Has work ever felt like dodging a storm of flying bricks and your job is just about trying not to get hit? This is Andrew Soren in today's episode of Meaningful Work Matters, I talk with Jordan Friesen, an occupational therapist and workplace mental health strategist,
about the connection between meaningful work and psychological health and safety. Jordan explains how today's workplaces are placing greater mental and emotional demands on employees and that's increasing the amount of stress and risk people are facing at work. We dive into this changing landscape. We look at Canada's national standard on psychological health and safety, as well as Australia's new
laws on psychosocial health. We also explore why psychological safety is the foundation upon which meaningful work should be built and how leaders can better support their teams and measure well being, which frankly, is just as important as implementing initiatives. If you're a leader, HR professional, or anyone looking to create a healthier, more meaningful workplace, this conversation is packed with actionable insights.
Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host Andrew Soren, founder of eudaimonic By Design. On this podcast we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating
the challenges of meaningful work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful and supports everyone's well being. Subscribe or follow us now and let's make Meaningful Work matter. Jordan Friesen welcome to Meaningful Work Matters. It is a pleasure to be able to have you on this podcast. Thanks Andrew. Pleasure to be here. I want to just jump right in. Maybe you can tell us a little bit
about who you are and also what makes your work meaningful. Who I am? Let me start there. I'm a native Manitoban and proud Winnipegger. I'm a husband and a father to an almost four year old daughter, Charlotte, and those are maybe the most important pieces of my identity. I'm an occupational therapist by trade,
so I'm a resident registered health professional here in the Province of Manitoba. The work that I do focuses exclusively on helping leaders and employers create mentally healthy or psychologically healthy workplaces for their people. I've been doing that for about five years on my own and previously spent a chunk of time with the Canadian Mental Health Association, Canada's largest mental health charity. And what makes my work
meaningful? Well, there's many things I think first and foremost I have my own experience of living with and recovering from a major depressive episode and sort of ongoing symptoms of major depressive disorder. So the cause and the issue in of itself is something that's of personal importance to me, something that's impacted my family as well. So that's piece of meaning, number one, is that it ties directly
to an experience I've had in life. And then I think the meaningful piece number two is just that I see workplaces as one of those environments where there's so much opportunity to influence positive well being. Given the amount of time we spend at work for the course of our lives, something like 80,000 hours in our careers, a massive amount of time. It's one of those settings where from a population health approach, I just think there's so much opportunity to
make meaningful change in people's lives. And I think that drive towards settings based approaches or systems based change comes from some of my early experience in my career. And for the first couple years of my career as an ot, I actually worked with young men recovering from psychotic disorders. And so I worked in frontline clinical
care delivery. And, and what I quickly found out was that the system of support that was supposed to be there to support these young men that I cared deeply about wasn't really there, wasn't really a system and wasn't really benefiting them. And so from there I think for me it was a drive towards more systems based approaches, more systems based work, which is
obviously what led me to the Canadian Mental Health association. And then again, this realization that workplaces provide such an amazing opportunity to help people have meaningful lives just because of how much time we spend at work. Thank you for that story. It's really, really helpful to be able to hear the whole entire spectrum of that from personal experience to also thinking about systems. There's a lot about the way that you, you frame all of that that resonates a lot.
