Taking Care of Your Employees: The New Normal

thank you um i just wanted to say hello and welcome to everyone uh to ehrc

webinar today we are the topic is taking care of your employees and today’s session is the new

new normal where we will introduce dr ryan todd from adversity i’m marie mold and i’m the manager of

stakeholder engagement here at ehrc before we begin i want to acknowledge

that the national office of electricity human resources canada is located within the traditional unseated

unsurrendered territory of the algonquin anishinaabe people ehrc honors the peoples and land of the

algonquin anishinabe nation all first nations inuit and metis peoples and

their valuable past present and future contributions to this land

so before we get started i just wanted to go through a couple of housekeeping notes this session will be recorded

today as you heard and available on our website at electricityhr.com

we ask that you please mute your microphones and turn the cameras off while we have our special guest speaker

present and there will be an opportunity to ask questions you can populate those in the

chat session or unmute your microphone at the end of the presentation and we highly encourage it

so now it gives me great pleasure to introduce you to dr ryan todd

dr todd is a psychiatrist and technologist founding the workplace mental health and resilience platform

headversity his work at adversity brought together a team of psychiatrists psychologists and

educators to build an industry redefining platform that is setting the new standard for workplace mental health

and working with some of north america’s leading employee employers such as shell global and first group america while

also working with post-secondary institutions like nate state college of

north atlantic and yukon university dr todd is also an award-winning

documentary documentarian i can’t speak today excuse me a top 40 under 40 recipient with avenue

magazine a published researcher and the host of a popular podcast hr podcast beyond the

checkbox through adversity dr todd envisions getting the core training skills out of

the backlog mental health system and into employees hands also note if you’re currently an ehrc

member with us adversity is part of our roster of partners for members only which will receive a discount when

you’re using any of these partner or perk services so now i’m going to hand it over to you

dr todd over to you thank you very much for that

for the introduction and uh excited about the session today we we have a small urg group so i’m okay for folks to

chime in turn your camera on uh be as engaged today as we can uh if you know

if there was thousands of people on zoom it’s a little more difficult but please if you have any questions or

commentary throughout this just turn your microphone on or i’m watching the chat room too on my laptop so i’m

happy to take any questions and make this as interactive as a session as possible and that’s what today really is

all about is about providing you some value and we’re going to look at things in a bunch of different paradigms

because things have been very stressful for us in particular as workplace leaders things have been extremely

stressful for us in the last year and two years and we i felt you know as a

psychiatrist that the mental health you know call it the crisis would in

some ways dissipate over you after after the pandemic the post-pandemic era would

be a time of joy what we’ve seen actually is the opposite we’ve seen an echo pandemic where people are coming to

emergency rooms for psychiatric issues more we’ve seen four times greater the

rates of depression than we did in even the early stages of the pandemic three times greater the rates of anxiety so we

know that right now is a very stressful time there’s a lot of data from previous

large scale events to explain at least in part why this might be so

that if we all remember i mean most of us are canadian on this call we we remember the the horrific uh fires in

fort mcmurray and what happened was uh half the town of fort mcmurray uh where

a lot of the uh the oil sands and energy in our country comes from half that town was wiped out due to a fire a wildfire

and the trauma that that caused was horrific physical trauma destruction but what we saw actually was

that it was only 12 to 16 months after that event after the

fires were out after the homes were rebuilt that short-term disability costs went

through the roof they actually saw a sharp spike in short-term disability costs and when i talk to our leaders in

disability in health care and in various industries across the country we are

seeing what i’ve heard is an increase in short-term disability due to mental health at a rate that we have not seen

so that’s part of why i’m here is to help us get ahead of that adversity

and to really bring this down to a personal level so today what i would like to do is take us through a couple

of different exercises we’re going to do a lot of writing today i have my white board going

we are going to ask you to do a lot of writing so the first thing i’d ask you

to do is just get out of paper and pen because we’re going to do a lot of exercises today as as a group and as individuals and the

paradigm that i want to bring to you is called interpersonal therapy now ipt is the is

the paradigm that we’re talking about but it was really designed in the 60s 70s and still ongoing research

on this this type of therapy that helps people in transition

from something very traumatic and difficult to something new and we talk a lot in mental health about post

traumatic growth and it’s like if you could imagine a

forest fire like we saw in fort mcmurray burning down a number of forests

burning down a lot of trees what we see 10 years later is the nutrients from that fire made the

