okay well i have 12 o’clock on my clock so i think we’ll get started uh first of all i want to say hello and
welcome to everyone i’m marie mold and i’m the manager of stakeholder engagement here
at electricity human resources canada so i want to thank you today for joining our webinar today
how to build team resilience with our guest and be power first of all i want to mention
that robin condon who was to co-present today sends her regrets as she was unable to
make it in this webinar today however we do have dr shelly parker
who will provide us with their robust program on creating a psychological health and safety strategy
winning them an award of being canada’s safest player
employer player employer as we continue working through the
pandemic hrc is here to support the industry with the continuation of our coven 19 series of webinars
sorry i’m just having uh i should pay attention to this to the screen here
um psychological health was top of mind and a growing concern discovered in our most recent survey with hr professionals
across the country that was our most recent survey and just
as this morning there was latest findings from camh that was in the news that revealed that
30 of parents with children under the age of 18 still living at home
are feeling depressed so before we get started i just had a couple of housekeeping
notes we will be recording this webinar and posting it onto our website afterwards
there will be a q a session after the presentation so please feel free to cue in your questions in the chat function
and we’ll queue them up so for those of you who do not know who ehrc is ehrc is a national not for
not-for-profit organizations supporting the human resources needs of the canadian electricity and
renewable energy sector our role is to have insight to make sure that every employer
union and educator is prepared to meet the sector’s electricity needs we’re an extremely
collaborative organization our work is done hand in hand with employers
unions educators governments which are both federal and provincial governments and other industry
associations now i’m very delighted to introduce our presenter today dr shelly parker
dr parker is the industrial psychologist specializing in health and safety applied research at nb power
her area of expertise is employee stress and health and safety strategy
improvements welcome dr parker i’m now going to switch it over to you
well thank you marie
i’m just going to try and um get our screen going here you go
okay thank you so i’d like to share my screen with you
how are we doing can everybody see the powerpoint am i on the right screen yes
perfect thank you well welcome to nb power’s version of
psychological safety and when the
program was first established way back when and i’ll give you the timeline so you’ll be able to
follow through the ins and outs the ups and downs and the scenarios that we experienced in order to reach where we
currently are we originally named the program very simply we don’t need a better hard
hat now there was a lot of controversy surrounding that particular naming only because we
had a few people come back and say you know what but we do need better hard hats sometimes
so it was taking everybody through the concept of that is true but what we need to know
first and foremost is how to wear the ones that we already have we don’t need better ones we just need
to know when to wear the ones we already have and if we’re at that point where we can
recognize when we need to use the right ppe then we’re already ahead of the game
we’re achieving what we started out to find what we started out to create
and if you look closely at our image they’re our own employees and actually
these guys happen to be best friends and you’ll notice that they’re each having a sticker on their hats
40 10 50 and that is one of the central concepts
of our entire program and in about two minutes i’m going to get to
that and let you know what it means it’s a really important concept that our
employees live day to day so welcome welcome to the psychological side of
safety and this is our journey in
2010 we noticed that a few things weren’t quite going the way that we
wanted and i started doing a lot of research because my field
is the research-based field we’re the we’re the applied psychologists we dig in and have a great time doing tons
and tons of reading research and critically finding out topics that are most relevant to our
situation so that we can then do our own research and that’s what i was doing in around
2010 and interestingly enough i started looking more at the incidents
at envy power and saying okay we’re having a we’re having a scenario related to safety incidents
we’re recognizing that you know they’re not headed in the direction that we want them to but they’re not
being very consistent either in fact there were a lot of peaks and valleys
associated with the numbers of our incidents that were going up and down and
when you stepped back and looked at it i recognized they were going up and down
consistent with organizational change so that was really
interesting when i went back through and i looked at them again one of the first peaks in employee
safety incidents coincided with the time when we were told by
our board of directors you know what envy power we need you to split into five separate
companies so we did and anybody who’s gone through a reorg from that magnitude
would understand the impact that it had on everybody we basically took one complete
provincial organization and made it into five separate entities
complete with shifting all the employees around that head office so that each operating
company now had their own floor so employees had to move to be on that particular floor
and okay we understood that that was going to happen everything settled down things looked
like we were kind of getting back to normal and then we noticed a few more peaks
because guess what there’s always related change to everything you do so the related change to splitting into
five companies was change in government the new government came back and said
you know what envy power we don’t think five companies are working very well for you let’s put you back as one so we went
through that whole reorgan incidents suffered and then of course a few years ago we
noticed a major major impact and we looked at that it coincided with our government saying
we don’t think we can afford you anymore and recover we’re going to sell you off to hydroquebec
employees reacted by going on what i called automatic pilot
you know it was almost like one one thing too many and yes they were trying to be safe but
