Latest / The SOM Podcast / Future of Work, AI, and Occupational Health: Navigating Change and Uncertainty
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by orchid Live. Find out more
- 0:04Speaker 1: at orchidlive dot com.
- 0:18Speaker 2: Hello, and I'll come to the societyat of Ocupational Medicine Podcasts.
- 0:21Speaker 2: I'm dot SORIS Center GP and Occupational Health physician and
- 0:24Speaker 2: I'm here with Cat Bernard.
- 0:26Speaker 3: So yes, hello everybody. My name is Cat Barnard, and
- 0:29Speaker 3: I am a director at a company called Working the Future,
- 0:34Speaker 3: which is a future of work advisory firm. In short,
- 0:38Speaker 3: we track and analyze a range of trends and we
- 0:41Speaker 3: help businesses understand those trends and prepare for and adapt
- 0:47Speaker 3: to very different work futures.
- 0:49Speaker 2: And that's a great place to start because we're going
- 0:52Speaker 2: to be talking about artificial intelligence work and health, and
- 0:57Speaker 2: it's something that I'm very interested in for our specialty
- 1:00Speaker 2: because I think as well as changing what and how
- 1:04Speaker 2: our specialty will do and function, AI is obviously going
- 1:08Speaker 2: to change workplaces across the board and therefore change the
- 1:12Speaker 2: bread and butter of what we see in our clinics.
- 1:15Speaker 2: So I just love to get your kind of high
- 1:18Speaker 2: level take on that to start with, and the kind
- 1:21Speaker 2: of trends that you're seeing are made.
- 1:23Speaker 3: One of the things that I just want to point
- 1:25Speaker 3: out is that much of the desk BACE research that
- 1:29Speaker 3: we track and analyze pertains most specifically to people who
- 1:34Speaker 3: work in offices. Although that said, I think, you know,
- 1:38Speaker 3: it's quite an interesting thought experiment, isn't it to imagine
- 1:42Speaker 3: the professions or the roles that people undertake as part
- 1:47Speaker 3: of their work lives that aren't going to be impacted
- 1:50Speaker 3: by artificial intelligence in some way, shape or form. Because
- 1:54Speaker 3: obviously lots of people don't work in offices. If you
- 1:56Speaker 3: think about people that work in healthcare profession, if you
- 1:58Speaker 3: think about people that work in the educational profession, and
- 2:01Speaker 3: yet the issue of mainstream generative AI is a key
- 2:05Speaker 3: issue for those people as well. So I tend to
- 2:08Speaker 3: kind of try and broaden the aperture and think about
- 2:12Speaker 3: where are the professions where AI will not feature? And
- 2:18Speaker 3: really loosely, I can think about things like, you know,
- 2:20Speaker 3: hairdressing or construction work, or let's say agriculture or horticulture,
- 2:28Speaker 3: or you know, professions where you use your hands. That said,
- 2:32Speaker 3: how will the administrative side of those professions get changed?
- 2:35Speaker 3: But Lucy speaking, when we're talking about the impacts of
- 2:39Speaker 3: generative AI on people at work, we tend to talk
- 2:43Speaker 3: about people who are working in offices who are increasingly
- 2:48Speaker 3: expected to use digital tools as productivity resources to help
- 2:54Speaker 3: them do their work quicker, better, faster.
- 2:56Speaker 2: So there's kind of like access of exposure, and that
- 3:00Speaker 2: depends a little bit on industry. It depends a little
- 3:02Speaker 2: bit on occupation within industry. It probably also depends a
- 3:06Speaker 2: little bit on whether you're a junior or experienced higher
- 3:09Speaker 2: and also whether AI at this point, because of course
- 3:13Speaker 2: the technology continues to evolve, whether it's automating tasks or
- 3:18Speaker 2: augmenting human impact. And I think you've kind of illustrated
- 3:21Speaker 2: that really well with the examples you've given across the economy.
- 3:25Speaker 2: So we'll be thinking, I guess a little bit more
- 3:27Speaker 2: about those desk based roles in this forum.
