A blogger who I admire Euan Semple just this week remarked that he sometimes has odd dreams about technology and it got me thinking.
In his dreams, the BBC-trained engineer sees rooms dark and grey that used to be filled with the excitement of TV productions.
I was a journalist for 12-years and sometimes I still have newspaper-related anxiety dreams.
In the dream, I can’t scribble the story fast enough in my notebook to ring the copytaker and phone through the story ahead of the panic of an upcoming deadline. I struggle with an intro and I can’t read my words back.
I don’t know how to interpret dreams, but I reckon this is because I spent years polishing and getting good at a particular craft I don’t use anymore. My puzzled sub-conscious is asking me why I’m not using it.
The roots our early rule learning put down with us are so deep that they’re still there decades after being last used. Technology has made them irrelevant.
As I write this, a Facebook group has posted a picture of fishwives on the streets of Liverpool in 1900.
Maybe those women in old age too would dream of selling fish years after their trade died out.
And in years to come, reader, maybe you’ll dream too of struggling to get a fax machine to work.
The Taxpayers Alliance are a right wing pressure who demand openness on public sector spending despite having opaque funding. As an anonymous bloggerpoints out they’ve gone a bit shy when it comes to big ticket Government waste.
Phew, £5.7m, that’s an awful lot of foam rubber buds, but it doesn’t stop there. There was more than half a billion alone on a cancelled programme to modernise the Warrior armoured fighting vehicle, easily enough to run your average local authority for a year.
There’s a moral point here, this is our money, spent on stuff that’s supposed to protect the people who serve our country, yet due to general incompetence and faulty systems it gets wasted,
Just the other day the Treasury wrote off £4.3bn stolen from its emergency Covid-19 schemes. That’s money that was stolen, not misspent, and Government has decided not to pursue it. There are probably reasons for this, it may cost more to investigate and prosecute, but it still sends out a poor message.
As you’ll see from the links, this stuff was reported widely at the time, just swallowed up by a news agenda that was understandably concentrating on cheese and wine parties. We tend to accept waste as part of the process and it is true to say that in any complex system some money will be poorly spent.
But I think there is a bit of a double standard here. Look carefully at the website of the Taxpayers’ Alliance and you won’t find any reference to the examples I gave above. There is some focus on national spending – for example Government office space – but if you looked at their version of waste you’d think the local state was the prime offender.
Take the TPA’s exhaustive work on printing costs for local authorities. By a Herculean feat of largely pointless FOI-ing they managed to work out that UK councils spent £41,610,366 on printing costs between April 2020 and February 2021 (this was a decline of £31.9 million from 2019-20, or 43 per cent).
Sounds expensive, when you realise that a lot of the spend isn’t on Basildon Bond, it was fees paid to external suppliers to print stuff that helps our citizens find and understand services.
I’m sure there is room for some savings but this is justifiable spend, not money wasted, and the figure is going down not up.
The same with the salary figures in the TPA’s annual Town Hall Rich List. I’ve been that press officer who deals with media enquiries on the back a six figure payout.
I’ve patiently explained fruitlessly that monies paid to pension funds for departing staff are not really a fair measure of incomes received and that local government leaders need to be paid well for a job of huge responsibility.
The thing is, I kind of get what the TPA argue. It is hugely important that the state spends its money wisely and transparently. Like them, I believe in a smarter, and probably smaller, state that better serves its citizens. However, I also believe that we should treat investment in local services as an investment not a cost burden.
Of course, money should not be wasted in either locally or nationally, but by focussing on the Town Hall rather than Whitehall, the TPA and others often have the wrong target.
Maybe we should just push back more?
The author is a public sector communicator with more than a decade of experience.
Many people have opted for a fresh start with a new job after a long slog pf pandemic. But what happens when your WFH – working from home – office is just the same as it was before? You can make a fresh start with that space too, says Lucy Salvage.And you can do this without changing job, too.