what they were doing was relying on this concept called automaticity in order to stay
safe so automaticity is like going on autopilot and if i were to say to you right now
and just you know if you’re on mute it’s fine if you’re not that’s even better but i’m gonna ask you a question and
just blurt out the answer what’s two times two
four we didn’t have to think about it the same as three times three or
four times five all of these thoughts all of these requirements all of these
operations are at automatic reflex level we’ve been trained in those lower
ordered operations we don’t have to think about them and that’s the joy of automaticity
you don’t have to think about responding because it’s right there you’ve done it so many times you know
it’s just automatic recall however as everybody knows when you’re working
in an electrical utility regardless of your position whether it’s a power line technician or an engineer or
an admin person or an accountant you need to have a high level of safety
related to your job being on autopilot’s not going to do it
for you so the more i thought about it okay we have to we have to help we have to do
something well in my world everything’s quite logical so what’s the opposite of autopilot
well when i dug into the research it was mindfulness that in itself came with a huge huge
scenario of issues however i also brought with it the idea that if
we were going to start working with mindfulness if we were going to start basically implementing
mindfulness it needs to be part of a greater strategy so other concepts that
i implemented to support the concept of mindfulness was the one of relatedness meaning
employees needed to know that they were related to the same thing
that every other employee executive even the ceo and president were related to we needed to get out
there that concept of you know what guys regardless of who you are we are all nb power employees
we had to get out concept of competency all levels of management had to
recognize how competent their employees were and
by recognizing their competencies we had to help management recognize they could step
back and stop this micromanaging because they needed to allow employees
that sense of autonomy and employees needed to learn that they could actually
provide what’s called that interactive constructive feedback meaning if they were being asked to do a job a
certain way and for whatever reason they felt that it wasn’t appropriate they could question that it was their
right to do that so what else did we do well
i have to make sure i can change my slide here i also had to bring out this concept of
multitasking because when i started talking to everybody in particular the
executive basically along this you know what mindfulness is etc etc
and the need to pay attention to focus our attention on one thing at a time
you know it was that old yeah yeah we can do that but we have so many other things we can you know we can just do a few things at
the same time however i was able to put this in front of them and let them know that you know what
there’s no such thing as multitasking because the human brain with its billion
neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections it’s a very cognitive powerhouse in many
ways but one of its core limitations is the inability to concentrate on two things at once
we can’t multitask our brain’s not set up that way now it can do two things
extremely fast one right after the other so that it appears as oh it’s doing it simultaneously but
really and truly if we were to break it out into its separate parts it’s doing one thing at a time mind you
if you’re trying to do a lot of things in the same time frame you’re not giving
either one of them your full attention so they suffer so let’s bring it back to
our timeline i was just starting to introduce that concept of mindfulness and i got help we got a hurricane we got
hurricane arthur and as i was presenting to
the executive how mindfulness would really help as we started to recognize the magnitude
of this herd point hurricane i recall one individual in the back of the boardroom
in a moment of quiet just kind of scratching his head and looking at me and saying
you know you talk about mindfulness and that might be a really good idea but i have a question for you what the heck are you smoking
because you had to recognize the time and that concept of mindfulness in an
electrical utility was just not even on anybody’s radar to consider
and here i was asking the board asking our executive yeah just please have faith in me listen
to what i’m saying let’s use mindfulness and to their credit
they said all right give us more information we’ll see what we can do so i let them know that basically i
wasn’t asking them to sit around in a circle and hold hands saying kumbaya
i wanted them to use mindfulness exercises as a way to role model to employees
how it could pay attention in a more selective in a more discerning way how we could
pay attention taking into consideration everything going on around us everything
going on around us in that environment that very hectic environment of a hurricane
and stay safe and stay focused but do it in a calm less stressful
manner and they did it so we had literally what i say was our call to
action and i created quite a few mindfulness exercises and i can send them to you
marie if you want to send them out after and one was it was called just breathe
and it was a very special type of breathing exercise the other one was that concept of 40 10
50 which helped explain for everybody where our thoughts went at any point in
time so as i’m talking to you you may get a little blip in a little blip out you know just that
little thought that little memory that little image and
that’s okay we get them everybody gets them so they’re in they’re out they’re gone however if they come in and they kind of
register with us long enough so that we pay attention to it and then they’re gone then we might
start thinking about it more often and then they might come in and stick around a little longer than what we’re
expecting or wanting so that all of a sudden our attention gets shifted
from what we’re supposed to be paying attention to to what these thoughts are so
the 40 refers to 40 of those little blips and thoughts
they’re referring to things that happened in the past like things that happened last night or last week
and 50 of them are referring to things that are going to happen that we’re planning
on doing like tonight like tomorrow like next week that leaves only 10
of our conscious thought focusing on the task at hand now me giving you a presentation like
this isn’t you know calling on much of our safety abilities to sit up and
