Workplace mental health strategies in action

Over recent times, there's been a significant shift in the attitudes and understanding around workplace mental health. There's been three significant changes in that time. One is that the recognition that proactively promoting mental health is an opportunity for businesses to improve productivity, attract and retain talented staff, and that evidence based interventions return a positive return on investment.

Research has shown us that an integrated strategy that includes promotion, protection, and support is the most effective way to do this. Promotion, focus on those who are well, how to maintain their wellness and extend their mental health. Protection is for those who may be going through a tough period in the workplace and we can support them by identifying risk factors, and if we cannot control those risk factors or eliminate them, put in place protective measures. And then there's support for those who may in fact be experiencing a mental health condition.

In 2014, Beyond Blue and the Mentally Health Workplace Alliance created the Heads Up website as a source of evidence-based information on workplace mental health. The website contains a depth of information, has printable resources, downloadable resources, videos, and online learnings. In previous Beyond Blue webinars that are on the Heads Up website, we've already covered topics such as Better mental health at work, why it matters, How to develop a mental health strategy for your workplace, how you can develop a plan and take action on workplace mental health, a session on Workplace mental health awareness, How to support someone with a mental health condition return or remain at work, and most recently, a Small business mental health webinar which focused on the role of work contacts, friends, and families.

However, it's important to note that there is no silver bullet when it comes to implementing a mental health strategy in your workplace. Every workplace needs to adopt a strategy that aligns with its business needs, its culture, its demographics, and it's business size. Today we thought we'd bring along the practical experiences of some organisations who are in the process of implementing a mental health strategy in their workplace.

To do this, I'm joined by representatives of two organisations that have commenced a strategy and are here to share their learnings with you. Perhaps I could just ask, Sarah, would you like to introduce yourself and the organisation, please?

For SCA, we've always been aware of mental health issues in the workplace, and we've always had management training put in play. For us, probably over the last 18 months to two years, we've started to be more proactive in this space. So, early 2018, we put together a workplace major project group and by that we interviewed a number of staff and we had a lot of focus groups, so we put out a survey, we had 700 of out 2,500 staff reply to that, and then we carried on with face-to-face meetings as well.

Just to obviously get to the crux of what staff are looking for in the future of their workplaces, and on the other side of that was our SCA Embrace, which is our national charity partnership program. We run on a two year model where we support two charities for that period of time, and we provide in-kind advertising and support in-house as well through our dedicated staff. From that, we're actually partnering with Beyond Blue at the moment so we've been able to tap into the resources through this charity partnership. Both of those pillars have brought us to where we are at the moment in our workplace strategy of mental health.

Thank you and we very much value that partnership with yourselves. It's a win/win situation. I noticed there you mentioned one of the key points was a formation of a project team to focus on this. I think that's an interesting point we might come to a little bit later.

Gareth, what was the trigger at Jirsch Sutherland?

I think that's a really good question in terms of this turning point or the trigger. I think our history went back before that actually. We've been around since 1984 and throughout that period, we've tried to understand who we are authentically as an organisation, and what it means to work for and with our organisation. We have constantly asked staff and clients who we are and what we do, and something very strong came through in that feedback, people saying that we care for our staff, we care for our clients, and we care for the communities we serve. We thought, “If that's the feedback we're getting and it's something that we wanted to understand, are we already doing activities that would come under, shall we say a mental health policy and banner, without necessarily us having formally badged it as such?”. So, whilst the language around mental health is wonderfully open now and people are engaging with that, and that probably provoked us to question ourselves, when we actually went back into the history to see, “Well, what are we already doing in this space?”. We were pleased and liked to see that we've authentically been doing this maybe for 25-30 years.

But with this new narrative and the help and support you can get from organisations like Beyond Blue, it helped us go through and have a look at where our strengths and weaknesses were in this area, and where the gaps were. We're probably relatively new to formalising it, we've probably only been looking at this for the last six months, but now that we have started, that process has really cascaded very quickly, and dare I say it, very easily. Because we've had some expert guidance, some fantastic support, and actually it just joined up the dots that we were already playing with.

