Real leaders leave a legacy. They capture the hearts and minds of their teams. Their origin story puts the safety and well-being of their people first. Great companies ubiquitously have safe yet productive operations. For those companies, safety is an investment, not a cost. For the C-suite, it’s a real topic of daily focus. This is the Safety Guru with your host, Eric Michrowski, a globally recognized ops and safety guru, public speaker and author. Are you ready to leave a safety legacy? Your legacy success story begins now.

Hi and welcome to the Safety Guru. Today I’m very excited to have with me a special guest, Beverly Beuermann-King. She’s a mental health and corporate culture expert joining us as we celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month. So, Beverly, welcome to the show. Very excited to have you with me.

Wonderful. Thank you, Eric.

So maybe let’s get started with how did you get into this space? How did you start approaching this space around mental health and corporate culture?

It was a roundabout kind of journey, I think. So, I started running a residence for Sheridan College and within that, you know, dealing with stress of students and being away from home and having to buy their own food and manage their money. And many students were at risk, I would say. And so that piqued my interest and developing some programs to help them move forward. And then I started with the Canadian Mental Health association and that was an amazing experience because at that time I was presenting programs to frontline workers on mental health and mental illness and how to help the most vulnerable in our populations. So it was, it was, it was a good start because it gave me a feeling for not just how to deal with stress as the frontline workers, but also how to deal with people who were really struggling with mental illness issues, which then kind of propelled me into being able to do this in a corporate setting.

There we go. And obviously we’re looking at mental health, incredibly important, huge connection as well to physical safety in the workplace. But first, I want to get into a topic that we hear a lot in the news around burnout. And can you get to some of the themes in terms of what contributes to high burnout in individuals in workplaces?

Yes. So, for me, burnout is about losing your fire, losing your spark. So, it’s more than just being tired out and worn out. The essence of who you are is being taken away. And so, when we look at what are some of those contributors, because it is a workplace issue, it’s, you know, often we’ll talk about burnout in like a general context of being tired out and worn-out, burned-out kind of thing. But in a. It is a workplace issue. And so, we need to address some of those top contributors. Work overload. Too much to do, not enough time to do it in, which is a common theme, I think. But I think the other pieces that go with that is not having control. So, a lack of control is part of that. Lack of recognition is part of that. Not having a support circle around you contributes to that. And in some cases, you know, we look at, are you the right person in the right job right now?

Sure.

And so sometimes, you know, we look at maybe we were, and the job has changed, or the culture has changed and it’s not a good fit anymore. I use a slide when I’m working with audiences and its high demand plus low control equals high stress. And so, we think about situations where people are under high demand, where there’s a lot on their plate, but not necessarily a lot of control over what they do. That’s a recipe for high stress, which can lead to burnout, it can lead to depression, it can lead to anxiety issues. The other one is, you know, high effort plus low reward. Okay, so when we have a lot of physical effort or a lot of mental effort, but without a lot of recognition around an appreciation for what we do and what we contribute to it, again, that can lead to high stress.

And that recognition, correct me if I’m wrong, could also be. So, I’m thinking about somebody who’s doing physical work, maybe building something. It could also be the seeing the fruit of your labor. Or does it need to be direct recognition from your leader?

It doesn’t necessarily need. I think it’s about being proud of the job that you’re doing and that it’s contributing to the overall goals of the organization. So, it doesn’t necessarily need somebody to say thank you. But if you can see how as a team you’re progressing or how as an individual you contributed to that and then that’s celebrated as an accomplishment. Because recognition isn’t necessarily about an increase in pay. It’s about the pleases and the thank you and, and the camaraderie that goes with it and the many wins along the way.

And I think I like that because you are really. Yes, the recognition from your leader is important, but also the connection between what I’m trying to accomplish and some of those pieces in terms of seeing those milestones. I remember some studies several years back just even showing that people working on very long term projects, if they didn’t see the fruit of their labor for a long period of time, There was impacts on efficiency and overall morale, but teams, I saw very quickly, even progress, small changes, small improvements, felt a lot more recognition as well in that regard.