and pay attention although i would like more than 10 you know it’s pretty important however
we had to register with employees the fact that those little blips they carry emotion
with them that’s the issue it’s not what the thoughts about
excuse me it’s the emotion that it brings with them so for example if all of a sudden you
had this little blip saying oh wish i hadn’t sent that email off last night that i sent
uh that’s not good so all of a sudden you’re starting to get a little bit of regret
and that starts kicking in and what if all of a sudden you think oh i have a meeting i have to attend tomorrow and
it’s not going to be pleasant and the more that starts kicking in the more we get consumed
with anxiety so the idea of up here 10 which was a phrase created
by our employees by the way is all about learning to focus on the present moment
of trying to simply control those past and those future
emotions based on thoughts and the 60-second breathing exercise is
a little quick breathing exercise that they learned
in order to use to up their tent and control those emotions
so the executive really jumped into the fray they took all of
these exercises and they hit the field literally when we had hurricane arthur so throughout all the
restoration efforts we had executive meeting with every contractor
every employee just simply to review the mindfulness exercises so that
they could leave them with the employees so they now had those exercises they could use at their
own discretion whenever they needed them and you want to know something in three weeks of restoration we had
zero incidents and in the lessons learned that we conducted afterwards employees stated how much those exercise
kept them focused on their job and reduced the stresses and anxieties
that they were experiencing so when we took it further we continued
to emphasize the concept of 40 1050 but throughout the entire corporation the 60-second breathing
exercise became part of the tail board we utilized what i refer to as safety
drive where i simply went to that group of individuals that i call middle
management the forgotten child similar to our little child in a family and i would ask
them just simply three questions what’s preventing you physically from
working safe today what’s preventing you from a process
perspective from working safe today and what’s preventing you psychologically from working safe
today answers to those three questions
enable them to create action items so that they could start resolving any
issues associated with those three topics and it was a tremendous success because it gave them control
over things that they felt they couldn’t control executive mindfulness training sessions
were created the executive went through full
day training sessions and you want to know something even today this would be four years
later today they will start a monday morning executive meeting by just simply turning
the lights down a little bit and everybody taking a moment to just breathe and just
capture their thoughts and just get focused on what their agenda is and they continue to continue to
promote mindfulness throughout the corporation executive field visits again were part
of the arthur scenario and they continue today we don’t need a better hard hat is
the phrase that’s still being used and just like employees have tailboards when
they’re going to start physical jobs management has a tail board as well that they do prior to meeting with employees
and it just simply is mindfulness-based questions that enable them to get in the right frame of mind well how did we do
we had the best safety record in the history of envy power and we are now celebrating 100 years
we had it for three consecutive years we reduced our medical aid by 97 disabling events were reduced by 99
and our compensation rates were reduced by more than 60 we received two gold medal awards for
psychological safety and for our safety culture and in 2016
we were voted canada’s safest employer in our division but we also did a few
other things we had a total health index conducted within the corporation and
from 2016 to 2019 we recognized we were doing that great
our physical safety was really doing well but look at these these are mental these are physical
health related issues not safety these are health related issues we weren’t doing as well as what we
thought we were doing time for change since 2019
we’ve been focusing so much resource on employee mental
health i created what’s called a pop-up cafe and vice president of hr and myself
randomly choose locations and show up with coffee with donuts
with muffins with silhouettes empty silhouettes just a silhouette of
somebody’s head male female and we put them all over the room and the purpose is to just simply invite
employees in to talk about mental health to talk about issues that they’re afraid to talk
about such as suicide such as depression and the whole idea is
literally to have these concepts desensitized the silhouettes are placed around the
room so that privately on their own time they can go in and fill in a silhouette with thoughts that they may
be having at that moment with emotions they’re very successful we have the efap
program that we’re continuing to promote by employee road shows safety needs
safety meetings and again through the mental health cafes letting people know what resources are available to them
as well as through our communication and bulletin boards we’re utilizing the pathway to coping
course which is of course done through our university university of new brunswick it’s offered free
to all employees there’s a quote from a current entity power employee and a graduate of the course
as to how how well worth the time and effort it was for them to learn these particular coping skills
and currently we have over 300 employees registered in this
the pandemic response as everybody on this webinar knows it really took everybody
for a loop we had to dig deep to get a lot of resources in place but one thing that i was able to do was
the end of april complete a survey that focused on anxiety resilience loneliness and safety
and this was sent to all employees and contractors we had 50 percent participation rate for
this anybody who’s trying to run a survey within their company knows this is a really good rate
particularly when employees are scattered all over and what did we find we found
that regarding anxiety and regarding loneliness and regarding safety
the age group most impacted by this was the 30 to 44 year olds and in particular
female we knew that from a safety perspective the group most impacted were the envy
power employees working in nb power locations