It's a 30-year history, but it's actually accelerated in our language, in our use, and certainly in terms of filling in gaps. It's been very exciting over the last six months.

Absolutely not. I think if we had, in naivety, asked some of our staff and some of our leadership team, "Have we got a defined, structured approach to mental health?" The natural answer to that would be “No”, but the reality is, we did. It just wasn't necessarily written down. There was a number of things that we were doing, so when we realised we needed to join up those dots, we actually already had quite a lot of assets, material, people, approaches that were already in place, and this just helped us knit it together.

So, a couple of points I take out of there is, one is I get a sense that this is what the staff were asking of the organisation, it's the kind of workplace they want it to be, which in our terms is a mentally healthy workplace. But it's coming in that almost indirect sense from your staff and the fact that you have a national strategy, but it's implemented locally, I think is a very important feature for any organisation that has a dispersed, geographically dispersed workforce. And most organisations in Australia do have that in one way or another today.

Gareth, what was the starting baseline within Jirsch Sutherland?

Again, another good question. I think the key is to start. It's very easy just to say, "Well, that's something we'll do in six months or in 12 months. It's something we'll look at.". I think the main thing is to start, to actually get some people together. I think a bit like with your example [Sarah], we put together a working party essentially that represented people in different offices, and we've got five offices nationally, from different levels within the organisation and different professional backgrounds, so that we could try and understand again who we are and what we do, and what we think we would need to do.

Very quickly we identified, as we said earlier, what we were already doing, we could see some of the gaps and it's at that point, quite simply, that's when we contacted Beyond Blue to say, "Right, we're at this point, we'd now like some help to take it to the next level.". We had support in concept from each of the offices, and from each different level within the organisation and then we wanted some help to say, "How do we take this forward? What is the next step?". So, we reached out to those people that understand this better than we do and that gave us the confidence to take it to the next stage.

Thank you. I think it's surprising for most workplaces to realise that they do have a source of data that they can draw on in terms of, as Gareth has said, what are they currently doing? There's a number of initiatives a lot of companies do. If you have a domestic violence campaign for instance, domestic violence is a risk factor for mental health. You're actually addressing mental health through that initiative.

You've also got, looking for those quick wins, which Gareth has just mentioned. What are the things you can do very quickly to get the ball rolling? And a lot of organisations have got data such as EAP reports, employee engagement surveys, which you've both mentioned, and there are tools such as People At Work, which is a Queensland tool, and a UK HSE or Health Safety and Executive, provide a pathway to gathering further data.

On the Beyond Blue website, there's a free resource that outlines seven actions you can take to create a mentally healthier workplace, and that's another good starting point that you might like to refer to. We've both talked about who needs to be involved, was there a need to grab the leadership team in your organisations to drive this or were they already on board?

At SCA, we have an incredible board and senior leadership team and they're proactive in the enhancement of SCA across many avenues in the audio space, but also very much in the people area as well. Being able to have that ability to bring something to the table to them in terms of a committee forming, and these are the findings from staff information, they very much encourage us and empower us to be able to carry out that workload.

We did have the buy-in, but they very much leave us to our own devices and empower us to run that and deliver back to them some recommendations and having their buy-in is incredibly important. One of our senior staff members, our COO, very much welcomes this space and encouraged us to lead with it. Having senior leaders support this, and it starts from the top up and can filter through, it just shows that there's recognition of the importance of it, especially with SCA and the media industry, it is a 24/7 business. Sometimes that work/life balance can go astray but now that we are focusing on it, we're able to put those recommendations to our staff to take time out, and our senior staff members are leading by that example as well.

It's very important to get that buy-in across all levels and we found that the leadership were committed to this as an approach, because as we looked at our mental health philosophy, if you like, we think it extends beyond our staff. It's with the people we work with such as accountants and lawyers, and their clients.

