‘TREAT YOUR STAFF AS HUMANS NOT ROBOTS’
TWO years ago, Andrew Tamplin was a senior manager in a UK-wide FTSE 100 company. Then, at 10.15am on a Sunday, as he took his shower, he had a nervous breakdown – and everything changed.
“It’s a classic story, in some respects, of thinking I was superhuman, thinking I could do everything and taking on more responsibility, never saying no, working all hours, weekends, never being able to switch off,” Andrew said.
“Enough was never enough. With hindsight, my mental illness probably started 18 months to two years before the actual event happened. Looking back, there were certainly warning signs – going from the life and soul of the party to not going out or being too tired to do anything, not being able to make decisions like I used to, worrying about decisions I had made.
“Because they came gradually and slowly and creep up on you, you sort of don’t realise how they accumulate into a problem.
“My breakdown happened one Sunday morning while I was in the shower and I just froze. I could not move from there. Everything just collapsed. I couldn’t speak. There was no going back. I didn’t go back to work, I couldn’t go. I couldn’t pick up the phone. I couldn’t do anything, That was it.”
Now Andrew, 41, from Cardiff, has set up his own business, Canna Consulting, to try to change employer perceptions of mental health – using his own experiences to help.
He said: “It took me about 12 months to get to a position where I could lead a normal life again. Going from someone who was an extrovert to not being able to decide if they wanted a cup of tea or coffee was a completely life-changing scenario.
“From there, I started to think what the future holds. I just felt something positive had to happen from what had happened. There must have been a reason for it.
“One of the reasons was it saved me from something much worse, because if I carried on as I was, I wouldn’t be here to tell the tale. I have no doubt in that at all. It stopped me in my tracks just in time. That’s the way I look at what happened.
“Then I decided I’d spent 20 years in an organisation with several big leadership jobs, managed lots of people and didn’t want to throw that all away like it never happened, because it did. But equally, I wanted to use what happened to me to help other people.”
Canna Consulting aims to break down the barriers often associated with mental health by offering seminars on how leadership affects the well-being of staff.
With three in four employees in the UK experiencing symptoms of poor mental health at some point in their lives, according to Business In The Community’s 2016 Mental Health at Work Report, highlighting the impor- tance of mental health in the workplace has never been so important.
And with mental health costing UK businesses an estimated £26bn a year – around £1,025 per employee – according to Mindful Employer, good health is also good business.
Andrew says the biggest obstacle he sees is naivety by bosses – but it’s not intentional.
He said: “Looking back in the corporate world, we can talk about things changing, which they are, but it’s slow. Some of the corporate stigma around mental health still exists, not because I think anybody means it, but they don’t understand. “It’s naivety a lot of the time. “I can remember someone telling me when I was getting ill: ‘Just go home today and put a DVD on and come back tomorrow and you’ll feel better.’ But watching an episode of Are You Being Served? isn’t really going to solve the problem. I don’t think it was meant horribly, but I don’t think they knew what to say, either.”
Andrew says the starting point to tackling issues is to treat staff as human beings, and not robots incapable of emotions.
He said: “If you’re a manager of people you have a responsibility for their well-being. Rightly or wrongly, some actions that managers do subconsciously probably actually affect people’s well-being.
“Sometimes people don’t understand other people’s issues or problems and the effect of piling on work on somebody when they’re snowed under already.
“I’m not a qualified psychotherapist but what I do know is I’ve been the leader, I get the business side but, on the flip, if we don’t look after the mental well-being of our people, you won’t have a business to run.
“We forget that we’re dealing with human beings, we’re dealing with people who have lives, who have issues and have worries, joys, upsets. Sometimes we live in a corporate bubble that forgets all that.”
And one simple way to confront the stigma head-on is to treat it in a grown-up way, says Andrew.
“I do think the UK has an unhealthy obsession with work/life balance,” he said.
“We get it wrong. It’s very parentchild a lot of the time. ‘Do you mind if I come in an hour later tomorrow?’ Well, that’s like a child asking: ‘ Do you mind if I go to school an hour later tomorrow?’
“In an adult-to-adult world, we should be saying: ‘It’s a tough day tomorrow, I need to get my head around things so I’ll be in at 10am.’
“I think we need to grow up a little bit.”