January. It’s a funny old time. A time we reflect on how well we’ve adulted over the previous twelve months and hoping that some of the things we learned (both good and bad) will help us to have a better stab at the next twelve.
The pandemic has robbed us of this annual tradition somewhat.
The last two years appear to have merged into one hot mess of over-working from home, not socialising, and generally burning out both physically and mentally.
It has felt harder this year perhaps to see ahead to the positive change that a new year can bring and leave the old, but still ever present, behind.
For many, myself included, the new year is a time for fresh starts. New beginnings. Saying goodbye to the old and hello to the new. For a lot of people it’s cutting loose from an existing job to seek a new opportunity. Nearly 9 in 10 (89%) UK workers were looking for a job around this time in 2021, I would wager that the figure is just as high going into this year.
Out with the old: but is it?
At the end of 2021 I myself joined the hordes of millennials who continue to take part in the “Great Resignation”. Having got my feet firmly under the table at my local council for the last nine years, I was just as surprised as anyone to be handing in my notice last November.
Suddenly, I found myself in the exact same position as millions of other professionals over the last two years – I was about to start a brand-new job with a different organisation and with people I didn’t know, and all from the comfort of my own home. Yikes. At one point it looked like I might be lucky to meet my new team in person over Christmas, at one of those things called a “party” (and not the cheese and wine kind). But sadly, it didn’t happen for reasons we know all too well.
For someone who has never freelanced, I struggled to get my head around the notion that I would be downing tools on 17 December at my desk from home as Media and Communications Officer for Wealden District Council, and in January 2022 I would start my role of Digital Content Creator for the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health at that very same desk.
In the same room, staring at the same four walls, watching the same rain fall out of the same sky, landing on the same cat. Suddenly, a new year for me wasn’t necessarily going to be as new as I thought it was. I was going to have to make a real effort to make it feel different and exciting; and that itself felt quite daunting.
In with the new: some tips
So, what did I do to make the transition from one remote job to another feel fresher and newer? Well, lots of little things that may not seem significant, but together they have made a difference. I’m hoping that these small changes will also encourage some new longer-term habits:
Workspace prep
I shifted some furniture around – repositioning some of the furniture in the room helped to make it feel visually different.
I de-cluttered – I used the time between Christmas and New Year to go through all the old paperwork and “stuff” that occupied the room. What didn’t get binned was recycled or sent to the charity shop.
Happiness is houseplants – I resisted the urge to buy yet more houseplants, but instead gave the existing plants in this room some extra TLC. I even swapped some of the pots around to give the illusion of newness.
I set up my new tech the night before – saving myself unnecessary stress by getting it in situ and making sure the laptop was fully charged and working.
I started a new notebook – my decluttering unearthed a plethora of notebooks in all shapes and sizes. Nothing beats a fresh notebook when starting anew!
Time management prep
I bought a planner – 2022’s answer to the Filofax! Planning journals are a big thing right now, and as someone who has always struggled to keep up with both my work and personal commitments, it’s been a revelation to get back to basics with a paper diary. I can have it in front of me on my desk as a constant reminder of what I’m supposed to be doing and when. Planning journals also include other features, such as daily to do lists, and space to note down goals and achievements. I also love the motivational quote and mood stickers for personalising each page.
I downloaded a time logging app – I’m not required to officially log my hours in my new role, but I wanted to keep track of my time. It’s also help keep structure to my day so that I’m not tempted to sit at my desk all day without taking a proper break. There are numerous free apps available; I settled on Timesheet and so far it’s working a treat.
I committed to “me time” – one of the first pledges I made to myself as I started my new job. I am now consciously making effort to take regular breaks and at sensible times. No more eating my lunch at 3pm!
Morning routine prep
I get dressed the night before – not literally! Thinking about the night before what I’m going to wear the following day has really helped to speed up the morning routine, as does laying your chosen attire out ready for a new day (or just throwing it on the back of a chair).
I set my smart speaker to work – I found a banging playlist full of motivating songs to wake-up to. Each evening I select one to be woken up by and ask my smart speaker to set a morning alarm to it. I’ve found it helps to change the song every so often, otherwise the jump start effect can soon wear off and it becomes too easy to sink under the covers and sing to it instead!