It's actually a collective approach that we wanted to make sure that all of us are supporting each other. Any job can be stressful but of course if you're having clients come to you at a point of stress, that in turn can generate your own stress. So, it's very important for us to get the leadership, the management, and the whole team onboard with this because we need to work with the accountants and lawyers and company directors.

So, in many ways, people understood it straight away and want to support it and get on the back of it, because it's part of who we are and what we do. We have to offer support to businesses, that's why they come to us. What part of the challenge is, some people didn't necessarily know how that was going to play out, or how it already plays out. The ambition and the intention is there, and in fact the reality is there. We just weren't clear necessarily what that meant and how you can define it.

By understanding where the gaps were and what we can do to fill it in, it's enabled us to demonstrate that this can work across all levels and certainly the support from the board has been fundamental to that. They understood it from day one, but they did want to see what that would actually mean in reality.

And actually when we came back with the program, a range of ideas and initiatives, many of which we were already doing but formalised, it was actually very simple. In the nicest way, I had lots of responses to some detailed proposals simply say, "No brainer. This makes sense. We're already doing it.". If it's very thought through and simply presented, I think it's very difficult for most people to argue against some of the initiatives that we put in place.

Yeah, I think with Jirsch Sutherland, I would anticipate that if I was a client, I wouldn't be coming to hear good news, by the nature of your business typically, insolvency. I think the way you've got that executive buy-in is so important, and both of you have taken to your exec. team, a program of work, a defined initiative, just like a project, any other project in the business. I think that's a very important way you need to approach this topic, is, "Here's what we want to do. Here's the time frame. Here's the resources we need and this is the outcomes.". And then yes, you will get support, because you've got a defined initiative.

How did you engage employees at Jirsch Sutherland, Gareth? Was there a universal acceptance?

Yeah, to develop on what you just said earlier as well, I think there's a risk in some organisations that mental health is this fluffy, tangible thing. It's sort of a nice aspiration, but how do we actually deliver it? Can we deliver something that does make a difference in people's lives?

So, we came up with this program which is across probably eight or ten different initiatives and we tested it out with our staff. We went and spoke to different offices at different levels, most levels actually, and everybody offered their feedback on some of those initiatives. Some people put their hand up and said, "Well actually, can I contribute to that? Can I lead this project?" or, "We're already doing something else under a different initiative. Actually, it'd be really good to sit it under this program.".

So, we did take it out for a lot of consultation. Consultation I think is often a misheard or misunderstood word. We were actually just listening. We went and spoke to people, they told us what's happening, what they'd like to do, and we incorporated that back in. We did take it out to all levels in all offices, and to your point earlier, I think it's about having a national umbrella if you like, but it has to be delivered organically within each local office. They need to own this.

This isn't a top-down, "We're imposing this.". This is what the stuff has said they like to do and we facilitate that happening. In turn, we then roll that out, actually in partnership with our clients and our contacts. Just as a very brief example, we did some seminars three or four weeks ago during mental health week and those seminars were for our staff and our clients. We didn't want to separate those out, so we did it together and through that again we've got new initiatives that are going to come out of that collaboration. Absolutely, I think it's about taking it out to all people involved, all touchpoints, have the discussion more than a consultation, and get everybody to understand what's involved and to own it.

Thanks Gareth. How did you engage staff at Southern Cross Austereo? I'll just nickname you SCA.

For us, we probably took a slightly different approach in our launch. Through Beyond Blue, we've been able to have lived experience guest speakers into a lot of our offices around the country and we will continue to do so during the partnership. For that, just to be the beginning of opening up the conversation, was very impactful. We actually had a number of senior leaders that had courage to speak about their own journeys with mental health, or that they've been touched by a family member or friend's mental health.

Having senior leaders open up in those environments to the staff and to break down that stigma and have those conversations led then into the launch of our Wellness Connection Platform. We've built an online platform that lives on our intranet, and that has so many resources. Some filmed editorials, as well as documentation, and we lead through to the Beyond Blue website as well. We also have wellness initiatives that have been rolled out locally, featuring on that website.

