Join Dr. Jennifer Russel, Diana Tikasz and Françoise Mathieu as they share strategies to protect our health and well-being during the pandemic.
BC Children’s Hospital, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Academy Lecture Series, September 14, 2020
Join Dr. Jennifer Russel, Diana Tikasz and Françoise Mathieu as they share strategies to protect our health and well-being during the pandemic.
BC Children’s Hospital, Child & Adolescent Psychiatry Academy Lecture Series, September 14, 2020
Over the past six months, we have seen our workplaces and organizations undergo overwhelming changes and upheaval. Despite these challenges, there are leaders among us who have faced this crisis with flexibility, empathy, and compassion.
What can we learn from these champions of compassionate leadership? How do we incorporate the values of compassionate leadership in our own teams and organizations?
In this webinar, experts in the field of leadership and organizational health discuss the key components of compassionate leadership during times of crisis.
To access the webinar, please sign up for our mailing list below.
Panelists
Françoise Mathieu, M. Ed, RP, is the Executive Director of TEND. She provides expert consultation and training to leaders from a range of sectors including military, police, healthcare, university, child advocacy centers and many other high stress, trauma-exposed work environments.
Cambria Rose Walsh, LCSW, has held the role of Project Director for several state and national initiatives in child trauma treatment & trauma-informed systems. She worked at the Chadwick Center for Children and Families at Rady Children’s Hospital for 20 years before opening her own private consultation practice on Trauma-Informed Systems and Secondary Traumatic Stress.
Tamsyn Brennan, MSW, RSW, MBA is the Director of Clinical Services at Chisholm Services for Children in Halifax, NS and has years of experience working in social service and education settings including palliative care, pediatric oncology, child protection and welfare, public and private school settings and with Corrections Canada.
Dr. Jennifer Russel is a Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist. She graduated from McMaster Medical School in 2005, and completed her Psychiatry Residency at the University of Toronto in 2010. She has been a TEND associate since 2019.
Her main area of focus has been working with youth with complex mental health difficulties such as severe mood disorders, anxiety disorders, psychotic disorders, and neuropsychiatric disorders as well as with their families.
As a psychiatrist juggling work in a tertiary care hospital while homeschooling my two primary school children during this pandemic, I quickly realized that I needed to develop tools to keep myself physically and emotionally healthy -- I needed to grab my psychological PPE.
I reached out to Françoise Mathieu and we developed a web-based presentation for the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine, Continuing Professional Development. Many health care workers across Canada joined on May 27, 2020 to explore best practices to stay well.
We called it Psychological PPE: Exploring Compassion Fatigue and Learning how to Keep Ourselves Psychologically Well.
In this presentation, we discuss:
Since developing this tool, I have continued to increase my daily wellness practices: regular exercise, virtual coffee dates with colleagues, regular peer support meetings, reducing media exposure and I have also reminded myself of the importance of regular pauses during my busy days.
These strategies have had a powerful positive impact on my energy, focus and ability to self-regulate during challenging days.
For more strategies we recommend:
Mathieu, F. (2020) This is a Marathon Not a Sprint: https://www.tendacademy.ca/marathon-not-sprint-covid19
By Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed, RP, CCC., Executive Director, TEND
Since email came into the workplace, followed by texting and a variety of other modalities to contact one another, the sheer volume of touch points and contact moments has dramatically increased. People expect speedy replies to those messages – no matter how urgent the matter truly is.
I am a Generation-X’er who joined the world of work in the late 1980s, so I remember when we used those pink telephone message pads for returning calls. If you left your office for a while, on your return you would find a large pile of those pink slips waiting for you.
It was a chore, but it was just one way of being encroached upon. Now we have ten ways.
In my opinion, there are two main issues to unpack here:
The first is that this information overload is limiting people’s productivity and ability to focus.
Cal Newport, author and computer scientist at Georgetown University, has written extensively on this topic:
This incessant communication fragments attention, leaving only small stretches left in which to attempt to think deeply, apply your skills at a high level, or otherwise perform well the core activity of knowledge work: extracting value from information.
To make matters worse, cognitive performance during these stretches is further reduced by the “attention residue” left from the frequent context switching required to “just check” if something important arrived.