- 3:31Speaker 3: Yeah, but equally, I guess, you know, sort of kicking
- 3:33Speaker 3: it back into your area of expertise and specialism. One
- 3:37Speaker 3: of the challenges that we've got with the whole advent
- 3:40Speaker 3: of AI is that it's a one size fits all
- 3:44Speaker 3: kind of label where actually there's a whole raft of
- 3:48Speaker 3: different subcategories underneath it. So if I think about, for instance,
- 3:52Speaker 3: and I am absolutely the least qualified person in the
- 3:56Speaker 3: room here, that if I think about the way in
- 3:58Speaker 3: which artificial intelligence can be used in let's say the
- 4:03Speaker 3: field of radiography to analyze X rays and other images
- 4:09Speaker 3: allegedly far more accurately than the human mind can. That
- 4:13Speaker 3: is a very different application of AI to his co
- 4:18Speaker 3: pilots in this building that occupies a thousand workers, go
- 4:22Speaker 3: and use it.
- 4:23Speaker 2: I agree. So there's different use cases within the economy too,
- 4:27Speaker 2: And I think that kind of brings me to this
- 4:30Speaker 2: question around what are you seeing on the ground, Because
- 4:35Speaker 2: what we see from our practice and also in the literature,
- 4:39Speaker 2: and I think the literature is catching up here. It's
- 4:42Speaker 2: not like there's a huge amount of evidence generation on
- 4:45Speaker 2: what is actually happening to the workforce or the humans
- 4:50Speaker 2: who are deploying AI more in their work. We're seeing
- 4:54Speaker 2: that it sometimes isn't that smooth going, and there's a
- 4:58Speaker 2: change element that's challenging. There are these other risk factors
- 5:02Speaker 2: for work relata stress that also can kind of come
- 5:05Speaker 2: out down the line when AI is thrown into the mix.
- 5:08Speaker 2: For example, people without managerial experience suddenly supervising agents, or
- 5:13Speaker 2: people beginning to use AI to unlock skills that they
- 5:17Speaker 2: didn't previously have but then requiring human supervision or people
- 5:21Speaker 2: finding that they can be less boundaried about work because
- 5:24Speaker 2: task initiation is so easy when you're speaking to a chatbot.
- 5:28Speaker 2: So I just would love to hear your take on
- 5:31Speaker 2: what you're seeing with the organizations you work with.
- 5:34Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, So what might be useful is to try
- 5:37Speaker 3: and apply some kind of a historical lens if we can.
- 5:43Speaker 3: If you think about you know, we're in twenty twenty six,
- 5:46Speaker 3: the mainstream Internet was born. If you were birthed in
- 5:53Speaker 3: the nineteen nineties. The naughties was the decade where we
- 5:58Speaker 3: saw the arrival of social media and the advent of
- 6:02Speaker 3: cloud computing, which meant that organizations could outsource their technology
- 6:08Speaker 3: environments to the cloud. We know that the arrival of
- 6:15Speaker 3: cloud computing and the concept of big data, the idea
- 6:22Speaker 3: that every organization owns vast volumes of proprietary information held
- 6:28Speaker 3: either in the cloud or previously on its own servers.
- 6:32Speaker 3: We know that digital transformation has been a big thing
- 6:36Speaker 3: in business for probably the last ten years. There's some
- 6:41Speaker 3: really interesting data points out there about digital transformation. Most notably, McKinsey,
- 6:48Speaker 3: the big management consultant, has recorded pretty consistently that seventy
- 6:53Speaker 3: percent of transformation programs fail And originally, when that data
- 6:58Speaker 3: first came out, it was like full stop, they fail.
- 7:01Speaker 3: But actually when you dig around in the background of that,
- 7:05Speaker 3: you start to see an emergent picture, which is that
- 7:08Speaker 3: they fail typically because of the human lack of adoption.