And I think as a leader, that’s an important part of your role, is to help people to see those wins. Because most projects are long term. Right. And you take, you know, a lot of effort along the way. And so what are the milestones that you’re trying to hit and making sure that you’re taking a moment to celebrate it? Because most of us, you know, we get to the end of that project, we move right on to the next project. Maybe there’s three or four projects going on at a time, and we never actually look backwards to see how far we’ve progressed along the way.  

And so, you get into the, the element of burnout. You also talk about some of the essential needs that we have, which you’ve started already talking about. So, tell me a little bit about those essential needs that we all need to have in the work that we perform.

Yeah, it’s, it’s great. You know, as leaders, understanding what your teams need in order to be engaged helps you to be a better leader, helps your team to be more productive, helps your team to stay safer. It’s, it’s all of these things. Right. And so, number one is actually respect and appreciation. If we look at all of the needs, it’s being recognized for your time, your energy, your contribution, the wins that we talked about along the way. But then there’s a whole bunch of other things. So, knowing what’s expected.

Sure.

You know, we talk about how do we make decisions and how do we, you know, proceed when we’re working in these projects? Well, we need to know what’s expected from us, and it needs to be clarified, and it needs to be expanded upon because often we’ll just, you know, we assume that the other person understands. Right, right. The ability to speak up, which I think is a huge piece when we talk about psychological safety as well as physical safety. When you don’t feel like you are in a safe situation, are you able to speak up or is it frowned upon or are you punished in some sort of way? Speaking up. So that ability to speak up, to say that you don’t understand, that you don’t know, that you can’t handle it right now, that there’s too much on your plate, that you need help, all those pieces with that, the freedom from hostility. And so, we talk a lot about what is the environment like? Is it full of harassment and discrimination? Is it an environment where, you know, you get the brunt. I look at a customer service piece, nobody opens them up going, oh, my gosh, I really like whatever this thing is.

People phone up and complain. The IT department, nobody says, oh, my computer is working so well. I’m so thankful. Right? And so even, you know, that hostility is okay. So maybe that is part of the job. How do you get rid of it? Right? And so, I think of the roads department, nobody’s talking about how well they did in cleaning, you know, the snow away and all of that other kind of stuff. But how do you help them to see, yes, they’re doing a good job. And how do you help them get rid of some of that hostility when it does occur? A sense of belonging. We used to call that one of the soft skills of leadership. You know, the team building stuff. It’s, it’s a bit of a, you know, it’s a waste of time. We could do it just because, you know, somebody told us we had to. But we now know how incredibly important that is for people to be resilient, that they have people that they can count on, that they’re connected to, that they share values with, that they can partner with and ask for help from. And so, it’s not just about a social nicety.

It’s an essential need as far as being able to keep people safe. See, where am I? Leadership support. That’s a big one. They need to know that you care. Not that you, you know, that you need to be best friends, but they need to know that you are aware of the situations that they’re in and the workload that they have, that you. You see them as more than just a number, right? An employee number and understand what makes them tick and what is valuable to them, the resources to do the job. Again, I think this is a huge one when it comes to safety because we’ve seen it where people are expected to work in maybe dangerous situations or unsafe situations, but they don’t have the tools to make sure that they stay safe in a workplace? It may not have anything even to do with safety. I had one team where they were frustrated over not having things like staplers and, you know, because nobody, you know, whose responsibility was it to go get that stuff, right? Like, it was just unclear kind of red tape that was associated with it. People generally want to do a good job, so if you give them the tools, they’re more likely to be able to do that.

