Hey, it's a real honor and pleasure to speak with this group today, and in the interest of keeping things moving on schedule, it's my charge to get this session underway. I'm Chris Cunningham, I'm a professor of industrial, organizational, and occupational health psychology at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. I'm also rounding out my term as president of the Society for Occupational Health Psychology, and I've had a privilege to work with a number of your members over the past couple of years on a variety of different committees and projects, and when they told me about this conference, I was really excited to have an opportunity to possibly come and speak to you all a little bit about this field called occupational health psychology, but I also thought this might be an opportunity to dig into a huge and growing domain of health-related intervention known as social support interventions, and try to explain to you all why these are being so successful and impactful, because there's a little bit of a mystery, sort of black box thing going on when it comes to this type of intervention. So these are the two main things we're going to get into today, and I've only got an hour, so what I'm going to ask is, I know we've got a bunch of folks online too, which is wonderful, you guys can put your comments and questions in the questions box if you're online, and if the rest of us could kind of share them and save them rather till the end, that'll give me a chance to address them when we have time, okay? So let's get this underway. A couple of things I want to always preface this with, I'm not a therapist, okay? I'm an industrial psychologist, so I don't do the whole, like, diagnose you, figure out what your issues are, I'm not going to set up a treatment plan for you individually. The way I work is I work with organizations to design environments that can actually optimize the work experience for the workers, but also for managers. I also try to help organizations do a better job of designing work so that it can actually be done by a normal human being, and not some sort of superhuman, something I bet many of you are familiar with as well. One thing, when I get into the topics I'm going to talk about today that's really important is that, you know, there's really no substitute for the care and compassion and support of somebody who is licensed to do this type of work. So if anything I say today strikes a note or resonates with you and you are thinking about yourself or others, I urge you to take advantage of resources that are available to you not only at a national level, and there's one link here that's useful, of course it's not showing up well on the slides, and it's through the American Psychological Association's crisis page, but there's also a number of local and regional resources that have become super powerful. One quick example of this, where I live in Chattanooga, we've developed a program called Life Bridge, and this is in response to a rash of physician suicides that happened in recent years, really traumatic, really terrible for the residents and the remaining folks that are working, and we built a coalition of therapy providers in the community that offer their services free of charge, anonymously, confidentially, and the utilization of this program has been phenomenal. So I'm not here specifically to talk about that today, but if anyone is interested in learning more about that, just reach out to me after the talk and I can put you in touch with the folks that are running that so you can see kind of the model that we've developed there. Today, I'm going to feel like this trip was worth it if I'm able to get across these three learning objectives with all of you. I'm happy to go down tangents, if time allows, it probably won't, but basically this presentation is divided into two sections. The first section is to introduce you to this field of OHP, and the second section is to really delve into psychological health and how and why social support interventions are important and essential to making that happen and protecting that. I'm going to cover a lot of ground today, and I do tend to speak kind of fast if you can't already tell, so if you have questions, again, feel free to ask me at the end or follow up with me afterward. My email is going to be at the end of the presentation. So real quick, this first section, we'll go through just a few slides to give you some perspective on my perspective. Occupational health psychology, OHP, is an area of applied psych that's relatively recent since about 1990, 1991, and it's focused on applying psychological theories and evidence to issues of worker health, safety, and well-being. So the unfortunate acronym we've come up for that is WHSWB. It does not roll off the tongue at all, but I think you all know what I mean. It's a very broad domain that we're targeting. And the thing that's really important about OHP is that we are not really in the business of treating the symptoms that people develop when they have exposures or when they have an accident, but we're really more interested in the prevention and the promotion aspects of this work that we all collectively do. So you'll hear a lot of folks with my background and training emphasizing that we've achieved wellness when we've reached a state at which there's an absence of symptom, okay, when people are actually flourishing and thriving. These are words that are commonly used within my domain. What's really important for this group, I think, is that OHP and folks like myself that have that background, we want to be helpful to folks like you that have very, very strong content expertise in specific areas, because in our experience, there's really no way to actually strongly improve the health and safety and well-being of workers unless we take into account the underlying psychology that's affecting the way that they think and they perceive and they appraise and they behave and they feel in that work environment. And all those things I just listed, of course, are kind of the core content domain for psychology. Okay, so we'll come back to this theme in a minute. I also, I guess I should just emphasize, too, we are fully aware of the development of this Total Worker Health Initiative and the upcoming Society for Total Worker Health. And for those of you that like to think in that sort of transdisciplinary way, this is really a fantastic group to be watchful of, and it would facilitate connections between folks like yourselves, folks like myself, and other specialists that have expertise in different areas. So think about that. Now, like I said, it's a relatively new domain in applied psychology, and it's really driven by a broad understanding of complex interactions that affect all of us as human beings in the world around us. So this model here is kind of an adaptation of one that was popularized by Albert Bandura when he was demonstrating his social cognitive theory. Some of you have exposure to this. The difference here is that instead of behavior, the element that we often focus on here, too, is the social aspect. So it's not to say that behavior's not there, but for us, behavior is wrapped into the psychological box that you see on the screen. And then, of course, the environmental and the social domains are also playing a role. And the important point to emphasize here are the double-headed arrows, okay? These are all reciprocally related. So when we act or we pretend like we can affect a person by just changing a piece of the environment, we're forgetting that those individuals, just by being there, also affect the environment. And if we think that we can educate an individual employee and teach them how to be smarter or more safe about what they're doing, we neglect the reality that if we don't also change the social norm around that behavior, none of that training is actually going to be as effective as it could have been, okay? So this is part of what this model helps to illustrate. For those of you that actually end up being interested in anything that I say today, we actually did write a book on this, and it took us too long, so I market it whenever I can, okay? So it's called The Essentials of OHP, and it actually is designed to be for master's-level professionals. That was the target audience, and it's completely accessible, and it goes into all of the topics here a lot more deeply today. For those of you that are also interested in seeing very current stuff that's going on in the field of OHP, we have this website at sohp-online.org. Yes, that particular screenshot highlights some COVID-related resources, but I assure you that for us, COVID actually didn't introduce anything new. All it did was exacerbate problems that we had been studying and trying to understand for decades prior. So you'll see that that website actually has a wealth of other resources that go way deeper than some of the most current pressing topics. Now, it may help you also to know that people that work in research and intervention in my domain, they study topics like this, okay? And I'm not going to go through each of these. That would not be a good use of our time. But what I want to just highlight here is