soil so rich that the trees and actually the forest grows and is reborn in a lot

of ways in a stronger and thicker way and that’s what we shoot for as human beings

and that’s what we’re trying to get through today is how do we go through a process of transition after this

pandemic how do we adapt to what we used to call the new normal early stage

pandemic now this is the new new normal what does that look like and how can you as a leader take skills to help your

employees throughout that training throughout that transition

throughout that very difficult time so that’s where we’re at right now and i’m really excited about this session today

okay so we’re going to take the next kind of 30 minutes 45 tops this won’t be an hour long session where uh you know

we don’t have engagement and we’re here just listening to a webinar so i want your questions in the chat room please

feed them to me alongside this entire session i’d like you to to chat with me too because we have the size of a group

where we can do it and i wanted to go a little old school today so i actually made cue cards when was the last time

that you saw cue cards uh for me it was quite a long time ago but i want us to put in the chat room uh

and i’m asking one question with our first cue card can we read that can we zoom in on that guy

okay the cue card reads the most stressful experience we can have is

blank all right the most stressful experience could we zoom in on that corgi

oh okay that’s easier okay look at that okay the most stressful experience we can have is

blank i want you to uh go into the chat room and fill in the blank for me what is the

most stressful experience we can have yeah absolutely marie that’s that’s that

is that is significant to see our life threatened yep anyone else thanks for

silvia for that elizabeth yes absolutely the unknown very good

anyone else want to chime in what is the most stressful experience that we can have as human beings

okay so what we do know is from years of research in adversity and resilience is

that the most stressful experience we can have is around change and all of you are

outlining something around change bereavement death the unknown where do

we go next not being able to pay bills that is absolutely bang on danielle so we

had seen a large-scale study done by the american psychological association that had shown that the most stressful things

in north america money conflict and interpersonal relationships

health and all those come down to change and us changing our lives in some

capacity and we actually know there’s a very specific type of change that impacts us greater and that change is

most stressful when one it is sudden two it is out of our control

and three is severe okay so one in a sudden two it is out of our control and three

it is severe and death and bereavement in the family is is something that is very much

uh in line with that and there’s an experiment that i want to talk about briefly about change and what

we do in psychiatry uh is we like to hook people up to machines like functional mris

so we can measure how the oxygen and blood moves in the brain why do we want to do that essentially

because we want to see where people are moving the energy in parts of their brain because we think that certain

parts of the brain are responsible for how we process certain things okay

so when we put people in a functional mri and we do a card changing experiment

with them that means we lay down a card and it’s the four of spades and then we put

the four spades down and the four spades down and we keep flipping four spades over if we change that card to something

that is different the queen of hearts for example we notice that there’s an uptick

in blood and oxygen to a place called our amygdala and that is one of the oldest parts of

our brain but we know that is responsible for processing things like stress that is a fight flight or freeze

part of our brain so we know that change even in a small very controlled environment is something that is

stressful for us now to to get over this one thing that we have to do is to really uh is to really manifest this so

what it asks us to do right now with your pen and paper is to just simply write down

all the stressors that you have in your life right now okay and i’ll take the time to do this i have my little white board so what are all the stressors that

you have going down in your life right now and i want you to at least come up with five just get it all out let’s go

through that initial stage of a good ipt process what are all the things that you’re

dealing with right now that are stressful for you and i’ll do this alongside you so let’s take a couple minutes to do this right now

let’s do a little bit of lonely work so i’ll give you like two minutes to just be cathartic and write down all the

stresses that you’re experiencing right now hmm

you

okay i’ll give you a couple more minutes to wrap up and then we’re going to just do a very quick kind of mental exercise

around these stressors but this is the first kind of stage of a good ipt process just to be cathartic

get these things out so we can talk about them

okay so i’ll go through mine so and i don’t expect us to share all of our stressors but in a moment of

vulnerability i’ll just take you through kind of what mine are so you know my daughter has a cold right now so she’s home from daycare that’s a bit stressful

i hope she she’s okay i i didn’t get to work out this morning

and for me that’s really stressful that might sound weird but i need to exercise every day because i’m kind of a

uh mind races kind of guy so i need to do that and i wasn’t able to do that this morning um just ongoing

interpersonal stuff at work we have a large number of employees now and everyone has their own personal needs

