Episode 14 – Season 2

Davina Ramkissoon, Health & Wellbeing Director at Zevo Health | Where should you start with a wellbeing strategy?

Davina is the Health & Wellbeing Director at Zevo Health. She leads a team of Psychologists and experts in the fields of Nutrition & Fitness in the delivery of forward-thinking, engaging and evidence-based Workplace Wellbeing Programmes.

On the Workplace Wellbeing podcast we often discuss individual tactics for improving wellbeing but in this episode we want to go a step further and discuss strategy.

Davina is often involved in helping companies set their wellbeing strategy so we discuss how employers should go about establishing a robust strategy.

Davina and Ian Discuss:
– Needs analysis and the discovery phase
– How to get started with implementing a strategy
– Wellbeing champions and ow they support a wellbeing strategy

What’s Inspiring Davina
Eshter Perel: Mating in Captivity: How to keep desire and passion alive in long-term relationships

How to contact Davina
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davina-ramkissoon-7007a41b7/ 
https://www.zevohealth.com/ 

Transcript

Introduction
Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Podcast, the podcast for wellbeing professionals that looks at best practices in organisations that care about their people, and which keeps an eye on the growing number of suppliers in the wellbeing space.

The workplace wellbeing podcast is sponsored by fastPAYE a financial wellbeing solution that facilitates flexible salary advances. It also provides access to financial education, a benefits assessment calculator, and a host of other financial wellbeing tools. fastPAYE he is part of the work tech group that includes ShopWorks Workforce Solutions, and SolvedBy.Ai.

ShopWorks offers Scheduling and Time and Attendance tools that improve your workforce management processes. Whilst SolvedBy.Ai provides unique artificial intelligence products that deliver optimum staffing levels and improve employee retention.

Ian Hogg
Hi, and welcome to another edition of the workplace wellbeing Podcast. I’m Ian Hogg Chairman of fastP.A.Y.E.Today I am joined by Davina Ramkissoon Health and Wellbeing Director at Zivo Health. Davina leads a team of psychologists and experts in the fields of nutrition and fitness in the delivery of forward thinking engaging and evidence based workplace well being programmes. On this podcast we often discuss individual tactics for improving well being. But I want to go step further today. Davina is often involved in helping companies set their wellbeing strategy, and in today’s episode, I want to discuss how employees employers should go about establishing a robust strategy. Hi, Davina. Thanks for joining us. 

Davina Ramkissoon
Hi, Ian. It’s great to be here with you today.

Ian Hogg
Good to have you. Listen, why don’t we start as we always do with you tell the listeners a bit about your background, and then how you ended up at Zevo. And a bit about what Zevo do really?

Davina Ramkissoon
Okay, definitely, I’ll try and keep this as concise as possible, it’s probably best not to turn it into this as your life. But in essence, yeah, I’ve always, I always knew that I wanted to work with people. And this was shaped in part by seeing my parents careers. They’re both nurses, my dad being a mental health nurse and my mom specialising in a different area of healthcare. But in essence, my views on health and well being were shaped very early on, and the constant communications around you know, healthy eating well being, really merged. But instead of going down the medical route, as they did, I was more interested in the psychological model, and understanding the why, why we behave in certain ways, and how this impacts our quality of life, which is why I actually progressed into professional training in psychology. And then later specialised within health psychology itself, which is a new, fairly new area of health psychology, and sort of psychology. And I’m now in the process of completing my doctorate in that area as well. So my interest in workplace wellbeing really was caught during my master’s research, where I was looking at stress and recovery after work, and how your ability to switch off can be impacted by your rumination style. So it’s really thinking around, you know, when you finish work, in the old days when he left the office, now, when you’re closing the laptop, you know, are you still thinking about work in your spare time. And if you are dependent on how you’re thinking about work, it can really be either a beneficial process or a very negative one, in which, you know, stress has continued to run in the background, we’re ruminating on how things have gone, not so well. Or maybe how you know that last meeting up to you. And it’s not really beneficial in terms of problem-solving. And that’s where when you are thinking about work from a problem-solving perspective, it’s slightly more creative, isn’t as stress-inducing, and it really, it doesn’t tend to impact your ability to switch off and recover. And just reading all the literature just sparked something in me because it’s so clear that well being shouldn’t be something that we think of at the end of our working day. It should be something that we think about continuously throughout our day because we spend the majority of our time at work. And it’s more time than we spend with our family and friends, especially when we were going into the office, Monday to Friday. So just taking my view on my training and health psychology, which was all concerned about healthy ageing, it’s looking at the quality of life that we lead. It’s thinking around different aspects of healthcare that we need across our lifespan, and just really thinking about how we can create healthy behaviours earlier on to help us as we age, and this is probably so important, especially considering, you know, retirement and ages are being pushed later. Now for my generation, we’re looking at retiring at 70. And from a personal perspective, I’m just thinking, you know, I want to still enjoy my life and enjoy, how I interact and in that goes with life and thing, everything that comes with it. And that includes how can cultivate a healthy body. And as we know, desk working isn’t inherently dangerous. But it does come with a few risks, and especially in relation to musculoskeletal problems. So there’s just such a vast landscape in workplace wellbeing in which we can bring healthy behaviours to the way we work to ensure that the health and well being of employees is looked at. And of course, we know it’s a business priority. Now,