It's always interesting to me that so much of our work, especially kind of the, the work that revolves around trying to answer complex questions often starts from research trying to deconstruct what has maybe happened often not terribly well in our lives or potentially deconstruct what has happened really well. But that's, that's exactly it. And I think the other, the other flavor that I'll, I'll share is that actually before I decided to become an occupational therapist, I was actually
going to be a rocket scientist. And so I was actually, I was studying aerospace engineering, learning how to plot orbits into space when that, that first major depressive episode hit in my life. And so what attracted me to that as a career path was the complexity of problems that I got to solve. And I think what's really true about the work that I do now is that I'm still
helping solve incredibly complex problems. They're just human based problems, you know, instead of, you know, figuring out how much rocket fuel gets a satellite into orbit. Right. An amazing thing. And it's such a truth, right, that humans are one of the most complex organisms, you know, around that we have. To be able to study. And so, you know, the thinking about human problems is incredibly complex, especially when you start mixing humans together, which is what happens as
soon as you get into a workplace. That's exactly what it is. All, all work environments are a collection of human beings trying, trying to relate to one another. That's it. Well, I'm, there's a, there's so many different roads that we're going to go through in this conversation, but let's just start at the top. Let's start with like when I know that you focus on workplace mental health and safety. What does that mean? Well, it probably means
different things depending on who you ask. But the way I like to think about it in general is how can we prevent work from adding unnecessary stress to our lives and then by extension, when life is adding unnecessary stress to our life, how can work be a place of safety, comfort, support, sort of that safe haven when everything else in life is going wrong. And the analogy I often use, and many people have used, heard me use it,
is of a construction site. And in any construction site, when you walk on the job, the first thing you need to do is put on your personal protective equipment, your hard hat, your steel toe boots. But if you imagine a construction site where at random intervals throughout the day, a supervisor would start randomly kicking bricks down onto the floor below. Not hard to imagine that doesn't matter how great your hard
hat is, somebody's going to get hurt eventually. And so the approach that I look at with organizations is how can we make sure that, number one, your people have appropriate hard hats, right? The appropriate personal protective equipment they need for their brain health, for their mental health,
for their well being. But then more importantly, once we've got that in place, let's take a look up three floors and find out where those bricks are dropping, who's dropping them, and whether or not we even know that they're being dropped. That's the better way to think about it. For organizations, that's where
the huge advantage comes in. Thinking about how work is designed, how work is carried out in ways that are actually good for our mental health, that don't add that unnecessary stress, that aren't dropping bricks on our heads every day. It seems like this topic has gotten really big, certainly a lot of attention. Does that mean that there's more bricks being dropped these days? Well, potentially, if we think back to the work of the early industrial revolution,
work was in many ways simpler. Think about an assembly line, the primary brick that could drop on you. There is just pace of work, frankly. But now the work that we do as humans is more complex, it's more brain based, it's more interpersonal, it requires more collaboration, it requires more problem solving. And so when, when the work that we're doing is that much more complex, the types of bricks that can
fall are certainly more diverse. And so bricks that maybe we see falling now that perhaps, maybe wouldn't have fallen years ago or things like poor communication or poor change management, stuff that in large organizations maybe didn't need to think so much about
40, 50 years ago. And I think the other reason that it's become such an important topic, well, there's a few, but I think businesses are really starting to realize the connection between the mental health or well being of their people and the productivity that they see in their work environment. And there's fairly unequivocal research on that connection. From an academic perspective, employers are often hard to reach with sort of peer reviewed evidence in a way that really resonates
with them. The other thing I think employers are seeing is a bit of a pain point, particularly in their younger workers. In that coming out of COVID where all of our mental health collectively took a hit, has continued to be challenging. More workers are at risk for. Or. Mental health or mental illnesses or psychological injuries, whatever term you want to attach to it. And I
think they're also more vocal about that risk. I'm thinking about our youngest generation and generations of workers in particular, where a conversation about mental health is no longer taboo. In fact, it's an expectation within the work environment and they're letting their employers know very loudly and clearly what those bricks are and that they don't like them falling
on their heads. So it's becoming a pain point I think for a lot of companies in the attraction retention of this youngest generation of workers as well as they're just seeing more problems crop up, they're seeing more things like disability leave, they're seeing more things like people struggling in the work environment and leaders in particular, not really sure how to deal with these things because they've maybe never had
to before. Just yesterday I got an email from Gallup about some of the top reasons for employees taking opportunities or potentially leading opportunities. So specifically this was US Data. Like what is the number one thing that attracts employees to new opportunities? And the number one, 59% reporting very important
was greater work life balance and better personal well being. It has been a dramatic reset and, and the one figure I like to share that sort of builds on that, admittedly not from a sample as large as Gallup has pulled and maintains, but a firm called ukg, sort of an international benefits consultancy, they did a market survey back in 2023. There's about 5,000 employees all over the world. And they asked them, among many other
questions, who has the most impact on your mental health? And they listed a bunch of options like your spouse or your family or your doctor or your therapist or your counselor and of course your cowork workers and your boss, sort of all domains of life. And the top two tied were spouse, partner, significant other, and your
immediate supervisor or boss. And so again, it just builds on that case and many managers are terrified when I share this with them, that you might have as much impact on your employees sense of personal well being as the most significant relationships in their life. And so I think triggers for them a need for a different set of skills as a leader. And Andrew,
you're smiling. So there's a thought there. This idea that my boss and my spouse are kind of the two most important, like emotional influences in my life is. It's real. It's real. I think for any of us that have had a boss and have had a spouse, partner, significant other, if we actually think about it, it's true. Like who are, if you think about, if you're getting together with your
friends, right. Maybe it's a Friday night or where, whatever. Like who are the two people that you are most likely to complain about? It's great. It's great. I wish that, I wish that we could maybe choose our bosses in the same way that we chose spouses. That life work would certainly be very different. Work would be very different. But I think though, what you're seeing and you mentioned that Gallup data is people are actually choosing their bosses. Right?