- 7:14Speaker 3: And typically, in my experience, failure to adopt happens because
- 7:19Speaker 3: there is an incoherent narrative. There aren't sensible rules of
- 7:26Speaker 3: engagement that are presented. A story isn't told about why
- 7:31Speaker 3: that adoption needs to happen, and what is going to
- 7:35Speaker 3: happen to the humans that work within the organization, how
- 7:39Speaker 3: will they be impacted? And the one thing that I
- 7:41Speaker 3: think is true about AI adoption, which is a massive
- 7:46Speaker 3: cause of concern but also a massive opportunity for those
- 7:50Speaker 3: working in occupational health, is that there isn't a coherent
- 7:54Speaker 3: story around what is going to happen to the jobs
- 7:57Speaker 3: that people do, and if people are anxious that their
- 8:01Speaker 3: jobs are unsafe because of the arrival of generative AI
- 8:06Speaker 3: in an economic backdrop where we have just experienced cost
- 8:11Speaker 3: of living crisis after cost of living crisis since twenty twenty,
- 8:16Speaker 3: with things like you know, the start of the Ukraine War.
- 8:19Speaker 3: Now what's going on in the Middle East supply chain
- 8:22Speaker 3: shortages that happened as a result of COVID. You know,
- 8:25Speaker 3: we seem to be living through a time where the
- 8:28Speaker 3: global economy is becoming increasingly unsable and uncertain, which is
- 8:34Speaker 3: causing a lot of people to be very, very worried
- 8:37Speaker 3: about their financial futures, and there is data out there
- 8:40Speaker 3: to support it. You know that financial wellbeing is one
- 8:44Speaker 3: of the pillars of well being overall. Well If you
- 8:47Speaker 3: add into the mix a lack of coherent narrative around
- 8:51Speaker 3: job security arising from the adoption or the expected adoption
- 8:57Speaker 3: the required adoption of generative AI, it stands to reason
- 9:01Speaker 3: that you know, people are less likely to adopt tools
- 9:07Speaker 3: if there is a belief that those tools could render
- 9:10Speaker 3: them redundant.
- 9:12Speaker 2: Makes total sense, and I can see the anxiety element
- 9:15Speaker 2: there and how that may impact people's ability to get
- 9:19Speaker 2: on board with change and impact their productivity and impact
- 9:22Speaker 2: their health and the relationship between their health and their work.
- 9:25Speaker 2: I think part of the challenge, obviously, is the technology
- 9:28Speaker 2: is changing all the time, and it must be so
- 9:31Speaker 2: difficult for organizations to think ahead about how they will
- 9:38Speaker 2: communicate with their workforce and how this will look and
- 9:42Speaker 2: I would also say that before we even get to replacement,
- 9:46Speaker 2: the process is still challenging. The kind of shift in
- 9:50Speaker 2: what people do day to day and their shift in
- 9:53Speaker 2: thinking and their shift in workplace tasks seems to come
- 9:58Speaker 2: with some kind of you pacial health fallout. I'm really
- 10:02Speaker 2: interested in what you see with organizations between whether you
- 10:07Speaker 2: see and I've seen a bit of this few and
- 10:09Speaker 2: far between, but kind of systematic adoption of technology with
- 10:14Speaker 2: really clear ground rules for the workforce and access to
- 10:19Speaker 2: tools and guidelines, and really encouraging building out time within
- 10:24Speaker 2: the week for people to experiment with AI, whether they're
- 10:27Speaker 2: a technical hire or not, versus kind of giving people
- 10:31Speaker 2: access and encouraging them to use AI versus no real
- 10:35Speaker 2: narrative around it and more of an ad hoc approach
- 10:38Speaker 2: where some interested people might be bringing in some tools
- 10:42Speaker 2: and other parts of the workforce aren't at AOL. And
- 10:45Speaker 2: whether you see that spectrum in your practice and how
- 10:49Speaker 2: you find each of those in supporting the workforce.
- 10:53Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean every point that you raised there is
- 10:56Speaker 3: a really significant one. The data is kind of it's
- 11:01Speaker 3: warm data, like it comes out in drips and drabs,
- 11:03Speaker 3: and you know you'll see a piece of research undertaken
- 11:06Speaker 3: over here and a piece of research undertaken over there.
- 11:09Speaker 3: And of course research is quite sexy in the twenty twenties.