The last couple, you know, I talked about the ability to bring their talents to the Table. You know, what, what makes them tick, what do they like, what maybe they’re great at planning? Are you using their talents to the best of their abilities? And let’s see, where am I? Nine would be calm. They want moments of calm, which is hard to do in today’s workplace because it’s full of chaos and full of uncertainty. And so, when we talk about periods of calm, not hours, but sometimes just the ability to step away or to take care of yourself or to close your eyes or to take lunch and take your breaks. Right. It’s all part of that, taking it from way up high to, to a level that’s manageable. And then the last one that I have is hope. And I talk about strategic in the work that I do. And it’s, it’s not whimsical, airy, fairy kinds of things. It’s about, for me, hope is about having a vision of where we’re going. It’s about having the energy to get where we’re going, and it’s about being able to problem solve when things stop us from getting to where we’re going.

Right. So, it’s about that flexibility and creativity and innovation.

Sure.

And as leaders, you need to be the one to shine that beacon of hope for the team because things are challenging right now.

When you go through that list, there’s quite a few that have also a very direct link with all the research on just physical safety and the impact on physical safety. You talked about speaking up culture, a key component, because we need people to stop work when they see something that doesn’t look right or ask questions if they don’t really understand the task in front of them, which sounds simple, but it’s not that simple. It’s not that straightforward to stop things to alleviate in a regular environment. Psychological safety is hugely important. But this is, I would say, even more important when you’re doing physical, physical risky work.

Absolutely. You know, we, especially with our younger generations coming in, that ability to speak up and say they don’t understand because there’s the fear of embarrassment, the fear of not looking good enough, the fear of failure. And so, all of these fears stop people from, from speaking up. You know, we have the motto, see something, say something. And I want, you know, your, your listeners to understand that goes for physical safety as well as psychological safety. So, if you have that, you know, where the hairs go up on the back of your neck that says something’s just not quite right, or you have that in your stomach, we get that too when, when we are talking to somebody, and they don’t. They seem off is often what we’ll say. And so, when that happens, we need to step into those conversations and have a supportive mental health conversation with them to say, okay, like what’s going on? And find out if there’s a way that you can support them.

And I think that links to what you were talking about before in terms of caring. Because if I care about you as a person, then I also, I know your baseline. I know what you normally would, you should feel like, how you should talk. And so, I, because I know you. And so, if I’m caring also, it brings up this whole theme of I’m going to approach you because it’s worth having this conversation.

Yeah, we don’t ever want to see anybody fall through the cracks. Right. Where they didn’t feel like it was safe to bring something up or they were embarrassed to bring something up. You know, being able to have those conversations, it. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be about a mental health challenge, a mental illness challenge. It could be that this person’s struggling with a two-year-old that’s going through the terrible twos, or they have a teenager who’s really struggling in school, or they’re looking after elderly parents. A mental health conversation is really just about a caring conversation to open up, find out what the issues are and lead people to the resources that are going to help them to get through that situation.

Let’s dive deeper into this one because I think it’s, it’s an important one because we know that also if from a mental health standpoint, something’s off, which, as you said, could be even something being distracted and not able to sleep because of my 2 year old or a newborn infant or all sorts of other worries that could be coming in the workplace. I don’t have all my attention in the workplace, but also, I’m. I’m more likely to do things that are at risk or more risk gets introduced into the work that I’m performing. So, I think it’s hugely important when we think about safety, both from a psychological standpoint but also from a physical standpoint, is having those conversations. So how, how would somebody go about it? And how do you advise a leader to have those conversations with somebody when they see something that seems a little bit off?

This episode of the Safety Guru podcast is brought to you by Propulo Consulting, the leading safety and safety culture advisory firm. Whether you are looking to assess your safety culture, develop strategies to level up your safety performance, introduce human performance capabilities, re-energize your BBS program, enhance supervisory safety capabilities, or introduce unique safety leadership training and talent solutions. Propulo has you covered. Visit us at propulo.com. 