Right. And they're, they're, they're choosing the ones they don't want and they're trying to find new different or better ones at a different company. Right. And, and they're, you know, people are maybe leaving a job or leaving a Company. But let's, let's be real here. Like, at the end of the day, they're leaving their boss. And, and, and again, that's the, the biggest contributor to whether someone stays is if they have that supportive, caring leader.
So people are actually already choosing their bosses, but they're usually. They're choosing by leaving. They're choosing by leaving. Exactly. Well, we'll come back to that. We'll especially come back to this question of
bosses and what they can do right and wrong. But before we do, you know, even in talking about that Gallup data, I said people, you know, people are choosing work life balance and well being and well being and mental health, like mental health and safety, are, you know, maybe different things. So how do you think about the relationship between those two things? Well, admittedly they're in the general populist understanding of those terms. They're muddy.
They're in many ways almost used interchangeably from a mental health perspective. I think about mental health as a continuum from sort of ideally healthy and balanced to acutely and diagnosably ill. The other way to think about it, I know more from a positive psychology slant would be languishing to flourishing. And I'm also
very comfortable using that terminology as well. You know, wellbeing in my mind is, you know, in either case, that feeling of positive mental health or that feeling of, you know, connection, contribution, meaning, purpose, vitality, as well as that movement up from languishing to flourishing. And so Corey Keys has, you know, a dual continua which I think is really helpful to paint that difference. That said, most employers aren't necessarily concerned with that level of
academic rigor or detail in it. What they want, basically, if I could, if I could sort of consolidate what most employers think when they think about mental health, well being, psychological safety, they want employees that are happy to come to work engaged, productive, and that when they leave work, they have energy for the other important parts of their life.
And so, and whether we call that well being or whether we call that mental health, at the end of the day, that's the outcome employers are looking for. And so I'm very happy to use the language that resonates with them and obviously correct the language, that's completely inaccurate. But that's really, I think, what employers are looking for. I think that's great. I'm just gonna,
I'm gonna add a layer about model, which I think is terrific. And if anybody's listening to this, Corey Keith has just published a wonderful book that's called Languaging which he thinks is actually one of the biggest challenges that we face from a mental health and a well being perspective. But just this dual continuum model is a really interesting model. And one way to think about it is we have different kinds
of stress in our lives and there's different language. I could call it mental illness, or in this case I'm going to call it just stress or challenge that exists in our life. And then we have potential resources. Again, we could call it mental health, or we could just call it well being resources. And so if you plot resources, mental health resources, or wellbeing resources against how much challenge you have, you get a bit of a two by two. And you know, if you have very little challenge and
a whole lot of resource, you might be flourishing. And if you have a whole lot of challenge and very little resource, you're probably suffering. But those aren't the only two options. You have very little resource and very little and very little challenge in what Corey would describe as languishing, which is the feeling that many, you know, described feeling during the pandemic where nothing was fundamentally wrong, but nothing was fundamentally
right either. Yeah. And then you have another quadrant which is, you know, a tremendous amount of challenge, but also a tremendous amount of resource to be able to deal with that challenge. And, and the data shows Michelle McQuaid has done a lot of good, you know, research around organizations and trying to understand within organizations, where do people fall in those four boxes?
