Wellbeing Focus – Tackle post lockdown anxiety with the help of Working Well

Lorna Marshall is the Working Well Coordinator for Knowsley and the Business Relationship Manager for Knowsley Chamber. From her unique role in the borough, Lorna takes us through the support available to; help us cope with mental health issues, how to tackle the anxiety that is cropping up as lockdown ends, how Working Well can support your business and employees and the importance of ‘good health, is good business’…

It’s the news we all thought we’d been waiting for. Last month as the Government unveiled its roadmap to ease lockdown restrictions, many of us felt overwhelmed and even anxious at the idea of “going back to normal”.

It’s hardly surprising. With cases falling and the vaccine rollout continuing, we are on course to see restrictions lifted by June 21. It’s incredible to think that the first lockdown was late March last year. That will be 15 months. Many of us have adapted to lockdown life and a return to normal could come as something of a shock.

We’re being asked once again to rearrange, re-familiarise and reconnect with lives we left behind last March, and make way for a new normal – a normal that is really anything but that. And while the idea of seeing our family and friends is one to be relished, the prospect of picking back up with those daily routines is understandably daunting.

So it is perhaps more important than ever to prioritise wellbeing in the workplace. At Knowsley Chamber we have been delivering our specially designed Working Well programme for more than 10 years, in partnership with Knowsley Public Health.

The Working Well programme provides bespoke wellbeing support for Knowsley businesses and aims to promote and enable healthy and productive workforces, in turn reducing sickness absence and creating a healthy working environment in Knowsley.

We work with a number of specialist organisations and providers across the region in order to offer the very best support to our members. Here, two of those experts offer their advice on ways we can try to take charge and overcome anxiety as we prepare to return to the workplace.

Antony Dowell is a mental health first aid trainer at Imagine Independence, a registered charity and provider of adult social care services in the North West of England and London.

Antony and his team provide a range of high-quality support to people who experience challenges in life, such as mental health issues, learning disability, older age or who have had experiences with the criminal justice system. Their mission is to value people, challenge stigma and transform lives.

He says the most important thing is understanding that feeling anxious or nervous during lockdown is completely normal: “Stress and anxiety is our body’s way of letting us know that we’re responding to change – it is a physical reaction and something most of us will experience at some stage in our lives.

“In times of uncertainty, it’s important to recognise and accept what we can and can’t change or control.

“The things we can change are easier to plan for, though not always easy to achieve; but we also need to be aware of increasing resilience to the things we can’t change and develop a list of helpful responses – and there are some really useful online tools that can help us to do this.

“The BBC offers a stress container exercise, which we recommend to many of the individuals we assist. It is important not to be too prescriptive when providing mental health support, instead let individuals have control over their own choices.

“I believe that people intrinsically know what is good for them and what is not, and simple exercises like this can help us make better choices.”

Lee Monaghan supports this. Lee is a director and facilitator at Evolving Mindset CIC, a non-profit mental health organisation established in 2019 to promote positive mental health in our communities.

Working with businesses, schools and public sector organisations, Evolving Mindset helps develop and implement effective mental health training and practices. Lee says we should do what we can to try to manage negative thoughts.

“We can often feel that we don’t have control over our thoughts,” he says, “we have on average 60,000 thoughts a day and we use different techniques to try and control them, especially the negative ones.

“Repetitive negative thoughts create those uneasy feelings that many of us are experiencing. Often those thoughts are a result of us trying to predict the future or play out situations before they occur, which in reality none of us are able to do.

“That said, our thoughts are incredibly powerful, in that the way in which we think influences the way we feel. The way we feel influences the way we behave. The way we behave reinforces the way we think. It is what we call the cognitive triangle.

“So, if our thoughts are negative, we feel negative – low, sad, anxious or stressed. We then display negative behaviours – crying, becoming withdrawn or isolated,

even shaking or pacing. So using those available resources to identify and accept those negative thoughts and begin to develop coping strategies is a great first step and something we can all do now.”

Antony adds that we should also be aware when things feel like they’re becoming too much, and try to take action. Men in particular, he says, tend to use unhelpful coping strategies to ‘put-up-and-get-on’, which is detrimental and potentially very damaging to our mental wellbeing in the long run.

“There’s a minefield of so-called self-help articles out there, so even getting access to reliable help or advice can be overwhelming. NHS online offer a short quiz that aims to deliver easy-to-implement action plans tailored to each individual. It really is a fantastic resource and something we recommend to many of the individuals we support.”

Working Well co-ordinator, Lorna Marshall, says employers also need to be ready for challenges around employee wellbeing post-lockdown.

“Right now it is arguably more important than ever to ensure the wellbeing of your workforce, and that includes mental and emotional wellbeing,” she said.

“Over the last 12 months, the Working Well programme has supported businesses in Knowsley with COVID-specific resources, such as outbreak management, workplace testing and how to become COVID-secure.

“As well as support with workplace practices, there is also a £500.00 grant available for SMEs with 2-249 staff members who are geographically based in Knowsley. During the pandemic, the Working Well grants have been focused on COVID-recovery, with an emphasis on mental health.

“We have had some excellent applications that have been for mental health first aid training, sessions in resilience, fitness equipment and mindfulness.”