the breadth. There are some folks that target the individual and focus explicitly on individual differences. So these could be things like demographics, cognitive ability, personality, educational experience, but it could also be things like all the different characteristics that get glumped and glooped under the diversity and inclusion efforts these days. These days, too, there's a lot of increasing emphasis in aging and what that does to worker populations and also the families that those workers care for. You'll see here also a number of emphasis areas that pertain to the social dynamics of work. So how we treat each other at work, okay? That might include incivility, bullying, abusive supervision, things like that. But also how we treat ourselves and others outside of work. This is where a lot of folks target the work and family conflict domain, or actually the broader and more inclusive term is the management of role dynamics. That's a much more positive way of talking about it. And the truth be told, you know, without work, a lot of these problems, they don't necessarily go away. So I really do want to kind of highlight one of my personal biases really quick for you. I think that work is essential to high quality of life. And I don't know if everybody in the room shares that with me, but if you do, then well, good, we're on the same wavelength. If you don't, maybe you will by the end of the talk, okay? Because work actually provides access to resources that we need. And I'm not just talking about the monetary ones, because Lord knows a lot of us don't get paid enough for the work that we do. So it's not just that. But there are resources that work provides that we can't access in any other life domain, okay? And that's something that we really, really seriously have to remember, particularly if we're concerned about maximizing the quality of people's lives, the people that we're actually kind of, you know, charged with serving and protecting in the work that we do. So keep that in mind. And if anybody's interested in any of the topics that you see on these screens, I will be happy to connect you with individuals that do research in that domain. I've been in this organization and in this group for the last 20 years, and it's something that is a really tight-knit group, and we actually are very good at networking and connecting professionals with each other. So don't hesitate to ask for direction. The big piece here that I really want to emphasize is that we have started to realize that what we do in OHP is a bit of a lens amplifier or hub for a lot of other professionals in the occupational health domain. Like I said, there's folks in this room especially with a ton of content expertise. But in our experience, sometimes what's missing is a ton of expertise about the human element and how they're going to react to what you try to teach them or the technology you try to implement or the controls that you try to put in place. And so sometimes and often, we find that there's a need to add a second layer. There's a need to take this great work that you're doing and really give it a chance for success. Just a real quick example, you know, there's a company that I've worked with down where I live in Chattanooga, and it's a carpet manufacturing company. And you'd think they have their stuff together because they're one of the largest flooring manufacturers in the world. But every year, people die in that plant. And their solution to this in one of the areas was to paint the floor orange and put up plexiglass shields so that people wouldn't get in the machine because that's how they're dying. We're not talking like nice deaths, we're talking about like crushing and roller-type deaths, okay? And of course, they did all that and they thought, we've got this, no more problems. But what they didn't do was change the incentive system, which was piece rate. And so people were always going to be looking for a way to go faster to get more done to keep the machines running because they were compensated, they were incentivized, okay, to produce more. And sure enough, you know, within a month of them doing all this work, two people died and it was completely preventable. And the organization acted like they didn't understand what went wrong. The safety engineers scratched their heads and said, I don't really get it. And the technology manufacturers said, you know, well, they just, they clearly weren't properly trained, okay? So this is just like a common situation, unfortunately, and I know many of you have seen things like this happen. And it's, again, it's not that psychology alone fixes it, but it's that when you partner that with something else that's being done, then you have that true multi-pronged approach. And that's the approach that actually leads to really long-lasting change, okay? And that's a theme that I'm going to come back to again a little bit later. So when you hear me talk about psychology is essential, that's what I'm getting at. I'm not going to try to undercut any of the expertise any of you have because I don't have it, okay? But what I am going to say is that there's a personal element that we want to be aware of and that's something that's so critical, especially as we transition into the topic of psychological health, which is inherently personal, and social support, which is inherently group. Okay, these are two things that we can't throw technology at to solve. These are two things that we have to actually work in that, those different veins, those different domains. So getting into that a little bit, the key points that I'd like to try to highlight for you as we move past this point in this presentation are these, okay? So I really truly believe that psychological health is essential for optimal functioning at work. I also think that there's no way we can protect this, sustain this, maintain this unless we take collective action, and I'll explain what I mean by that in a minute. I'm finding in my own work and a lot of others in this domain are also seeing this pattern developing that one of the most effective ways of protecting psychological health is with social support interventions. But the really interesting thing about them is that there's a lot of them out there, but almost none of the published material on it explains how and why they work so well. And so I can provide that today, I promise, because it's something I've been struggling with for a long, long time. So I'm going to help you understand why they work and hopefully encourage you to think about weaving some of that into the work that you're doing as well. And then I'll even try to get to the point that I think social support has to be an actual feature of work, because if it's not, we're not really doing everything we can to create that safe and healthy work environment. So a couple quick definitions, and I promise we'll move a little faster after this slide. For those of you that maybe don't spend a lot of time thinking about mental health, here's the way it's defined by the folks that struggle with it on a day-to-day basis. So the American Psychological Association suggests that it's a state of mind. You can read the rest of it, but then you'll see my highlight on ordinary. And so I want to come back to that theme in a minute. But this is the idea that we are really functional when confronted with the ordinary demands and stresses of life. Another perspective from the World Health Organization is that we are achieving or experiencing good mental health when we realize our own abilities and we're able to work productively and contribute to one's community. Notice the direct connection here between personal mental health and your ability to work. Okay, work ability, mental health, really intimately connected. Now some of you may be scratching your head a little bit because you're like, wait a minute, I didn't think this was a talk about mental health. That's later today. Okay, this was a talk about psychological health. Well, okay, they're very closely related. In fact, a lot of the people I know that work at APA aren't real happy that APA has decided to focus on mental health because they think that that's actually a little bit too restrictive. Psychological health allows us to start thinking about how people think, how they feel, how they behave, how they interact with the world around them. That term might be a little more inclusive. This is one of those places where I tell my graduate students, you know, I don't really care what label you use as long as you're doing the work well. I'm going to say the same thing to you. But I like psychological health better myself because it provides that sort of inclusiveness. And also in some of the work environments I work in, it has been shown to carry a little less stigma than me going around talking about mental health. That just seems a little too soft. Psychological's still on the verge, okay, but it's something that people kind of can come to grips with as being somewhat serious. So you'll hear me use these terms a little bit interchangeably. Please don't be upset. I'm trying to show you that landscape. Now most of us that work in this domain, if we're talking about psychological