I sacked-off the snooze – rather than having a five-minute snooze that turns into 45 minutes of additional sleep, I now make sure that as soon as my alarm goes off, I sit up in bed. Even if I’m not quite ready to get out of it, sitting upright helps to get the blood re-circulating and resets the mind.
I have breakfast before starting work – I’d gotten into a bad habit, especially over Christmas of not eating breakfast until gone 10am, sometimes not until 11am. Now I make sure I have breakfast before logging on. Eating at proper regular intervals has helped me to feel more alert and energised.
Make the most of what you have
I know I am very lucky to not only have a spare room, but one that I have been able to dedicate to office space (and an extended wardrobe – see also floordrobe). Like a lot of people back in early 2020, I took root in my local Homebase so that I could prettify the space I was going to be spending a good 80 per cent of my time in. To keep the spend low, I made better use of my existing space by sourcing a lot of my furniture from Facebook Marketplace and upcycling.
Finally, something else I am going to try hard to be this year is more present. Less dwelling on what has gone before, more living for each day, and stressing less about what may or may not happen in the future. Also, having gratitude for the smaller things and putting less pressure on myself to achieve perfection when nearly perfect will more than do. For we can do as much de-cluttering of spare rooms as we like, but unless there is also the space in your mind, we can never truly feel refreshed and renewed.
Bringing in these small changes to my workspace and my behaviours has made the transition from one job to another from home a lot easier. It has allowed me to mentally separate one from the other and feel a sense of new beginning, even in the same surroundings. How long my new good intentions will last, I can’t say; old habits do tend to die hard. However, now that I’ve told all of you what they are, I guess it’s going to be a lot trickier to not keep it up. Damn.
Lucy Salvage is digital content creator at the Chartered Institute of Environmental Healthand social media strategist at Talking Mental Health.
There’s no question that TikTok is the flavour of the moment on social media.
But rather than being merely a pair of fashionable for three days rain boots I think this platform is going to stay the disrtance.
One of the reasons why I think it wikll is because of the resources and assets they are pouring into TikTok for Business. I strongly recommend getting on their mailing list. One recent in-box pearl has been TikTok For Business’ Official Guide to Marketing.
The 61-page document has UK is a really fascinating read.
While its aimed at small business there’s enough there to keep public sector people interested.
Here’s a few pointers I learned.
TikTok has 100 million users in Europe.
Users are keen to discover and seek inspiration. If you can provide them with entertainment you’re in with a chance.
TikTok users go to TikTok to lift their spirits not shout about potholes.
46 per cent of users have discovered new things through TikTok..
Diversity, authenticity and self-expression are key character traits for the platform.
67 per cent of TikTok users are over 25.
Sub-genres thrive on TikTok and use hashtags to find each other. Like #cottagecore or #MumsofTikTok.
One of TikTok’s straplines for marketers is ‘don’t make an ad, make a TikTok.’ In other words, make something entertaining and authentic for the platform rarther than post the same video here that you’ve made for everywhere else.
Telling a story works.
Being authentic works.
You don’t have to post highly-polished content.
Explore the tools that TikTok gives you to engage. Like the Q&A functionality, duets where people can make a response video with you or polls.
Show your face and be human.
Entertain your audience first and your audience will grow.
Use shopify if you want to sell things. This means creating a shop specifically for TikTok. But if that means you can sell tickets to the show more easily it makes sense to do that.
There are 150,000 royalty free tracks you can use and re-purpose that TikTok give you for TikTok.
You are encouraged to work with creators in a campaign and there’s a clearingb house where you can do just that. In other words, work with TikTok users to create the content you are after. Easier for big brands, nop doubt. But its a solid idea.
Don’t be afraid to jump onto trends to reach big numbers.
Or in other words, treat TikTok like its own distinct platform and create platform for it.
The guide is useful if you’re looking to take a plunge with it.