From there, we also then very quickly after the launch of that intranet item, we then launched into Mindfulness Month only a couple of weeks later. So to Gareth's point about just starting, it is, we very much gave that initiative to our general managers locally and just said, "Just do three or four initiatives across the month.". What we actually saw was there was so much more being done. There was walking meetings, mindfulness sessions, meditation learnings, and just simply putting that into play in the day-to-day activities over a period of four weeks, the feedback we got from that was absolutely tremendous. It is something that we will continue to roll out yearly, but to that point as well, it's also not waiting 12 months to run that again. It's about implementing that day-to-day in the normal business day. It allows staff to get a feel for it, and from there we will continue building.

Excellent. I think the example you've quoted of leaders sharing this personal story, or of someone they know who's impacted by a mental health condition, is probably the most powerful way a leader can show their personal commitment to this topic and the strategy within the business. Both of you have touched on how important it is to go out and get their involvement, as Gareth said. You're consulting but you're actually listening. Our experience clearly shows a top-down, bottom-up approach is the best way to create momentum in this space. I think we're both doing really well in that sense.

Nothing's perfect in this world, so you must have run into some challenges or barriers or roadblocks along the way. Could you just share some of those with us and how you got around them?

Yeah, I think it's probably from that geographical standpoint as well, that I've mentioned. In terms of that, we do respect that this isn't for everybody and it's a topic that may be too sensitive for some to discuss in the workplace and we 100% respect that. We get negative and positive feedback through our email address of the Wellness Connection, and we reply to everybody, that's only fair. There's always going to be those roadblocks when it comes to, “This is not for everybody.”, but it's just about being there for the majority and respecting the minority that don't want to be a part of it, and that's absolutely fine.

For us, we probably haven't seen too many other negatives as yet, probably because of the early stages that we're in, and being the business that we are, obviously it is high paced and quite stressful at times, so we do ensure that our leaders are just on the floors with our staff, making sure that their day-to-day activities are comfortable for them and the environment that they're in as well. And then also leaning on our EAP services as well.

I'd share that [Sarah’s] experience there. I think because most of the initiatives you want to put forward kind of make sense, the staff support it, because the leadership support it, because the clients that we're working with support it, it's actually almost as if we're pushing against an open door, I'll be honest. It's sort of like the floodgates have opened. Now we've started, as you said, we're having staff come up with ideas, initiatives, so I suppose a challenge might be A) getting started, and then B) once you have got started, to run with it.

It is an organic growth period and you can have all sorts of ideas and initiatives, actually probably more than you'd imagine. I suppose the challenge is actually get started and then B) encourage the feedback and learn to work with that. But we've had very little challenge, it isn't as if I can say it's been overly expensive, so it's not as if this has blown our budgets. I don't think it's been a distraction for stuff, I don't think productivity has suffered, I don't think the advice we've offered has changed. All I can see is this has added to our business, added to our staff, and added to the advice and support we can offer to our clients. To be fair, it's not been enormously challenging. It's just getting on with it.

Yes. I think that's a fascinating observation, in that as generational change is happening in the society, people are looking for different outcomes, aligning their values with the workplace, and if you're looking at strategic resource planning, you need to be able to work out, "Well, what sort of workplace do we need to be to attract and retain the talent that you want?". That's exactly what you're touching on here and perhaps if I can be a bit optimistic, we'll get to the point where workplaces that aren't mentally healthy, they're the ones that have the stigma, because people don't want to work there.

I think some of the other challenges we've observed with businesses as they've gone to implement their strategy, is the realisation that progress is not always a straight line. We start out a project, we think it's going to go fine and then reality comes along. There can be lots of changes in business that happen. For instance, an organisation might acquire another business, bring in a different culture and then you've got these two different cultures. If you do a survey, you may find the overarching approach to mental health has slipped a bit, but that's because you've got a whole bunch of new people in the organisation. You may also find that the external challenges bump into the business at different times that can distract resources, but I think what we've heard from both of you is that if this is part of the business, it's very much embedded in the strategy and the DNA, it will survive those kinds of changes.