and things that we need to take care of and i didn’t really sleep well last night my wife is a physician she was on

call so she was getting paid throughout the night um and that because she’s a physician she’s

actually uh going to be working at least part of the year in toronto so i’ll be kind of back and forth between calgary

and toronto and i don’t know how that’s going to work out so those are all the things that i’m dealing with right now

and at times those get better at times those things get worse and one strategy that i want you to

deploy right now when you’re thinking about your stressors one this is a trick just to write them all down on a piece

of paper why do we do that because there is a a process

that happens when you write and there is a bit of a metaphor that happens when you write to just be

cathartic and get those thoughts from living up here and not being able to think about them and some being

subconscious and simply just becoming more and more stressful to making them

conscious and putting them on a piece of paper and then the next thing that i do

is understand that most of these things are actually very much out of my control

most of these things are very much out of my control and what we like to think of is what is in your control it’s

anything that is within your skin those are my thoughts that’s my effort

that’s my emotions that’s my attitude towards things but everything else is really outside of

your control we can only pretend to exert control on those things so what i

literally like to do when i’m feeling very stressed out and this is a preventative measure so things don’t get

worse is to just literally put a box around it

and that also is a bit of a metaphor for putting something in a box and being able to rationalize and

contextualize is put them in there because if we want to you know be cathartic and

get rid of some of those negative stressors they can’t live up here but they also just can’t live

in the ether right they can’t be out here anyway so we actually have to put them in a physical space and let’s put them in a box that’s the first very

simple tool that i use with a lot of patients and i’d encourage you to use that

when you’re stressed out and today we just did it we just put all of our worries in a box and put them in a physical place and there is a process

there and we know through a lot of research again and putting people in a functional mri that this reduces the

stress and reduces the areas of the brain that deal with stress from the amygdala so that’s the first thing i

want to talk about today was just being cathartic and writing things down and making them

concrete and then putting them in a box and i call this a worry box a very simple trick

that we can use with ourselves or with employees if we’re becoming overwhelmed okay the second thing that i want to

talk about was the pace of change and so here is my next

uh old school flash card and i’d like to get some feedback on

this can you read that corgi okay so the pace of change is

blank in our world the pace of change is blank i’d love to hear from you of what you think

this could be intense elizabeth you’re absolutely right any other feedback on what the

blank could be the pace of change in our world is what

fast till the i agree with you there

marie said it’s overwhelming yep i i agree with that too

complex thank you adele okay these are excellent answers my thesis about change is that it is all

those things danielle said it’s constant adele said it’s complex marie said it’s overwhelming we’ve heard that it is fast

my thesis is that the actual pace of change that we’re experiencing is increasing

i would say it is increasing uh it is all those things it is fast it is overwhelming as complex but we know that

the way that we are asked to adapt to new technologies uh the the things that we’re asked to

adapt to in our workplace uh is is ever increasing i think about

my my grandfather when i think about uh when he was in the workplace so my

growing up in a very small town my grandfather was the he sold

bulk oil so he sold barrels of oil to farmers

and he did that for the duration of his career actually he was the mayor of our very small town and he put the first

sewage system in our very small town and this is we’re talking 75 80 years ago 100 years ago

and you know the thing that astounded me about my grandfather was that he had essentially the same career selling

barrels of oil to farmers in the community uh and around macklin saskatchewan for

close to 30 or 40 years the technological change that he saw during that time

was pretty constant but it was not fast like for example when when my grandfather

grew up he had a horse and a buggy he went to school in a cart driven by a horse

and then of course the the the ford trucks came out and the vehicles and that was essentially if you

ever talked to him he’s long since passed uh but if you ever talk to him he would say that that was the major change

that he saw over the 30 years of his career now think about the technological

change that we’ve experienced in the last five years think about the technological change that we’ve experienced in the last two

years and think about how this little guy here has changed the way that we

perceive and communicate in our world and i want us to be conscious of that

so the exercise that i’d like you to do right now very quickly is write down

all of the modes of communication that you have available to you right now

okay so i have my phone and my laptop but i just want you to stretch

your uh inventory of what modes of communication do you have available to you right now let’s make this

subconscious thing of how we’re pulled in 100 different directions very conscious okay and i’m going to

write this down with you as well

you

okay so i i can think of right now am i looking at this one here this one here okay just want to make sure i’m meeting