I feature TikTok in my training and get the feeling that people are tempted but feel as though they won’t get it and that it’s for young people. I don’t think that’s going to be a fair assessment very soon.
But before you do for your organisation my advice would be to spent time on it in your own time and under your own stream.
Human comms is something that works. We can sometimes forget to do iut as a communicator. Catherine Molloy shows how it can be easily done.
It is the responsibility of the communicator to be understood. But beyond that, it is the responsibility of the communicator to write in such a way as to evoke the desired response. Do acronyms and council-ism’s help you to be understood? Do they encourage a positive response? Referring to ‘Members’ rather than ‘Councillors’? Referring to the ‘AQAP’ rather than the Air Quality Assessment report? Many still feel that writing to customers’ needs to be a version of a 1970s formal letter….
“Dear Resident, I am writing on behalf of the Council regarding your application for…….”.
Stop! Stop! Stop!
Our written communication needs to be show we are human. We need to use ‘normal’ language, demonstrate understanding, show we care in finding a solution or listening to the problem…. ultimately, we need to show empathy. It is only when we communicate on a human level that guards come down, anger and frustrations fade away to be replaced by acceptance and perhaps even understanding.
As communicators we know all of this and like me, you probably spend much of your time trying to explain this to others in your organisation or rewriting letters, emails, web copy etc etc.
To aid you in your internal endeavours, I offer my tips for writing with empathy.
Tips for writing with empathy
Think about how you like people to talk you
How do you feel when you receive an overtly formal email? Chances are your customers will have the same reaction. Stop, think and write as you would like to be spoken to – open, honest and not overloaded with information.
Throw out that template email / letter – how old is that thing?
How many iterations from different people has it had? Let’s not create work for ourselves but at the very least begin an email should refer to the specific correspondence you have received. Of course that is not…”I refer to your letter of 6 November 2021..” but rather “I can appreciate your frustration and I would like to help you. Let me start by recapping on the situation…..”
Treat people as important
You may have received the same query / complaint from numerous other people, but individual circumstances differ, and we should take the time to acknowledge that.
Show your personality in your writing
That doesn’t mean writing as if you were replying to What’s app message of course, but the reader should be able to get a sense of you from your writing (or your Chief Executive or Leader if you are writing for someone else).
In a world where people are bombarded by so many pieces of written communications each day, it is those written with empathy and thought that will stand out and positivity support us in our work with our communities.
Catherine Malloy is communications manager at Elmbridge Borough Council in Surrey.
LinkedIn is sometimes a tough nut to crack. But it can be a positive channel as Connor McLoughlin of Wokingham Borough Council says.
LinkedIn? Shouldn’t we give control to HR? That’s where people go to find a new job right?’
Sure, it can be used for recruitment, it’s where people go to talk about work after all.
But LinkedIn is a legitimate news feed. And it’s one where we can adjust our messages to help reach more even more of our residents and partners.
Since we opened our account at Wokingham Borough Council two and a half years ago, we’ve more than doubled our followers by repurposing content with the right emphasis.
As this has grown, we’ve found that more people who see our content each month has trended upwards (see graph below).
You don’t start with a NextDoor-sized following (those generous people giving us five-figure audiences), but you’ll probably have a few thousand. We started at 2,500.
We’ll top 400,000 impressions in 2021 and that’s the kind of awareness which I’m sure all public bodies want to tap into.
Easier to repurpose
The Ofcom Online Nation 2021 report says 27 per cent of adults aged 16 or older use LinkedIn, making it the sixth most popular social media platform.
But crucially it’s the third most popular where the content is arguably not video-led, like Instagram (second), YouTube (third), Snapchat (fifth), and TikTok (eighth).
Your Facebook and Twitter content is more easily put onto LinkedIn than any other channel.
If you’re lucky enough to have one of those social media scheduling tools, you might just need to tick an extra box and make a few changes to your copy.