And the vast majority fall either into the, you know, languishing quadrant or the struggling with challenge, like thriving in their challenge kind of quadrant, you know, those, those not, not in necessarily the flourishing or suffering quadrants, which is just interesting for us to think a little more, bit more complexity about it. It's a little bit more of the aerospace
science. Exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes. Well, you know, while, while I know a lot of people love a dichotomy, the two by two is probably more likely where we live and, and probably even the 3 by 3 or 2 by 2 by 2. Right. Like there's complexity to it. And every model, every way we try to simplify it is incorrect in some way, but helpful in another. You got it. What do you think is the relationship between meaning
and psychological safety? Well, I think meaning would be one of those things that across the peers that I generally work with would be considered to be a positive or protective factor for mental health and well being in the workplace. And so obviously, if you have a workplace or a job or a role that gives meaning to your life, that's generally A positive thing for your well being,
it moves you up towards flourishing. That said, we know though that, you know, meaning in the absence of or in, in the presence of a million other falling bricks is not enough to keep you well. And so I like to think of it, you know, as in a work environment, you know, before you can really capitalize on the benefit of people finding meaning and purpose and value in their work, you actually need to set a baseline foundation of
safety. So you, you need to generally stop most of the bricks from falling on people's heads before meaning can turn into a really positive thing. Otherwise, the risk is that meaning and purpose and drive or personal values, alignment with your work can lead some more challenging consequences. Right. If we think about, for example, people in healthcare that derive likely a lot of meaning and purpose and value from the core of what is supposed to be their job of healing people and keeping people
well. But then you, you pile on bricks. Like. Excessive work hours, you know, incivility or poor sense of psychological safety within their team, you know, continuous funding cuts, lack of control or autonom me over how and when they work. At that point, meaning is no longer a helpful thing. In many cases that meaning, purpose and value or drive to do that work can contribute to things like burnout or emotional distress in the
work environment. So that's the double edged sword is from where I sit, meaning is great and it's very beneficial and it's a positive thing to find in your work as long as the other aspects of your work aren't, aren't actively damaging your well being. Listeners to this podcast might remember an episode with Scott Barry Kaufman. Scott studied Maslow, kind of looked at all
of Maslow's work around the hierarchy of needs. And you know, Maslow never actually intended for there to be a pyramid that was actually managed by consultants who decided that it was a pyramid. A better kind of analogy that Scott uses is to think about it like a boat. And so those safety and security needs, kind of like the hull of the boat, they're the thing that you sit with, right. And the, the meaning or growth or relational self actualization, kind of like the sale perhaps, or sails that
you can raise and lower depending on the conditions. But you know, just like what you're describing, if somebody's sitting on top of the, you know, top of the sail and throwing bricks down into the holes in the hole. Exactly, you're not going to be going like all you're going to be doing is spending time trying to figure out how do I fill those Holes. And, and if you're, you know, trying to do that and holding on to a giant mast of meaning, you're going drown pretty quickly.
That's actually a perfect analogy. I might borrow that one. So you talked earlier about systems. And so one of the biggest influences on systems of government and both of us are in Canada. And one of the things that I know that you have spent a lot of time with is the national standard for Canada around psychological health and safety in the workplace. So can you just tell us a little bit about what that is?
Yeah, for sure. For those that aren't familiar, Canada is the first country in the world actually to develop a national guiding standard on psychological health and safety. Or in other jurisdictions it might be referred to as psychosocial safety or psychosocial health and safety. But essentially a standard that describes a safety management system for the well being or mental health of employees. There's a CSA standard, you can find it online, it's free.
It's a voluntary standard at this point and it was developed in 2013. And the basic premise of the standard is just like you have a safety management system for physical risks in your workplace, where you identify the risk, you find some way to mitigate it, you evaluate whether it's working and you continue to engage your workers in that process. Same thing for psychosocial risks. Those would be the bricks. And so Canada is the first country to develop a standard like
this. It's been used as a model for a global ISO guideline and it's been used to influence other jurisdictions around the world, in particular Australia, which has legislated psychosocial safety within every workplace over a certain small size, I believe. So in Canada. This document, I think has served as a strong signal to employers or policymakers.