- 11:13Speaker 3: So one of the things that we have to be
- 11:14Speaker 3: discerning about is what is credible research? Right? Is it
- 11:18Speaker 3: research that has been pulled together for marketing purposes or
- 11:22Speaker 3: is it bona fidey, well grounded, well structured research. That's
- 11:26Speaker 3: point number one. And then I think it is clear
- 11:31Speaker 3: from what we have seen that the level of investment
- 11:37Speaker 3: into the digital tools is not accompanied or complemented by
- 11:43Speaker 3: an equivalent amount of investment into upskilling the human beings
- 11:48Speaker 3: who are then expected to use those tools. That's one point.
- 11:53Speaker 3: Another point, and there's some lovely research that's been undertaken
- 11:57Speaker 3: by Megan Rights and her research partner John Higgins. So
- 12:01Speaker 3: Meghan is a professor at I think Oxford these days,
- 12:06Speaker 3: and they've been exploring the concept of spaciousness and how
- 12:11Speaker 3: little time is granted to people at work to think
- 12:15Speaker 3: and to play and to experiment. And as you pointed out,
- 12:19Speaker 3: you know, playing is actually a primary way in which
- 12:23Speaker 3: we learn as social you know creatures, right, So there
- 12:27Speaker 3: isn't the time that is being allocated to just explore
- 12:32Speaker 3: and noodle around and figure out there certainly doesn't seem
- 12:36Speaker 3: to be any coherent accepted standards of kind of minimum
- 12:44Speaker 3: viable usage around you know, ethics and privacy and confidentiality
- 12:50Speaker 3: and data sovereignty and fundamentally big questions that do have
- 12:56Speaker 3: a long term impact for the healthy functioning of organizations, communities, societies, countries, etc.
- 13:04Speaker 3: So all of those things kind of weave in and
- 13:07Speaker 3: out of one another. In the absence of a credible
- 13:12Speaker 3: story or a strategic narrative or a framework for sensible adoption,
- 13:18Speaker 3: people make up stories for themselves, and without clear parameters,
- 13:24Speaker 3: they'll bring their own tech to work, they'll play in
- 13:27Speaker 3: ways that perhaps are suboptimal for the organization and the
- 13:31Speaker 3: objectives of the organization. So I'm really curious about the
- 13:36Speaker 3: role that communication plays as we navigate into the future
- 13:43Speaker 3: and what strikes me. And there was some data that
- 13:45Speaker 3: we picked up in one of the more recent research
- 13:48Speaker 3: updates that we produced for the Institute of Internal Communication.
- 13:52Speaker 3: Seventy seven percent of UK workers are pretending to know
- 13:57Speaker 3: more about generative AI than they actually do. This is
- 13:59Speaker 3: a according to some data that was published by a
- 14:02Speaker 3: company called plural Site, and in that same roundup. We
- 14:06Speaker 3: also discovered that ninety one percent of senior executives are
- 14:10Speaker 3: exaggerating their knowledge of AI whilst demanding that their colleagues
- 14:16Speaker 3: down the organization adopt it. So it just feels like
- 14:20Speaker 3: it's just a confusing, mucky murky mess until we start
- 14:25Speaker 3: being clear about how we use the tech and what
- 14:30Speaker 3: our expectations are. And also we allow sandboxed experiments for
- 14:36Speaker 3: people to experiment and make mistakes, because that's how we learn.
- 14:40Speaker 3: If you think about how we learn as human beings,
- 14:43Speaker 3: we learn through making mistakes, don't we. So we have
- 14:46Speaker 3: to provide them the environments for people to sit with
- 14:50Speaker 3: the technology and learn in a structured way, but we
- 14:55Speaker 3: don't seem to be providing any of that situational you know,
- 15:02Speaker 3: the environment for people to discover for themselves how to
- 15:06Speaker 3: use the tech. And the final thing that I want
- 15:09Speaker 3: to say on this, Lara, because I think this is
- 15:11Speaker 3: a really big point that isn't being addressed. If you
- 15:15Speaker 3: think about the way that most people have been hired
- 15:20Speaker 3: into their jobs, mostly what happens the process starts with
- 15:26Speaker 3: the creation of a job description and then the budgetary
- 15:30Speaker 3: sign off, Yes, we have the money to bring on
- 15:33Speaker 3: somebody to do this work. Somebody somewhere has written a
- 15:37Speaker 3: set of roles and responsibilities, and the roles and responsibilities
- 15:40Speaker 3: are then accompanied by a set of desired skills and
- 15:44Speaker 3: then sometimes accompanied by a set of nice to have skills,
- 15:48Speaker 3: but that is typically the makeup of a job description.
