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NB Power and How to Build Team Resilience

Join us as we kick-off our fall webinars featuring NB Power’s Robin Condon, Director of Total Health & Safety and Dr. Shelley Parker, Industrial Psychologist specializing in Health & Safety Applied Research at NB Power.

NB Power has created a psychological health and safety strategy that has garnered them the distinction of being Canada’s Safest Employer. This webinar will showcase NB Power’s robust program that incorporates mindfulness to tackle stress and encourage resilience. The presenters will share best practices on what has worked with their teams and how to move forward as we tackle issues such as loneliness and anxiety while working from home.

Video

Transcript

okay well i have 12 o’clock on my clock so i think we’ll get started uh first of all i want to say hello and

welcome to everyone i’m marie mold and i’m the manager of stakeholder engagement here

at electricity human resources canada so i want to thank you today for joining our webinar today

how to build team resilience with our guest and be power first of all i want to mention

that robin condon who was to co-present today sends her regrets as she was unable to

make it in this webinar today however we do have dr shelly parker

who will provide us with their robust program on creating a psychological health and safety strategy

winning them an award of being canada’s safest player

employer player employer as we continue working through the

pandemic hrc is here to support the industry with the continuation of our coven 19 series of webinars

sorry i’m just having uh i should pay attention to this to the screen here

um psychological health was top of mind and a growing concern discovered in our most recent survey with hr professionals

across the country that was our most recent survey and just

as this morning there was latest findings from camh that was in the news that revealed that

30 of parents with children under the age of 18 still living at home

are feeling depressed so before we get started i just had a couple of housekeeping

notes we will be recording this webinar and posting it onto our website afterwards

there will be a q a session after the presentation so please feel free to cue in your questions in the chat function

and we’ll queue them up so for those of you who do not know who ehrc is ehrc is a national not for

not-for-profit organizations supporting the human resources needs of the canadian electricity and

renewable energy sector our role is to have insight to make sure that every employer

union and educator is prepared to meet the sector’s electricity needs we’re an extremely

collaborative organization our work is done hand in hand with employers

unions educators governments which are both federal and provincial governments and other industry

associations now i’m very delighted to introduce our presenter today dr shelly parker

dr parker is the industrial psychologist specializing in health and safety applied research at nb power

her area of expertise is employee stress and health and safety strategy

improvements welcome dr parker i’m now going to switch it over to you

well thank you marie

i’m just going to try and um get our screen going here you go

okay thank you so i’d like to share my screen with you

how are we doing can everybody see the powerpoint am i on the right screen yes

perfect thank you well welcome to nb power’s version of

psychological safety and when the

program was first established way back when and i’ll give you the timeline so you’ll be able to

follow through the ins and outs the ups and downs and the scenarios that we experienced in order to reach where we

currently are we originally named the program very simply we don’t need a better hard

hat now there was a lot of controversy surrounding that particular naming only because we

had a few people come back and say you know what but we do need better hard hats sometimes

so it was taking everybody through the concept of that is true but what we need to know

first and foremost is how to wear the ones that we already have we don’t need better ones we just need

to know when to wear the ones we already have and if we’re at that point where we can

recognize when we need to use the right ppe then we’re already ahead of the game

we’re achieving what we started out to find what we started out to create

and if you look closely at our image they’re our own employees and actually

these guys happen to be best friends and you’ll notice that they’re each having a sticker on their hats

40 10 50 and that is one of the central concepts

of our entire program and in about two minutes i’m going to get to

that and let you know what it means it’s a really important concept that our

employees live day to day so welcome welcome to the psychological side of

safety and this is our journey in

2010 we noticed that a few things weren’t quite going the way that we

wanted and i started doing a lot of research because my field

is the research-based field we’re the we’re the applied psychologists we dig in and have a great time doing tons

and tons of reading research and critically finding out topics that are most relevant to our

situation so that we can then do our own research and that’s what i was doing in around