That said, I think there are challenges in uptake of every voluntary standard, especially a standard that has a dual purpose of both protecting as well as promoting worker health. It's very easy to legislate or regulate the protection of worker health. It's a little bit trickier to legislate the promotion of health at work, but that's what the standard is here in Canada.
So it's that safety plan do check act just applied to a different set of risks and encouraging employers to develop that management system for those risks. How would you describe adoption rates in the country? Well, it's difficult to track, again because it's voluntary. Anecdotally, from my experience working with clients all across Canada, I would say poor. Like in terms of actual adoption. The word that I like to Use and employers feel more comfortable with is alignment because
it is a voluntary standard. And so I would say there are still the majority of employers that have no idea what the standard is. But I actually don't know if that's a problem at the moment. A standard is a technical document. A standard in and of itself doesn't necessarily describe the outcomes that could be achieved from it or the outcomes that an employer might want to achieve from it. So I'm not so concerned about the adoption of it.
I'm concerned about whether employers understand what best practice in mental health in the workplace is. And so, you know, the, the, I would say the, the typical approach to mental health or well being in the workplace is just to give people more hard hats. Right. Why don't you just be more resilient? We'll give you some skills to be resilient. And, and I could go on a soapbox about the word resilience. I won't do that right
now. But, but really it's a document that just describes that shift from hard hats to bricks. So I think I'm not so concerned whether employers look at and intimately know the details of that document. It's something that I need to know and be familiar with as I guide them towards alignment with those best practices. But the ultimate goal is that I could work with an employer for five to 10 years and guide them towards all those best practices. And then in 10 years time we could
take a look at that standard and be like, hey, here's this thing. Guess what? You can check all these boxes. It's useful to send a signal, less useful in practice just because it is an overwhelmingly technical document that has no legislative or regulatory force
behind it. I'm curious to go to Australia to just compare and contrast because I know that their regulations have come out like very, very recently, I guess six months or so, pretty substantial changes that have regulated people to use, you know, a variation on a. Them. Um, what stories have you heard from Australia in terms of how it's going? Yeah, so, so the, the legislation of psychosocial safety in Australia actually began back in 2021.
So it's been a few years in now and it's sort of gone kind of jurisdiction by jurisdiction. Australia there was one holdout that actually I believe just earlier this month passed legislation now. So everywhere in Australia it is in fact the law and some of the drivers for Australia was just how mental
injuries in the workplace were affecting their economy. So large disability related costs, large productivity costs and employers were beginning to realize it and See, some of the challenges associated with is interesting even in the first year or so. I think what's encouraging is that actually you saw a lot of news of employers being fined and we're not talking slap on the wrist fines, we're talking multimillion dollar fines for not having these systems in place and it resulting in injury.
So I think legislation and regulation is probably one of the levers that's in this case most effective. Is it most likely to. To gain positive favor with employers? No, probably not. But it seems to be having some success in Australia. Time will tell and give it another five years and we can look at the data and see. But their primary targets from what I understand were productivity as well as reducing disability related costs and seems to be moving them
in the right direction. The group that essentially pushed this though was actually a mix of both sort of nonprofit sort of mental health groups and charities as well as large employers. And so it was largely an employer driven initiative, which I think helps the standard here in Canada was an employer driven to an extent, but obviously also labor driven. And so it has a different flavor to it and a different
but just for its use. Are there other places in the world that you see as, you know, particularly positively deviant when it comes to trying to figure out how to do this? Positively deviant. I love it. The classically positively deviant country of B actually France, which has actually had since 2007 protection for psychological health built into their labor regulations
and legislation. I would also, you know, outside of the legislative arm, I would also look to a lot of countries in Europe or Scandinavian countries, for example, that just have different philosophies over work and its impact or it's the place it fills in our life. I'd see those as positively deviant as well. And again, data suggests happiness and quality of life and all sorts of things that when you put work in balance and when you purpose, productivity and balance actually
leave space for a lot of other really good things to happen. Those Scandinavian countries, those Scandinavians. I know, right. The saunas and, and the work life. Like I iga, you know, it's great. I know, right. So in, in the positively deviant, we'll keep using that term. One of my favorites organizations that you've gotten to partner with, what does like really good practice look like in
terms of implementation of some of these things? One large national retailer that I've had the opportunity to work with, they've had a quote unquote mental health and well being strategy in place in their organization for many years Largely HR driven, largely benefits driven, you know, training, education, lunch and learns and seminars and professional development and all that stuff.