I started first working in children’s services and was working with a range of families and children in terms of age span, and was also attached to different localities and different schools, secondary schools and primary schools being the lead point of contact there for any child that needed additional support. But yeah, it was after my master’s that I transitioned into workplace wellbeing. And my experiences have been shaped by different roles, which were predominantly based in HR teams, where I could pull in my knowledge from my education and do my work experiences, to shape the mental health and well being of those workplaces. And I’ve worked in various industries, which has included construction and financial services. And now, you know, with Zevo Health, there’s a whole client portfolio that we look at, from retail to technology to in financial services. So you’re looking at different working environments. And it’s all about how you bring both the theory and the evidence to those workplaces to ensure that you’re designing a workplace well being straight strategy or programme that’s fit for its purpose, for example, you know, construction workers aren’t going to need the same thing as predominant as workers in tech industry. So it’s really thinking around what is the science that’s currently coming through? And how can you apply further learnings to help further increase and support workers in their working environment?

Ian Hogg
That’s excellent, you know, good background, and thank you for telling us that. So if a couple of things, if I may. So you talked about, you know, we should think about well being throughout the day, rather than just at the end of the day, is that sort of prevention is better than the cure type approach? I, if I just get stressed all day, and then try and fix it at the end of the day, it’s too late. Is that? Is that where you’re going with it? Or?

Davina Ramkissoon
A typical client is really interesting because it doesn’t really exist we hear this a lot, it’s never one size fits all. So what we always do is we try and obviously, it is budget dependent, and employers and organisations are in different phases of where they’re at with their wellbeing strategy and their investment into it. But what we always say is, like, let’s start at the very beginning with a needs analysis. And let’s understand the well being of your organisation. So that we can design interventions to suit the different ways in which you work and places that people work. And we can base it on data. So this is really important because when it comes to organisations, we have to take the psychological models and apply them in a business case, business case format. So that we can bring all the senior leadership team with us whether it’s a board of directors, whether it’s the management and employees, we’re trying to reach so many different levels. And so the communication has to be right. During that needs analysis first sets us all out on the same page, we’re looking at the data, both quantitative and qualitative, to understand what are the priorities that are coming through from the workforce, and where there might be potential differences. For example, if we’re working with a global company, their APAC region might have vastly different needs to their EMEA team. So it’s important to pull out some of those differences and then tailor the approach to suit the needs. So as you mentioned yet, construction workers, you know, the thing that is important to note, there’s access, they’re not necessarily going to have email addresses or by logging onto a computer every day. So you have to think around, well, how do we reach those people? And if we can’t get to them and their working day? How do we get creative? How do we ensure that they have access to the support that their company is providing for them? And that’s where you might look at technology, and ensuring that maybe, you know, there’s so is Zevo Health, we have employee wellbeing app, which means that employees can just download the app to their phones. And it provides a wealth of resources. There’s an academy section, which has lots of courses on it. We also have nutrition and exercise classes on it. And then we have a section on mindfulness. So those are all in the individual ledge, you can click in and pick something that resonates with you that you’re interested to learn a bit more on. But in addition to that, we also have the ability to link in with your own EAP. So we also have an EAP service. But if there’s an or if there’s already an existing EAP. So you’re employing the system programme in place, then we can link that through the app. And then it’s just you’re thinking about barriers to engagement. Hopefully, we’re removing some of those barriers as we’re going

Ian Hogg
And through EAP typically, that would be some sort of helpline where people would get through to advisors that are a specialist in a particular area. Is that how it is?