2010 and interestingly enough i started looking more at the incidents

at envy power and saying okay we’re having a we’re having a scenario related to safety incidents

we’re recognizing that you know they’re not headed in the direction that we want them to but they’re not

being very consistent either in fact there were a lot of peaks and valleys

associated with the numbers of our incidents that were going up and down and

when you stepped back and looked at it i recognized they were going up and down

consistent with organizational change so that was really

interesting when i went back through and i looked at them again one of the first peaks in employee

safety incidents coincided with the time when we were told by

our board of directors you know what envy power we need you to split into five separate

companies so we did and anybody who’s gone through a reorg from that magnitude

would understand the impact that it had on everybody we basically took one complete

provincial organization and made it into five separate entities

complete with shifting all the employees around that head office so that each operating

company now had their own floor so employees had to move to be on that particular floor

and okay we understood that that was going to happen everything settled down things looked

like we were kind of getting back to normal and then we noticed a few more peaks

because guess what there’s always related change to everything you do so the related change to splitting into

five companies was change in government the new government came back and said

you know what envy power we don’t think five companies are working very well for you let’s put you back as one so we went

through that whole reorgan incidents suffered and then of course a few years ago we

noticed a major major impact and we looked at that it coincided with our government saying

we don’t think we can afford you anymore and recover we’re going to sell you off to hydroquebec

employees reacted by going on what i called automatic pilot

you know it was almost like one one thing too many and yes they were trying to be safe but

what they were doing was relying on this concept called automaticity in order to stay

safe so automaticity is like going on autopilot and if i were to say to you right now

and just you know if you’re on mute it’s fine if you’re not that’s even better but i’m gonna ask you a question and

just blurt out the answer what’s two times two

four we didn’t have to think about it the same as three times three or

four times five all of these thoughts all of these requirements all of these

operations are at automatic reflex level we’ve been trained in those lower

ordered operations we don’t have to think about them and that’s the joy of automaticity

you don’t have to think about responding because it’s right there you’ve done it so many times you know

it’s just automatic recall however as everybody knows when you’re working

in an electrical utility regardless of your position whether it’s a power line technician or an engineer or

an admin person or an accountant you need to have a high level of safety

related to your job being on autopilot’s not going to do it

for you so the more i thought about it okay we have to we have to help we have to do

something well in my world everything’s quite logical so what’s the opposite of autopilot

well when i dug into the research it was mindfulness that in itself came with a huge huge

scenario of issues however i also brought with it the idea that if

we were going to start working with mindfulness if we were going to start basically implementing

mindfulness it needs to be part of a greater strategy so other concepts that

i implemented to support the concept of mindfulness was the one of relatedness meaning

employees needed to know that they were related to the same thing

that every other employee executive even the ceo and president were related to we needed to get out

there that concept of you know what guys regardless of who you are we are all nb power employees

we had to get out concept of competency all levels of management had to

recognize how competent their employees were and

by recognizing their competencies we had to help management recognize they could step

back and stop this micromanaging because they needed to allow employees

that sense of autonomy and employees needed to learn that they could actually

provide what’s called that interactive constructive feedback meaning if they were being asked to do a job a

certain way and for whatever reason they felt that it wasn’t appropriate they could question that it was their

right to do that so what else did we do well

i have to make sure i can change my slide here i also had to bring out this concept of

multitasking because when i started talking to everybody in particular the

executive basically along this you know what mindfulness is etc etc

and the need to pay attention to focus our attention on one thing at a time

you know it was that old yeah yeah we can do that but we have so many other things we can you know we can just do a few things at

the same time however i was able to put this in front of them and let them know that you know what

there’s no such thing as multitasking because the human brain with its billion

neurons and hundreds of trillions of synaptic connections it’s a very cognitive powerhouse in many

ways but one of its core limitations is the inability to concentrate on two things at once

we can’t multitask our brain’s not set up that way now it can do two things

extremely fast one right after the other so that it appears as oh it’s doing it simultaneously but

really and truly if we were to break it out into its separate parts it’s doing one thing at a time mind you