- 15:52Speaker 3: You then decide, well, that looks like an interesting job.
- 15:55Speaker 3: I'm going to go and apply for it. You attend,
- 15:57Speaker 3: you know, you send your CV, your CV gets shortlisted.
- 16:01Speaker 3: You a tend a range of interviews, you have a
- 16:03Speaker 3: range of conversations with your future employer, and you know, finally,
- 16:07Speaker 3: happy days, you are offered the job. To what extent
- 16:11Speaker 3: have you constructed that job? You personally haven't constructed that job.
- 16:16Speaker 3: You've applied for a job that you know that you
- 16:19Speaker 3: have got the aptitude, the skills, etc. To deliver on,
- 16:22Speaker 3: but you haven't actually created the job. We've now got
- 16:26Speaker 3: generative AI coming into organizations, and what needs to happen
- 16:32Speaker 3: is that we collectively need to determine which tasks can
- 16:37Speaker 3: be handed off to an AI. But most people don't
- 16:42Speaker 3: know which task can be handed off because they've never
- 16:45Speaker 3: constructed their own jobs. It's quite a thing, isn't it.
- 16:48Speaker 3: You can do the work. That's one thing. You can
- 16:51Speaker 3: do the work. You know what your roles and responsibilities
- 16:53Speaker 3: are on a day and day out basis. But actually
- 16:56Speaker 3: taking a step back and a helicopter view of why
- 17:00Speaker 3: do I do the things that I do? Why is
- 17:02Speaker 3: my work stacked up in this way? What constitutes a
- 17:05Speaker 3: work stack? What constitutes a workflow? That's a completely different
- 17:10Speaker 3: level of thinking that most people have had zero experience of.
- 17:16Speaker 3: So to land to drop a technology into a workplace
- 17:20Speaker 3: and expect people to be able to reverse engineer which
- 17:24Speaker 3: elements of their work can be handed off to an
- 17:28Speaker 3: AI that also needs training and it needs sensible parameters
- 17:33Speaker 3: for safe adoption, none of us have got that expertise, right,
- 17:38Speaker 3: very very few of us have got this expertise. So
- 17:41Speaker 3: to expect the technology to land in a way that
- 17:46Speaker 3: brings about the efficiency is absurd.
- 17:50Speaker 2: No, I agree with you. A role, of course, is
- 17:52Speaker 2: a very big part of the work related stress picture.
- 17:56Speaker 2: Role clarity. When am I doing what's not my role? Hey? Changed?
- 18:00Speaker 2: I thought I was meant to be doing this. We
- 18:03Speaker 2: know that that causes work related stress. But it's a
- 18:06Speaker 2: very interesting lens that you bring there around. Okay, well,
- 18:10Speaker 2: that's going to happen, But also who's meant to be
- 18:13Speaker 2: determining these roles? Can it just evolve organically or not?
- 18:19Speaker 2: And I suppose again, I'm just thinking about the challenge
- 18:22Speaker 2: of uncertainty with this technology and which humans find hard.
- 18:27Speaker 2: Humans find uncertity really hard, and what that means for
- 18:30Speaker 2: organizations who are trying to leverage the technology and communicate
- 18:36Speaker 2: that uncertainty and still deploy it. Do you have any
- 18:40Speaker 2: thoughts on that, and like how the uncertainty could be managed?