A simple change to emphasis, or bringing something else to the fore, maximises engagement for LinkedIn. Things we find which always work are:
Shout about great news for your area
Leverage your partners on shared projects
Celebrate your colleagues and their successes
Example: Safe place for successes
For example, this post about the borough being a healthy place to live here.
We find LinkedIn is a place where our great news for our business and our area are celebrated by our audiences.
New film studios in our area and our borough coming top of the ONS health index (see above) are two examples of this in 2021. Both had more impressions (6,000+) than we have followers (less than 4,500 at the time of posting).
On Facebook these items were dampened with pessimism from a few residents, the type all local authorities deal with on that channel.
But on LinkedIn we only see positivity and it helps us to higher engagement rates. Colleagues, residents and partners amplify this with their networks and help us celebrate the success.
We are always happy to be the hook people work from to promote something themselves.
In the public sector partnership working is essential. It’s also essential it’s celebrated.
We find when we draw these partnerships out in our LinkedIn posts, tagging our partners in, they always perform better.
The companies/businesses, and sometimes their staff, we work alongside want to mark these too. People are proud to work with us and bring benefits to our residents.
We’re fortunate to have several large construction projects taking place across the area, linked to additional housing in our borough in recent years.
There’s also a chance to share content, hence some of the excellent video content we’ve been able to promote in the last 12 months.
Put your colleagues at the front of the story
Our work is done by great people. LinkedIn is the right place to talk about them and what they do for us.
Look at your stories. It might work better on LinkedIn if instead of talking about the thing, we talk about the person who did the thing.
Or we make sure we factor the people who were involved into the wording of a post in a way we wouldn’t on another channel.
We’ve all had to re-nose a news story or press release, apply the same to your social content for LinkedIn and you’ll see the engagements jump up.
And if you are using LinkedIn for recruitment, no potential staff member is going to be deterred by a workplace that shouts about the great work of its colleagues.
But what does the data tell us?
These points of focus have helped us more than double our following in two years, with consistent growth in the number of people who see our content and engage with it.
In the last year, we’ve seen total engagements alongside audiences of local authorities with followings five times ours (see table below). LinkedIn provides this data for ‘competitors’ in its native analytics if you’re interested.
There’s no competition for audience but it helps to know if what we’re doing is resonating and providing value to those who do see our content relative to similar organisations.
Council
Followers
Posts
Engagements
Average engagements per post
Engagements to followers ratio
Wokingham Borough Council
5,640
288
8,393
29.14
1.4881
County council 1
26,111
216
8,543
39.55
0.3272
County council 2
26,674
195
8,777
45.01
0.3290
New, large unitary
4,983
488
7,016
14.38
1.4080
Similar sized unitary
6,536
241
2,848
11.82
0.4357
Data correct as of 13 December 2021
Make it work for you
If it’s a channel you’re already using or one you’re looking to unlock, these are a great place to start with adapting some of your content from other channels.
Lift and shift. Repurpose with purpose. It won’t involve a 9:16 video.
You could bring lots more eyeballs on some of your biggest projects and get to highlight your perfect partnerships or celebrate your colleagues. After the last few years, we could all do with a bit of the latter.
Connor McLoughlin is senior communication, engagement and marketing specialist at Wokingham Borough Council.
Here they are in the list as the highest UK channel in 5th behind global brands Alphabet (i.e. Google) Meta (i.e. Facebook), Amazon and Microsoft.
Why is this significant?
It’s significant because it represents a reminder of the importance of traditional media and that they are re-inventing themselves.
It’s a reminder to take local media seriously.
Reach plc have more than 100 print newspaper titles and more than a dozen web presences like Staffordshire Live. They also have national titles The Daily Express and Daily Mirror.
Reach have done some great work with changing from the traditional print focussed model to the hybrid of print and web.
The most critical time in any battle, Craig D. Lounsbrough once wrote, is not when you’re fatigued, it’s when you no longer care.
Fatigue is certainly something familiar to public sector communicators but no-one can accuse them of not caring.
If anything, I think those in NHS, local and central government, police and fire care a little too much.