if you’re trying to do a lot of things in the same time frame you’re not giving

either one of them your full attention so they suffer so let’s bring it back to

our timeline i was just starting to introduce that concept of mindfulness and i got help we got a hurricane we got

hurricane arthur and as i was presenting to

the executive how mindfulness would really help as we started to recognize the magnitude

of this herd point hurricane i recall one individual in the back of the boardroom

in a moment of quiet just kind of scratching his head and looking at me and saying

you know you talk about mindfulness and that might be a really good idea but i have a question for you what the heck are you smoking

because you had to recognize the time and that concept of mindfulness in an

electrical utility was just not even on anybody’s radar to consider

and here i was asking the board asking our executive yeah just please have faith in me listen

to what i’m saying let’s use mindfulness and to their credit

they said all right give us more information we’ll see what we can do so i let them know that basically i

wasn’t asking them to sit around in a circle and hold hands saying kumbaya

i wanted them to use mindfulness exercises as a way to role model to employees

how it could pay attention in a more selective in a more discerning way how we could

pay attention taking into consideration everything going on around us everything

going on around us in that environment that very hectic environment of a hurricane

and stay safe and stay focused but do it in a calm less stressful

manner and they did it so we had literally what i say was our call to

action and i created quite a few mindfulness exercises and i can send them to you

marie if you want to send them out after and one was it was called just breathe

and it was a very special type of breathing exercise the other one was that concept of 40 10

50 which helped explain for everybody where our thoughts went at any point in

time so as i’m talking to you you may get a little blip in a little blip out you know just that

little thought that little memory that little image and

that’s okay we get them everybody gets them so they’re in they’re out they’re gone however if they come in and they kind of

register with us long enough so that we pay attention to it and then they’re gone then we might

start thinking about it more often and then they might come in and stick around a little longer than what we’re

expecting or wanting so that all of a sudden our attention gets shifted

from what we’re supposed to be paying attention to to what these thoughts are so

the 40 refers to 40 of those little blips and thoughts

they’re referring to things that happened in the past like things that happened last night or last week

and 50 of them are referring to things that are going to happen that we’re planning

on doing like tonight like tomorrow like next week that leaves only 10

of our conscious thought focusing on the task at hand now me giving you a presentation like

this isn’t you know calling on much of our safety abilities to sit up and

and pay attention although i would like more than 10 you know it’s pretty important however

we had to register with employees the fact that those little blips they carry emotion

with them that’s the issue it’s not what the thoughts about

excuse me it’s the emotion that it brings with them so for example if all of a sudden you

had this little blip saying oh wish i hadn’t sent that email off last night that i sent

uh that’s not good so all of a sudden you’re starting to get a little bit of regret

and that starts kicking in and what if all of a sudden you think oh i have a meeting i have to attend tomorrow and

it’s not going to be pleasant and the more that starts kicking in the more we get consumed

with anxiety so the idea of up here 10 which was a phrase created

by our employees by the way is all about learning to focus on the present moment

of trying to simply control those past and those future

emotions based on thoughts and the 60-second breathing exercise is

a little quick breathing exercise that they learned

in order to use to up their tent and control those emotions

so the executive really jumped into the fray they took all of

these exercises and they hit the field literally when we had hurricane arthur so throughout all the

restoration efforts we had executive meeting with every contractor

every employee just simply to review the mindfulness exercises so that

they could leave them with the employees so they now had those exercises they could use at their

own discretion whenever they needed them and you want to know something in three weeks of restoration we had

zero incidents and in the lessons learned that we conducted afterwards employees stated how much those exercise

kept them focused on their job and reduced the stresses and anxieties

that they were experiencing so when we took it further we continued

to emphasize the concept of 40 1050 but throughout the entire corporation the 60-second breathing

exercise became part of the tail board we utilized what i refer to as safety

drive where i simply went to that group of individuals that i call middle

management the forgotten child similar to our little child in a family and i would ask