The other big barrier, which Sarah you touched on, is stigma. If we’re particularly talking about male dominated workplaces, I'm going to be very stereotypical here Gareth, men are reluctant to seek support for their physical health and we're certainly not going to talk about our mental health. So, there's this whole barrier around stigma and opening up about that, and again, that's where that lived experience coming in, where you get someone who has experienced a mental health condition, that's a peer roughly to the audience, they cut through this like a hot knife through butter, more than anything else. There are ways that you can do this. One of the other ones is that you need to keep communicating that this is the business, this is important to the organisation. It's not a flavour of the month kind of exercise.

If we're looking at any project or initiative in an organisation, we want to be able to measure, “What are the outcomes and what are the benefits? How do we know we're making change? How do we know where we need to adjust our project plan?”.

So, given the work that you've done so far Sarah, what would you see as how you're going to measure your success, what's the kind of benchmark you're going to work to?

We're actually having these conversations at the moment, in terms of measurement, because I suppose at this stage of where we are at, it's probably been more feedback based through surveys and word of mouth and conversations. So, we will focus more on that with our mental health strategy documentation, with the experience and expertise of Beyond Blue staff, we will continue that conversation. Probably levels of absenteeism dropping, culture results, with our culture results that we do biannually, and noticing change there. We still have a little, probably a bit of work to do there, but we will certainly engage in the right aspects to build on those measurements.

It's an interesting stage we're also in, to the extent, some of these initiatives are relatively new and so we'll be measuring how those engage with people over a period of time. As an example, we ran a series of seminars, that I mentioned, during Mental Health Week, and we had some fantastic attendance at those, and the feedback we had is they'd like us to do more. Our speakers there, we worked with Beyond Blue who kindly helped and came along and gave us some speakers, we ran those events in every city where we operate across Australia.

We had some fantastic attendance, some great feedback. We'll be repeating that. We'd like to see if that is going to increase both in frequency and number. In terms of staff, in terms of staff retention, we believe we've got very good staff retention already. We have staff been with us for 15-20 years and so we'll be certainly measuring our staff retention, and we're building into our exit interviews for those that do leave, more dialogue around mental health to see if any of those are factors in them staying or not staying.

One of the key things that has come forward actually, through us wanting to look at hard data if you like and what we can do to make a difference, is actually all of our managers and principals and partners have put their hand up to take part in the mental health first aid certificate. They wanted some kind of framework where they can operate. I suppose one of your earlier questions, one of the challenges, some people are a bit nervous about opening up a can of worms that they're not trained to deal with.

All of those people I mentioned on that level are going to be going through that mental health first aid certificate in the next three or four months. Now, it's not just so that they can look after their own teams and themselves, but also our clients as well. That will be a measurement tool because obviously how many people have done it, and they may or may not have more experience. Some will be anecdotal, rather than just purely empirical, but by putting these tools in place, we can track it over time.

The other thing which I think is fascinating, again this may have been one of the triggers that you were asking about earlier, we received a letter probably four months ago from a former client from 15 years ago. She said, "This is a letter I've been meaning to write to you for the last 15 years.". It was about a lady and her husband that had some financial difficulty with their business, and whilst they needed some transactional advice and support with the business, the impact that had on her mental health and that of her husband was so substantial, that it's changed their family for generations, and she wanted to provide the feedback that the approach we took has changed her life and that of her grandchildren who weren't even around then. Some of the feedback and the measurement can be in data, but I think some of it is anecdotal. When you get things like that, it makes you realise that what you're doing makes a difference. It justifies continued resourcing and support within those areas.

What I'm hearing is, early days you'd get a sense of qualitative, the culture changing, the letter like you referenced Gareth, but also looking towards the quantitative measures of staff retention, productivity, and I think Gareth, that wonderful example you gave of the letter the person wrote, highlights how a mentally healthy workplace is not just for the organisation or the staff. It actually extends out to the family and friends or in your case, through the clients, Gareth. The whole concept resonates across the Australian community, and I think if we can take that broad approach, it then adds another value to organisations in terms of looking at how they can engage communities, how they can support communities overall.