health or well-being, we'll tell you that it's continuum, okay? I hope you love my graphic. I worked really hard on that one. Sorry. There were parts of this slide deck that went well. This was not one of them, okay? But a couple of things that are really important. Psychological health is super changeable, okay, and frequently so. So unlike a lot of the conditions and issues that we struggle with with other areas of health and safety, psychological health can fluctuate moment to moment. Because at some level, we're even talking about emotions and moods, okay? And then of course there are more serious forms of psychological health and disorders that take a lifetime to develop and they might take a lifetime to change. So we need to understand that this is a really broad bucket or domain that we focus on, and not everything here can be influenced exactly the same way. What is also important though is that psychological health is not solely determined by external factors. So if you're an expert in environmental control, then that's awesome. But that's not enough if we want to protect the psychological health and well-being of our workers. Because there's stuff going on inside. And I'm going to show you some of this in a few minutes with some recent data that have been coming out showing you just how much stuff is going on inside. And what we've got to realize is that when workers come to work, they're not a blank slate. We come to work with all the junk that we've been dealing with outside of work. And then we have to power through it while we're at work. And then of course we all know it also goes the other way. I mean, any other junk we pick up at work, we then take with us when we go back. So these are really complex role dynamics, as I said earlier, that we are trying to navigate. And that's why we need this sort of blended approach. The other thing that should be emphasized is psychological health doesn't manifest or show the same way for everybody. Some people bottle it up and you never know that they're dealing with anything. Of course, we worry about these people because they also tend to explode when things get too tough later on. Then there's others that wear their heart and soul on their sleeve. And they walk into a room and they're having one of those sort of Debbie Downer days. And they're like a walk in black hole. And they take down the tone of the room in like 15 minutes. Really fascinating research studies, by the way, have shown that in a typical office environment, let's say we've got 100 people in a cubicle set up, within about 10 minutes of somebody like that walking into the room, the collective mood and affect of that room drops significantly on scales that we would use to measure that kind of feeling. So if we don't think your presence affects people psychologically or socially, then we're not really paying attention to the research. But if we also don't think that these things matter at work, then we're just burying our head in the sand. Because these are factors that affect every aspect of how we react in those work environments. No matter what else is going on, what we're dealing with that day is the person that we are. That's what we have to try to learn to navigate. Now sometimes, and again, go back to that earlier definition, the mental health is when we're able to handle ordinary demands well. But the thing is, sometimes, a lot of times lately, the demands we face in our non-work and work lives are not ordinary. So here's some data from one of the really large scale surveys that APA did recently. And you can see here an emphasis on essential workers and how about a quarter of them have been diagnosed with a mental health disorder since the start of pandemic. Now you hear that word disorder attached, then you realize we're not just talking about having a bad day. Okay, we're talking about like something clinically diagnosable, something very serious that they needed help from a professional to address. The other thing I want to highlight here, this is one type of worker. This is the worker that somebody decided it would be a good idea to label essential. Okay, side note, you know how much damage that's caused to everybody else who wasn't labeled essential? Oh my goodness, like I've been in the middle of a large scale study of resilient healthcare workers and I cannot tell you how many of these folks have actually had their resilience dinged for the first time in their career just because they were hospital pharmacists and their hospital told them, you know what, you're not really that essential. Why don't you not come into work for a while? You can just take calls from home. And they're telling me, they're like, I thought I was a member of the team, you know, and now they're telling me that I'm not needed, right? And it's not just them. I mean, there's so many other folks that are dealing with this too. But I promised no major tangents, so I'm going to go back to here. So the thing that's important here is notice that this survey is also highlighting what these essential workers needed, wanted. They're basically begging for more emotional support. Guess what? That's a type of social support. That's how we deliver emotional support is in social relationships. So keep that in mind. The other thing that's really interesting, and this is actually a silver lining to COVID, is that by and large, Americans are really not comfortable talking about health and especially mental health. And now it's becoming a little more normalized. But you know what could really help it become normalized? If we actually took it seriously in our workplaces. Like if we actually use the work environment as a delivery mechanism to provide the kind of care and support that these workers need. That's really one of the coolest things about being in a work organization is that you have a semi-controlled environment. Yeah, there are a ton of risks, but if you compare the work environment to what goes on in people's personal lives, you would think, whew, this is easy. And so sometimes that work environment gives us an opportunity to provide the kind of support or at least access to the kind of support that people need and they're just not going to find in any other aspect of life. So something to keep in mind. These extraordinary demands aren't just limited to people who are called essential workers. This survey also went on to explore what's going on with parents. They didn't get the label essential, but anybody who is a parent realizes just how essential you really were. And the really, really big challenge is that for most working parents, they were having to adjust to a demand profile that was changing hour to hour. As a COVID case popped up in their schools, kids were sent home. When they thought they were going to be able to take that work trip or go do that big presentation, suddenly everyone was schooling from home. And the internet was strained and we had no office space. And your stories are probably way more complicated than anyone that I've heard, but you know what I'm talking about. And it's been a really, really challenging couple of years and you can see it in the responses of these parents. And again, what are some of the big takeaways? Huge demand for emotional support. Again, treatment seeking being normalized. So a big point I just want to emphasize here is there may have been a time years ago when talking about social support and psychological mental health was, you know, like too squishy, not really something that we really want to take seriously. Now is not that time. Okay, now is the time when people are actually asking for it and it's an opportunity for us to do something more. Now, just a couple of things to help you understand a little more of the baggage that workers are carrying into the workplace with them from a psychological health perspective. On first glance, this set of data looks really good. What percentage of adults is receiving the social and emotional support they needed? Half say always. So, yeah, we can focus on that, sure, but that means half aren't, okay? And the thing that really makes me nervous are the rarely, never, and sometimes group which collectively equal a large chunk, especially if you extrapolate that out to the broader population. Another set of data here. Percentage of adults with any mental illness in the past year as of 2020 by age and gender. So, just looking across this, one of the big takeaways is we're not all right. And you've heard the saying, we're not all right and that's okay. We're not all right and it's not great for workplaces because if I have this percentage, just to pretend you have 100 people in your organization that you work with, and if you just apply these blank percentages to that, you realize, right, that that's a sizable number of folks that is carrying some stuff that they might be dealing with and might actually benefit from some attention, just even a passing attention to the mental and psychological health that they are struggling with at that time, at that point in time. Another thing to highlight on this slide and the next couple is notice the high, high rates of folks that are at a, what would be considered a primary working age. These