How do we sustain mental health when working from home?

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The literature on health and safety at work makes very clear that for many people work is a major source of stress and working from home, particularly now during the lockdown period, is producing new forms of stress. There are reports that mental health problems are becoming very common. There can be many reasons for this. One is the depression and anxiety that comes with a sense of isolation: being cut-off from day-to-day contact with the work community. The loss of the normal structure to the day can also induce anxiety: people have to find the self-discipline to create and sustain their own daily structure. And there is the stress of managing home/work relationships, looking after children or sharing workspaces with family members. There are many examples of people, Roald Dahl and David Cameron amongst them, who have resorted to sheds in their gardens in order to keep work and home life separate.

How can an employer help employees sustain good mental health and well being if they are working from home? It is not so easy to monitor how people are feeling if you don’t see them and not the same opportunities to offer help. Fortunately the internet is a medium capable of supporting many kinds of activity apart from work and social media in particular is showing ways in which people can support one another. There are a variety of ways employers can harness these capabilities to help their staff:

  • Creating informal on-line ‘get togethers’ that are about sharing experiences rather than doing work
  • Creating opportunities for shared activities like fitness classes
  • Building opportunities around on-line work meetings for side conversations
  • Developing a counselling or ‘buddying’ scheme; someone who regularly reviews with staff how they are coping. Care needs to be taken that this is not seen as a performance review.

Above all people need an opportunity for a ‘reflective space’, perhaps with people they trust, in which they can put the daily hassle behind them for a time. My colleague Simon Bell has developed a novel way of doing this in which people come together in Zoom meetings to reflect on Mindfulness Stories that Simon has written.

As always each organisation will have to find the best way to support its staff and an iterative, exploring and
learning process will be necessary.

Professor Ken Eason

‘Mindfulness through Fiction’ stories are now available as an e-book

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Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable – e-book now Available on Amazon

Featuring the stories used in our Mindfulness Zoom classes.

Using fiction to explore mindful reflection. A best friend never met, a mysterious journey half begun, a solution unseen in the brightest light, a shadowy creation creating itself, these are some of the fictions used in Parable.
This novella is about the braiding of reality and fiction. It makes use of short stories containing subliminal prompts, arranged in quartets.
‘Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable’ takes the reader on a journey of five contexts: Me, my world, my shared world, my group and finally; beyond me.
The prompts contained in the fictions are intended to act as means to nudge individuals and groups, lay readers and practitioners to consider their role, experience and ideas in the contexts of the five quartets.
The book helps us to find reflective space in our lives by means of fictions.

Buy Now

What happens to the culture of the company when we work from home?

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In companies where people work closely together a culture unique to them will emerge. In successful work cultures people show ‘esprit de corps’; they have great loyalty to one another, share common values and support one another through difficult times.  Nowhere has this been more evident recently than in the way NHS staff have worked under intense pressure and at great personal risk to keep the death toll from Covid-19 as low as possible. We have clapped to show our appreciation but they have been sustained by the help and support they have got from one another.

All organisations would love to have a dedicated workforce of this kind but how does it develop and how is it fostered? Some important ingredients are that people work together in tight teams with common goals and that they are able to develop empathy and understanding for one another. This can be accomplished most easily when people work in face-to-face settings involving close interaction and have plenty of opportunities for informal gatherings.

How is this to be replicated when people are working at home? There is a danger that they will lose the sense of being part of a team because there is little to sustain it. If they have come from a strong face-to-face team culture, they may be able to sustain the culture for some time but what of new people joining? How do they get to know their colleagues?

There are two ways to promote company culture. First, ensure the organisation is not completely virtual: that some of the time people do meet in face-to-face settings and that, when they do, there are opportunities to share experiences and sort out problems. Second, use on-line meeting capabilities not just for getting through normal work but also to replicate all the other ways people interact with one another at work. During lockdown there have been many examples of people ‘getting together remotely’: to share family stories, to do physical exercises together, to sing together. How many of these kinds of activities could become a normal part of remote working organisational life in the future?

We don’t know very much about sustaining organisational culture when people work from home and organisations will need ways of monitoring the state of their working culture as time goes by to test whether the actions they are taking are effective.

Professor Ken Eason

How do you manage people working from home?

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If you have ben used to managing people through regular face-to-face contact with them what do you do when they are working from home and you never see them? How will you know they are putting the hours in, following all the proper procedures, hitting deadlines and achieving good quality standards?

One way is to install monitoring apps on employee’s equipment. There are apps that will allow you to ‘look over their shoulder’ and see what is on the screen and that will count every keystroke. The apps will give all kinds of histograms and charts to summarise time spent on screen, productivity, errors, websites visited and so on. There are reports that more and more companies are installing these apps.

