When the Mental Health Foundation changed the theme of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week from “sleep” to “kindness” in response to the coronavirus crisis, some participants might have struggled to see what big, bureaucratic companies would bring to the discussion.
But Zoe Sinclair, founder of This Can Happen, sees something else. Her organisation, with an annual conference and awards, encourages companies to prioritise mental health support for their workforces. And she believes the compassion shown throughout the pandemic can be seen in companies as well as in communities.
“When you think of big business, the first word that comes to your mind is probably not kindness,” Sinclair says. “But I do think kindness has been seeping through organisations. I have been hearing from [people] that they’ve never known their companies to be so kind, that they have never got to know their teams better. This is something we need to hang on to and to pave the way for kinder cultures in our workplaces.”
Sinclair joined a panel of guests for one of EG’s podcasts to mark Mental Health Awareness Week. Alongside her were Juliet Smithson, head of operations at RICS charity LionHeart, and Howard Morgan, founder of real estate consultancy RealService and co-founder of John O’Halloran Initiative, set up in memory of property director John O’Halloran to encourage awareness of mental health issues in the industry.
If the Covid-19 pandemic and the eventual recovery present an opportunity to reset priorities and refocus business beyond just the bottom line, what might a kinder, more compassionate real estate sector look like?
OK not to be OK
Coronavirus has been a “leveller”, says Smithson; a crisis that has affected those in the boardroom and on the shop floor alike. And it has put the issue of wellbeing and mental health even more firmly on the agenda than was already the case, even for those who once would have considered themselves removed from the conversation.
“It’s become OK not to be OK,” Smithson adds. “People who perhaps felt that mental health challenges were things experienced by other people, and perhaps thought that was a sign of weakness – those people have been affected themselves. They’ve been stressed and anxious and they felt under pressure. It’s accelerated this change of belief that we all wanted to get to where people can see that [mental ill health] happens to anybody. It has no respect for education or seniority or cash in the bank.”
And that has encouraged a greater embrace of wellbeing within companies. “We’ve seen a lot of companies bringing their wellbeing functions to the forefront,” Smithson says. “They have become essential parts of the HR infrastructure. Putting wellbeing at the heart of people management was coming. But I think it’s been accelerated.”
And there will be further impetus, Smithson believes, as she predicts a “tsunami of mental health impacts further down the line”.
“I think people are still in survival mode at the moment,” she adds. “We will see a great deal of demand across all the whole spectrum from the low-level support services to the crisis intervention services.”
Looking inward is one test. The next challenge for real estate as an industry is to spread a new sense of corporate compassion and kindness further – into the supply chain, into the places, spaces and communities that businesses build and bolster.
Morgan believes good work is already being done here. He points to the big property companies in which directors are slashing their salaries in order to put money into community funds. He also highlights the work of LionHeart, LandAid and the Do Some Good initiative set up by Debra Yudolph to help the property industry aid the NHS with vacant space and other resources. But the industry is too rarely given credit for such efforts, and that concerns Morgan. More often, he says, there is a perception of an unkind industry in which big business landlords abuse tenants.
“We need to challenge ourselves and ask the question: why is this happening?” he says. “As an industry, do we have the reputation and are we recognised as being empathetic? Probably not. And I think that could be an issue.”
He continues: “I’ve been impressed by all the work that’s been happening within the property industry around the mental health agenda. And I’m really enthused by the individuals who are coming forward and clearly care about their colleagues and care about the business. That’s not getting out to the outside world.”
Next generations
Nonetheless, Morgan wants the property industry to double down on these efforts, to develop a longer-term outlook, to appreciate more fully how its actions now will affect people and places long after the current generation of chief executives and c-suite colleagues are gone.
As he notes, “a society grows great when old men plant trees, the shade of which they know they will never sit in”. (The origin of the proverb is unclear. Some suggest ancient Greece. Morgan admits he heard it for the first time during lockdown via Ricky Gervais on Afterlife.)
And as Sinclair adds, the younger generation of professionals will encourage the planting of those trees. “They are not going to allow us to continue as business as usual,” she says. “It is those people coming up the ranks who will not allow us to continue in the way we have done, and will want us to continue with the kinder cultures we have seen at the moment. They will question us oldies to ensure that our practices change and that we go forward in the way that we want to but perhaps haven’t seen yet.”
The panel
- Zoe Sinclair, founder, This Can Happen
- Juliet Smithson, head of operations, LionHeart
- Howard Morgan, founder, RealService, and co-founder, John O’Halloran Initiative
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