Davina Ramkissoon
Yeah, yeah. So EAP can be it’s varied from provider to provider, one of the core offerings is always the therapy, so that access to counselling, where you might access brief CBT, for example, which is sorry, I’m aware of all the acronyms, so the Behavioural Therapy, which is really, really valuable for anyone who’s experiencing anxiety or depression, and it can be delivered very effectively online and through telle counselling. So those are great interventions to have there. And then with other providers, you have access to financial support, or housing support, it really depends, you know, what you need and what the employer has, but as a core benefit, there’s the counselling available.

Ian Hogg
So if you went back when you do a needs analysis, so presumably, that is really surveys, questionnaires, speaking to people, workshops, decent we in software, we call that the discovery phase, where we can understand so So you go through that phase, where what you put a team in to sort of help understand what the what wellbeing challenges are within the organisation, I take it and then you will, you’re fairly neutral, you’re not just trying to solve say nutrition or fitness, if it was financial well being, you would come up with a strategy to help solve that for the, for the people that had that problem would you.

Davina Ramkissoon
Exactly. So we’re looking at the whole spectrum of health and well being so we might look at elements of physical, psychological, social, financial issues really depends on what we’re seeing from the data. And also working in collaboration with the organisation. So we take we hold qualitative focus groups to hear from the employees. Because, you know, the great thing about data in terms of quantitative data is you can pull a number, and you can, and you can present that back. But really, you get more detail from the qualitative to say, what does that number mean? And what might solve that issue? So we pull all that data together. And as you mentioned, yet, we’re impartial we’re trying to find the halfway house, that’s going to suit the majority of people and also the budget that’s available. So some services that we might look to deliver from our in house team of psychologists like therapists and counsellors and our exercise nutritionist, PR professionals, is developing a suite of training specifically for that client. And they’re focused on health promotion training. But in addition to that, what we’re seeing a move to for some of the organisations who have already established wellbeing programmes is that they’re looking to bring in expertise. So in some of our clients, we actually have a team on-site 24/7, or when the operations are running, so that if an individual needs counselling, they can link in with that person in real-time, and have that meeting in their working day. And then there’s constant training that’s happening, or they’re working with the senior leadership team to look at some of the change management aspects that are coming through. And then we get to a bit more granular and detailed and the interventions that are being designed. So we recently designed a 10-week managerial programme or course, or I should say, for a sales team, and in the EMEA region. So we had 40 managers go through that. And it was five weeks of training, complemented with five weeks, five sessions of one to ones. So they had time to attend the group training, assimilate that learning and then apply it to their own life. And that training, that course saw great improvements in psychological wellbeing life satisfaction, happiness and purpose. But we also took some organisational measures, and we looked at productivity, so perceptions of productivity increased, as well as perceptions of physical health, and work-related attitudes. So the sales managers of that course felt better able to manage the workload coming through and to manage their stress.

Ian Hogg
And was it about the sales managers reducing their stress? Or because they had salespeople that worked for them? Because sales is a pretty high-stress place and sales guys are always stressed? So is it? Is it were they trying, were you trying to coach people on how to make sure that their team weren’t stressed or make or that they were, they were coping and managing their own stress levels.

Davina Ramkissoon
So health always starts with yourself first. But if you have a leader who’s able to have strong boundaries, and they’re able to manage the depth, the downwards level of stresses, it’s going to have a ripple effect on their team. But as you’re saying, like sales is such a high demanding team to be in very competitive, very target driven. So it’s also about managing your stress, and not always be is managing the ‘Always On’ aspect of sales as well. So we saw, whilst we were targeting the managers themselves, many of them were saying, This is great, how do I bring this up to up to my team, and we were saying, go through the process. And then you’ll see the ripple effect, and then when we were doing the qualitative feedback at the end, they were saying, I’m a better manager now because I’m able to take care of myself and my team have responded positively to myself going through this training. So whilst we weren’t directly managing and measuring the impact on our teams, we’re hearing it qualitatively through the feedback. So yeah, I’d say if you’re delivering an intervention to an individual, it’s naturally going to have a ripple effect.