We know that multi-tasking is a myth. What we are really doing when we attempt to do two things at once is switch-tasking – rapidly shifting our attention back and forth between two tasks. The result is that our productivity tanks and we end up doing worse on both tasks.
The second is that we need to manage expectations about communications.
There needs to be an agreed upon etiquette about the speed of reply, amount of detail and who should or should not be included in responses.
I’m sure we have all had the experience of being included on a “reply all” that was totally unnecessary. Folks, I really don’t need to be included in an email response that says, “Sounds good!” and has been sent to 200 people.
Here at TEND, our team has agreed upon the best ways to reach one another to avoid the “all day meeting” on three different communication platforms. (We revise this as we go, but we have found Slack to be a great way to do all of this.)
Another important aspect of this is being clear about what is truly urgent vs. emergent vs. FYI. Our team has agreed that, if one of us sends a text asking for an immediate phone call, it is an emergency. We don’t do that unless there is a clear and imminent need for it.
We schedule calls as needed. Our solution has been to compile questions that are less time sensitive and have a weekly team meeting to discuss non-urgent or emerging issues.
In fields were people feel reactive at the best of times, some co-workers view everything as urgent – when maybe it’s not. This requires some discussion to come to an agreement about what urgent means. “I need to get this off my pile of stuff to do” is not urgent for the team – even though it may make that person feel better.
Each team will have to navigate their unique workplace culture and demands of their workload to come to an agreement about workplace etiquette. Here are some suggestions to consider:
In this new world of remote work, one essential step to working well as teams is to regularly review our team’s communication methods and be open to regularly revising those approaches. What worked well (or, let’s be honest, maybe not so well) six months ago may no longer be the best way to work together now.
We encourage teams to be willing to regularly review and address what is allowing us to do our best work and stay connected and creative during this new work landscape.
In the coming weeks, we will be exploring the key tenets of Compassionate Leadership and research shows that good communication is a pillar of healthy workplaces and of a compassionate leader.
[Podcast] Ep. 194 – “The New Future of Work”, Making Sense with Sam Harris
[Book] Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World by Cal Newport
[Book] Busy: How to Thrive in a World of Too Much by Tony Crabbe
By Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed, RP, CCC., Executive Director, TEND
Over the past few weeks, we have heard from many parents and guardians about their experience of trying to juggle new work routines while parenting and/or homeschooling during this pandemic.
It probably won’t surprise you that nearly everyone has been reporting the same feeling: overwhelmed.
During a webinar that I was delivering last week, one worker asked us the following question:
I typically work 3 days/week but am now working 7 days/week to get my work done. During this, my partner and I are trading off caring for my two and four-year-old children. Any strategies to manage this?
I have been mulling over the complexity of the question and my brain went into a flow-chart mode because, of course, the answer to this question is:
It depends.
Is the challenge related to relationships or workload? How many responsibilities are you juggling? What was your situation before the pandemic started? What is it now?
It depends on so many factors. I can put on my couples’ therapist hat and go down one path of suggestions – or I can switch to my organizational health hat and take this in a whole other direction.
The first step is to clarify what your specific caregiver roles are currently:
The second step (presuming now that you are living under the same roof as your spouse) is to clarify the work duties of the parties involved. Which of the following situation most closely resembles your situation?
See how complex this quickly becomes?
Now, let’s have a look at your employment situation (and your partner, if it applies). Are you:
If that is the case, consider the following:
Your unique situation can be further complicated by other caregiver duties, health concerns, resources available in your community and so many more.
Although there are no miracle solutions to this complex challenge, there are some excellent resources available that offer strategies to juggle this very real and difficult reality that so many of us are currently facing.
Here are some great suggestions from trusted sources:
From the CBC, “New normal’ for parents is struggling with grief, guilt and pandemic demands — but you’re not alone”
Selected quotes from the article:
—
From the New York Times, “Agonizing Over Screen Time? Follow the Three C’s”
The Three C’s as according to Dr. Jenny Radesky, M.D., a pediatrician and expert on children and media at the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital:
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From the Canadian Pediatric Society “Parenting during COVID-19: A new frontier”
Selected quotes from the article:
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From the New Yorker, “This Is What Happens to Couples Under Stress”: An Interview with Esther Perel”
Selected quotes from the interview:
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From the Gottman Institute “ The Marriage Minute” newsletter.