are folks that we often believe are healthy and they're resilient and they'll bounce back and we really don't need to worry about them and that's not what the next sets of data are going to show. Okay, so really be attuned to that. Comparing those substance use or suicidal ideation related to COVID from, related to COVID-19 in June and you can see again how these numbers are excessively high and way higher for certain types of occupational groups than others. You can see also the groups reporting symptoms of serious distress from before COVID to during COVID. That's what these bars are representing. Okay, and I mean I don't need to explain this one to you because you can all see the gap. What I find particularly striking is the gap in that 18 to 29 year old range again where we thought everybody was fine and they're not. Now here's where it becomes really problematic. We could say, okay, these needs are real, we all get it, we agree, but we're not trained to do that kind of work and here's the bad news. There aren't enough people that are trained to do that work and in fact you can go all over the country and you can find entire regions where there are barely any folks who are licensed to do the work necessary to meet these needs. Okay, and here's the thing that makes it a little more stressful for me is that the workforce projections, now we're going back into the domain that I live in, the workforce projections show that this is only going to get worse or at least stay relatively as bad as it is now. So one of the big implications here are that the need's huge, it's been getting worse, we don't have enough folks to deal with it professionally, we can't outsource this problem, so where does that leave us? And hopefully you're kind of thinking along one of the wavelengths that I'm thinking along which is well maybe we can do something about it within our organizations and that's exactly what I'm trying to advocate for is we've got to figure out how to help each other better. The good news is we don't all have to be clinically trained experts because we're not always dealing with the worst cases of the worst cases. Truth is sometimes all we need to be providing is that emotional support, literally that shoulder to cry on or sometimes the physical or material support, you know, helping out when they need to care for a kid or an elder adult or helping out when they need to move from one apartment to another. These little examples of social support are never going to be provided by an expert clinician but they're going to come from a healthy social network and one thing that we've sort of really shot ourselves in the foot with, especially for organizations that have decided to go with remote and hybrid work arrangements, is that we've decided that that type of efficiency and flexibility is more valuable than tight-knit social connections and that's a serious decision and it's one that we haven't really thought through. So going into this a little bit more deeply, let's understand that working can contribute to and be affected by our psychological health, okay, and that's a really super important point for us not to forget and we also have to understand that maintaining psychological health gets worse, gets really difficult, when the demands chronically exceed the resources we have to meet those demands. I'm going to talk about that more in a minute. When these demands are heavily social or interpersonal, ambiguous and or linked to insecurity. Now why is that collection so toxic? Well, because a lot of times those types of demands we don't know how to cope with. So like if a boss gives you an excessive workload, yeah we can get angry and stressed about it but we know what has to be done, got to get through it, got to put in some more time, I'm going to get through it, I'm going to work late, I might miss a weekend but this is going to get done. But if people just start being mean to you, for example, or they ostracize or ignore you or you start reading signals and signs from your leadership that your job might be in jeopardy or, you know, I don't know, maybe we have bad inflation and your job and your pay isn't keeping up with that and you're starting to wonder how am I going to pay rent? If all of these things are happening, there's very little you can do as a worker. This is like the worst kind of stress we can imagine because it's there, you see it but you don't know how to respond to it and the truth is you probably can't without the help from somebody else and who's that somebody else going to be? All of those factors, by the way, those sub-bullets were all made worse by COVID but like I said earlier in our domain, COVID did not introduce a lot of new stuff. It's just shown a really bright spotlight similar to these on the issues and realized that we needed to kind of really get serious about doing something about it rather than just talking about it and studying it all the time. So it's actually, we're kind of glad for that, that's the only thing we're glad of, okay, but it's something that we're glad about because now people are seriously taking these matters to heart. The other thing I just have to stress because most of the work I do is with business leaders, okay, is that this is not just something you do because it's ethically or morally right. Worrying about psychological health is actually smart and really good for your business. We have to understand that when people struggle with any kind of disorder, physical or psychological, these can negatively impact or impair or impede their ability to be a good performer. And these days, many organizations can't afford to be super picky about who they hire, plus it's illegal to screen people out when you have one or more of these types of disorders, so there's that. But there's also the issue that when you hire somebody, you need to try to figure out how am I going to accommodate you? How am I going to help you be successful? How can I help you actually generate value for the organization? That's a straight business argument, okay, and it's one that's not being addressed right now. Even less severe psychological health conditions can still negatively impact counterproductive work behaviors. That's a whole class of study in our field. We got a cooler acronym for that, CWB, okay, sounds like a TV network. And this includes anything that anybody's doing that's not actually contributing to the company's bottom line, which is a lot of things right now, okay, like spending time shopping online. That used to be the big one, but nowadays, it's craving social connectedness on social media, which, by the way, got another study going on right now in there. We were looking at what's contributing to burnout among working women, and we found that social media is actually one of the most dangerous things that people are engaging in. The two most strong emotions that they feel when they engage in social media use are envy and pessimism. Those don't build you up, like that's not an increasingly positive thing, yet that's people turn to social media when they can't find those connections often in their more normal circles. It's an interesting, interesting side note. The other business implication is we know that on the flip side, when workers have positive psychological states and feeling good about work, this actually then begets more positive states and more positive feelings. There's a really strong theoretical model in our domain and in the positive psychology domain known as a broadening build theory. Some of you are probably familiar with it. It boils down to something like this. If you help people stay positive, then positive they will stay, and other people will become likewise. Remember that study I shared earlier where I said somebody that negative came into an office setting and brought everybody's mood down? Well, they did that same study with somebody who came in real positive, and it still worked, just not as well. Negative forces are way more powerful and way faster. Negative forces can help, but they don't tend to spread out as fast or as quickly, so an implication there is we need to try harder, but that's something we can get behind. The other thing that many business leaders can get behind is that there is now evidence and it's growing evidence that when you invest in protecting psychological and mental health, there are positive returns on investment. By some estimates, these can be as high as 4.2 to 1. Now, a lot of these studies are tied to the implementation of EAPs, and no offense to anybody in here who might be attached to an EAP, but that's a nice offering, but the utilization rates of these offerings aren't real good. Why are they not real good? Because when they're implemented, we don't really ever think about the psychology or the sociology or the norms about that being implemented. So we're lucky if 30 to 40% of workers will even use an EAP when it's implemented. Now, by intervention standards, that's not fantastic, so we've got room to work there, but imagine if they're seeing that kind of impact now, imagine what kind of impact could be had if we actually rolled something like that out that people used. I'm going to zoom out now because I'm a