But this route to employee management is beset with dangers. It can be very invasive of privacy, in this case the privacy of other people’s homes. You might be capturing an employee’s computer use when they are not actually working. You might also, inadvertently be capturing information about other members of the family.  You might be storing information that would put you in breach of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR). At the very least, the monitoring procedures that are in place must be transparent to everybody being monitored. Another problem is that procedures that attempt tight control invite people to ‘game’ the system, to look for ways of keeping the scores high by artificial means and find workarounds to fool the system. And there is no end to the ingenuity people display when they want to preserve some level of control over their existence.

Before rushing to computer solutions to manage remote workers it is important to consider other approaches. There may be an opportunity to work towards a culture of trust: one in which, for example, each employee has targets to meet and they are entrusted to find their own ways of achieving those targets. Management of this kind is known to help employees feel more a trusted member of the team and less like a dispensable cog in a machine.

Whatever new system of management emerges, it will be best created by consulting with staff and working iteratively towards procedures that enable effective management and engender good employee well being.

Professor Ken Eason

Mindfulness class continues – Monday 13th July

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Our next Zoom class will be on Monday 13th July at 2pm BST. The 20 minute classes are free of charge.

There will be two more Zooms (on 20th and 27th July), then Mindful Stories is taking a break. We hope to be back as a Podcast in the Autumn.

Application to attend is open to all, simply reserve your space and we will send you a link to be used on the day. 

The mindfulness session will make use of a Quartet of the Mindful stories,

The quartet will allow you time and space to consider your relations with yourself, your world, our shared world and your community. 

I look forward to seeing you on Monday if you can make it. Just click the button below to reserve your space and I’ll see you there.

Please reserve my space

Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable – e-book now Available on Amazon

Featuring the stories used in our Mindfulness Zoom classes.

Using fiction to explore mindful reflection. A best friend never met, a mysterious journey half begun, a solution unseen in the brightest light, a shadowy creation creating itself, these are some of the fictions used in Parable.
This novella is about the braiding of reality and fiction. It makes use of short stories containing subliminal prompts, arranged in quartets.
‘Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable’ takes the reader on a journey of five contexts: Me, my world, my shared world, my group and finally; beyond me.
The prompts contained in the fictions are intended to act as means to nudge individuals and groups, lay readers and practitioners to consider their role, experience and ideas in the contexts of the five quartets.
The book helps us to find reflective space in our lives by means of fictions.

Buy Now

Now available – Mindfulness Through Fiction: A Parable

/in , , /by

Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable – e-book now Available on Amazon

Using fiction to explore mindful reflection. A best friend never met, a mysterious journey half begun, a solution unseen in the brightest light, a shadowy creation creating itself, these are some of the fictions used in Parable.
This novella is about the braiding of reality and fiction. It makes use of short stories containing subliminal prompts, arranged in quartets.
‘Mindfulness through Fiction: A Parable’ takes the reader on a journey of five contexts: Me, my world, my shared world, my group and finally; beyond me.
The prompts contained in the fictions are intended to act as means to nudge individuals and groups, lay readers and practitioners to consider their role, experience and ideas in the contexts of the five quartets.
The book helps us to find reflective space in our lives by means of fictions.

Getting the Work/Life Balance Right

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For many people the daily work/life balance has been defined by the hours spent at the office, shop or factory. You have to work there for a set number of hours and then you can go home and forget about it. Working from home throws all that up in the air. You could now work very different hours and make it a much better fit with school hours for example. It could be a great boon to getting a much better work/life balance. But it might work the other way round. Because your ‘work’ is always as near as your laptop or mobile phone, your bosses or work colleagues might expect you to respond at all hours. When I was a university teacher I remember a paper on the ‘Perpetual Professor’ who because of on-line systems would be available around the clock to answer student queries. My devotion to my students never stretched that far!

If the new flexibility afforded by home working is to be of benefit to both employees and companies, agreed patterns of work need to be worked out. Because people have very different domestic arrangements this may not be a case of all employees following the same practices. It is likely that the Principle of Minimum Critical Specification from sociotechnical systems theory will apply. Everybody will need to agree to some common practices, for example, that on-line meetings are arranged at a time of day to suit everybody (not easy if you are an international company with staff in other time zones). Some companies have also instituted a rule that emails can only be sent during normal working hours (or at least no one is expected to respond to midnight messages until the following day). Beyond the minimum common practices, people might then put in their work hours when it suits them, the rule being that they put in the requisite amount of time per week.

It is unlikely that all the issues about working from home will be resolved quickly. It will require an iterative approach that gradually evolves practices that enable the company to work well and employees to get the benefit of a better work/life balance. It will also require open and transparent communications so that problems can be surfaced quickly and fair solutions identified.

Professor Ken Eason

What will we miss by working from home?

