Losing your mind at work
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On World Mental Health Day, we hear the experiences of people who've suffered a mental health breakdown at work, and ask what employers can do to support them. We hear from Ian Stuart, the UK CEO of the global bank HSBC, Paul Farmer from the mental health charity Mind, American comedian and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax, Dean Yates, the head of journalist mental health and wellbeing strategy at the news agency Reuters, Geoff McDonald, global advocate and campaigner of Minds at Work, and Dr Claire Douglas, head of occupational health and wellbeing at SCS Railways in the UK.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: Depiction of workplace stress, Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa, and this is Business Daily from the BBC, coming up, losing your mind at work. |
| 0:10.0 | I didn't stop working until I was dismissed, but I never told anybody I had mental health problems. |
| 0:17.3 | That's the actor and author Ruby Wax, speaking at the Mad World Summit here in London. |
| 0:23.5 | It's a conference all about making mental health count in the workplace. So is there a business |
| 0:29.2 | case? Every single organisation we walk into any workplace, we make sure that we keep people |
| 0:35.8 | physically safe. Why would we not want to do the same to keep people |
| 0:39.8 | emotionally and mentally safe? That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC as we mark |
| 0:45.1 | World Mental Health Day. Does business have a role in taking care of their employees' mental health? |
| 0:56.8 | Well, people who've come to the Mad World Summit here in central London certainly think so, |
| 1:01.8 | and they include leaders from the business world. |
| 1:04.5 | Among them is Ian Stewart, the UK CEO of the Global Bank, HSBC. |
| 1:09.8 | He told me why he thinks it matters for his bank. |
| 1:12.7 | I think it's been one of these things that's been hidden away for a long time, |
| 1:16.3 | and it does have a big impact on your business. |
| 1:18.7 | When you start to look at absenteeism and people not being at their best, |
| 1:23.3 | it has a really big impact on your customers, on your financial performance, and just on the very well-being of your organisation. |
| 1:30.5 | So it's about the bottom line? |
| 1:32.2 | I said that quite openly today. |
| 1:34.1 | We're in the results business, and if we don't look after our people, yeah, it'll really hurt our bottom line. |
| 1:38.9 | So you might as well do both. |
| 1:40.0 | But what about when the business is precipitating the mental health crisis in a person, pushing them? |
| 1:46.1 | Yeah, so we've got to be really careful because we are really bad at setting deadlines. |
... |
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