the eye line here so on my phone i can text but that means sms whatsapp and

signal are the three apps i have available i can email but i also slack i can

physically phone someone and then i have like a personal like i can just talk to people in the office and we’re back in

the office now that’s actually pretty wild to think about how even our way of

communication technology has so rapidly changed and knowing that change is the most stressful thing that can happen to

us and knowing how rapid that change has been this is very stressful for us as humans and rammus hogard who’s an expert

in mindfulness calls this the paid reality we are pressured we are always on

we are information overloaded and we are distracted and that is how

you are that is how i am that is how all of our employees are we are pressured to continually push the

needle whether it’s hiring or retaining employees or whether it’s increasing revenue or

outputs or projects we’re always on you cannot take a minute off now we’re always on zoom

and i appreciate a bunch of our cameras are off today because i imagine you’ve already been in two hours of meetings

this morning with your cameras on where information overloaded we’ve never had access to more information at any time

in the history of the world i can go on wikipedia youtube google anything and find out anything about anything right

now and we’re distractible we have at our disposal all of these types of

communication and that can make for very stressful and distractible times so

i’d like it to take us through a very quick exercise today that we’re going to do together and it is a simple breathing

exercise and we’re just going to picture a box in front of us

and we are going to do four cycles of breathing and i want you to register how

you’re feeling right now it might be a little overwhelmed might be a little excitable might be

whatever is a little sleepy and i want you to register how you feel after we do four very simple cycles of breathing and

this is the second tool that i want to use today is this breathing tool to get

us out of this paid reality i want to do just a very brief mindfulness practice okay so important to have your feet on

the ground you can even do this standing uh just put your hands on your legs or on your

chair wherever it’s most comfortable but feel the feet feel the soles of your feet on the ground

and i want you to take four breaths with me if you can do in through the nose out

through the mouth that’s most helpful and i want you to picture a box in front of you where we’re breathing in for two

seconds we’re holding it for two seconds breathing out for two seconds and holding that for two seconds okay so do

the first one with you then i’ll walk alongside okay so let’s get started right now so in for two seconds

two out for two seconds one two

hold it for one two okay another one

in one two hold it one two out one two

hold one two okay we’re going to do two cycles on four second intervals so

breathe in one two three four hold it one two three four

out one two three four and hold that for one two three four

and the last one get to the bottom of the diaphragm really big deep breath in

three four hold it one two three four and out let your

shoulders drop one two three four

okay so we’ve been able to do a little bit of a breathing exercise to just kind of reset all the stuff that was happening

in our day and that’s the antidote to the busyness that we feel and i just want you to

register how you feel after breathing whenever i take even 10 seconds just to do one

cycle of breathing i feel different i feel a lot different and there’s a lot of neuroscience to

back up how that works in reducing something called cortisol cortisol is very connected to adrenaline

and those stress hormones and we can reduce that pulsing through our body by just simply

breathing so if i have a challenge for you and another tool that i want to deploy today and that you can help

deploy with your employees just the breathe and i would even challenge you to

start a meeting off might be a little awkward the first time but i guarantee that your employees will actually enjoy

it and even look forward to it just to start a meeting off even with two deep breaths on a cycle one two

three four hold one two three four out one two three four

hold one two three four we’re hearing from marie and sylvie that they feel a little better and i agree i

feel better just doing some deep breathing okay let’s get to the next skill now

that we’re grounded and connected uh let’s chat about the next part of of uh

of this resilience training session today all right here is the cue card

and it reads blank remains the most important resilient skill we have

can you read that cue card maybe i’ll put it close to my face so we can zoom in there blank remains the most

important resilient skill we have all right let’s hear from you in the chat box

what is the most resilience important resilient skill that we have

taken time for myself each day excellent what is the most important resilience

skill that we have

come on i need more guesses letting go adele perfect i love it

marie said taking time for herself each day okay so we know that

all these skills are important when we talk about resilience skills danielle said movement is very important

energy management is a crucial skill mindfulness uh mental health mental fitness

heartiness marie says knowing what is out of our control i completely agree

when when we look at all of the resilience skills from self-expertise to mindfulness mental

fitness hardiness energy management throughout times of extreme change and

when we are under a duress as a workplace self-expertise

and knowing yourself continues to be if not the a very important skill the

most important skill there’s a lot of research to show that those who are the most emotionally