them just simply three questions what’s preventing you physically from

working safe today what’s preventing you from a process

perspective from working safe today and what’s preventing you psychologically from working safe

today answers to those three questions

enable them to create action items so that they could start resolving any

issues associated with those three topics and it was a tremendous success because it gave them control

over things that they felt they couldn’t control executive mindfulness training sessions

were created the executive went through full

day training sessions and you want to know something even today this would be four years

later today they will start a monday morning executive meeting by just simply turning

the lights down a little bit and everybody taking a moment to just breathe and just

capture their thoughts and just get focused on what their agenda is and they continue to continue to

promote mindfulness throughout the corporation executive field visits again were part

of the arthur scenario and they continue today we don’t need a better hard hat is

the phrase that’s still being used and just like employees have tailboards when

they’re going to start physical jobs management has a tail board as well that they do prior to meeting with employees

and it just simply is mindfulness-based questions that enable them to get in the right frame of mind well how did we do

we had the best safety record in the history of envy power and we are now celebrating 100 years

we had it for three consecutive years we reduced our medical aid by 97 disabling events were reduced by 99

and our compensation rates were reduced by more than 60 we received two gold medal awards for

psychological safety and for our safety culture and in 2016

we were voted canada’s safest employer in our division but we also did a few

other things we had a total health index conducted within the corporation and

from 2016 to 2019 we recognized we were doing that great

our physical safety was really doing well but look at these these are mental these are physical

health related issues not safety these are health related issues we weren’t doing as well as what we

thought we were doing time for change since 2019

we’ve been focusing so much resource on employee mental

health i created what’s called a pop-up cafe and vice president of hr and myself

randomly choose locations and show up with coffee with donuts

with muffins with silhouettes empty silhouettes just a silhouette of

somebody’s head male female and we put them all over the room and the purpose is to just simply invite

employees in to talk about mental health to talk about issues that they’re afraid to talk

about such as suicide such as depression and the whole idea is

literally to have these concepts desensitized the silhouettes are placed around the

room so that privately on their own time they can go in and fill in a silhouette with thoughts that they may

be having at that moment with emotions they’re very successful we have the efap

program that we’re continuing to promote by employee road shows safety needs

safety meetings and again through the mental health cafes letting people know what resources are available to them

as well as through our communication and bulletin boards we’re utilizing the pathway to coping

course which is of course done through our university university of new brunswick it’s offered free

to all employees there’s a quote from a current entity power employee and a graduate of the course

as to how how well worth the time and effort it was for them to learn these particular coping skills

and currently we have over 300 employees registered in this

the pandemic response as everybody on this webinar knows it really took everybody

for a loop we had to dig deep to get a lot of resources in place but one thing that i was able to do was

the end of april complete a survey that focused on anxiety resilience loneliness and safety

and this was sent to all employees and contractors we had 50 percent participation rate for

this anybody who’s trying to run a survey within their company knows this is a really good rate

particularly when employees are scattered all over and what did we find we found

that regarding anxiety and regarding loneliness and regarding safety

the age group most impacted by this was the 30 to 44 year olds and in particular

female we knew that from a safety perspective the group most impacted were the envy

power employees working in nb power locations

that made sense to me because if you’re working at home you feel safer because you can control

who’s entering and who’s leaving your home when you work at a work location you don’t have a lot of control who enters

your workspace so the safety issue was well explained the 30 to 44 year age group

experiencing anxiety experiencing loneliness that that’s your sandwich generation

that’s the group of individuals particularly the female who is responsible for raising children

responsible for perhaps looking after older relatives there’s a lot of anxiety

associated with that with the desire to keep them safe to keep them healthy

during the pandemic so the responses make sense resilience there was a lot of resiliency

but interestingly enough it was with employees who were in the 50 year age bracket enough

particularly male and those who had the longest rates of employment with envy

power we also established a helpline again that was established back the end of march and that simply

was a call-in line for employees or their families to use

a lot of calls that i received actually were from parents just simply wanting somebody to talk to