that made sense to me because if you’re working at home you feel safer because you can control
who’s entering and who’s leaving your home when you work at a work location you don’t have a lot of control who enters
your workspace so the safety issue was well explained the 30 to 44 year age group
experiencing anxiety experiencing loneliness that that’s your sandwich generation
that’s the group of individuals particularly the female who is responsible for raising children
responsible for perhaps looking after older relatives there’s a lot of anxiety
associated with that with the desire to keep them safe to keep them healthy
during the pandemic so the responses make sense resilience there was a lot of resiliency
but interestingly enough it was with employees who were in the 50 year age bracket enough
particularly male and those who had the longest rates of employment with envy
power we also established a helpline again that was established back the end of march and that simply
was a call-in line for employees or their families to use
a lot of calls that i received actually were from parents just simply wanting somebody to talk to
their children or to help them cope with the adverse effects that their
children were experiencing as a result of them being at home and interestingly enough a lot
of parents who did work from home they had such a huge sense of guilt associated with the fact that
they knew they were still getting paid and they felt that they weren’t earning their pay because they had to
couple their work with child care so they had to almost be given permission to recognize that
you know what right now we’re in very different times we know that you will give us all that
you can give us in terms of work but we also know that right now you’re a full-time parent as
well so choose your poison what’s it going to be full-time employee or full-time parent
because you can’t be both at the same time so we help them schedule times where
they could call in where they could get their work completed while making sure that their children were
being looked after we also created a recovery tool tracker
and this is a workforce recovery tool that managers could use
simply to get a snapshot of their employees status so they knew what special considerations
had to be put in place for certain employees it worked very very well and still continues to work for us
our next steps well our safety culture survey closed last week it’s another survey
that’s being done by an outside company the results we get will inform what cultural changes
we’re going to need in order to take this to the next level
and we’re also going to be taking results from the survey i completed back in april to
focus on the loneliness topic as well as to see what other types of programs we can put in place
to enable more employee engagement we know that based on
the canadian research that the canadian psychological association members have completed
we know that there’s a huge issue around just a sense of being able to control
activities control events going on around us and
taking that into consideration our message going forward will be this is our call to action we’re going
to take control so we need employees to know that they still have power
and they still have control over their lives in the pandemic so we’re going to be teaching them a
variety of techniques that they can use so we’re continuing to
do our research we’re continuing to reap a few benefits such as the employee recommended workplace
awards and in our category which is government and large we were able to
still achieve the employee recommended workplace award for the last three years including this
year so we were really excited over that so in conclusion i want to thank you for
the opportunity to tell you our story and i’m going to turn it back to you marie
and respond to questions thank you dr parker um i
i really uh commend you and i want to congratulate you on all the awards that you’ve won and i’ve also uh know that mindfulness
can sometimes be very um uh to actually do i’ve tried it before
and with so many distractions in life and work it’s it’s a very difficult exercise
um so i was just going to see if there was any questions uh on the chat so if anybody wants to
ask a question feel free to to actually um cue those up um and i will start it off
with one question so uh i know you spoke a little bit about the pandemic
but now that there’s a heightened amount of cases in new brunswick um do you think that you’ll have to
adjust what you’re currently doing or will you continue doing what you’re doing
you know that’s a really good question i believe what i will continue to do
and what i will ask my co-workers to continue to do is to stay the course
i’ve i’ve demonstrated through doing um the mental health cafes because i
meant to mention in the last two weeks i’ve completed 14 mental health pop-up cafes and i’ve been
doing it online through teens and gathering a lot of feedback and one of the most positive aspects of it is that
at the end of the cafes i call employees forward and ask them
for action plans like this is our your call to action how are you going to manage this what is your action plan for
the fall for the winter going to be let’s talk about it let’s create it so by creating
action plans we’re giving them control we’re giving them power over a situation that a lot of
individuals basically feel that they’re powerless to control but you know what they’re not because if
we follow public health guidelines we’re taking control we’re
wanting that power and we can have it and employees need to know that they still have control and they still have power
and that will help them have that positive attitude they need going forward so they simply can say you
know what we can handle this i i agree with you totally on that i
mean um you know it just if you don’t it raises that um that panic or
that anxiety um dealing with this yeah and uh yes if you want to send over
the exercises we’d love to see them thank you and share them if we can um so just check and see if there’s any other
questions i don’t see any other questions um
so it was um i just i guess we’ll finish up here so i want to just first of all say thank
you so much for participating today and all of our participating participants today online you can stay
informed for future webinars and resources by signing up for our newsletter at electricityhr.ca we do have
one final webinar that will be happening at this in our series in december
on december the 9th on workplace culture so i want to uh thank everybody enjoy
the rest of your day and i hope that you will join us soon take care thank you everybody