I use a model called Alec A L, E C and it stands for Ask, listen, encourage and check in. And it’s a simple model. And again, there’s all different kinds of models that are out there. But I like Alec because I think I’m thinking about who I’m talking to. Alec is a person, right? And so, we want to make sure that we’re having a human conversation. So, when I, when I start with the A, which is ask, I’m not only asking, how are they doing? Which is not a great question. And I’ll get to that in just a second. But I’m also identifying what have I noticed that’s different about that person? So, I might say something like, Eric, you know, you’ve been really distracted today, right? So, I’m going to talk about what is it that I’m noticing and what’s going on?

What are you dealing with? What’s getting in the way? When I say how are you? It is far too easy for people to say, fine, good. Okay. And that’s the end of the conversation. Other questions you can use are, you know, today was a really tough day. You know, what, what kinds of things, you know, were you having to deal with? Or what was, what’s the best part of this project that you’re working on? What’s the hardest part of this project that you’re working on? You know, that was a tough conversation. How are you feeling about that conversation? Right. And so, you can, you can dive a little bit deeper, I think, with other questions other than how are you? Right. Or how are you doing? The listen then is listened to what they say, listen to what they don’t say, say, listen to the feeling behind what they’re saying, and then ask some clarifying questions. This is, you know, it’s about helping them to access what is going on. But how long have you felt that way? How is that impacting you? Because then that’s maybe when you find out that they haven’t been sleeping for the last two weeks.

Right? Sure, it might be. Have you ever felt this way before? What have you done when you felt this way before? And so, you can get, you know, that listening is. You can ask questions even though you’re listening, but you’re trying to find out, like the emotion and the strategies and the causes in that listening. The E is all about encouraging. And so, before I go any further, I absolutely want to say this is not about you being a counselor, a psychologist, or a therapist.

Right.

This is just about having a supportive conversation. So, when I talk about encourage, encourage is who can they go and talk to? You are likely not the right person to help them solve this, unless you’re the leader and you can find some accommodations that can be helpful in the workplace. But for the most part, you know, can they go talk to the doctor? Have they talked to their family members? Have they gone and see their therapist? Have they considered a therapist? Can they go and talk to the HR department? Right. There’s lots of different things that you can point them to. It might, you know, as the leader, it might be, you know, if it was a particularly tough, emotional, strenuous, chaotic kind of day, maybe you can give them an extra hour off or tell them to go and take a longer lunch break to get there, you know, kind of there, their head kind of cleared and so that they can think better in the, in the situations. So, the accommodations and the encouragement are just to let them also know that you’re there to listen. And then the last, you know, we said ask, listen, encourage.

And the last part is checking in. Because I think sometimes, we get, we feel like we’re prying or we feel like we’ve had the conversation, we should never have this conversation again. And so, the check in is, hey, you said you were going to go and talk to your doctor. How did that go? Not. You don’t need to know the details.

Yeah.

But hey, is there anything else that I can support you with? Is there anything else that you found out or is there anything else that we need to talk to? You know, hey, if they love watching the, the hockey games, talk about hockey. Right. Like, don’t shut down other conversations because maybe you were a bit nervous or unsure of yourself in the other conversations.

And I think that’s a very straightforward, memorable model. As you bring up. What if somebody shuts down when you say, you ask, how are you doing? If they say I’m fine or they’re dismissive. Right. I like other probing questions because how are you? I think we’ve almost learned that the only right answer to it is I’m good or I’m fine. How do you respond if somebody shuts down?

It depends on the relationship that you have with that person, whether you’re the leader, whether you’re a good colleague, you know, whatever that looks like. But in some cases, I would go back to what is it that I have noticed? Because that can Open it up. So, you got really angry in our meeting today, or you were really distracted, or you forgot all about this, and that’s not like you. Or, you know, I’m looking at that report or I’m looking at that job, and there were a lot of mistakes made, and that’s not usually how you do things. So. Right. If you can point out what you’re noticing, it’s harder for them to avoid having the conversation. Right. You can, you can, you can delve in. You may not get to the emotional part, but you can certainly talk about. Okay, well, I get that maybe there’s some other things going on and you’re not wanting to talk about them right now, but this is what I need you to do because there’s still this safety and standard of work and those things that are expected. So, you can still go back and kind of talk about it if there’s.