Ian Hogg
And I think when one of the sorts of standards of things when you get in any strategy implementation, whether its well being or financial strategy, is you’ve got to get senior people to buy into it. So I get that if you’ve got the manager buying into it, then he or she is more likely to be tolerant of the problems of that, you know, their team. Whereas if you just trained the team, but not the manager, I know some old school sales managers that were just, you know, probably wouldn’t be too, too open to this sort of conversation really, but would you agree with that is that

Davina Ramkissoon
Oh, definitely, and this was and we would have experienced this as well and myself being in the room with the board of directors and half the saying, you know, show me the number and the others the other half saying, health isn’t it? Number it’s, you know, it’s more complex than that. So even at that level, there’s still this struggle to understand how we measure well being in an organisation. Yeah.

Ian Hogg
No, I agree. I think it’s probably the, you know, the biggest challenge, isn’t it to try to convince people that the ROI? Yes, there are benefits to having healthy productive staff, obviously. But, you know, the Finance Directors are never going to get completely evidence-based ROI on their investment really are they?

Davina Ramkissoon
Well, this is interesting, because we’re looking to move towards that ROI or return of value. So that ROV, but what the literature is showing is that you can calculate this, but it has to be, you know, you’ll get that figure back over maybe a term of five years. So that’s where we’re really encouraging our clients to look at not necessarily a one-year strategy, we’re saying, let’s look bigger because the longer-term strategy will enable us to calculate some of this ROI, or ROV, which is what you really want in terms of short term intervention. So for example, with that course, that I was speaking about that we ran the sales managers, we were able to look at the short term impact. And I mentioned some of the outcomes that we measured. But it would be great to kind of look further down the line and say, Well, what was the attrition, you know, the comparison group for managers who did attend this course or didn’t attend the course or, or look at other indicators of health. But this is definitely something that we can start to map on a value level. So return of value really looks at your quality of teamwork, your job satisfaction, it looks at your attrition levels, in my income, involve some of your 360 reviews, maybe you have, you know, measuring your satisfaction with your line manager, it might look at how many people are thinking of leaving the organisation some of these factors and you can start kind of getting a good measure of value. Definitely, if you can’t get a return of an investment calculated.

Ian Hogg
No, I agree. And we were with fastPAYE, where we’re going for financial well being is we often measure sort of proxies for wellbeing, like you say, retention, or whether people work more overtime hours or you know, whether their attendance improves, rather than actually, whether they’re whether the well being is improved. And, you know if you do that by survey, it’s all you can measure is the proxies that you believe have been driven by the wellbeing like the retention. So yeah, and I think it’s a challenge. But you know, hopefully, there’s lots of people working on it. And, you know, Finance Directors some of them, I think, are waking up to the fact that there are some things you can’t measure, but they’re just the right thing to do, you know.

Davina Ramkissoon
Exactly, exactly. And I think there’s still some hesitation around that approach, even though we know it’s the right thing to do. It’s a business priority, the pandemic has exacerbated a lot of the mental health issues that were already present. And so before the pandemic, the World Health Organisation, predicted that depression would be the leading cause of disease burden by 2030. So we were already on that trajectory. And whilst I’ll balance out, you know, the pandemic has given some people some space to balance their priorities over health and wellbeing. And just going back to what we were saying earlier around prevention. A lot of the conversation around the pandemic is how can you prevent yourself from contracting COVID-19? So that line of thinking has been extended to well, how do I prevent physical ill-health? And how do I prevent mental health? And you would assume that there’s been so much talk in the media around self-care around burnout around preventing those issues, speaking up, speaking to your line manager, if you are concerned about anything, and just that vulnerability piece around speaking about mental health, which may have been harder for some people to do, especially because we’re not taught that going into the workplace, you know, you know, from my perspective, you know, when I first entered the workplace, that wasn’t something that would have come easy to a lot of leaders, and now it’s slowly changing. So we’re undoing learning for like 20, 30, 40 years where we would go, right we’re going into work put on your professional hat on anything that’s impacting you outside and your personal life shouldn’t be bought in and we’re going well no, we need to address what’s happening if there’s someone coming into work with depression, and it’s impacting their performance. And you know, we should we want to keep that person in our organisation because they are a value. So it’s really thinking around how we look after our employees at a much deeper level.