professor and I can't help it, and I want you to see two major theories that guide a lot of the work in this domain represented in visual terms because we like pictures, and it's early, I get that. So one of the big models and one of the big challenges in our domain is to design work so that demands that are imposed upon workers are matched or at least correspond with resources that they have access to, okay? And notice that this is represented this way on purpose because for most of us, that profile is always lopsided. There's almost always more demand on us than there are resources to meet it. That's why we find work stressful. If you know anybody who loves their job and like really is enthused and super engaged and they never complain about stress, have a conversation with them sometime about what it is about the place that makes it so positive, and almost always you will find it's because when they're there, they feel completely supported, they have access to all the resources they need, they've got the technology, they've got the team, they've got the supportive and flexible boss, they have control over their schedule, they've got the dream job, and that is a job that ensures resource demand balance, okay? So what most of us do in our intervention work is we try to help organizations figure out so what are those demands, and then what are the corresponding resources, and which ones aren't there, and how do we get them there? And you might notice, given the theme of today's talk, social resources are a huge bucket, and one of the elements, one of the ways that we show that is with support, and another way is by not treating people poorly, civility, okay? Well, guess what? When an organization's culture is characterized by high levels of support, that mistreatment stuff kind of goes away, because when you're actually supporting each other, when you're advocating for each other, when you're standing up for each other, you don't tolerate people being mean. It just doesn't happen, and that's one of the coolest things about support interventions, okay, is that when we implement them, we're not just providing a resource, we're taking away a huge demand, one of the worst demands that's so toxic for people in work environments. So file that away as one piece to why social support interventions are so powerful. Another very powerful model that I'm sure more of you are familiar with is the demand control model, but what you may not realize is that over the years, this has been expanded, and there are two different moderators that have been tested here. One is support, and one is self-efficacy. Now we're not here to talk about efficacy, but this pertains to how confident somebody is in their ability to do the job. What we do want to focus on, though, is that support also factors in here, and the way that you look at something like this is that demands are like work demands, workload, control is a resource, a really powerful resource, and it shows up in the way that, say, like a boss says, hey, I need you to do this, and I'm going to let you approach this the way that you know you need to approach it. So in other words, empowering you to make the decisions you need to approach the management of these demands. Now, here's the thing. For some people, that's phenomenal. The people that feel like they know what to do with those demands. That's why efficacy has been shown to matter, because if I drop that control on you, and you're new to the job, or you just really don't understand what you're doing, and the boss says, here's what I need you to do, go for it, I believe in you, and the worker's like, yeah, but I don't believe in myself. Like this is not a good thing. Like in that situation, this doesn't work well. But you know what? Even if I don't believe in myself, if I got low efficacy, if I have a support network I can turn to, and I can say, hey, I just got this set of demands, I just got these tasks, I don't fully understand what I need to do, can you all help me? And if that network says, yeah, like here's how we do it, then you're going to be okay. The other thing is sometimes, even when we know what to do, okay, the demands are heavy, and it takes a lot of effort, and we burn and churn, and we're really getting drained, and then your coworkers are there beside you saying, hey, you handled that really great. Or your boss is saying, wow, that was impressive, I wasn't really sure that you were going to be able to get through it as easily as you did. That's going on your record in a good way, way to go. That's an example of support. That boosts people up as well. So this is a really simple model, and I know that, but even in its simplicity, we see a critical role that support plays. And this is not new, by the way. This idea of support playing into this, we've known about this for 40 plus years. And so it still kind of boggles my mind why we're still wondering, is it worth worrying about support at work? I don't want anybody in this room to leave today wondering, is it worth worrying about social support at work? Yeah. Okay? All right. Let's go a little further. Oh, wait. This is my favorite image. Okay. So thinking visually, metaphorically, if you will, when we create social support setups at work, what we're trying to do is basically build a bridge. Okay? So I live in Chattanooga. This is like huge hiking area of the world as it is out here. And surely there's some people in the room that have been on a hike before, or have had nightmares about being on a rope swinging bridge, maybe. And when you go on long hikes, hopefully you're not doing it alone. And maybe you've even gone with a small group of friends, and there's always the one that leads the way, and then there's the one that brings up the rear, and then there might be you stuck in the middle. And this is the cool thing about how social support works, is somebody pulls, and somebody pushes. And inevitably, we get from where we are to where we're going. But there's more in this picture. Okay? Notice this bridge is not just a single set of like two by fours, but it's got walls. Now they're rope walls, so it's still scary as anything, but they're there. Okay? And it's a very well-built bridge. This thing's not going anywhere. It might shake a little bit, but you're going to be able to handle this. Well, that could be your organization. But for a lot of folks, it's not. Okay? For a lot of folks, they go to work, and they're lucky if they've got one friend to cling to. One person to pull them, one person to push them, one person to walk alongside them. But if they've got only that, and they have no other supports, there's no safety net, there's not even a clear path, if it's a winding bridge, that is an incredibly challenging reality for somebody to navigate. Now wouldn't we rather they focus on doing their job instead of having to worry about all of that on top of doing their job? And so that's really what we want to try to do with social support interventions is build that sort of culture where it is a little bit more easy for people to get from point A to point B, from the start of their work period to the end of their work period with the help of others. And there's evidence now across different populations and contexts that these interventions can make a huge difference in work settings. I'm going to show three of them here in a minute. One reason why is that they're all strongly founded in psychosocial theory and evidence. So these are not attempts to implement a new technology because we think it can sell well and make a lot of money. These are interventions driven by the way people treat each other and by the value that that creates in our own lives. These interventions are simple. They can be implemented at a variety of levels, and they don't cost a lot to put into place, which makes them ideal candidates even for small organizations who may think, I can't do anything to protect the health of my workers. Yes, you can. They follow what's called a robust or could be seen as a robust delivery mechanism. So you all know that when it comes to intervening, you know, sometimes the greatest intervention fails because we can't get it in the hands or arms of people fast enough, okay? But with social support, that doesn't necessarily have to be the case, all right? Because you can deliver it collectively. You can use groups to meet the needs of groups rather than just one individual teaching a small set of individuals. And so that means rapid deployment. And it also makes it possible for you to create follow-up and sort of booster shot options to keep people engaged, to keep people practicing these techniques. The other reason that social support networks work is that when they're designed well, they are actually kind of like organizational development interventions. So I also do a lot of work with companies that are trying to change culture and climates. And one of the big things you're trying to do is adjust the way that organization sees itself. But you know what it takes to actually change an organization? You actually have to change the people in the organization. You don't change organizations. You change their members, okay? And so with social support