And then keep the conversation open. I know there may be some things happening. I may not be the one you want to talk to. Maybe there’s somebody else that you want to talk to. If you don’t have the number, I can certainly give you that. You know, it’s completely confidential. Right. So, there’s, there’s ways of helping to provide support without that person maybe opening up to you. There may be other people that you can point them in that direction.

You can point them in that direction.

Yeah. But I think you still have to address some of the behaviors because those behaviors can lead to safety issues, they can lead to substance use issues. Like there can be all kinds of things that are happening.

Yeah. And you touch on it briefly. But what if you think, hey, I’m not an expert, I’m not a psychologist. I never went to school. I don’t. To study psychology. I don’t know how to have these conversations. And maybe I’m concerned it’s going to be awkward and uncomfortable. How do you convince somebody that, hey, it’s just a regular check in, it’s not a big thing.

It is a regular check in, and it is going to be odd, and it is going to be uncomfortable because they’re not the type of conversations that we have. But again, I go back to what we talked about earlier. It would be better for us to have an odd and awkward conversation than to have somebody put themselves at risk or somebody to fall through the cracks because they felt like nobody understood them or nobody cared.

Sure. And how do you build this in a culture? Because you obviously talk about culture and culture change in that Space. And I think it’s one thing to get leaders to look at these things. And it’s important because I remember one leader was telling me how they asked somebody, they noticed, they knew this person was felt a little bit different that morning. They were about to touch some very heavy machinery and then they checked in similar to what you described. And the person said I didn’t sleep at all last night. I was evicted from my home. And they said, well, you shouldn’t be doing this high-risk task right now. And they did all the right things. From an active care standpoint, how do you build that into the culture? Because it’s one thing for the supervisor, for the leader to have that conversation. How do we get more peer to peer?

Mm. I think it goes. It goes right back to the values that we have as a, as a team or the values that we have as an organization. Our values are more than just these words that are written on a piece of paper that are posted on some wall. What I encourage teams to do is to really talk about these values and what does it look like when we’re living them and what does it look like when we are not living them? And I think that what does it look like when we are not living them is even more important. That’s where we define, hey, if we’re going to talk about safety or if we’re going to talk about respect or going to talk about trust, well, what does it look like when we’re not showing trust? What does it look like when we’re not showing respect? What does it look like when, you know, these things are happening and list out some of the issues that have taken place that becomes a regular part of our conversation. One of the teams that I really like, one of their ideas was every Friday they have a values conversation, and they talk about where did we hit the mark and where did we miss the mark?

And it’s not about punishment or pointing or singling people out. It’s about keeping those values or those rules of engagement front and center and how can we be even better next week? And so, I think that that ingrains it into the conversation. And then the other piece is education, you know, bringing somebody in to talk about depression and anxiety and what’s the difference between the two? Most people have no idea what the difference is between the two. And what is it, you know, what does it look like when, you know, what do we mean when we talk about our EAP and what can we go to them for or, you know, how do we. How do we have a supportive mental health conversation with a family member, with a colleague? Right. So that’s the kind of education that we can bring in. How do we build our resiliency tool belt? Because it’s not just about dealing with the problem. It’s how can we give people the tools so that it doesn’t become these major issues. And so those are the types of education and. And that has to come from the top down as well as from colleague to colleague.

You know, it’s great. Companies put in programs of any kind, and then the leadership doesn’t support the program. They don’t come to the programs, they don’t, you know, they don’t champion them. That speaks volumes to the rest of the team.

Yeah, absolutely. And so, I’d love to touch on the topic of toxicity and how do you address it? How do you deal with toxicity in a workplace?