 I think the other aspect to remember is that the timeframes with these changes can be sometimes significant. I can think of early days when occ. health and safety came into organisations, it didn't change overnight, it took time. Now it's there, it's this maturity curve as an organisation gathers speed.

Many organisations want to know, "Okay, where do I go to get information? I just don't know where to start. What's a good source of information?". Where did you go and what sort of resources have you found helpful so far, Sarah?

For us, we very much are leveraging off our partnership with Beyond Blue. We're also very lucky to have one of our announcers have his own mental health charity, from a male point of view. That's been very interesting over the years, seeing his charity develop and then really we're just tapping into the expertise of lived experience speakers, as well as our own staff knowledge, our people and culture team, and what they've learned over the years as well through training.

Then we carried that onto our learning and development pillar with our managers as well, to ensure that they're trained appropriately to deal with circumstances, very much leveraging on the Beyond Blue relationship in building our strategy for the future, and then just looking at all general resources and what we come across through the internet.

I think what I'm hearing in what you're saying there, is this becomes part of the training and professional development within the organisation to some extent, so that I've heard of organisations that, when they do their management development programs, they embed messaging around mental health in that, and they can do it by including a case study of an example of a staff member who may be having a particular experience and how would you support them, it can be integrated within the existing training frameworks of an organisation.

Gareth, you mentioned mental health first aid, is there anything else you're looking at doing?

Yeah, so I guess we say to our clients when you need help, speak to the experts, which allegedly is us. Same approach when it comes to mental health. We're not experts in this. We've got some fantastically bright, intelligent accountants, that doesn't necessarily mean they're great at engaging people on mental health. That's why we've gone out to engage with specialists who can help us understand what we need to do, so our starting point here was Beyond Blue. We had the conversations with Beyond Blue and they helped us audit everything we do and look at where those gaps are and how we can take it forward.

We also work with an external HR partner, who again has got experience in this area. We've also worked with our EAP provider and so it's a multifaceted approach, taking in the advice from experts and trusting their guidance. Then we add in our flavour and we've actually got somebody within the business who looks after training. So, working with her to ensure that everything we're doing can be rolled out in a more structured way. Am I or others in the organisation fully trained and practiced in this? No, but this isn't what we do, but we're taking the advice of others, adding in our flavour, making it work for us.

That's right. It's not a cookie cutter approach here. They're examples of best practice and we have learned from other examples and case studies and we've added in what's going to work for us in our scenario, with our type of clients, with our type of staff. We work in a people business, professional services team. They're going out and selling their time essentially and they do that because they've got personalities, as well as technical skills. By definition, we are a people business, but when we start going to areas that are beyond business restructuring, sometimes we might feel a little bit nervous about and we don't want to step in areas where we're not expert.

So we never want to become that expert, but we want to be sensitive to it, aware of it, and we want to direct people in the appropriate way. That's really where working with Beyond Blue, EAP provider, and our HR partner helps us put that package together, and the first aid certificate is part of that as well.

No, maybe I can just give sort of a working example and the kind of scenario that we may have to deal with and how our staff can affect and influence that. A typical example may be on a personal side, rather than a business side. There may be somebody who is living in a property with the strata fees, and they're struggling to keep up with the payment of those strata fees, and the strata company may be coming to them saying, "Look, we're going to have to look at bankruptcy.".

Now, at that point, as that individual, who may be struggling because they're suffering at home, they may have relationship issues, they may recently have lost their job and they're having financial troubles. If you add all that up together, that's one hot pod of a problem. But actually there are ways through that. Of course, if they come and speak to our accountants, yes, they can put together a financial package somehow to restructure that, but actually they're dealing with somebody that's probably in a highly stressed situation, their mental health being severely compromised.