- 18:44Speaker 3: So I think the sooner the organizations start addressing the
- 18:48Speaker 3: human factors the psychology of change, the better. I don't
- 18:53Speaker 3: think we can expect healthy, robust, sustainable AI adoption and
- 19:00Speaker 3: we start to address the human factors. And I defer
- 19:03Speaker 3: to you, I am not a clinician, right but having
- 19:07Speaker 3: worked with high performing teams for several decades, I've got
- 19:11Speaker 3: an elevated interest in psychology and how people perform well
- 19:16Speaker 3: at work, on what happens when they don't, and what
- 19:19Speaker 3: the reasons are for why they don't. One of the
- 19:21Speaker 3: things that strikes me is that one of the most
- 19:24Speaker 3: useful models of behavior change that I have come across
- 19:29Speaker 3: is the procesca declemente trans theoretical model of change, which
- 19:34Speaker 3: was devised in the nineteen seventies, I think, and it
- 19:39Speaker 3: seems to be the case that it's been used with
- 19:41Speaker 3: great efficacy in behavior change programs including smoking cessation, weight loss,
- 19:48Speaker 3: lifestyle management, addiction recovery, et cetera. Etc. Maybe I was
- 19:54Speaker 3: thinking about us recording this conversation, right, but I've just
- 19:57Speaker 3: in the last week. I've just gone round I don't
- 19:59Speaker 3: know dozen people that I know who work directly in
- 20:03Speaker 3: business transformation or change communication to inquire whether or not
- 20:10Speaker 3: that model of change features in any transformation programs, and honestly,
- 20:16Speaker 3: I was met with blank stares right across the board.
- 20:19Speaker 3: Nobody had heard of that model. And so it strikes
- 20:22Speaker 3: me as quite peculiar that from an organizational point of view,
- 20:27Speaker 3: businesses approach change as if it was a modular process
- 20:33Speaker 3: to be managed rather than a deeply personal psychological process.
- 20:41Speaker 3: Do you know the guy Andrew Huberman. He has a
- 20:44Speaker 3: podcast called Huberman Lab. He's a neuroscientist, I think, based
- 20:48Speaker 3: in the States, and one of his findings was that
- 20:51Speaker 3: it takes typically between eighteen and two hundred and fifty
- 20:56Speaker 3: four days for a human to successfully change habit. Well,
- 21:01Speaker 3: I don't think that's factored into any change programs either.
- 21:04Speaker 2: So exactly, And it's the pace of change and the
- 21:08Speaker 2: kind of dynamics of the change. It's not like you
- 21:12Speaker 2: could set out on a journey around AI transformation and
- 21:16Speaker 2: six months later that journey would look the same, because
- 21:19Speaker 2: of course the technology is evolving all the time, so
- 21:22Speaker 2: I think there's a real challenge in communicating and managing
- 21:26Speaker 2: those variables.
- 21:28Speaker 3: But that kind of.
- 21:28Speaker 2: Six changes of six stages of change model that you
- 21:32Speaker 2: outline will probably be familiar to many of the listeners
- 21:36Speaker 2: to this podcast, because, as you say, it's something that
- 21:40Speaker 2: we come across in medical training to manage addictions. And
- 21:43Speaker 2: I think it's a very interesting concept around how we
- 21:46Speaker 2: could possibly use that to support the workforce and support
- 21:52Speaker 2: the organization. And I'm thinking again about what you said
- 21:56Speaker 2: about research and again how organizations can conduct research internally
- 22:01Speaker 2: to help feedback on what's going on on the ground
- 22:05Speaker 2: with the humans as they adjust to working with more AI.
- 22:08Speaker 2: So I think there's plenty to be done here, and
- 22:12Speaker 2: lots of occupational health clinicians and teams can weigh in on.
- 22:16Speaker 2: But what would your kind of takeaway be for an
- 22:20Speaker 2: occupational health team who are seeing a little bit of
- 22:24Speaker 2: fallout on human AI interaction in their workstreams. Where do
- 22:30Speaker 2: you think we should pitch our efforts.
- 22:32Speaker 3: So counter to what seems like a very dominant Silicon
- 22:39Speaker 3: Valley skewed narrative about AI adoption, I believe that successful
- 22:47Speaker 3: AI adoption is contingent on the human capacity for that adoption.
