Maintaining Resilience for Service Hero’s

Mar 09, 2021 • Features • Mark Homer • Staff Wellbeing • Covid-19 • Leadership and Strategy

Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates, interviewed Mr Robert Smith MBA, Psychotherapist and Specialist in Clinical Psychology within Organisations on how we can look after service engineers and technicians' wellbeing during these challenging times.

In the somewhat crazy times that we are all living in, did you know that losing your sense of humour could well be an early sign of stress!

There are hundreds of thousands of service engineers and technicians supported by their colleagues, management and supply chain who continue to maintain, support the fabric of the critical infrastructure in our world. Behind every laboratory, hospital and utility are our dependable service hero’s. Yet are we doing enough preventive maintenance support to look after these professional’s wellbeing? Mental health problems, in particular stress, are affecting many service leaders. For some leaders, it becomes a critical illness. Field Service News investigates this topic.

My name is Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates. I have been asked by Field Service News to talk to Mr Robert Smith MBA, Psychotherapist and Specialist in Clinical Psychology within Organisations. I have known Robert Smith for several years. It was thirty plus years ago we first met at a communications training event, “Meet the Press”. Robert was my coach and mentor, I owe him for teaching me the art of communication, influencing and persuasion. What follows is our conversation on a topic that I think is impacting many service leaders today.

Mark Homer: Mr Robert Smith, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our readers?

Robert Smith: Hello from snowy Scotland, and I'm Robert Smith. As Mark has already said, I've been in the people development business for most of my career. I started off working with professionals and then developing managers and leaders, but it's always been about people. I was kind of taken as being an organisation psychologist meaning everybody thought I knew about clinical psychology, which I do now. A regular scenario for me, was people coming up to me on courses and saying, “Robert, you know about people. Can I have a private word with you I need some advice.” If I could use a professional expression, I was quite worried I might (suggested ‘screw people up’) somebody up in the process of answering because messing around with people's brains when you don't know anything about it can be dangerous. So, I started formal education and training, developing my career within the Mental Health spectrum. I have had a brilliant and fascinating time working in hundreds of countries mentoring thousands of professionals. Over the years I have worked with many engineers and people in the service and IT industries. Our discussion topic today is extremely relevant.

Mark Homer: The majority of Field Service News readers are in the service sector. Many are delivering services and managing corporate service organisations with hundreds of field technicians and engineers maintaining critical equipment. In the present Covid crisis, engineers and technicians are maintaining critical equipment in hospitals and laboratories. They have all got the normal working day pressures plus the new additional and extra complications that COVID has introduced. The topic of our conversation today is corporate mental health. I'm keen to understand from your perspective if you have seen an upturn in referrals and to ask what your advice would be to field service leaders at present?

Robert Smith: My interest has been over the last few years to focus on Corporate Mental Health because it is becoming critical for every organisation. A report produced by Deloitte and Mind (the mental health charity) that was commissioned by the UK Government studies mental health and the corporate world. It was published in 2019 and covered the period between 2016 and 2019. The loss to the corporate world, because of poor mental health, not serious mental health, increased by 16%. It was recognised as a real problem before COVID came in. The amount of money they estimate that was lost to corporations in 2019 was forty-five billion pounds. This is an astonishing figure. It varies in the different industries on how much is lost, but typically due to poor mental health, in the services sector it is probably the equivalent to two thousand pounds (£2,000) per person. You can do the math yourself to work out how much that would cost your organisation. The amount of money that has been measured as lost is huge. Now that was in 2019. This is 2021. I can't imagine what the numbers are going to be for last year. There's another number I need to tell you about. The World Health Organisation predicted in 2019 that the leading disease burden globally in 2030 will be depression. This is frightening. If you look at the numbers of suicides in the UK, in the last three months this has gone up by 25%. There is enormous pressure on people, but people tend to sweep it under the carpet and ignore mental health problems. I saw on the news the other night that National Health were saying that they don’t have the mental health facilities to support their staff. I think that the onus has got to come onto organisations to look after their staff. Now what we're after is improving mental well-being and mental resilience, so that people can do their job, be successful and keep the company's operations running smoothly and growing.