intelligent or practice insight exercises actually can endure the most difficult

situations and insight and self-expertise remains one of the most important skills so

we’re going to do a little bit of a self-expertise exercise right now

and the two of these exercises are very simple one is about just understanding your

insight and where you’re feeling right now so the the key to

exercising your self-expertise one is to write down your mood

and two put a number to it the intensity okay so the mood is important because we

often mix up mood with thought and mood and emotion is

defined with one word and that’s like disgust or anger or happy or sad

and there’s a finite number of emotions that we experience

okay so i want you to write down your mood uh and try and pin it down to one emotion that you’re having right now and

i want you to write that down and i’ll do that alongside with you

okay my emotion actually i feel is energized right now and then let’s put a number to

it zero being the least intense experience of that emotion and ten being the most intense

experience of that emotion so i’m feeling like eight energized it’s because i’m talking

to you and i love doing these sessions so that’s the first piece of this self-expertise exercise and that is a

simple exercise that you can do every single day a couple times a day if you’d like just to check in with yourself and how

you’re doing you can encourage your employees to do the same the second exercise we’re going to do

is about your self-expertise and how you understand yourself and what we know as your brand and this

is called an above the line and below the line exercise so right now i’d like you to take a couple minutes we’ll take maybe 30

seconds right now to think of a time where you performed

very well in your job or at home or something but think of it like a performance like you

did an exceptional job at that time and i want you to put a couple words to that above the line

and then think of a time where you didn’t do very well so you were you know struggling in that role or that

situation or that conflict or whatever it is and put that situation a couple lines to

that and i’ll do this alongside so let’s take about 30 seconds to a minute to think of a situation where you really

did well in a situation where you did not do well

okay so my situation that i didn’t do well in is i was about a month ago in very

extreme conflict with a board member that we had and we saw things very differently

and had to separate our work relationship

so that was something that really bothered me i was not thinking clearly i was losing sleep that was a situation

where i was not at my best a situation recently where i was thought i did better or thought i did well is we

recently started working with one of the largest construction companies in in the country

adversity has so that was a great process loved the people loved the process and it was a really important kind of

deal that this company did with us to bring on adversity to all their employees

so that’s step one of this exercise step two

that i’d like us to really get into now is define a couple of the things that you did during that

performance again let’s call it a performance that really helped you okay and use one

word if you can so i’ll do this alongside you but list a couple of words

of what really helped you kind of nail that thing or what encouraged you to struggle when you’re

talking about that time where you really struggled and and then we’ll come back and do the

next step of this so a couple words that really uh

helped you thrive during that time like what were the things and characteristics of you that helped you thrive and then

what were the characteristics of you that defined your struggle

okay so for me i’m gonna start with the time when i really struggled when i had this

uh conflict with the board member of our company um i the thing that defined that for me

is i’m very conflict adverse i really don’t like conflict and i’m trying to work on that trying to engage in you

know more constructive discussions but i really hate that and then i felt

like there was a lack of trust in that situation i really hated that that bothered me that that i didn’t trust

this individual and i felt like this individual didn’t trust me that that shook me at my core

now the second part of this is really important because this is how we often can define our brand through different

difficult circumstances who cares what your brand is on a good day we want to understand our brand when

times get tough when we’re going through a global pandemic when you’re asked to roll out a new program to your entire

company when you have to have a difficult conversation with an employee that is when we want our brand to show up and

how do we understand where we’re best how do we understand what our brand is

is let’s focus on this part of positive situation and the key features of us

during that situation for me when we close this very large construction company i felt like i was

being thoughtful in how we were working together

most importantly i felt like we had a strong connection and and i pride myself on being able to

create connections with people as a therapist as uh one of the leaders uh at adversity

as a as a father i pride myself on doing that so that is what i

want my brand to be as someone who creates connections okay so i’d like you to

think about right now and take a couple moments as we are inevitably going to get into more stressful and difficult times

circle the word that sticks out at you most in terms of what you would like your brand to be during difficult times

for me it is someone who creates connection that is what i want my brand to be this is the brand exercise so just

to review this portion on self expertise which we know is an important skill

especially when we’re in stressful times one to get our grounding to get our ability to figure

out where we’re at right now name your emotion put a number to it okay so you can figure out where you’re