From their website:
It’s a resource of tools, articles, videos, exercises, and more, all founded on Drs. John and Julie Gottman’s four decades of research and clinical experience, delivered straight to your inbox. Our goal is to teach you one thing each day that will deepen your friendship, allow you to use conflict as a catalyst for closeness, and enhance the romance in your marriage.
VISIT THEIR WEBSITE TO SUBSCRIBE
—
From Greater Good Magazine, “All I Want for Mother’s Day Is an Equitable Division of Labor“
Selected quotes from the article:
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From the New York Times, “Productivity Isn’t About Time Management. It’s About Attention Management”
Selected quotes from the article:
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From UNICEF, “7 ways employers can support working parents during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak”
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We have also created a new series of webinars to support teams during COVID-19.
If you’re interested in learning more, click here or get in touch.
As we continue to face this global crisis, we all need to be mindful about our physical and mental health. How do we understand our knee-jerk reactions to stress and how can we stay grounded in the face of uncertainty?
This is Part Two of our strategies to stay well in the long-term in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The threat response is hard-wired into all of us. Throughout the development of our species, this primitive system prepared our bodies to either flee, fight, or even collapse and play dead in response to a potential threat.
In our modern day, this can cause problems as the threat response is unable to distinguish between a real threat and a perceived threat. Therefore, we do not need to encounter a real sabretooth tiger to activate this system – merely thinking about a tiger can trigger a flood of stress hormones.
During this pandemic, we may find ourselves ruminating (how could we have prepared better?) and re-living past events (could I have helped that person in a better way?) – or we may find ourselves worrying and anticipating an uncertain future.
By doing so, we are igniting our threat response. This puts us in a reactive state that inhibits our ability to problem-solve and do our best work.
What can be done?
Practicing the Three Minute Breathing Space can help us to cultivate the skills of mindfulness.
Click here for a printable version
Dr. Rick Hanson has said: “Positive is like Teflon (does not stick) and negative is like Velcro (sticks easily).”
Humans are neurobiologically hard-wired to register negative events far more quickly and clearly than positive events. In fact, we need to focus on a positive event for 20-30 seconds for the event to register – whereas a negative event is registered instantaneously.
This is related to our threat response and our evolutionary survival instincts – we needed to be on the alert for the negative in order to survive.
This legacy has left us with a negativity bias. In order to combat this built-in bias, we need to be purposeful in focusing on the positive.
However, in the midst of a crisis, it can be challenging to find goodness when we are surrounded with fear, uncertainty and conflicting information.
What can be done?
We recently interviewed Dr. Patricia Fisher, TEND senior advisor, and she reminded us that, although leaders are often perceived as being exempt from stress, they are often the most overloaded people in our organizations.
Leaders are not super-humans. Middle managers especially are facing extraordinary pressure as they balance everything coming down from the top with the responsibilities coming up from those they supervise and the individuals that they serve.
And, like all us, they are also trying to navigate family demands and complex personal situations.
What can be done?
Check out our interview with Dr. Fisher for more suggestions on staying well as a leader during this pandemic.
Most professionals in human service fields are familiar with shift change and handover processes. However, when work pressures are amplified, such as during this pandemic, it is easy to forget how important those debriefing connections are for our mental health.
It is likely that the way in which we do handover has changed: instead of face-to-face interaction, we may be working virtually; or perhaps we are so rushed to get home to take care of loved ones who have been isolated in the house all day that we just can’t find the time to debrief.
Another aspect of transitioning from work to being off duty is finding a way to ground ourselves so that we can have some restorative time.
Our nervous system cannot be “on” 24/7 and we must establish routines and rituals, particularly during times of intense demands and uncertainty.
What can be done?
Debriefing:
Shifting to “off duty”:
“In the end, with systems crashing and failing, what mattered most and had the greatest immediate effects were the actions and decisions made in the midst of a crisis by individuals.” Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial
Although the scale and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic are unprecedented, there are many lessons learned from the past. Sheri Fink’s Five Days at Memorial highlights the crucial importance of ensuring basic physiological and emotional needs for all service providers and their leaders – this is always true, but particularly during crisis situations.