For me, this is a great topic, I should say. I love talking about this, which sounds very weird, but I’m seeing so much of it happening right now, and it’s probably one of my biggest presentations that’s being requested for consulting because we haven’t been taught, again, how to deal with people who are negative and difficult and toxic. So, toxicity. We know that toxic workplaces breed toxic employees, and toxic employees breed toxic workplaces. So, we’re continually impacting and infecting each other. And we’ve seen that happen. Somebody comes in and they’re in a terrible mood, and it just ripples out to everybody else in the team as the day goes on. So, it is important that we address it. And as leaders, what I would say is that your job is to protect the rest of the team. And I think what happens is if that person is. They may be a leader themselves, they may have a lot of the knowledge, they may have some seniority, and we don’t know how to deal with them. And we don’t want to lose some of that knowledge. So we tolerate them and we put up with them, but we know that that, again, just bleeds out into every other aspect.

Right. You know, just it sticks to everybody else around. And so, it’s. Stepping into these conversations, I go back to what I talked about before, about the values. You can’t hold somebody accountable if you haven’t defined what the values are. What does it mean to work in this team? And when you’ve done that, that’s when you can go back to that person and say, hey, this is what it means to work on this team, to be a Contributor on this team. And these are the behaviors that are not working right. I often like to use the this is where you’re doing well and this is where you’re not doing so well, or this is what’s working and this is what, what’s not working so that we reinforce what we want to see more of. And we know we start to address those things that are not appropriate in the workplace.

And so hugely important topics. We talked about mental well-being. We talked about toxicity in workplaces, which obviously bleeds over in the safety space. We talked about burnout, which obviously bleeds over in the safety space. What are some of the other benefits for organizations to really embrace these topics and driving forward movement?

Certainly, engagement is the biggest one, I would think, because when we, you know, when we address the toxicity appropriately or when we address the safety hazards appropriately, people can bring the very best of themselves to the workplace. And so, we know productivity goes up, we know creativity goes up. Innovation, collaboration, like all these great things happen. And if we’re looking at some of the chaos that we’re having to deal with in our organizations, we need people to be on point. We need people to bring the very best of themselves so that they can stay safe and so that we can deal with whatever is happening out in, in the world around us.

So, Beverly, knowing that it’s mental health awareness month, what can organizations do to bring this topic to life within their organizations?

Celebrate, Celebrate, celebrate. You know, it’s an opportunity to bring awareness to all these topics and it’s also an opportunity to help support people by giving them some resiliency tools. And it might be, it might be a health fair where you bring in some community agencies to talk about the resources that are there. It might be bringing in a speaker for a speaker lunch and learn series to highlight these in more depth. It might be mental health breaks. So, one of the resources on my website is, you know, what can you do on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? Celebrate and bring awareness to it and, you know, have some fun with it. That’s what, you know, we talk about the, often the downside of safety and resiliency and mental health. But have fun with it. It is about a celebration and so bring the awareness to these issues but also celebrate the people that you have in your organizations.

Excellent. Thank you so much, Beverly. Beverly, if somebody wants to get in touch with you, how can they do that?

My website address is worksmartlivesmart.com and the email address is infoorksmartlivesmart.com and absolutely there are articles on the website. You know, there’s over 500 articles on mental health, leadership, resiliency, toxicity, and so if you want to see more of that, absolutely use those resources.

Thank you so much for joining me today.

Oh, you are so welcome. Thank you for this.

Thank you for listening to The Safety Guru on C-suite Radio. Leave a legacy. Distinguish yourself from the past. Grow your success. Capture the hearts and minds of your teams. Elevate your safety. Like every successful athlete, top leaders continuously invest in their safety leadership with an expert coach to boost safety performance. Begin your journey at execsafetycoach.com. Come back in two weeks for the next episode with your host, Eric Michrowski. This podcast is powered by Propulo Consulting.