Mark Homer: Service leaders are very much used to running a deskless workforce; lots of engineers and technicians are on the road. In the current crisis, many back-office and supporting allied functions that were traditionally office-based are now working from home. Numerous organisations are running 24x7 operations. We are hearing of increasing break-fix work and Preventative Maintenance backlog of work because a lot of routine work in the early stages of the Covid crisis was deferred. A traditionally difficult job now also has the added mix of this deferment work. Add the new Brexit paperwork, which is in some cases complicating or delaying some supply chains. Then the added pressure of people falling ill, isolating or safeguarding. What signs should a service leader, service manager and colleagues who are supporting each other lookout for? What are the typical symptoms you should be aware of and what would your advice be?

Robert Smith: Let me just pick up what you're saying there. What's happened to the engineering world has happened in the mental health world as well. Because what has happened is that people have spent a lot of time fixing things, but not maintaining them. You need to maintain things to be able to make sure that you don't have to get into the serious end of things. I've spoken to many engineers about what the pressures are and one of the great pressures, and one of the reasons that their levels of stress have gone up, is that they're not doing the job that they've signed up to do but they're doing Red Alert work. Red Alert work included emergency and stand-by work and critical cover. It's causing a lot of problems for people because if you're on Red Alert all the time you are ready to fight the good fight at any time, and that drains your energy level dead.

The whole process is very similar to an engine of sorts. The human condition (our engine), it is about making sure that you maintain things because if you don't maintain things, then what happens is, things go wrong. You need to do something to keep it at the positive end of mental health.

Now, what do you need to look for. As I am sure you already know, engineers have got a good sense of humour. One of the quickest ways to identify that engineers are under stress is that their sense of humour has gone out of the window. I think this is true of most people, but service engineers usually have a very good wry sense of humour. Being able to notice that this is going or is lost in an engineer is a big sign that they are struggling.

"80% of the workforce turn up with their arms and their legs. 15% turn up with their arms and their legs and their brain. Only 5% turned up with their legs, arms, brain and heart..."

For a service manager, one of the first things to recognise is start with self.

Self-First, because there is a new thing that seems to come up, which is a bit of a strange thing which is called imposter syndrome. It's like you're under a great deal of pressure because you don't think you've got the skills or the capabilities that everybody else thinks you have. You are under personal stress because you feel as though you're inadequate. Yet you have to keep up a brave front and one of the quickest ways you know about there being a potential issue is that as a manager and a leader, you get disturbed sleep. That you wake up in the middle of the night, and you haven't left work, it's still going on.

The other thing that you could recognise maybe in yourself, and in staff as well, is called presenteeism, which is about being at work and working longer hours, but not actually being productive. The London Business School did a survey on it. They stated that about 80% of the workforce turn up with their arms and their legs. 15% turn up with their arms and their legs and their brain. Only 5% turned up with their legs, arms, brain and heart. What does that mean well? Imagine being in a warehouse and there's a box in the middle of a warehouse. 80% of the staff would just walk around the box. 15% would actually probably pick the box up and do something with it. However, only 5% would probably think “Why is this box here? What is going on?” and solve the mystery of the box being in the middle of the warehouse. So, what is happening is that people are turning up to work but not really being present. They are there in body but not necessarily in mind and spirit. This a growing problem in the workforce. One good way of identifying that someone is under a lot of stress is if they are spending too long at work. Does that make sense?

Mark Homer: Yes, because if someone is not present in mind it will take them longer to complete a task and be efficient at work. The result of this will be someone having to increase the workday to complete their daily tasks. I know a lot of people articulate that they're worried about something, for example you can sometimes spot people repeating themselves in the context of worrying. I like the point you're making about waking up early in the morning. How can we help worriers? How can we recognise people that are under stress?