As Fink says in the quote above, it is in the moment-to-moment decisions that we will make as individuals that will matter most. The good news is that we have a vast body of knowledge about crisis management, human psychology, burnout, compassion fatigue and strategies to manage human physiology during times of crisis to help guide our way.
We won’t be able to control many aspects of this pandemic, but we can control our responses and the ways that we take care of ourselves and one another.
We are in for a marathon, not a sprint – so, remember to take it one step at a time.
We are in for a marathon, not a sprint – so, remember to take it one step at a time. #COVID-19 #caremongering Click To Tweet
Join our mailing list if you would like to stay updated on our latest resources.
Books
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink (2013)
Help for the Helper: The Psychophysiology Of Compassion Fatigue And Vicarious Trauma by Babette Rothschild (2006)
Resilience, Balance and Meaning: Supporting our Lives and our Work in High-Stress, Trauma-Exposed Workplaces by Patricia Fisher (2016)
Building Resilient Teams: Facilitating Workplace Wellness & Organizational Health in Trauma-Exposed Environments by Patricia Fisher (2015)
The Compassion Fatigue Workbook: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Traumatization by Françoise Mathieu (2012)
Our Online Courses
Compassion Fatigue 101 with Françoise Mathieu
Organizational Health in Trauma-Exposed Environments Online Course: Essentials with Dr. Patricia Fisher
Resilience in Trauma-Exposed Work with Dr. Patricia Fisher
Staying Grounded in Stressful Work with Diana Tikasz
There is now wide consensus that responding to the COVID-19 pandemic will take months rather than weeks.
As professionals in essential services, we all need to consider strategies that will help us stay well long-term rather than racing to just get through another day.
What can we do to remain clear-headed and balanced during this pandemic?
I am sure that many of you remember the scene in the movie Apollo 13 where the crew is urgently trying to find a way to perform a lifesaving repair on their spacecraft’s air supply. A NASA engineer throws a box of assorted items on a table and says to his colleagues:
“OK people, listen up […] we gotta find a way to make this, fit into the hole for this, using nothing but that.”
The team could only use materials that the stranded astronauts would have access to on their ship. These engineers needed to think fast and creatively – with the eyes of the entire world watching them. Failure to resolve this problem meant certain catastrophe for the crew.
High stakes, lots of pressure, intricate problems and few resources – during this COVID-19 pandemic, many of us feel like those NASA folks and the key challenge is this:
How do we access creative problem solving when we are stressed and exhausted? How do we retain the ability to think clearly when the reality is that many of us were launched into this crisis already tired and depleted?
The Impact of Wear and Tear: A Cautionary Tale
When experts discuss burnout, compassion fatigue and moral distress, they often overlook a crucial contributing factor to provider impairment – plain old fatigue.
In her explosive book Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death at a Storm-Ravaged Hospital, Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Sheri Fink investigates what took place in a New Orleans health care facility in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in August 2005.
For several days, the hospital lost power as well as much of its contact with the outside world. Exhausted staff, all of whom were now taking refuge in the sweltering facility, were desperately trying to care for patients – often working with very little sleep, a lack of food, and no sanitation, air conditioning or electricity.
Leadership quickly eroded. Medical professionals who were stuck in the hospital had to contend with a lack of communication about evacuation plans and no hope of respite to come. There were no more established shift schedules, handover, or time for rest.
In her book, Fink shares numerous interviews with staff where they describe overwhelming moral distress, feelings of burnout, and anger towards senior leadership and the government. It is widely agreed that these factors contributed to serious lapses in judgment by some of those health care workers which led to some questionable ethical decisions in the end.
Our organizations experience significant challenges at the best of times and there are many cautionary tales such as those in Five Days at Memorial that describe the dangers of pushing employees past their level of healthy functioning. In the face of this COVID-19 pandemic, we have additional work pressure including supply and equipment shortages; fear of contagion for patients, for ourselves, and our families; difficult ethical decisions; and significant moral conflict.
Five Days at Memorial demonstrates the potentially catastrophic consequences of wear and tear in crisis situations as well as the deterioration of problem-solving skills that can occur when we do not have time to refuel and reset.
What can be done?
Dr. Patricia Fisher, clinical psychologist and senior advisor at TEND, is an expert in organizational stress and burnout in health care and other human service organizations. Dr. Fisher has long expressed concerns about the potentially disastrous impact of ignoring the basics of human physiology of helping professionals and their leadership.