Here is a list of predictions for 2022 after two years of pandemic.
Predictions I got right for 2021
It’s going to be a tough year. Up there with death and taxes this is the most obvious thing to get right.
There has also been an avalanche of mental health problems. Almost two thirds of public sector comms people have reported their mental health deteriorating.
Disinformation and misinformation has been vital. It’s a battle that against anti-vaxxers has been won. On Facebook, bright teams across the UK did start to recruit an army of volunteers. Locally-made content did in the end prove more effective than the generic national message.
Equality in PR did fail to improve. Social media teams did face the brunt of online abuse. The age of comms teams did continue to age without there beinga flow of new younger talent.
Media relations did become more important as people looked to traditional news for pandemic updates.
Predictions I didn’t get right
Given the numbers, I thought they’d be more WhatsApp for Business use to tackle disinformation. Deepfakes remains a fringe issue not mainstream as the tech improves. The knowledge gap with AI and PR in the public sector didn’t close despite best efforts. Issues surrounding Brexit remained local or regional as the pandemic took priority.
PREDICTIONS FOR 2022
WORKPLACE
Yes, it will be harder still. Sorry.
Health and Safety. Communicators will wise-up and realise that Health and Safety legislation around online abuse covers them too. This represents a final maturing of the field. The risk of not taking these steps for the organisation will be an expensive lesson through litigation.
Gap months to recharge will be more common. Buoyed by a low unemployment and burnt out by two years of pandemic public sector comms people will increasingly feel able to walk off the job, recharge with gap months away safe in the knowledge they’ll likely find work on their return.
A dip in political authority. In England, the weaker grip on authority shown by Boris Johnson will make this a tougher year. Communicators will be asked to communicate messages that more will push back on. They will need to localise the message. This will be most pronounced in England but with trust in politicians taking a battering Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland PR need also to take account of this.
Brexit again. As the full implications of withdrawal from Europe come into force this will cause problems for public sector communicators.
Staffing the rota. It will be harder to keep the wheels turning as staff numbers suffer from retention problems, COVID-19 outbreaks in the team and growing expectations on what the team can do. You think you can do business and usual as well as COVID comms for a third year? Things and people WILL be falling over.
Decision making across the board will be poorer. In the US, firefighters have a bank of learning from incidents that last months. Chief amongst this is proper rest. Why? Because decision making suffers without time to recharge. The UK hasn’t grasped this strategically, at government level or tactically. This will roll downhill to the comms team.
Diversity continues to be overlooked. We’re aware of the problems posed by having a middle aged white workforce in PR. Doing something about it is another thing.
TECHNOLOGY
The AI gap grows. Some great work has been done by the CIPR in this field to encourage communicators to learn about how Artificial Intelligence can affect their jobs. The pressure of the inbox means a lack of strategic thinking to properly embrace this.
TikTok. This will be the year when this platform continues to breakthrough and becomes a solid way to reach all ages and not just under 24s. This will open up if you love the platform or hate it. I’m not convinced the public sector realises this.
Organic Facebook continues to wither. Just chucking your content onto a corporate page will continue to be, as the kids say, a dick move. It won’t be reaching many people. An ad strategy or a strategy for connecting with groups continues to be vital.
Video continues to soar. No surprises to hear me talk about this. It’s a continuing trend. 5G will make it easier as will social media’s obsession with copying TikTok.
Upright and wide video. Videographers will need to get used to shooting in two formats and in different styles depending on the platform.
Hello, Nextdoor. This is the year when the community platform continues to thrive. Its audience is over 55s in a geographic area and a public sector agreement means you can reach every member. This is more compelling in 2022.
One size fits all comms continues to fail. If you’re making the same content and stuffing it across a range of channels you will fail even bigger in 2022 than you have done in 2021.
Think granular comms. The one-size-fits-all broadcast message continues to fail and more observant people will be aware of this. Personalised messages for sub-communities will be the most effective use of time. This could be content posted to a Facebook group or £50 spent to reach a specific community.