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Many organisations have been practicing home working for years. What is striking is that most of them have not gone wholly virtual: staff may work from home 3 days a week for example and come into the office on other days. Or they might just come in for special meetings. All kinds of ‘blended’ arrangements have evolved.

What is it that causes organisations not to go wholly virtual? In part it seems to be that whilst it is possible to do the functional work on-line it is not so easy to do many of the other things that hold an organisation together and enable it to drive forward:

  • How do you spark ideas off one another to get new developments started or solve knotty problems?
  • How do you discover what’s worrying people and might indicate big problems coming later?
  • How do you introduce new staff: how are they to ‘get to know’ their colleagues? It is one thing to work with colleagues who you have known in face-to-face settings for years: it is quite another to develop empathy and understanding with people you only see on a small screen.
  • How do you negotiate with people remotely? You need to understand them, what motivates them, where there is room to manoeuvre, where their red lines are etc, and there can be no side conversations away from the negotiating table to facilitate that kind of understanding. There are reports that Brexit negotiations are not going well and some of the difficulties are being attributed to the lack of opportunities for informal conversations because everything is confined to teleconferencing.

Every organisation will have to work out what work it can do remotely and what is best done by getting people together face-to-face. The problem is that whilst there may be widely shared views about the routine work it may take more effort to dig out all the less proceduralised but nevertheless essential informal work that also needs to be done.

Professor Ken Eason

Our Mindfulness Classes Continue on Monday 6th July

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Mindfulness as we are released from lockdown

Our next Zoom Mindfulness class will be live on Monday 6th July at 2pm BST. The 40 minute classes are free of charge.

Application to attend is open to all, simply reserve your space and we will send you a link to be used on the day. 

The mindfulness session will make use of a Quartet of the Mindful stories,

The quartet will allow you time and space to consider your relations with yourself, your world, our shared world and your community. 

Want to get organised? Here’s what you need to know: 

  • The classes will be hosted on Zoom. 
  • Available both on a computer or on your phone. Download the Zoom app ready if you’d like to. 
  • You can have your video on and be seen or you can turn it off and keep to yourself while following the class. 
  • You can keep your audio on and chat with the others in the class if you’d like to, or you can mute. 
  • It is best to be seated on a comfortable chair in a quiet place. 
  • I’ll keep the classes simple and focused on the story of each week. 
  • The class is 40 minutes, but you can log off at any time if needed. 

I look forward to seeing you on Monday if you can make it. Just click the button below to reserve your space and I’ll see you there.

Please reserve my space

Mindful Stories

Mindfulness in Lockdown – Mindful storiesThe Zoom Mindful Stories are all available in the forthcoming publication, A new approach to Mindfulness: Mindful Stories (MiSt) Cambridge Scholars. Summer 2020

Given the current crisis and the time we are spending in our homes the ability to be mindful, resilient, adaptive and active is crucial to our own well-being and creativity, to organisational relations and to our everyday relationships. Addressing underlying issues, by stepping beyond the everyday tasks and issues that we are encompassed in, enables us to build greater capacity, reflexivity and compassion, allowing us to take this back to our everyday situations. This is the space offered by the BI’s virtual mindfulness sessions. 

What if I’m really struggling to work from home

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By Professor Ken Eason

 

Some of us are in a very good position to work from home. We have a room we can call a study where we can set up a decent workstation and we have a good broadband service. All those Zoom participants who have a well-stocked bookshelf behind them seem to be very well set up for home working. But there are many people who have really struggled: working on the kitchen table, sharing tablets with children doing their school work, working in a space that is also for cooking, playing and entertainment. Most of our homes were never designed for home working. And how many are trying home working without good wi-fi? If some employees are in this position, what can an employer do?

The first requirement is to know the position of everybody. That requires the research part of the action research cycle. How have people actually coped with home working during lockdown? This may need sensitive questioning because people may fear the consequences of revealing they have been struggling.  We have often undertaken this kind of research for clients because we can ensure independence and confidentiality.

But what actions can be taken? 

Setting up home working workstations.  There is a lot of ergonomic advice available to help people make the best of what they have available to them. Here is the advice from the Health and Safety Executive.

https://www.hse.gov.uk/toolbox/workers/home.htm

Setting up video conferencing.   Similarly, there is a lot of advice available to make the best of videoconferencing. Getting the screen at eye height, for example, is important so that you appear to be making eye contact with others on the call.

Paying for equipment and services. People may have muddled through lockdown with the equipment they have at home but if home working is to be permanent, the employer may need to provide a support package, not just a computer but perhaps an office chair and a contribution towards broadband costs.

Local office rental space. If it is really difficult for people to work from home, there is also the option of renting local office space perhaps for a group of employees who live in a particular area.

The appropriate action will vary even within an organisation. A linked action-research strategy will be needed to reveal what is needed.