As she explains in her book Resilience, Balance and Meaning:
We are pretty good at dealing with spikes in stress levels as long as we get back to a relaxed state. Unfortunately, many people are consistently living with higher levels of chronic stress and their bodies are simply unable to experience any respite from the pressure. This has consequences.
Physical and mental health are often the first things that are sacrificed in crisis situations. As we know, in order to maintain our ability to think clearly and to do our work well, we all need to:
Although these suggestions seem simple, we need to be mindful about checking-in with ourselves and monitoring our physical and mental health.
For leaders, check-in with your staff to ensure that they have what they need – and don’t forget that your own self-care is important too.
We are all currently receiving a large volume of rapidly evolving and sometimes contradictory information about COVID-19. As teams, it can be difficult, time consuming and confusing to have to wade through the deluge of information.
What can be done?
Ensuring that we maintain clear communication is a crucial component of keeping our teams cohesive and functioning well.
The amount of stress we experience during times of crisis depends on many factors including past experiences, personality factors, current life stressors, coping strategies, prior training, personal resilience, and many others.
Regardless of the level of stress that we experience, it is important that we reset ourselves into a “rest and digest” state rather than some form of fight, flight, or freeze state as quickly as possible after a period of increased stress.
If we pay attention to our body at these times, it will give us clues as to what needs to happen next in order for us to reset ourselves. Often our body knows what to do – for example, bodies often tremble following a crisis event.
Things like crying and trembling are activities of the parasympathetic nervous system that the body uses to reset itself. It is best to allow the body to run through its course rather than forcing yourself to stop.
What can be done?
Activities of the nervous system that allow the body to metabolize stress hormones include:
Join our mailing list if you would like to stay updated on our latest resources.
Books
Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital by Sheri Fink (2013)
Help for the Helper: The Psychophysiology Of Compassion Fatigue And Vicarious Trauma by Babette Rothschild (2006)
Resilience, Balance and Meaning: Supporting our Lives and our Work in High-Stress, Trauma-Exposed Workplaces by Patricia Fisher (2016)
Building Resilient Teams: Facilitating Workplace Wellness & Organizational Health in Trauma-Exposed Environments by Patricia Fisher (2015)
The Compassion Fatigue Workbook: Creative Tools for Transforming Compassion Fatigue and Vicarious Traumatization by Françoise Mathieu (2012)
Our Online Courses
Compassion Fatigue 101 with Françoise Mathieu
Organizational Health in Trauma-Exposed Environments Online Course: Essentials with Dr. Patricia Fisher
Resilience in Trauma-Exposed Work with Dr. Patricia Fisher
Staying Grounded in Stressful Work with Diana Tikasz
Additional
COVID-19: Resilience Support Toolkit provided by Hamilton Health Sciences
Dr. Patricia Fisher, co-founder and Senior Advisor with TEND, is a clinical psychologist and specialist in organizational health and workplace wellness in trauma-exposed workplaces.
In this interview, Dr. Fisher shares best practice recommendations for leaders amidst the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Q: Dr. Fisher, you have been an expert in organizational health for many years, with a particular focus on professionals who work in health care, corrections, law enforcement and social services. How did you become interested in working with high stress, trauma-exposed professionals?
A: Like many of us in this field, I had intense personal experience as a clinical psychologist working with high-stress, high-trauma client groups within highly challenged systems and institutions (e.g. mental health, social services, justice system, etc.).
And this is going back to the late 70’s, before we had much language or knowledge around the effects of this kind of work on individuals and systems.
By the late 80’s and early 90’s, we had a much better handle on trauma as it pertained to victims – but we were starting to see serious challenges arising for the frontline trauma workers and their organizations. At the same time, it was becoming clear that frontline workers were providing critical, life-changing services to the client groups.
So, we had a double bind: there was a growing need for services but at the same time, the workforce and their organizations were losing capacity and, in a sense, victimizing their workers.
Fortunately, pioneering work by Pearlman, Saakvitne, Finklehor and others was looking at the impact of trauma work on practitioners and starting to propose ways of addressing it. In the mid-90’s, I began to look at the risk and resilience factors at play for practitioners working in trauma-exposed environments within highly pressured and constrained organizations. This was the basis of my Complex Stress Model as well as the research, trainings and interventions that were built on it.