WhatsApp continues. Half the country use WhatsApp. The public sector has been slow to adapt or innovate. It needs to. There may be movement later in the year as tools and functionality emerge.
Algorithmic upheaval. This is the year to pay attention to how your content performs week-by-week and month-by-month. Tried and tested ways of doing things will stop working more than they have for a decade. Will you notice? This will acutely be felt in Instagram as they react to TikTok but others will change how they perform, too. Pay attention.
STRATEGIC
Educate your client. Comms teams used to leaving out copies of the local papers for visitors are long a thing of the past. So too will be teams just reporting broad numbers. With effective comms evolving to granular personalised messages the leadership need to be educated more than ever. They may be used to seeing a breakdown of headlines in the local paper. They’ll need to know that U24’s got this message on TikTok. You didn’t post it to Facebook because that’s not where they are, for example. Those who you report to need to be brought along with you or tghey won’t understand what you’re doing.
New skills. After two years in the trenches refining skills and plugging the gaps is essential. Come up for air. Your brightest people have a broad set of skills. Bright people will take those skills elsewhere if they don’t feel valued. Never truer than in 2022.
Online harms bill. This is likely to have an impact in 2022. It will ask organisations to be more aware of abusive content and ask them for plans for dealing with it when they see it. You’ll need to record keep and show other steps. This is a work in progress.
Virtual reality and augmented reality. Keep an eye on this space. It won’t be truly mainstream in 2022 but people will properly be experimenting with it as the tech in their hands improves.
It can be hard to evaluate the value of things as a communicator. Putting a value on things is a powerful way of stating your case. Clare Parker, head of communications at Forest Research which is part of the Forestry Commission, explains how they were part of a team team that arrived at the mental health benefit of woods as £185 million. The report sets out the methodology used to arrive at the conclusions.
For years there was a lot to be said about the benefits to your mental health if you went outside. That personal good vibe, a break from the routine, even medical professionals making ‘green’ prescriptions to make the most of fresh air and a connection to nature. We all knew there was something good about it.
It’s not often there’s a real gamechanger, but this report is worthy of its landmark status.
“Valuing the mental health benefits of woodlands” report has some pretty impressive findings. A scoping study showed how being in forests increased chemical levels and hormones to make people feel better, and people felt less stressed during and after their visits. Incidents of depression went down by seven per cent and just 30 minutes per week will give you noticeable benefits. This isn’t about exercise either, just sitting or meditating amongst the trees increases the benefits too.
Those statement themselves are amazing, but it’s the hard fact that savings can be made in the annual costs to society of living with depression or anxiety. That is, in working hours no longer lost, medicines gone unprescribed, professional therapy unused. And those savings might even be underestimated.
The monetary value of the outdoors is an incredible piece of evaluation. Demonstrating the “avoided costs” to society is a powerful tool in understanding the impact of recognising, managing and even curing mental health.
In short, that lunchtime walk is not only doing you the world of good, it’s saving your organisation and society money.
Footnote: It was a privilege to work on the communications for this report. This truly was a team effort from the authors, the publishers and communications and press teams across Forest Research, the Forestry Commission, Defra, Scottish Government and Welsh Government.
Clare Parker is head of communications at Forest Research which is part of the Forestry Commission.
New Year, new you? Actually, it doesn’t have to be a New Year resolution to recognise the tough time you’ve had and act. Kelly Harrison talks about her journey from trauma back to the light.
This time last year, we were surrounded by chaos and uncertainty and emotions were raw. Everyone around me railed against more Covid restrictions and were devastated they couldn’t see friends and family for Christmas.
I welcomed the opportunity to hide away from everyone, and felt nothing.
I had just walked away from a role that made me feel worthless. My confidence was rock bottom and all the plates I had tried to keep spinning for so long fell to the floor and smashed.
Covid turned everyone’s lives upside down, but for me it just made an unreasonable job impossible. It was only when my husband gently suggested that opening my work emails shouldn’t reduce me to tears, that I decided to throw in the towel.