Robert Smith: It is a vicious circle. So, you're spending longer at work. You're going home but you are worried or thinking about work, meaning you're not actually leaving work. Plus, you are not sleeping well because you are stressed. Therefore, what happens is you come in tired. The next day you are not being effective and efficient meaning you worry causing the cycle to repeat.

We need to do something to train people to be able to sharpen their focus and their concentration so that they can get things done. Interestingly enough there's been some fabulous discoveries in neuroscience in recent years, the way that the nerves work for the fight and flight process, you can train people to use that. There are methods that you can use. That's part of what we do in our training is we teach people how to adapt your nervous system, in a way to be positive rather than negative because 95% of our behaviour is driven unconsciously, we don't think about it. Consider the way we breathe we do not think about it. For example, your heartbeats you don’t think about making sure your heart is beating or controlling the beats. If I raise my arm. I don't have to think about it, it just does it. If I had to do it consciously, that would be one large task having to think about all the muscles in the arm to make the arm raise. I have no idea how many muscles are even in an arm! It is important to recognise that most of our behaviour is driven by the unconscious, which most of the time is great because we don't have to think about it. When you are stressed, then your body automatically reacts in a certain way. The unconscious mind is making your body believed that a Sabre-toothed tiger is chasing you. However, there isn’t but that’s what your body thinks. How do you then calm that down, so that you can be running the bus rather than the bus running you? How can we control our bodies reaction? We've got to kick into action the 5% of the conscious mind that we can use to control the unconscious mind, which is running the rest of the body and telling you it's stressful. It all very interesting.

Mark Homer: Would you say that there's typically not a huge amount of leadership management training in this area. For example, a lack of training on active listening skills, or the ability to develop techniques to ask good questions to discover the state of an employee’s mental health?

Robert Smith: Brilliant question. Let’s consider the communication. So, in rough figures about 55% of communication is the visual part. We've gone into doing more zoom meetings these days, which of course, doesn't actually give you visual because we only see head and shoulders. 38% is the qualities of the voice. Finally, you've got the words that people are using. When somebody video phones in to talk to you, you're missing half of the communication. So, the manager has to listen for what is different. For many years, whenever I phoned this one person I coached and I said, “how are you today?” he would always reply saying he was fine. I would say, sometimes “No you're not”. He asked me how I knew that he wasn’t fine. I said well just listening to your tone of voice I can tell you are not okay. It doesn't take a great deal of training to be able to understand the difference in people's voice tone. Now that starts another conversation, which comes back to answering your question. For managers, when they listen to somebody and say ‘how has it been today or this week’ they need to pick up the tone of the employee. If the engineer’s tone is low or down, then the manager can say “You're saying that you are fine and, is that true? What's really going on?”. The fact that you've taken the trouble to notice that they're not their normal chirpy self, then they will react to this. They might share their problems or stresses or worries with you. You are not just walking through the process of saying hello, how are you because we do that all the time - don’t we? it's just the social norm, but to take that further and listen with care and ask, genuinely what's going on because “you don't sound as though you're fine”. Now you'll find that people will react to that.

Mark Homer: If I'm running a service organisation I might have potentially up to 1000 people in my organisation, is there anything as a service leader that I can start addressing now? Or can I introduce some form of training or regular check-ins?

Robert Smith: Okay, so the quick answer is you get us to come in and we'll spend time with you, and we'll design something because we don't do stuff that is off the shelf or the same for everybody because different organisations have different requirements. But there are things that you can do that are relatively simple and will help people. There needs to be a campaign of being able ‘self-maintenance’. The truth is you have got to take ownership of your mental health, that needs to be modelled from the top, that people have seen that they're doing things. So, there may become a need to have some sort of dialogue from the top through an organisation of what things can you do, I mean, simple things like having a walk somewhere during the day. If you have a brisk walk for 20 minutes, three times a week, enough to make your heart go a little bit faster not too fast, that has a profound positive effect on your mental health, because that stimulates the mirror neurons in the brain. One of the most effective, if not the most effective, way of changing your emotional state is breathing. When you're stressed, your heart rate goes up, your blood pressure goes up, you get clammy hands, and you can start getting a bit shaky. Your breathing changes and becomes quicker. Now what you need to do is deliberately use your conscious ability to change your breathing. By changing your breathing, you can control the nervous system and calm it down. The mind and body, which are interlinked, can be forced to calm down. Would you like to know how to do that?