Trauma-exposed workers and their organizations provide services that are vital for a civil society. It is imperative that we support those individuals and their systems.
Q: In your opinion, how important is leadership during this complex and rapidly evolving situation that we are in currently?
A: Leadership is so important under “normal” circumstances. Under the current situation it becomes critical and central.
It’s important to remember too, that we need to include both formal and informal leaders in our thinking. In these tumultuous times, many frontline individuals will be called upon to take on acting leadership roles in addition to their peer leadership roles.
Q: I have often heard you say that “leaders are people too.” Would you mind expanding a bit for our readers what you mean by that?
A: Leaders are often perceived as being exempt from complex stress and their consequences at the personal and professional levels. However, we often find that leaders are some of the most stressed people in organizations.
The pressures on leaders can be so intense at the best of times with everything coming down on them from on top in addition to the responsibilities coming up from those they supervise. In the current situation, these pressures will only amplify, and leaders are even more at risk for developing stress and trauma-related effects.
Q: I would like to talk a bit about the basics of staying well as a helping professional during these high stress times. You wrote a wonderful book called Resilience, Balance and Meaning – can you tell our readers about the focus of the book and why that might be more important than ever right now?
A: The workbook is designed as a practical, comprehensive resource to support all those in trauma-exposed work. Based on current research and best practices, it provides an understanding and action plan throughout the three sections:
The first section provides an introduction and orientation to the issues of workplace stress in trauma-exposed environments – what it is, how it works, what helps and what effects it has. The second section provides self-assessment tools that help to determine your current risk and resiliency profile, self-care status, and stress symptom profile. And the final section provides support to build a personal wellness plans for both your personal life and your work life.
Under “normal” conditions we often believe we can limp along without taking ourselves seriously – and that can seem to work for a while. However, with the current surge in stressors, we really must take informed and effective action to care for ourselves and our colleagues.
Q: What are your top recommendations for leaders in health care and first responders at this time?
A: Here are my recommendations:
Q: In your book Building Resilient Teams, you talk about Stephen Covey’s circles of control and influence. I was thinking that this is a very relevant concept right now. What are your thoughts about how Covey’s circles may be a useful tool right now?
A: For readers who may not be familiar with this model, Covey identifies three zones of control:
The smallest part includes things over which we have complete control; the next zone are things we have influence over; and the last and largest zone are things that we have no control or influence.
As you think about looking after your own wellness, it is important to be clear about what you do and do not have control over. When we are faced with situations in the workplace (or in life) that are unpleasant and/or stressful we have four choices:
When we are dealing with circumstances outside of our control, such as the current pandemic, we need to focus on the healthiest and most adaptive approaches – either with acceptance and self-care, by changing the way we deal with it, or escape from it.
It is extremely stressful to feel as though you have no control over the events and circumstances in your life, and your experience of them – and this is why it is so important to understand where you sit in the zone of control for the different issues you are facing right now. We need to recognize that we always have a place to find a sense of control – either over the situation or over how we choose to deal with it.”
Q: Finally, what is one message you would like to share with our readers, whether they are frontline workers, managers or senior leaders as we navigate through this unprecedented situation?
A: I believe we all need to keep coming back to principles of kindness – to ourselves, our families, our colleagues and our clients.
This pandemic calls on us to change the traditional helper belief paradigm from: “Either I take care of you OR I take care of me” – to – “I MUST take care of me so that I can take care of you.”
This pandemic calls on us to change the traditional helper belief paradigm from - either I take care of you OR I take care of me - to - I MUST take care of me so that I can take care of you. Click To TweetWe need to support trauma-exposed workers and their organizations as they provide vital services.
Leadership during times of crisis is critical and central.
Include both formal and informal leaders: frontline individuals will be called upon to take on acting leadership roles.
Leaders are often some of the most stressed people in organizations.
Focus on the healthiest and most adaptive approaches when dealing with circumstances outside of your control.
Set realistic priorities on a daily basis and recognize what you have achieved each day
Take time to ground yourself as you finish one task and before you take on the next task (eg. deep breath, “Feet on Floor”)
Stay connected with your colleagues in a kind and caring way and appreciate each other and your successes together
Take care of your body: hydrate frequently, make sure you have quick healthy meals and snacks, sleep as much as you can.