Ian Hogg
I 100% endorsed that I think when we spoke before Davina, you talk to me about the role of wellbeing champions within an organisation that’s trying to guess, wellbeing strategy. I think it was a really interesting subject you took the listeners through what a wellbeing champion is and how they sort of support the delivery of strategy

Davina Ramkissoon
100% Yes. So, a lot of the work that we’ve done with clients has been around delivering training, say, for example, we have our own mental health champion training, or we deliver mental health training in general, or there’s work around mental health policy, and that’s designed for an organisation. But what happens is that well being has to be part of the culture. And if it’s only lead from a leadership position, that puts a lot of that that puts the burden on propagating this culture of wellness of getting the communication out there on the leadership team, or on the HR team, if it’s being led by the HR team, a lot of organisations now are hiring internal wellbeing leads to look after the well being of the organisation. But what we’re trying to say is if we have a network of champions, in an organisation, that is also supporting the messaging, and helping to fight the stigma of mental health, or any type of stigma to do with health in the workplace, then then the emphasis is not placed solely on leadership. And there are more people on the ground, who are able to speak to their colleagues, their peers, and spread that same message. So it helps, in essence, spread that word, and helps change the culture at a rapid speed rather than just focusing it on a leadership team. So these champions that we have that we train up, they go through a Mental Health Champion training programme, which teaches them about mental health, it teaches them how to support someone in a crisis. And, and it gives them a good communication framework to open up a conversation around mental health and well being. And then there’s a self-care element on at the end of the course, as well to ensure that all of our well being mental health champions understand how to look after their own mental health. But you can extrapolate this out, and you could change it just to our wellbeing champions. It really depends on the organisation and what their needs are. But we do it from Mental Health Champion perspective, and we say to these champions, who are made up of leadership, as well as non-leadership individuals, is that we tell them and train them to know that their responsibility is not to provide therapy, it is ensuring that if we are noticing the signs of someone who is experiencing mental health, or we think they are that we’re able to have a conversation with them, just to say, you know, look, I’ve noticed that, you know, you’re not really you might be turning up to work late, or you’re not attending the team meetings as you would normally it’s everything, okay? And a colleague might pick up on that sooner than a team leader. Maybe just because, you know, it’s been a busy week, or there’s been lots of change happening, we know ourselves in business, everything can move quite quickly. So it’s about ensuring that there are champions who are trained within a framework to provide support, and they’re in a conversational way. And if that individual says, opens up and says, Yeah, I’ve not been feeling myself, like, the pressure of the pandemic is getting too much. If there’s a lot of pressure at home in terms of kids, or, you know, they might have elderly parents who were looking after, and it’s all just kind of feeding into one, they could then say to them, you know, with empathy, I’m really sorry that you’re going through this, do you know that we have this service available, and it might be the employee assistance programme? Or, you know, do you want me to put you in touch with HR, who might be able to support further, and you’re basically ensuring that people don’t get to crisis point. And you’re trying to intervene much sooner. So back to that early, early intervention piece. And with that, you’re building trust support vulnerability, but we’re also saying to the champions, as well be aware, just because you’ve had this training doesn’t mean that everyone is gonna want to talk to you. It doesn’t mean that you’re the right person for that person to speak to. And it might be that you might touch on something that that person isn’t ready to speak about. So your role is about providing a safe environment for an individual to speak to you should they want to but in essence, you’re just opening the conversation and a lot of the time, people will be quite touched, that you actually thought to reach out to them and to check that they’re okay. And should they change their mind, and they want to speak to you later on then at least hopefully, that interaction would have been a positive one, and they will come back to you, or they can come back to another man, Mental Health Champion. So when we’ve trained everyone up, we try and figure out what’s the best way to communicate this to an organisation as well, because you don’t want the champions to be hidden. You want them to be visible in the organisation, and that might be through your intranet site. In some organisations, when we were on-site, some people would have, you know, little stickers on their monitors or laptops or they’d have like a similar to like a high vis coat that you would have for the fire wardens. It’s really thinking around the culture and what works for that organisation, but that visibility pieces, he’s that’s not to be missed out. And then when you do that, you’re making it an ‘US’ issue, rather than a HR leadership issue where their reach can only be is so far when you need to have those one to one conversations. So just picking up on the colleagues that you’re seeing day to day.