interventions, that's exactly what you're doing. You're helping to teach people who work there why it matters, why we need to be there for each other, how you demonstrate support. These are behavioral things you can do. These are cognitive things you can do. These are emotional regulation things you can do. And that actually has the effect, when done well, of changing the norms. So that's the really cool thing about social support interventions is that they tend to build on themselves. You can start small and then before you know it, they take on a life of their own. That makes them a really powerful intervention because the trainer or the facilitator doesn't have to stay with the organization long-term. You can get it rolling and you can actually have some reasonable expectation that it will succeed as long as you lay that groundwork. The other thing that these interventions do is they highlight a vulnerability. And I know that's a really big popular thing to talk about today. And we can thank people like Brene Brown for popularizing this. And I think that's really, really powerful stuff. What's more powerful when these interventions are delivered well is that they don't just highlight vulnerability and they don't just make us come to grips with the fact that we're broken. But these interventions, when they're done well, they actually empower people to do something differently as a result of that, okay? In other words, they provide that resource that we need, we crave. They provide clarity, pathways, opportunities for us to navigate what we're doing on a day-to-day basis at work with the help of others. That's really what we're trying to do, okay? So these are some of the core reasons social support networks and interventions are so darn powerful. The other thing and last thing I'll just emphasize, I said briefly before, is that when you do it well and you implement a good social support intervention, you are also taking away social stressors or demands, like the mistreatment that I talked about before. A lot of these interventions also make it easier for people to manage work and family dynamics because they normalize the reality that we all need flexibility from time to time. Even if we're not caring for young kids, we might have elder adults that we're trying to care for. Or maybe we have a chronic physical health condition and we need frequent doctor's visits. And before, that was like an impossibility. But now if we've got a supportive social network at work and you say to people, look, I have to get this appointment. And they say, no, no, we get it. We got you. We understand this is what you have to do to be you, to be whole. We're going to help you figure that out. And this is not pie-in-the-sky stuff, guys. I'm not sharing an ideal. I've seen this work. I know organizations where this is the reality. The problem is it's not every organization. And that's the kind of thing that we want to keep working on trying to implement. So just a few quick examples. I know I'm going to be getting low on time because that always happens. Three quick examples. This is one that the militaries around the world have been testing for about 10 to 15 years. There's versions of it in the US, in Israel, in South Africa, India, China. And the one that I'm showcasing here right now is more found in the US military settings. Amy Adler is the one that's done some of the best research on this. And I included some of her articles in the resource document that's attached to this session in your conference app. What's so powerful about this is that this is a group-based intervention that is designed to teach a way of processing traumatic events without making people relive the whole event. And then it's designed to empower these groups to provide the immediate critical support at that point in time. This arose out of efforts that our military has been experimenting with for years to embed clinically trained professionals in combat zones with soldiers so that they are there to meet these needs. But what they realize is what I was sharing before. There's not enough clinically trained providers to meet these needs, so we've got to come up with a broader approach, something that everybody can use to support everybody. And what I want to try to stress here is that they've shown that just doing this kind of programming, which by the way has been picked up in a number of medical schools and hospital settings. The Battle Buddies program is gaining traction. The PRRx program is gaining traction. So there's a lot of different names on this kind of intervention. But this approach has been shown to improve unit morale. So now we're talking group level outcomes. We're not just improving how individuals feel about access to support, but they're actually changing the whole culture, the whole feel of these groups, which then has the result of furthering the longevity of this support, that it's lasting, everlasting, and it strengthens those ties. The other thing it does is that it's been leading to really good outcomes over time. So lower levels of PTSD symptoms, depression symptoms and episodes, sleep problems. And they've also shown that this is way more impactful than stress education. And by stress education, what they mean are the more typical stress management workshops. Quick tangent, I'm not a fan of stress management workshops. Because the thing is, we pretend like we manage stress, but stress kind of manages us. So when I get a chance to work with organizations on this, I teach recovery management workshops, where we're trying to help people get ready for what's coming. The truth is, if we were to get serious about the principles of stress management, what we would try to do is minimize stressor exposure. But of course, we're not going to do that past a point in work environments, because we have another word for stressors. We call them demands. And in work settings, that's kind of why we call it work. We give people demands, and they respond to those demands. So stressor management, stress management is only going to go to a point. It's not enough. And that's what they're showing with this research. They're actually helping us understand that that might do something, but this does more. So this is one kind of class of social support intervention. A second class, maybe. There. So this is a very powerful intervention. There's two forms of it, MHAT, CHAT. It's awareness training. MHAT stands for mental health awareness training. CHAT stands for co-worker health awareness training. You're not going to find CHAT in print yet. The only study I'm aware of that's done it was a thesis. And it was really well done, though, and that's why I'm happy to share it with you, because they took the principles of MHAT, which is documented and published very well, and they applied it to a broader co-worker group. And it totally works. So if you don't see it printed in a few years, I'll retract every statement I made today. It's not going to happen. But MHAT is so important. Why is it so important? It teaches supervisors how to be aware that their subordinates are struggling. Remember that earlier slide where I showed that we don't have enough clinically trained professionals to meet the need, and we got to go somewhere else? Well, where's that somewhere else? Well, it's our supervisors and everyone, okay? And the thing is, why aren't we better at this? Because a lot of us have never received any training in what to look for. And it's not rocket science, okay? It's like simple things like, hey, so-and-so has started coming late to work. Or so-and-so is dressing like way differently, like they kind of look like they just rolled out of bed. Or so-and-so has gotten real volatile compared to the way they used to be. Those types of changes are never symptoms or signals of anything good, okay? But a lot of us act like we don't see it, but we see it. We just don't know what to do with it. And this training gives us skills to know how to act, how to demonstrate that support. So here's an intervention that's delivered not to the group, but it's delivered to the supervisors. And if you do see that, it is delivered to coworkers. And the person or the individuals who benefit are the individuals who are struggling and in need. And what this does is it creates that social support network in times of crisis, okay? And it teaches people and empowers people. It gives them the resources, okay? In other words, to meet the demand that a coworker who's struggling with psychological or mental health issues might bring to work, okay? And this has been shown to be super impactful. It improving people's knowledge and efficacy again. Remember, now I feel like I can do something about this, which is hugely powerful, which then changes attitudes and then actually changes behaviors. Supervisors who go through this training are more likely to actually demonstrate care, compassion, and awareness of their subordinates' needs. That's a great example of another type of social support intervention. The other thing, if you're more interested in organizational level metrics, these interventions have been shown to actually have a positive impact on the company's bottom line by reducing mental health