do that.

Unknown speaker

Not enough time, not the right culture, guilt tripping people for needing to say when they’re getting near burnout. Yeah, which there can be embedded in many cultures as well. Just to wrap up, where do you think the future of psychological health and safety is or any final advice for trust and safety organizations looking to adopt that perspective in their workplace?

Unknown speaker

Yeah, I think it’s a big question. I mean, these things take time. I know when I started all guaranteed and excited that we could do it this way in around 2012, 13. Being me, I thought it was all gonna be like taken on by the next year or the year after I ended up going and working in the BBC as the head of mental health for a couple of years and did a load of work around this.

Unknown speaker

And I think at the moment, the fragmentation of what I talked about earlier, the way health and safety is done, HR benefits, everything’s really quite fragmented. And we’re not going to… unbuild that overnight.

Unknown speaker

But what I’d say is, what I see the future being is keeping going and saying, we do have to unbuild those silos. We can’t just go backwards and pretend that we don’t need it to be done this way because we do.

Unknown speaker

It is a legal requirement in many countries and even where it isn’t, it makes no business sense to let your employees be harmed by foreseeable things. Health and safety on the physical side knows this since long ago.

Unknown speaker

So, we can only go forward would be my point, but we need to go forward with enormous amounts of patience. Well, okay, that’s me. I do. I always want everything to happen now, but I think that knowing knowing how to do this, I feel you know I know how to help set up a strategy I’ve done it before and I know how to operationalise that strategy.

Unknown speaker

But what I keep encountering is those those fragmented responsibilities or accountabilities or the silos of budgets, the way businesses who is it that feels that who’s accountable for what where who’s leading All of that stuff is getting in the way of progress and it’s not gonna change overnight.

Unknown speaker

But what I would say is if someone’s listened to this webinar and does have business accountability, make sure you also have access to a budget that’s realistic for health and safety to do this right.

Unknown speaker

Of course, I’m going to say somebody like me really wants to help, but there are more and more people out there who can do so. But I would say just keep taking the next baby step forward really because we can’t afford to go backwards.

Unknown speaker

And I don’t think we’re going to anyway. And I see more and more employees coming and advocating for themselves as well. So I don’t know exactly where it’s gonna go at what pace, but it’s gonna keep going.

Unknown speaker

I’d agree, it’s been a lot slower over the years than I would have anticipated as well, or seen as well, but as you said, just taking those steps as well. I think there’ll be, the only other bit of the answer to that question is what I’ve learned is, things can be incrementally very slow, but my experience of other areas of work is there probably is going to be a tipping point whereby not long after everyone wonders how come we weren’t always doing this.

Unknown speaker

I do think that’s gonna happen. I’d like to think that we’re quite close to it, but there will be one and it will then accelerate. Yeah, absolutely. Jackie, thank you so much. It’s always a pleasure chatting to you and seeing your unique perspectives.

Unknown speaker

And I learn loads of new material every day, every time I’m talking to you as well. And just to say thanks so much for joining in this webinar today and hopefully see you all again soon. Thanks so much.