And they recently made a shift, this is probably about a year and a half ago, their entire mental health strategy was going to stop focusing on that and they were actually going to be focusing instead on troubleshooting and problem solving risks across different areas of their business.
And so if you can imagine the risks in, if we think retail, the risks in a loss prevention team, the people in the stores preventing theft or preventing crime from happening in the stores, much different from the risks that someone might experience in a warehouse or shipping
environment. And so an interesting example of where instead of trying to blanket something across an entire organization, they're actually individual, individualizing their approach to every different kind of work that occurs within their business and across retail. That's a lot of different kinds of work. So that's really cool. So I think employers that take away that blanket approach and move towards more bespoke or tailored actions really tied to the problems that each area
of work is having is important. Another organization I work with, a large accounting and consulting firm, they've actually done a good job of engaging employee networks across their organization to identify what are the pressing mental health needs in Calgary versus Montreal. What are the pressing mental health needs for employees who identify as indigenous or employees who are from a marginalized population.
And so again, the more bespoke or specific you can get to different needs of different groups, the better. Another organization I'm working with has actually prioritized training and training for management. And if we look at World Health Organization guidelines that were released in 22, 2024, I think actually just recently, training for managers and supervisors is one of the only recommendations that, that they could A endorse and B
endorse with a sufficient level of evidence. So to say that giving managers and leaders the tools to be able to recognize when an employee might be struggling with some aspect of their mental health or well being, to intervene appropriately and to connect them to the right resources and supports that specific, that kind of training, that skill is one of the best practices that I do see.
In particular, one organization I'm working with leaning into making it mandatory across a company, but also more organizations adopting it as a best practice. So again, coming back to this idea that you know your manager leader is, has a big impact on your mental health, they also have a big opportunity to notice when you might be struggling and to actually provide the right kind of support. What would you say you're doing if you're Trying to build capability and skill set behaviorally
within managers. So the basic sort of notice, ask and connect is, you know, one specific set of behaviors that managers should know how to do. But if we're looking for other, I would say, common actions that managers can be focusing on that create a positive working environment for people's brains. A few that I always come back to, number one is always
feedback. There's a lot of managers and leaders everywhere that shy away from it, deliver it in ways that are unproductive, and you may be familiar with radical candor and fall into this ruinous empathy category where I care about you. And so I assume that if I care about you, I can't actually give you difficult feedback or I can't have a tough conversation with
you. And that's exactly the opposite. And I remember talking with one manager about this, and he happened to share that when he started in a management role, he was down a few team members. And so his approach was to be very rah, rah, very encouraging, lots of positive affirmation and avoiding any sort of criticism or challenging feedback because he just really wanted these other people to stick around. And he said, it's really funny. A year later, they'd all left.
And when he asked them, when they asked, why are you leaving? They said, well, it's because my manager doesn't give me any feedback. There's no opportunity to grow here. Love it. And so really actually just completely bit him in the butt. Feedback, both giving and then also receiving. I would say that as a leader at any level, the one thing you can start doing that's going to radically start to shift the relationships that you have with the people that you lead is asking for feedback.