disability claims, average length of mental health claim, the time it takes to get processed. And there's another study that I don't believe is quite out in print that's shown an impact on prescription drug costs declining because of the use of support at work. It's pretty powerful stuff. Third example. There's a extension of the MHAT by the same research team with other folks now factoring in known as the SOS checklist. And this is something that's still rapidly being studied and developed, but it's a very simple tool. It's like a checklist, you see that in the name. And it's a tool that's designed to be put in people's hands so that you can quickly and reliably get a sense of, okay, how healthy, how mentally, psychologically healthy is my workforce? I know for a fact that many of you are very focused on making sure we're screening people for fatigue or being under the influence of drugs. But what about this stuff? Like, these tools are out there, okay? And they're being studied and they're being shown to be impactful. And you might say, well, that's not really social support. But no, no, it is. If everybody at work is trained in this and has access to this, then we're watching out for each other. And that is social support, okay? That's what I'm talking about, is trying to watch out for each other. So this is the thing. Support for psychological health can be built into organizations and the way we do work. And the points that you're gonna see listed here are simply designed to drive that home. The way we do this with organizational design is by trying to build in psychological safety, by trying to focus on principles of inclusion, not for some sort of superficial demographic or racial ethnic classification, but for the fact that we're all different. And that's it. Like, we really are all different. And if we are, then we need to be able to respond to that difference with compassion, with empathy, with support. That's what it looks like when you build this into the design of work. And what's interesting is that it actually has been shown to be very helpful, even in the most serious of cases. Now, one of my favorite blog writers is Dr. Paul Specter. And I put that link on the screen for you. He is an IO psychologist like me, but way more experienced and way more eminent. And in his last kind of domain of his career, he's decided he wants to start blogging. And he blogs on topics that we need to know today. And recently, he put out a piece on this. And it was super ironic because I'd just given a presentation on this. And that morning, I opened up my email and there's this wonderful blog and it's super well presented. I've got another one of his on an upcoming slide that I also strongly encourage you to look at about the downside of social support. There are times when social support is not helpful. And that's the flip side when we wanna be really cautious. Good news is that's a very small percentage of time. But it is important for us to be aware of that as well. Just real quick, if I can get this slide to go. Come on now. You made it so far, I know you can get there. There it is, okay. So, one of the last things I'm gonna say. If we really wanna get serious about improving social support and mental and psychological health at work, I wanna advocate strongly that we take an igloo approach to this. And I did not just make that up, I promise. A good friend of mine, Karina Nielsen, from the European region, she's traveled around a lot. She is an expert in intervention and evaluation design. And over the years, has popularized this model, which means that when we design interventions, we focus on delivering them at the individual, group, leader, organization level. And then recently, she added a second O, so it actually does spell igloo. And the second O is overarching context. Okay, so that's my humble attempt to represent that visually. And a couple points to just emphasize. You already heard me talk about all of these elements when I went through those three examples of social support interventions that we have empirical support for. Some are delivered to the individual. Some are delivered to the group. Some are delivered to leaders. Some all have effect at the organization level. But you know what? They all don't work unless we take into account that overarching context. And this could be the community. So you remember way earlier in the talk when I talked about that life bridge thing we're doing for physicians in my hometown? That only works because our community cares about our healthcare professionals. So some of our intervention work actually might need to be community education. Like we might actually have to go outside the organization to help folks understand how serious this need is. But this kind of comprehensive, multi-level approach is really what it's gonna take if we wanna address something as complex as social support and psychological health. If you're interested in learning more about this particular model, those are two references that I would suggest. And I don't remember if I added those to the list, but I promise if you search for Nielsen, those dates, and Igloo, you're gonna see these. And last slide. Where I would recommend we try to go are in three different directions. We're not islands and we shouldn't pretend to be. We are gonna need support from others at times. If we go person to person, looking out for each other is really what I'm talking about. And then being prepared to respond. And sometimes we don't know what to do, but we can at least help that person find help. And that takes a little bit of effort, but it goes a long way because that person might turn around and do the same for us later on. And even if they don't, we know we've done the right thing for the good of the organization. That's a form of support. Organizationally, we also have to understand that we also benefit from membership in a group. We are built up by this. That's why we work. It gives us identity, it gives us structure, it gives us access to those other resources that I said earlier. It's not just about pay. That idea of working can actually be really powerful for us in a positive way. So we have to kind of work to promote awareness there of these needs, to identify and address risk factors that would contribute to isolation, which is sort of the antithesis of social support. And again, that's a high risk issue. It's assigned to remote and hybrid working, so we want to be very cautious about that. And then we want to provide resources to facilitate and encourage supportive networks. And this can be done virtually, by the way. So that's something to be hopeful about. But it also doesn't happen on its own. And especially if you're working in an organization that's dealing right now with a lot of turnover and maybe having to hire a lot of people that are new and they don't know anything about the people and they barely know anything about the job. Remember, these are high risk folks because they need help plugging in. They're not part of the established structure that's there. And so we need to be thinking about them as well as they enter into that work domain. There's so much more we could talk about, but we're not going to have time today. So I'm going to stop there. Believe it or not, I've got five minutes. That's not bad, okay? And I'm going to see if I have any questions here online, and then I'll be happy to take questions out here. It looks like there might be microphones in places. So I see one person here and can't see anything else beyond right here, okay? So if you do have a question, work your way up to one of the mics and we'll try to process it from there. Okay, thank you all. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. I'm going to stop there. Pre-pandemic, the health care workers were among working in the situations with the most stress and the least support. And that obviously got a lot worse during the pandemic. NIOSH has an initiative looking for evidence of what helps. And yesterday, Kent Anger presented the preliminary results of his systematic review of the literature for what helps. And it was extremely depressing coming away from that, because basically what he found was virtually the only studies that had a significant effect, and he had, I think, 49 that met his criteria, were those that were tertiary preventive. In other words, treatment methods for people who were in trouble and had diagnoses. Virtually nothing on a preventive, either primary or secondary prevention. And the only primary prevention were really mindfulness kinds of things. So my question is, so isn't there any work being done in the health care setting for this kind of activity? Yeah, so thanks for the comments and for adding that context. There is work being done. In fact, the studies I summarized here are more on the prevention promotion end of the spectrum, but they're not all targeted at health care. And that's the other part of your question. There's been a lot of trouble in recent years, or until recent years, getting into the health care domain to do preventative work. Because a lot of times, members of this population are resistant to take time away from the work that they're doing to get involved