their children or to help them cope with the adverse effects that their

children were experiencing as a result of them being at home and interestingly enough a lot

of parents who did work from home they had such a huge sense of guilt associated with the fact that

they knew they were still getting paid and they felt that they weren’t earning their pay because they had to

couple their work with child care so they had to almost be given permission to recognize that

you know what right now we’re in very different times we know that you will give us all that

you can give us in terms of work but we also know that right now you’re a full-time parent as

well so choose your poison what’s it going to be full-time employee or full-time parent

because you can’t be both at the same time so we help them schedule times where

they could call in where they could get their work completed while making sure that their children were

being looked after we also created a recovery tool tracker

and this is a workforce recovery tool that managers could use

simply to get a snapshot of their employees status so they knew what special considerations

had to be put in place for certain employees it worked very very well and still continues to work for us

our next steps well our safety culture survey closed last week it’s another survey

that’s being done by an outside company the results we get will inform what cultural changes

we’re going to need in order to take this to the next level

and we’re also going to be taking results from the survey i completed back in april to

focus on the loneliness topic as well as to see what other types of programs we can put in place

to enable more employee engagement we know that based on

the canadian research that the canadian psychological association members have completed

we know that there’s a huge issue around just a sense of being able to control

activities control events going on around us and

taking that into consideration our message going forward will be this is our call to action we’re going

to take control so we need employees to know that they still have power

and they still have control over their lives in the pandemic so we’re going to be teaching them a

variety of techniques that they can use so we’re continuing to

do our research we’re continuing to reap a few benefits such as the employee recommended workplace

awards and in our category which is government and large we were able to

still achieve the employee recommended workplace award for the last three years including this

year so we were really excited over that so in conclusion i want to thank you for

the opportunity to tell you our story and i’m going to turn it back to you marie

and respond to questions thank you dr parker um i

i really uh commend you and i want to congratulate you on all the awards that you’ve won and i’ve also uh know that mindfulness

can sometimes be very um uh to actually do i’ve tried it before

and with so many distractions in life and work it’s it’s a very difficult exercise

um so i was just going to see if there was any questions uh on the chat so if anybody wants to

ask a question feel free to to actually um cue those up um and i will start it off

with one question so uh i know you spoke a little bit about the pandemic

but now that there’s a heightened amount of cases in new brunswick um do you think that you’ll have to

adjust what you’re currently doing or will you continue doing what you’re doing

you know that’s a really good question i believe what i will continue to do

and what i will ask my co-workers to continue to do is to stay the course

i’ve i’ve demonstrated through doing um the mental health cafes because i

meant to mention in the last two weeks i’ve completed 14 mental health pop-up cafes and i’ve been

doing it online through teens and gathering a lot of feedback and one of the most positive aspects of it is that

at the end of the cafes i call employees forward and ask them

for action plans like this is our your call to action how are you going to manage this what is your action plan for

the fall for the winter going to be let’s talk about it let’s create it so by creating

action plans we’re giving them control we’re giving them power over a situation that a lot of

individuals basically feel that they’re powerless to control but you know what they’re not because if

we follow public health guidelines we’re taking control we’re

wanting that power and we can have it and employees need to know that they still have control and they still have power

and that will help them have that positive attitude they need going forward so they simply can say you

know what we can handle this i i agree with you totally on that i

mean um you know it just if you don’t it raises that um that panic or

that anxiety um dealing with this yeah and uh yes if you want to send over

the exercises we’d love to see them thank you and share them if we can um so just check and see if there’s any other

questions i don’t see any other questions um

so it was um i just i guess we’ll finish up here so i want to just first of all say thank

you so much for participating today and all of our participating participants today online you can stay

informed for future webinars and resources by signing up for our newsletter at electricityhr.ca we do have

one final webinar that will be happening at this in our series in december

on december the 9th on workplace culture so i want to uh thank everybody enjoy

the rest of your day and i hope that you will join us soon take care thank you everybody