Eight

It’s an exciting time if you are a football fan, with the World Cup in Brazil just around the corner. As I write this, breweries, tinned hot dog producers and flat-screen TV manufacturers up and down the land will be hoping that both England and the weather turn up on time. In workplaces, people will be planning annual leave and forecasting sick leave in roughly equal measure. Tabloid newspapers will be printing cut-out prayer mats and giving away free flags to whip the nation into a ‘1966’ frenzy before we inevitably go out on penalties in the quarter-finals. Probably.

It’s a chance to see some of the world’s best players. And Wayne Rooney. Argentina’s Lionel Messi will be causing defenders to wake up in cold sweats, whilst Cristiano Ronaldo will be doing the same for many female supporters. Spain will inevitably win the thing, having passed the ball around for a month, probably texting their mates and signing autographs at the same time, before eventually deciding they’ve had enough for the day and decide to put a few goals past their demoralised opponents. England, well, it’s England isn’t it? The Forrest Gump of International Football – “you never know what you’re gonna get.”

Still, the fans of all nations can look forward to the spectacle.

Apart from a few. Marcleudo de Melo Ferreira is one. He was working on the stadium in Manaus where England are due to play Italy when he fell 35 metres from the roof which was being installed. He was 22 years old and the third person to die during the construction of the World Cup stadiums. Since his death, after which there was a period of mourning before work resumed, five more workers have died, bringing the total to eight who have been killed during the construction phase.

It’s no secret that Brazil’s tournament has been beset by problems: delays, a collapsed roof, budgeting issues and an immovable deadline. On its own, eight doesn’t sound like a big number. After all, it’s less than double figures and if you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, can you expect to build twelve stadia without killing a few workers? Is that an acceptable price to pay? The problem with the number ‘8’ is that it’s just a number. It doesn’t tell the story of the workers who gave their lives for the World Cup to happen and the impact that their deaths would have had on their families, children, wives and co-workers. The ripples of their deaths will go on in their communities long after the carnival has finished and England have trudged home sheepishly.

It’s hard to get details surrounding the circumstances of the eight deaths, other than what has been stated in the press so understanding the root causes is pure speculation. Poor management systems? Weak leadership? Faulty or poorly maintained equipment? Lack of training? Weak safety culture? Time pressures? Possibly all played a part. The 2012 Olympic build in London showed that you can build significant infrastructure safely by embedding a strong safety culture (no workers were killed during construction) but to compare the two is a little unfair: the UK has a world-class regulatory system and has made major strides in the last century in protecting workers from injury and ill-health and even in the UK the construction industry remains one of the most dangerous with 29 deaths between April and December 2013.

Everyone knows safety is important but it’s crucial that each fatality is learnt from, that the foot remains on the pedal in driving safety improvements. Because whilst each dead worker is represented by a statistic in official figures, they represented so much more to their own families and colleagues. We should constantly seek new ways of communicating risk and ‘nudging’ people to truly understand not just the risks of their work, but the impact that their failure to follow safe practice can have on others. I’ll leave you with this picture as an example.

Flip flops, apples and mops

I’ve made a self-diagnosis: I’m mildly stressed. In the week I chose to go camping in the New Forest, the glorious dry spell that led me to eat more sausages and burgers than is healthy broke, and was replaced by violent thunderstorms and localised flooding.  I had planned to spend my days lounging around the campsite, playing cricket with the neighbours, using empty beer bottles for stumps, but instead spent it mopping out the tent in my flip flops, while flood water lapped dangerously close to my electric hook-up.

It could be worse though. Much worse. My line manager doesn’t bully me, I have an interesting job and a great view from the office (right now I am looking out at Solomon’s temple and a selection of slightly neurotic sheep who are probably wondering where all the big explosions keep coming from – more on that in a later blog).

Work-related stress is debilitating, both for the individuals that suffer from it, and the businesses for whom they work. It’s easy to visualise the circle: workplace doesn’t promote health and wellbeing, people get stressed, people go on sick leave, business loses money, business has less money to invest in people. And so on.  

Many organisations do show a commitment to the wellbeing of their employees, but their efforts are misguided, and end up failing to make a tangible difference. I had a conversation with a senior director in a large public sector company recently, one that employs thousands of people.  Wellbeing was high on the agenda: people were encouraged to cycle to work, and healthy food and fresh fruit was available in the canteen.  It made little difference to stress-levels. They found that people who like apples, eat more apples, and the people who cycle to work do so with slightly more vigour: if you are being bullied by your line manager and made to wait in line to be let in to the office, apples aren’t going to help, at least not in the way they were intended.  That’s not to say healthy eating and exercise aren’t important: far from it. Having a healthy body is part of the solution, something I tell myself every time I walk past an Indian takeaway. But it is only a part of the solution.

Work-related stress isn’t an easy problem to address. Most people work to live, rather than the other way around. Put your hands up if you’d come into work next week if your Euromillions numbers came up this Friday? Thought so.  Work can be tough, and at times stressful. If it wasn’t, we’d all be dancing round and whistling like Mary Poppins and having group hugs. Some pressure is okay, and when the pressure build into stress, most people can cope for a short time (mopping the tent out the first time was okay but by day three, I was a seething mass of anger). When it gets too much it can have a massive impact on business productivity.

According to PriceWaterHouseCooper, the overall annual cost of sickness absence to UK businesses is nearly £29billion per annum, a rise of £1billion over the last two years. This increase is the result of average sickness absence rates rising to 9.1days per employee, up 5% since 2011. Even more worrying, Government reports suggest that it’s the longer-term absences caused by stress and anxiety that have gone up, whereas short-term absences (‘Yeah, feeling much better thanks. Must have been a 24-hour thing. Huh, what tan?’) have gone down. Work-related stress accounts for about a third of this figure: £10bn a year. Reducing stress-related sickness absence by as little as 10% could save UK businesses by as much as £1billion every year. That’s a one and seven zeroes.  That’s a number worth having a go at. 

It can be done.

Our team of work psychologists worked with one of the UK’s leading oil and gas supplier to reduce sickness absence throughout their call-centre workforce. Okay, confession time: I’ve lost my patience with call-centre staff many times, although not the company above, thankfully. Usually when I’ve been put on hold and subjected to the psychological warfare of Vivaldi’s four seasons on endless loop, only to be interrupted before the good bits, to be told I’ve moved up in the queue and they’ll-get-to-me-just-as-soon-as-they-jolly-well-can-you-delicious-and-valued customer-you (but what number am I?!). I’ve ranted. I’ve been rude. I’ve put the phone down in utter shame when they tell me the reason it’s not working is because I haven’t got my internet router switched on (yes, it really did happen). It’s easy to forget that the person on the other end of the phone is human (even if reading from a script to weed out the idiots like me) and they have feelings. Multiply a call like mine by eight hours in the job, and it’s not a surprise to understand why they had issues.

We like a challenge at HSL.  It makes our scientists smile in a strange way. It’s one of the reasons the Government keep us on top of a hill in Buxton. We were asked to help reduce the levels of absenteeism in the call centre. And we did. How? We talked to people: managers, workers, and everyone in between. We found out what it was really like, not what the policies said. We looked at how work-related mental health was managed, and we made suggestions. People got excited. Someone was actually taking their individual health and wellbeing seriously. 

And it worked. Using a systematic and pragmatic approach, the company has reported an 11% reduction in stress-related sickness absence rates with not a green apple or a free lunchtime head massage in sight.

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 If you want more information on the management of stress in the workplace, you can access various toolkits at HSEs website here: http://www.hse.gov.uk/stress/standards/