in studies of this nature. A lot of hospital systems aren't really excited about letting people in to do this kind of work, because they're kind of scared of what we might find. So I think we're going to see that growth really rapidly now, because we are seeing the effects that I was sharing earlier. It does work in other similarly high-demand occupations, like combat zones, for instance. But we have to figure out how to package it better to fit that need. That said, I'm really hopeful about it, because even though what you're seeing now, or what Kent was seeing now, is evidence of that tertiary effect, part of the reason that's the evidence that's being seen is that that's where the work's being done. It doesn't mean that it's not possible to do it on a preventative side of things. It just means that we haven't been studying it well there yet. So I'm very hopeful by what I'm seeing. Also, I'm very hopeful based on what I understand about how we change organizational cultures and climates. Just a side note, you will also find similar threads if you ever look into the research on mentoring and onboarding and socialization of workers. When there is a health and safety component to those programs, it has effects very similar to what we're trying to achieve when it comes to more formalized social support interventions. So I think we need to just keep reading more widely, and also keep taking chances on these interventions when we see that parallel or that transferability of some of those processes. Does that make sense? Thanks for the question. Yeah. Thanks. Great presentation, Dr. Anurag, Proctor, and Gamble. You talked about MHAT. So is it similar to mental health first aid or psychological first aid? And if yes, are there studies which talk about efficacy of those interventions? Yeah, it is similar to. There's been several attempts to create that first aid approach that you're describing. MHAT is similar to that. From the reading that I've done, I like the MHAT packaging a little better because it's a little more accessible, and it's also more generalizable to different work settings. Some of the first aid stuff that I've come across really may work well for a medically trained or minded population, but it's a tougher sell to certain other types of occupational populations. MHAT is kind of agnostic to occupational domain, which is why I chose to highlight that one today. Thank you for the question. Thank you for this excellent presentation. My question is, I was wondering if you can expand a little bit on your thoughts about how these interventions to provide social support can be delivered in a hybrid or remote work environment and what the research might be going in that direction. Yeah, so if I understand your question, you're asking kind of how can we take some of this and apply it to the online hybrid reality? Yeah. So that is really the big question right now, and a lot of my colleagues in the OHP domain are studying that right now. I know of three or four studies that are ongoing looking at different techniques. We know from some pilot stuff that was being done during the pandemic that trying to teach managers to have regular check-ins, preferably video their employees at least once a week, has been shown to be helpful. The reason for the video is that you can pick up a little more of those signs and symptoms than you could just by phone. So that's kind of why that seems to be helpful. Creating opportunities for people to connect for more social, not just work-related discussions is a big thing, and we lose a lot of that when we work remotely. We only come together for work-related meetings. And that's very efficient, for sure, but it doesn't give us an opportunity to build that sort of and demonstrate that sort of social support. So those are some of the techniques that are being tried. I think that you have a lot more opportunity if your organization is adopting a hybrid modality, because then what some organizations are doing is they're saying, OK, well, you work from home three days. We want you in two days. When you're here, we're going to have a lunch together. Or we're going to have a team meeting to discuss not just work, but just check-in, make sure we're checking in with how people are doing. These are some of the ideas that are being tested right now. Unfortunately, I can't point you to a list of very strong studies that proves this is better than that. But I think if you give it another year, you're actually going to start to see some of this stuff work its way. I just reviewed three such articles in the last two weeks for different journals, so I know it's coming. I just can't be any more concrete than that. This question may be a little bit premature as far as the development of some of these different ideas. But when I think about the work side, I think about different kind of stresses. I think about stresses due to a natural disaster, for instance, in the place where it's an acute event. And then I think about another stress when a company's downsizing, and you know that's going to happen six months out. So it seems like there really needs to be almost a toolbox for different types of stressors. And I wonder if there's any work on any of these different approaches you've mentioned, if you can start picking and choosing and really have more than one, depending on the type of stress your organization has. Yeah, it's a great question. And there have been a lot of people working on such toolkits, frameworks. What's interesting is what you're describing is a situation that becomes stressful for two really general reasons. Change freaks us out, because we know it's a discrepancy, right? We know we're about to do something different than what we've been doing, but we don't really always know what that new thing's going to be. And that is ambiguity. And ambiguity is one of the most generalizable stressors that we all struggle with, because it's not that we're opposed to it. It's just that we don't know how to prepare. We don't know how to respond. We're not sure if we're going to like what that new condition is. So by and large, what you're describing is a situation where we simply need good adherence to best practices in organizational design and change management, which they begin with creating an informative message for change that helps to explain to people what we're about to do as an organization and why, and gives them a chance to raise their concerns, share their questions, and actually receive thoughtful answers back. This, of course, is not the way every organization is run. And so sometimes, I guess, one of the simple ways of responding is that organizations actually make change harder than it should be often, because we don't want to have those dialogues with our workers. We tend to think, well, they're going to do it because I said so. And you might be right at a certain level, but they're going to make it a lot easier, and they're going to be a lot healthier if we get them to do it with us. And so this is one of the other core principles of change management, which is participation and trying to get people looped into the process so they're just not reacting to a demand that we made, but they're actually responding to a demand that they helped set for themselves. So those are just two really general principles. There's not a core framework that I know of that fits every specific instance, but there are some really straightforward guiding principles about how we minimize unnecessary stress that comes during change situations. And again, you would find a lot of that in that change management literature, that OD literature. Follow up if you'd like, and I'd be happy to send you some more stuff. And I did have a couple folks ask online real quick, I guess they lost my slides online, so I'm going to just put the email address in the box for them. The other question that came up is what happened in the carpet manufacturer? Did they find a way to decrease workplace injuries? And if so, how did they do it? To be determined, okay? Yeah, they hired us as a team, and we actually did work with them for a while, and they did have a nice period of time where there were no fatalities, which I would be excited about, except that then they got new leadership, and they went back, and then they started having them again. So it's been one of those cycle things, which is really hard to watch. But I am hopeful that they're going to realize that dying workers is really bad for business, especially right now, since they can't find enough people to staff all their lines. And so I'm expecting to see their concern rise again very soon, and we might get another opportunity to work with them again. Patience, I guess, is one of the challenges that we have. All right, I need to wrap up, because there's another session coming in. If anybody's interested in talking more, I'll try to stick around out there. But thank you all for your attention, appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

Chris Cunningham

social support interventions

worker well-being

psychological health

COVID-19 pandemic

employee performance

psychological and mental health

work demands

social support

hybrid work environments