at right now if you would like to extend that and figure out who you want to be in the

future who you want to be in that difficult circumstance this is an above the line below the line exercise

a situation where you really did well a situation where you didn’t do very well what were the key features of each

situation and circle the word the one word that sticks out to you as to what you want your brand to be

thriving those key situations we know that people who practice self-expertise and do practices like these have more

emotional intelligence and are able to really thrive in difficult circumstances

okay so i would like to wrap up with one last piece around the workplace and

i have created of course a cue card for this and i’d like some answers around

this nothing is more important at work

than your blank right so fill in the blank nothing

is more important at work than your blank

let’s get some feedback on what do you think what do you think this should be nothing is more important at work than

your blank

let’s hear from you in the chat

thank you excellent

then yourself your sense of self your ethic your engagement

excellent then your integrity this is this is great because it’s a super open-ended fill in the blank so

this could mean anything i love it integrity and i’ll tell you my perspective soon

all right anyone else then your relationships okay i want to take that one and run with it because i think that

is of utmost importance this is what i would argue is one thing that we’ve learned

throughout the pandemic is that nothing is more important at work than your team

and marie called it relationships and i agree with that wholeheartedly and

what we saw throughout the pandemic was you know we we had our old way of working together

and it was everyone in the office and we did have teams and we had one-on-ones but what i saw was a very sudden

transition to technological meetings obviously like meeting on zoom or

meeting on teams or skype or whatever the platform you are on but it a very intense reliance on that

five or seven or three or twenty person team what we saw was

because of the pandemic went from this office where we could see everyone and kind of

get a physical sense of the entire workplace to oh i actually only have visibility

into the three to five people that i work with directly and we had to create a strength in that

team to move our organizations forward we had no choice and what we saw from that was that team

was the most important unit the most important functional unit out of any of

the other functional units of the organization so i’d like us to reflect on that and i want to do a little bit of

a ipt exercise with our remaining minutes and it’s called an interpersonal

inventory and you can do this over the course of the next two minutes like we will or you could take the next couple

of weeks to do it because it can be a tricky exercise but i’d like you to

take some context here either at home or at work i want you to think of our

relationships because we are nothing without our team we’re nothing with our family and those relationships in

particular in difficult times we cannot get through those times without our team and our family so i’d like you to draw

some concentric circles three if possible

and i want you to put yourself in the middle

there’s little old me in the middle and i’d like you to take a couple of minutes to

write out some of the names of the people that are closest to you and i want you to put the closest people

right next to you and a couple of examples of people who are further away from you

family members that you haven’t talked to somebody who you just know peripherally and the point of this exercise is to

just get a road map of who you have in your life at work or at home and who is

on your team that you can rely on and again make these subconscious things conscious so let’s take a couple minutes

right now i’ll do this alongside you i’m going to put some key relationships here and then think of who would be kind of

more peripheral to me all right let’s take a couple minutes to do this right now

hmm

hmm

okay so for me very close to me is my wife i rely a lot on her for pretty much

everything i put uh jordan our ceo uh

right next to her but definitely not close to her and i have teammates who are

laughing about that because my wife might argue that our cfo could be closer sometimes

our leadership team at adversity i’m very close with i have a close colleague in psychiatry

i put my brothers and sister here my parents who i still connect with i have a good

group of kind of college friends that i put on this circle and i recently made a kind of a new connection that’s just a

peripheral individual so far but could kind of become closer in that circle okay so i’m hoping that you had a little

fun with that because what this does is again makes that subconscious thing of our

relationships very conscious and it also pins down who are the people that you can rely on when times are

difficult and when you are facing that inevitable adversity that will come up in your workplace or at home and that’s

what we’re doing today we are trying to get ourselves ahead of adversity and this helps us define who in our life who

on our team that we can rely on during those difficult circumstances

okay so let’s wrap up first of all i want to thank you so much for joining us today in this session and we covered a

couple of uh brief skills the first one was on just simply writing down

stressors in our life seems very simple very powerful exercise something that we

can do to make them conscious and then put them in a box put them in that worry box that was skill number one

skill number two was we learned a quick breathing skill to decrease the cortisol

that is pulsing through our body during a stressful work day and how do we do that

we do box breathing and i encourage you to do that with your employees as well the third skill that we talked about