Asking for feedback and opening yourself up to some form of vulnerability. Whether it's feedback about how you're leading or managing, whether it's feedback about an idea that you have, that simple, radical act of just simply asking for feedback, listening to it and being able to respond productively to it can drastically change so many relationships and even the culture within a team. So feedback, something that we often focus on as well as I would say, what empathy
looks like and sounds like in action. And I often ask leaders to think about, you know, either a toddler that's theirs or a toddler that they have in their life somewhere, right? And most of us have had some experience with a young child. I have one right now, so it's maybe just an acute reminder for me. But when toddlers are a toddler, their emotional range is quite limited. And it's very stochastic. So it's, you know, I'm happy or I'm angry or
I'm sad or I need a snack. Right. Like, it's very limited and it's sort of 90 degree perpendicular angles, every one of them. Right. As we grow up and we get older, we develop a much more nuanced sense of all the things that we're feeling and all those emotions inside of us. And we understand that I'm not just angry, maybe I'm upset and not just sad, maybe I'm discontent
and all of the different shades of color in between. And we developed this beautiful understanding of all of the emotional capabilities inside of us and inside of others. And then we get to a workplace and for some reason we're told, no, just forget about that. And if I were to ask any of you the three most common responses to how are you today? It would be fine. Good. Okay. Stressed and hangry or need a snack is probably still on the
list. Right. So we revert back to toddlers. So actually, helping leaders just simply start by paying attention to the things that they're feeling, and being comfortable putting words to it enables them to be able to do that better with other people. And when I talk about empathy, it certainly starts with an emotional understanding of yourself. You can't develop an emotional understanding of
someone else without your own. But I often emphasize that empathy is not just this cognitive or emotional activity that occurs inside of us. Empathy. And I'll say very bluntly to them, empathy is a, is a communication tactic or a communication
technique. Right. Empathy is a way of communicating. And so I focus for leaders on helping them communicate empathy, saying that if you haven't communicated your understanding of how someone's feeling or how they're doing or what's affecting them, you actually haven't demonstrated empathy in any meaningful way. And so you actually need to be okay with saying words like you sound very upset right now, or you sound very overwhelmed, or it sounds like that's making you very angry
or whatever the word might be. But actually being comfortable using those yucky, icky toddler emotion words right in, in the workplace is another sort of behavioral thing that often focus on with managers. And I'll literally spend time with them. I'll literally spend time with them having them write down every synonym they can think of for angry. And then we'll literally just say them out loud because they will
have never uttered them out loud in a workplace. There's so much power in emotional vocabulary, and there's some really Wonderful apps that are out there and tools, mood meters. But Yale has this really incredible how we Feel app out there. If you're ever looking at kind of boosting your emotional intelligence or your emotional vocabulary, it's a great way of creating nuance. Exactly. And I often say emotional intelligence is great, but for most leaders, emotional literacy is
often the starting point. We move in the direction of the things that we measure. So how are you seeing organizations really measure psychological health and safety? Well, so the funny thing is I'm actually not. And that's maybe not surprising in Canada anyway, because as soon as an organization measures it, then there's some accountability for it. Right, right. And although in principle it's great, organizations are at the point
where they want to do the right thing, but. But if they're not doing perfectly the right thing, or maybe they don't want to be held accountable for it. Right. Like so. So I'm actually not seeing a lot of organizations do meaningful measurement of anything they're doing with regards to psychological health and safety or mental health, which is, which is an ongoing challenge in the work that I do. And, and I'll maybe sort of wax sort of political or philosophical for a
second to say, you know, it's. It's been fine for the last, you know, 10 to 12 years doing this kind of work in your company because you just simply believe it's the right thing to do. And for most organizations, that's exactly the motive. I had a general manager for a consumer packaged goods company last year here in Canada, and when I sort of approached him with kind of this ROI based argument, he said, honestly, I don't care.
You know, this would have to be, you know, we have to be spending, you know, 10 to 100 times to bother me with a return on value investment. This is just the right thing to do. Which sounds really good at face value. The challenge is when, you know, the political or cultural winds start to change, where if we think about everything happening to our neighbors down south, Right.
And potentially the shift that could happen in Canada, it tends to bleed up here, is that if you haven't been measuring it, you haven't been demonstrating value in the work, then it's going to be very easy to say that, well, clearly now this does doesn't matter.
So, you know, the ways that I suggest employers start to measure it, you know, would be, I mean, it's hard to isolate in and of itself, but the difference between that incremental spending, like what more do you start spending on mental health or well being and that's through benefits or training or maybe it's just through how you redesign work or how you restructure roles. Like what's that incremental spend and then what's that saving
you people cost on the background? And that could look like, you know, absenteeism. It could look like, like, could look like disability cost savings, could look like benefit cost savings in many different ways. But those would be the like sort of the easiest way to get started, right. Is what are you additionally incrementally spending and you know, down the line a year or two from now, what does that turn, turn into in terms of cost savings on the people side of your business?