So the way in which we deliver our solution in itself can either add or reduce to that stress that that person's going through. By us supporting our staff member and giving them the tools, yes, at the end of the day it's their advice that's important, but they've got to be sensitive to the way they deliver it and if it's getting to an area where they feel uncomfortable, they've got to ensure that they're referring that person on for the support that they need.

It is a holistic approach to solving a problem. We are only one part of that solution probably, but we are very much at the coalface of seeing when those problems all come together. Then of course, for our staff member, they're going home hopefully having known that they've made a difference, but also questioning, "Have I dealt with this the right way? Have I referred it on?". We need to provide that support network for all those people involved in that difficult situation.

Thank you for sharing that example, Gareth. It's a very, as you said, holistic approach.

Some of the resources you may like to look at on the Heads Up website include Developing a workplace mental health strategy, which is a how-to guide for organisations.

There's also a Heads Up Action Plan which will step you through some initiatives you may want to undertake, provide you with the resources that you need to undertake them, and give you some guidance around measuring them.

And there is also a Mental health and wellbeing policy template document there.

I should also add there's, in addition to those, there's a Getting Started Kit you can download, which includes template emails, template footers, a whole raft of information that's there, to get you going. Of course, you need to tailor those to your own needs and your own culture of your organisation.

As we come to the end of today's webcast, what's your message, for both of you, in terms of, to the Australian workplaces, with respect to improving mental health? Do you have just a general call to action that you can suggest?

Yeah, I would certainly say get yourself involved. Listen to them, hear what the priorities are, and then just start slow. I think that's the key here, that we don't have all the answers and we never will, but we can build over the years, with engagement with our staff. I would just say lean on charities and organisations such as Beyond Blue and the Heads Up website. Educate yourself and then also then get your buy-in from your senior leaders as well, and then just start to have a program in play and pick up that feedback from staff and build on it from there.

Yeah, I share exactly those sentiments. I think those are great, great suggestions. I think first thing is, be confident that what you're doing is probably already some way down the path of where you need to go. We probably had 50% or 60% of content and material initiatives, so you're probably actually doing better already than you probably realise. The next thing is probably engage experts. Beyond Blue in our case, have certainly facilitated us and given us that injection of confidence to go to the next stage and given us templates and material and content that actually we can add our flavour to and can take us to that next step.

I think the other thing is just make that start. We're not going to get to the finish line this year, next month, 10 years’ time, but unless you start, you're not going to have some sort of progression. So, I'd say be confident in what you're already doing, because it's probably much better than you may automatically think, bring in the experts and make a start.

Thank you. I think what we've seen is, where success is often supported, is where you integrate this approach with existing initiatives in organisations, where you have an occ. health and safety initiative, you may have a wellbeing initiative, a risk management initiative, a strategic resource planning initiative. Everything we've spoken about today actually integrates into those and is very supportive of those initiatives. So, leveraging off existing initiatives within organisations is a powerful way of embedding the message into an organisation. I think we've heard from both of you, that this, what we're talking about, is very much not a tick the box exercise. This is actually getting into the culture, talking to the people, engaging the people, and I think I've heard that very clearly from both of you.

It can be tempting, some organisations to say, "Okay, we've done training, so we've ticked the box. Yes, we'll do manual handling training, so right, we've covered safety.", it's much bigger than that. It's actually making a substantial cultural change in the organisation. I think some of the key takeaways I've heard is, that we've said it a few times, is start small. Collate what you're doing and promote, promote, promote and keep going. Interact with your staff to learn what they want, where they want to go, and that this is an ongoing initiative that will take time to evolve and the process will evolve with the initiative.

So, I hope that's been of help to you, the audience, today. I think we've had some great examples from two businesses who are actually at the coalface, rolling out their own strategy, and heard some good tips around how to go about this. It's not the big monster in the room, it can be done very simply, very easily, but it just needs that strategic approach to do so. I'd like to thank both of our guests today, Gareth and Sarah, for coming along. And I hope you enjoyed the webinar and look forward to others that'll appear on the Heads Up website in the future. Thank you very much.