today was around self-expertise the people who thrive the most in

workplaces at home have a high level of emotional intelligence that’s a trainable skill and it starts with

recognizing where you are right now and understanding what your brand is

and who cares about brand in the easy times we want to know what our brand is in the difficult times and for me i want

to be someone who connects with people that’s what i want my brand to be finally we need to know who is on our

team when times are difficult and that’s at work that is at home sometimes those

worlds are very melded and sometimes they’re the exact same and to do that to really define your

circle we want to create an interpersonal inventory and i’d i’d encourage you to do that a couple times

a year to see really who is in my circle right now who can i rely on and maybe there’s some

relationships that aren’t as close to me that i’d want them to be maybe there’s some people who are very close to me and

i want to push them outside that circle and that’s okay and we can set boundaries around that

i think that these resilience skills are some of the most important things that we can learn and i can tell you that

folks who come to see me as a psychiatrist this is what we are trying to teach them to do is is learn these

resilient skills very simple skills that i was fortunate to learn throughout medical school and my

residency really basic psychological things easy tools but hard to implement in practice that’s also what we try to

do with adversity is to roll these skills on a digital platform learning management tools

so that you and your colleagues can practice them day in day out with that i’d like to thank you so much

for your time and attention today for joining me for marie for setting up this session this is absolutely the highlight of my

day and my week is being able to join leaders like yourselves who are part of important organizations with thousands

of employees to bring you these skills so you can bring these to your workplace and hopefully we cannot figure out a way

to bring these to your entire group so with that marie i don’t know if you want to send off but i’m happy to wrap things

up as we send off the session today i will do that but first of all ryan i

could listen to you constantly so thank you so much this was uh really valuable

um i did have a couple of questions for you i’m wondering uh if you’re willing to answer just the few that i had

because you did mention a very interesting stat at the beginning about the fires in fort mcmurray when you

talked about uh the short-term disability hype um 12 to 16 months

afterwards um so i’m just wondering in your professional opinion if you foresee this

as well with the pandemic that there will be a delay um because we’re not finished yet so i’m just wondering what

you think about that yeah my opinion is that we will um in talking

to um leaders in disability i had a conversation with the disability manager

at cowan last week and she said that in her 20-year career she has never seen

increases in short-term long-term and absenteeism costs due to

mental health issues she’s never seen this in her entire career makes some sense this is probably the

biggest event that we’ve experienced intergenerational event that we’ve

experienced in terms of a change sudden and uh

radical change and out of our control so we do expect that these disability

rates will continue to climb and we’re trying to we’re trying to get ahead of those as much as we can with our our technology

and our upskilling okay and just one other thing just to

kind of um fall like flow through on that particular topic is

uh change there is lots of change but um do you also see that uh because there is focus on other

things that are happening around the world like the war in ukraine um that the focus of the pandemic is

kind of diminishing um in regards to mental health because now there’s other things that people are

focusing on yeah i think there’s less of a focus on it and that’s

that’s you could argue that that’s okay and someone argued that that’s bad because we still have to be

uh we still have to be diligent as to our practices but i do see a decrease in

focus however what we’ve experienced right is this other enormous event

with the war in ukraine and we continue to get like really horrific news about like things changing in our world

changing like the shootings in texas yesterday i’m like things continue to happen in our world and we have access

and knowledge to those things and on top of that the way that we interact and communicate

is always changing so the change is constant as and as we mentioned right it’s intense and sometimes it’s

overwhelming and although the pandemic might be sort of in the rearview mirror we’re just seeing a whole host of other

things and that will continue right we will continue to see change in the workplace and our job of it as leaders is to get

ahead of that thank you and you know what like you said this doesn’t help right so

trying to put that away so many times during the day so you’re not constantly looking at that news

um okay perfect so i will i will wrap this up so i just want to thank ryan so

much for today’s session and all of the participants that did join us if you want to get more information

about this type of program along with other programs and benefits from ehrc please

visit our website and you can always send me an email we there’s also the newsletter that you

can register with onto our website it’s at the bottom of each page

so that wraps up this today’s today’s webinar but out of the series there is

one more final webinar that we will be doing uh next wednesday uh june the first with humberto carollo of white

ribbon and he’s going to be presenting promoting allyship and solidarity in the

workplace so that’s another one that you won’t want to miss i want to say thank

you and enjoy the rest of your day to everybody bye for now