Focus on what you have control over: unplug from a steady diet of news, rumours and externally imposed anxieties.
Resilience, Balance & Meaning Workbook by Dr. Patricia Fisher, 2016
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey, 2004
Staying Grounded in Stressful Work online course with Diana Tikasz
Resilience in Trauma-Exposed Work online course with Dr. Patricia Fisher
Organizational Health in Trauma-Exposed Environments online course with Dr. Patricia Fisher
By Françoise Mathieu, M.Ed, RP, CCC., Executive Director, TEND
I was catching up on the news this morning and reading about the long wait times to reach Service Canada to ask about employment insurance; about the days spent on hold by stranded travelers trying to reach airline customer service before the borders close; and other similar situations where callers are experiencing long wait times and high levels of distress and frustration.
We are also hearing about 911 communicators who are receiving large volumes of calls from both the worried-well and the mildly ill while still dealing with life and death matters. (By the way, this isn’t new for emergency communicators – as they will tell you – but the workload is unprecedented right now).
Since my team has had the immense privilege of working with many customer service workers and call centre operators in the past, from every possible industry that you can imagine, I would like to break down what may be happening at the receiving end of that phone call, live chat or email.
Most operators were already experiencing very high-pressure work environments before this pandemic unfolded.
Large volume of calls, angry and distressed clients, not enough time for proper breaks, and even physical injuries from poorly designed workstations are just some of the stressors that call centre workers deal with on a daily basis. Many are also struggling with low pay, long hours, low reward jobs and a wide range of workplace climates from the very healthy to the, quite frankly, straight-up toxic.
I used to provide employee assistance to a call centre that had a three-month turnover rate – that’s how long their staff lasted before they quit. That being said, I have mostly worked with incredibly supportive customer service leadership – however, they are still grappling with the complex challenges of the workload and difficult callers.
The types of calls that they receive are highly varied – even during normal circumstances.
These calls can range from callers who are seriously mentally ill, suicidal, uttering threats, being verbally abusive, or even just someone who is calling the wrong service and is very upset that the operator is unable to help them.
They rarely have the power to fix your problem beyond what they have the scope to do.
Call centre operators are working within the same mess that we are all in right now including slow websites, lack of information from high above, and rapidly changing policies, rules, regulations and procedures. Yelling at them will not make them more powerful than they are – and will likely just make everyone more stressed out and upset.
In some instances, you can ask to escalate the call to a supervisor for more answers, but that can be done politely.
Sometimes they do have some discretion to do a few extra things.
Yesterday, as I was busy working with some of my health care agencies on Zoom, my internet provider called to say that they had to interrupt my service for some not-very-urgent reason.
When I nicely told the operator about the work that I do, he genuinely thanked me for my service, and said that he would postpone the service interruption. In my experience, being kind to customer service workers goes a long way.
Most of them are not trained in mental health first aid.
Unless they work in a highly specialized service that provides mental health assistance, most operators do not have this kind of training. Yet, many call centre operators must manage callers who are emotionally dysregulated, and this can take a real toll on them.
They almost never get closure.
Many call center operators and communicators have told me that a challenging aspect of their job is that they rarely get closure on how the story ends. This may not be particularly distressing for someone who is trying to help you activate your cell phone but can be a very real source of emotional stress for those who receive calls about stressful or traumatic situations. Some of them have told us that these calls can “hitch a ride with them” and there is rarely time for proper debriefing afterwards.
They are going through this pandemic too.
Operators have financial concerns, families, and toilet paper shortages just like the rest of us (sorry I couldn’t help myself!). But truly, these folks are rarely highly paid, and this work is how they feed their families. Perhaps their spouse is out of work right now or maybe they are trying to take these calls from a crowded, quarantined house full of kids. We just never know what’s going on in the lives of others.
My aim today is to invite all of us to show some kindness and consideration for those communicators and call centre operators, even if they can’t help us to our satisfaction. They are dealing with an unprecedented volume of requests and are working as fast and as hard as they can.
So, please spare a thought for the folks at the other end of that phone line, customer service email or live chat and when you finally get a real human being at the other end, please thank them for their service.