- 22:54Speaker 3: And you're absolutely right. It's not singularly a once and
- 22:59Speaker 3: done option thing, because by the time you've adopted generative
- 23:04Speaker 3: AI slavor A, you know, flavors B, C, and D
- 23:08Speaker 3: will have arrived. It's also the case that AI adoption
- 23:13Speaker 3: is being floated at the same time the organizations are
- 23:18Speaker 3: having to think about carbon emission reduction or reducing their
- 23:22Speaker 3: dependency on fossil fuels because of what's going on in
- 23:25Speaker 3: the Middle East now, or you know, shifting attitudes towards work,
- 23:29Speaker 3: what are going to be the skills of the future. Like,
- 23:32Speaker 3: there's just so many flavors of change floating around in
- 23:36Speaker 3: the ether all at once. It's not singularly AI adoption
- 23:40Speaker 3: that needs to be overseen. And the other thing going
- 23:44Speaker 3: back to that change cycle is we know because the
- 23:48Speaker 3: cycle sets it out, it's iterative right, and there's always
- 23:52Speaker 3: the possibility of relapse. So we need to be thinking
- 23:56Speaker 3: instead of, I think, instead of assuming that change at
- 24:01Speaker 3: work is a linear, step by step process by which
- 24:06Speaker 3: we will arrive at a set outcome, I think, sooner
- 24:10Speaker 3: we can start thinking about the process of change as
- 24:13Speaker 3: being a cyclica process that is deeply, deeply human. Like
- 24:21Speaker 3: we know because the data is showing us that programs
- 24:25Speaker 3: of change fail because of a lack of human uptake.
- 24:29Speaker 3: So how might we as practitioners reframe transformation as being
- 24:36Speaker 3: a very human process that is cyclica rather than linear.
- 24:43Speaker 3: And how might we use what we know about the
- 24:47Speaker 3: psychology of change to encourage and invite conversations in organizational
- 24:53Speaker 3: settings that allow people to understand the basis by which
- 24:59Speaker 3: humans change habits and become a bit more comfortable with
- 25:02Speaker 3: both the process of habit change. Like once you can
- 25:06Speaker 3: see it, you can you tend to identify it within yourself.
- 25:10Speaker 3: It tends to ring true once somebody has outlined a
- 25:14Speaker 3: process to you. So there's that piece and then there's
- 25:17Speaker 3: the piece around. It's okay to fail. Failures are part
- 25:21Speaker 3: of learning. It's also okay to not feel okay about
- 25:25Speaker 3: the process of change, like we are emotional creatures, aren't we,
- 25:29Speaker 3: And some days will feel up and other days will
- 25:32Speaker 3: feel down. And I think perhaps if we were a
- 25:34Speaker 3: tiny bit more compassionate with ourselves and with our colleagues,
- 25:38Speaker 3: we might be able to make more progress rather than
- 25:41Speaker 3: this very mechanical way of thinking about organizational change, which
- 25:45Speaker 3: is somehow the human is an automaton that will just
- 25:48Speaker 3: do these things and then these other things will happen
- 25:51Speaker 3: as a result.
- 25:52Speaker 2: I really like that kind of analogy of moving away
- 25:55Speaker 2: from linear towards a more cyclical model of what's going on.
- 25:59Speaker 2: And I think for people working in occupational health there's
- 26:01Speaker 2: a kind of almost synergy there with like an audit
- 26:04Speaker 2: cycle or things they can do to sort of support organizations,
- 26:09Speaker 2: gather work and health data, and be a part of
- 26:13Speaker 2: that iterative process in a more evidence based way. So
- 26:16Speaker 2: I think that's a great takeaway. What's an interesting conversation.
- 26:19Speaker 2: Thank you so much for coming on and for Chastis.
- 26:22Speaker 3: Thank you very much for inviting me. It's pleasure.
- 26:33Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by orchid Live. Orchid Live is
- 26:37Speaker 1: a specialist occupational health software used by a number of
- 26:41Speaker 1: some members to run every aspect of their occupational health operations.
- 26:46Speaker 1: They hold healthcare records for over one million UK workers
- 26:49Speaker 1: and work with both in house OH teams and OH providers.
- 26:54Speaker 1: You can find out more at orchidlive dot com