You know, alternatively, it would be great to be measuring, you know, differences in productivity and output. Output which would I think add to the other piece of it as well. The problem is none of these variables you can isolate from a mental health perspective. Right. So that's where I think the data that I've seen start to really move decision makers is more story driven or anecdotal. Talking about an employee that was struggling, the support they received, how it helped and how it meant they
were able to stay at work, stay engaged, stay productive, stay healthy. The, you know, starting to look at and gather some of those stories and actually enabling some of that vulnerable storytelling within organizations is one less quantitative way to gauge some impact. I completely agree. I will say I was just having a conversation with some colleagues at DHL and I will name them because I think that they're doing
really, really extraordinary work. And they said they gave me permission to be able to just call out the fact that they were doing this really good work. But they've started throughout kind of the whole Americas to, to measure how people are doing. They have an are
we okay? Are you okay? Survey that has, that has actually had tremendous impact already in terms of getting a real sense from people as to how they're doing, how they, how they perceive themselves doing, and also some more objective kind of comparison points of, of whether they are actually doing different kinds of things behaviorally then using that as a way of trying to figure out at a very local level, you know, what they can be doing to
support and to help. And it's been so impactful that I think that they want to be able to try to roll it out globally, which is extraordinary, amazing, helpful to be able to have some examples of what good can look like. But we need more. We do. I think the challenge that I come up with to that sort of approach with most employers is that is that they'll assume that the bulk of why somebody might not be feeling okay is because of stuff that's outside of the work environment.
And that could in fact be true. There are a lot of reasons why even, you know, Andrew, you and I might be feeling simply okay today that have nothing to do with the work that we're doing. At the same time, I think employers need to recognize that even if it's something unrelated to work, if it's a caregiver issue, if it's a child issue, if it's personal financial issue, there is considerable benefit to them supporting an employee to deal with it effectively.
And the benefit is always to an employer. Always. And so I agree. I mean, it sounds like an awesome example. And if more organizations start to take that approach, I think we'd be moving in the right direction. What advice would you give to an organization just kind of starting out on this journey, wanting to take kind of workplace mental health and safety a little bit more seriously?
A few practical things. Number one, I'd like to say that a little bit of education on the topic does go a long way and not in so much as like, here's how to be resilient. But having people in your work environment with a fundamental understanding of what mental health or wellbeing is, how it intersects with work, is a good and reasonable starting point. You need to have that so that everyone kind of understands why you're doing
the things that you're doing. But then the other really practical thing that I'll share with employers is that outside of all of the jargon and the best practices, the. But the basic thing that you need to get good at is asking and listening to what your employees have to say about how work is impacting them. That's it. So like we can talk for hours about what best practice looks like, but at a fundamental level, you just need to get really good at
listening to your people. That's it. And if you do that, so much of what is best practice just falls into place naturally. So like just get good at listening to your people and doing something with what they tell you. That is, that's really, really good advice. There's one of the most famous resilience researchers often talks about resilience as ordinary magic. It's stuff that we all know we just don't do it right. Like that's how to talk to people. Very magic things.
Jordan. This has been an extraordinary, wonderful, eye opening conversation. Your capacity to be able to simplify an immense amount of complexity of human beings is inspiring. And also so useful. If people want to know more about your work or how to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do it? There's a few ways you can certainly find me online. LinkedIn would be the best you can search Jordan m. Friesen on LinkedIn should get me right there.
You can also find me on our website mindsetstrategy ca. We will make sure that all of those links are in the show notes for this episode. Jordan thank you so much for your time today. It has been pleasure. Thank you Andrew. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Meaningful Work Matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform and if this episode resonated with you, please take
a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps us make this podcast better and reach more listeners. You can connect with me, Andrew Sorin on LinkedIn or visit www.eubd.ca to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making Meaningful Work matter. See you next.