Mark Homer: Yes, this sounds like an amazing technique.

Robert Smith: This technique does need discipline but it's something that can be done. If you think about it. For example, I've just got out of an irritating service customer (client) and I've got back in my van and I'm feeling frustrated. However, I cannot be frustrated or aggravated because I have got the drive off for next appointment. Yet, all you need to do is just two minutes and you can calm down.

"Meditation is another very good technique and the science on this is magnificent. Now meditation it can be done, relatively simply without travelling to the top of a faraway mountain..."

So, you'll breathe in one long breath in, for just hold it and then two more. Now let it out slowly while counting to six, but let it go out. Let it all the way out of the body. It is important to make sure you really empty your diaphragm . Now if you do that breathing exercise for two minutes that will bring down your stress levels. Now there are lots of techniques like this that you can master to make sure you are constantly maintaining your mental well-being. You can't get anybody else to do it.

Beginning with breathing exercise is a good way to start. Meditation is another very good technique and the science on this is magnificent. Now meditation it can be done, relatively simply without travelling to the top of a faraway mountain. We teach techniques from QiGong which of course is for the martial arts and is what you do before the battle. This is 3000 years old – this technique has got a very good track record! Before you go to battle you need to have a clear mind. It takes about 10 minutes to do, but you have guided meditations now. I would be very happy to share one of those with you and your readers. If your readers would like to send it in their email, we'll send it to them. They can share it amongst the staff, and it is a profoundly powerful way of becoming centred and back in your self again.

Mark Homer: How would a corporate programme work?

Robert Smith: There are relatively short workshops that are spread over a few months. There are exercises both physical and mental because, you know, we're working as the mind and body. As I said that you know the process the neuro process that makes you stress can be reversed to make you relax, and we can teach you how to do that. We can teach how to control impulse mobile telephone activity. We each spend four hours according to Google, four hours a day on social media and email communications. Therefore, we teach you to control and have better control of your impulse, and how to use selective attention so you can deliberately have selective attention on things and lengthen the overall period of attention.

Mark Homer: These workshops sound like a great way for service engineers to manage their stress. Robert, how would people get in touch with you?

Robert Smith: The best place to go is our web site [details are below for both contact and to obtain a meditation relaxation audio]

Mark Homer: Robert Smith, thank you very much been an absolute pleasure. The full interview has been recorded including links to other resources and can be found on the Field Service News Portal. I for one will be practising my breathing techniques and downloading the relaxation audio. I found the statistics that Robert shared quite shocking. I know for many; Mental Health is something we may take for granted but as I get older the more I come across friends and colleagues who talk about the impact mental health is having on their lives or family. I would recommend adding mental health in the context of health and welfare as a discussion item on your next service team meeting and actively listen to all the responses. Please do also try the beathing exercise before you turn the page.

Robert Smith – Personal bio & contact details:

Corporate Mental Health Consultant

Robert has had an extraordinary career having received an MBA he went on to become a UKCP registered Psychotherapist adding Post Graduate Certificates in CBT and SFT and a Clinical Psychology Diploma. He is also a Master Trainer of NLP and Coaching. This powerful mix of business acumen and depth of psychology knowledge enabled him to design and deliver some of the most innovative Talent Development Programs in the world. So far, he has worked with people from 100+ countries, many different organisations and multi cultures. In some of those cultures Mental Resilience was necessary not only for work life but to stay alive. Robert and his team will stretch you, open your mind and transform you. All done in a no-nonsense practical way with even a dash of fun. But Robert will for sure, if you’re ready, prepare you for a new world.

Contact: info@lesleymackayassociates.com

Robert Smith LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-smith-6b94359/