Ian Hogg
That’s excellent. I think there’s also a value in it not being management, you know, you feel you can go speak to wellbeing champion, because it’s confidential, it’s not going to go anywhere. And it goes back to your earlier point that for years, people have been bottling this sort of stuff up and not sharing it and not being happy to talk about it and be nervous about the implications of discussing the fact that they might have, you know, some mental wellbeing issues. So I do believe that this is why I liked it, when you were telling me about it previously, I think wellbeing champions are quite a great initiative. And I think sounds much more approachable than seeing your boss, to be honest.


Davina Ramkissoon
Yeah, especially for once a first time conversation. And I think what is lost around mental health is that you can grow from a mental health illness, you learn so much about yourself. And you learn about, you know, what your boundaries are, what your strategies for wellbeing are when you need to call out for additional support. So it’s changing that narrative in the workplace, that if you experience a mental health illness, you’re weak, and you can’t do your job, and you’re not eligible for promotion, and all of this, it’s about that growth element. And that that growth part of the narrative that comes out of mental health, illness and stress as a whole. So I think there’s still some, whilst it you know, it’s terrible to experience and, you know, I think I’ll share with you during the pandemic, my anxiety levels went through the roof, I started having panic attacks for the first time. But I’ve learned through that as well, what some of my triggers might be, and why I’m having these experiences. And I can say to my CEO, hey, I’m not feeling the best today. And, you know, I might just need to just look, I’m going to get this task done. And then I’m just going to take some time back. And he’s grand, he’s going; yeah, sure. He’s like. Don’t even worry about that task, just finished now. So, it’s good to have those conversations and to have them in real-time as well.

Ian Hogg
Yeah, there’s an excellent, you know, I think you guys must be a lot of value to quite a lot of clients here with this approach. And it’s always good to talk strategy, I think because one of the themes of this podcast over 50 odd episodes now is that people often start with a tactic or an app or something without actually getting the strategy in place. So it was really, really good to hear how people could go about getting the needs analysis, training people up and then developing a strategy, I think, yeah, hopefully, a lot of our listeners can take some value for that. Unfortunately, we have no more time, Davina, just a few more minutes to sort of wrap up. So there’s one question I want you to ask that I asked everyone. Before I let you go. Can you tell me what book or media is giving you an inspiration at the moment and why?


Davina Ramkissoon
Okay, so I’m one of these people that reads a number of books at the same time. So at the moment, there are three books that I’m reading. So one is Eshter Perel. She is an amazing psychotherapist, you’ve probably heard a lot about her. And she’s got a great podcast as well, in relation to work and relationships, but I’m reading her book at the moment is called ‘Mating in Captivity’. And she talks about is how our quality of relationships determine our quality of overall health. And it’s great because it’s just looking at the deconstruction of society, and how that impacts the institution of marriage. So definitely that it’s a great book. The second book I’m reading is Brendan Kelly. It’s mental health in Ireland. It’s, I think it’s was released in 2017. It’s usually sold out, but then I managed to get my hands on a copy of it. And it’s just, you know, he’s clinical, actually, I think he’s a psychiatrist. Yeah, he’s a psychiatrist. But his book is written. It’s very easily accepted. So anyone who wants to learn a little bit more about mental health, perhaps you know you’ve, you’re supporting somebody in your family, it’s written from that perspective. So it’s a guide for patients, families, and healthcare professionals. And the language in a is just so accessible. So that’s great to read. And then I’m reading a little bit of science fiction as well, just to keep the creativity going. So I’ve got the three book problem there, as well. And that’s just, it’s our money on the beginning few pages of it, but it’s caught my attention already. So that’s what I’m reading.


Ian Hogg
Excellent. I normally have an audible you know I’m listening to one as well as reading. But the excellent I’ll make sure the links go into the podcast notes for those.  Unfortunately, we got to wrap up. That was excellent. I enjoyed it. Thank you very much. And, you know, hopefully our listeners will enjoy it.

Davina Ramkissoon
So thank you so much for having me.