I didn’t get the support I expected in my role and for months I blamed myself. I felt I had ‘failed’ at the job, and had no business in a senior role if I couldn’t cope with it.
After making the decision to leave, I started to feel better. I packed my feelings away in boxes and started to feel cautiously optimistic about the future. One morning I went for a walk with my husband and had been excitedly telling him about my plans. I felt in control and more confident than I had in months.
And then my mobile rang. It was someone from my old workplace and I suddenly felt sick. My chest was tight, my breathing was high in my chest and shallow. It wasn’t a difficult call, it was about something very boring and routine. But having to speak to them again, having to see that number flash up on my phone had triggered a trauma response I had no idea existed.
Recognising workplace trauma
Trauma is a word usually associated with something violent, like a car crash or an attack. For something to be traumatic, we might think there is force and shock. But I have found that trauma can sneak up on you. It can happen very quietly, while you are working away trying to convince yourself and everyone else, that you are ok.
From talking to colleagues and friends, I know my situation was not unusual. Communications is a field that rarely gets the respect it deserves. Under pressure to deliver campaigns and messages with very little resource, budget, or time. It is an easy department to blame when projects don’t go well, but it is not so easy to attract plaudits when things go well.
We have all seen the countless public Facebook comments deriding councils and public bodies for spending money on communications professionals. Wasting money on “someone to look after Facebook and Twitter. That money could be better spent on emptying my bins on time!”.
And then of course I take my hat off to my peers who have to face a deluge of abuse on those social media channels every day. Constantly absorbing the anger and frustration of local residents, who vent their fury on Facebook and don’t think about the person having to read these messages.
Until last year, I hadn’t really heard of workplace trauma. Of course I was aware of how people working in the police or fire service could be traumatised by the things they have to do and see every day. That fitted my understanding of ‘trauma’, but I didn’t realise that you could be traumatised by a toxic workplace.
Constant pressure to work over your hours, relentless workloads, bullying, racism, poor work-life boundaries and job insecurity all cause emotional and psychological damage. It can lead to depression and anxiety, and in some cases post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
In this kind of working environment, the stress that everyone is experiencing just gets kicked down the line. The pressure and unreasonable expectations flow from senior management down to junior staff. It creates a damaging culture where everyone is facing the same trauma at work every day. Add to that a customer facing role, where you are also being abused every day on social media for just doing your job.
For me, sobbing over my work emails was admittedly, a red flag that something was really wrong. More importantly, I had started to withdraw from everything including my children. I struggled to find joy in anything, my head was full of all things piling up at work and it changed how I felt about everything. I told myself how useless I was, and my body was telling me things were not ok.
Getting out
I was lucky I could get out. I could just hand in my notice and take a couple of weeks to just breathe outside of the toxic culture I had been trapped in. Some friends thought I was insane to leave a job in the middle of a pandemic, but I knew the insanity would have been to stay.
I signed up for some coaching, and it was an amazing experience. It allowed me to step back and assess what was important to me. The coaching made me think about how I talk to myself, which was pretty awful at that point. I had to look for opportunities to be kind to myself, and focus on the things I was really good at, and really enjoyed.
Slowly I started to get better, and I found a new job. Thankfully, my new role is great and a complete breath of fresh air. However, I know I have trauma triggers. Something might happen at work that reminds me of how I used to feel and I have to take a moment. I get some fresh air, go for a walk, or empty every thought in my head into my husband’s lap while he is trying to work (or cook, or DJ, or sleep).
Trauma doesn’t have to be one violent event, or a catastrophic series of events. It can be a slow build up of circumstances that have long-lasting effects on your mental health. I know my experience is not unique, particularly in the communications sector, and it is something we have to take seriously. Recognising trauma is the first important step, so the best thing we can do for ourselves is to just check in every now and again.
Go for a long walk on your own, or sit somewhere quietly and just ask yourself ‘am I ok?’.
You might be surprised by the answer.
Kelly Harrison is communications manager at Communicourt.