For more information on our Working Well programme or to find out how you can benefit, please contact Lorna directly via email Lorna.Marshall@knowsleychamber.org.uk

Expert Eye

It is one year shy of a century since Carrie Morrison became Britain’s first female solicitor in 1922, taking advantage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act that had been passed by Parliament three years earlier.

Leading Liverpool city region lawyer, Alison Lobb, is a big admirer of Morrison whom she believes is a pioneer who paved the way for women such as herself to forge successful careers in the law.

Alison, who since 2014 has been managing partner of one of Merseyside’s best known law firms, Morecrofts Solicitors, believes there has been huge progress since then but also says there is still some way to go, particularly when it comes to female representation in the upper echelons of the profession.

As recently as 1995, Ruth Harris made history upon joining City law firm Ashurst when she became one of the the first female lawyers in the UK who was allowed to wear trousers – an illustration of how absurd mindsets still persist.

According to the Law Society, since 1990 more than 60% of new entrants into Britain’s £28bn legal profession have been female. There are now more women than men practising as solicitors.

However, as Alison points out, there are still too few women in senior positions, particularly at many of the bigger corporate firms. Research carried out by the FT at the beginning of 2020 found only a a fifth of senior lawyers, or partners, were female and just under half of associates.

“There are still relatively few women rising to senior positions, particularly in the bigger firms,” said Alison. “That is maybe less true in Liverpool but it is certainly the case in national firms. Many careers seem to reach a plateau, and in some cases that’s a choice made by individuals and of course that is ok.

“Organisations such as the Law Society are committed to addressing the disparity but I still think there are barriers created by unconscious bias. There are a lot of people talking about the issue but it needs to get beyond just talk. We need to see some actual movement. I think bigger firms can be less flexible in their structure and that makes change more difficult.”

That certainly isn’t true of Morecrofts. The full-service practice, which is based in Liverpool city centre and operates from a number of offices across Merseyside, employs a total of 108 people, including 11 partners. Of the overall headcount, 85% are women and seven of the 11 partners are also female.

Alison added: “We don’t have any specific policies or processes to encourage more women into the firm or to progress while they are here. I think we moved beyond that some time ago, well before I became managing partner. We just instinctively look at everyone as a person – we don’t see women as a different species.”

Alison joined Morecrofts as a solicitor in 1999 and, even when she became managing partner, she said she didn’t have a great awareness of her gender being a particular issue, until she attended a Liverpool Law Society dinner for managing partners in 2015.

She explained: “I really sat back and realised that I was actually quite a rarity.

There was only one other female managing partner in that room back in 2015. That has increased, but we are still markedly in the minority.

“You sometimes see it in the mindsets of clients. If you deal with a client firm which has a male-dominated leadership team they are more likely to have an expectation of dealing with a man. One of our female solicitors went out to meet a new client for the first time and she took along one of our trainees, who happened to be male.

“Subsequent correspondence and calls from the client were directed by the client to the trainee, not to the female solicitor, despite instruction to the contrary. This is the problem with tackling unconscious bias. You can’t just flick a switch and things change. You have to work to change mindsets over a period of time.”

Alison believes one of the barriers to female progression in professions such as the law is the reality that women still make up the majority of carers in society. They are often trying to juggle the demands of their families and their careers, and firms with inflexible policies don’t make that any easier.

“I spoke at an event just before lockdown last year,” she said. “Afterwards I spoke to a woman who was joining a law firm. She had asked if she could work from home one day a week but they had said no. Firms who do this are doing themselves no favours. They risk losing excellent people through their own inflexibility.

“At Morecrofts, we recognise that people have childcare responsibilities or they might be caring for an elderly relative. So we look at ways in which we can accommodate that. Not only is it the right thing to do, it makes perfect business sense. We make it easier for great people to carry on delivering high quality work for the firm and our clients. It’s a win-win. Why would you not do that?

“One of the things we have seen a lot of in Liverpool is women who work for larger firms making the decision to set up their own practices, which is fantastic. They had decided working for a bigger firm didn’t suit them or their lives.

“At Morecrofts we have a big family law department. There are a lot of women working in family law and I think that is largely because, generally women tend to be able to adopt a more empathetic approach when dealing with clients. Family law can be a very emotional part of the profession.

Alison says Morecrofts has fared well during the COVID-19 lockdown. Due to previous investment into digital technology the firm was able to arrange for people to work from home easily within a couple of days. However, while she is immensely proud of how her team has adapted, she is concerned for the welfare of people in the legal profession.

“Some of our business streams have fluctuated but the majority of our people have continued to work throughout the pandemic,” she added. “What I am concerned about, though, are the levels of stress and burnout in the profession.

“Things such as childcare have become more of an issue with children being off school for long periods, or hard working lawyers expected to work and supervise learning at the same time. Other stresses on workloads have been exacerbated, for example by tacking the challenges brought by the artificially stimulated boom in property work, whilst dealing with third parties who do not necessarily have the technology to keep up.

“The courts and other organisations are struggling to adapt to the challenges of technology, and that impacts on a lot of our work. We are talking to our team a lot to make sure they are ok.

“In some ways we have been very fortunate in the legal sector, compared to other sectors. But there is a risk that people are being taken for granted. It is so important that firms are offering help and support to their staff whenever it is needed.”