 So my name's Ben Page. I'm the chief executive of Ipsos Mori in the UK. I'm part of Ipsos, which is one of the largest global research organisations. We're in 90 different countries. It's a great pleasure to be asked to moderate this. We've been looking at what's happened at work over the last six months or more of the epidemic, noticing dramatic changes of course, and also the challenges of this new weird world that we're in. And in a sense to me at least, and I'm really interested to see what my esteemed panellists think, we're in this place where it's liminal. We're moving in a way from the old world to the new world. The old world isn't finished, but it's unlikely that what comes after COVID will be identical to what went before it, even if a pill arrived tomorrow that we could all take and the vaccine, you know, we were all cured. Suddenly, would we all go back to commuting for hours to get to various places of work when many of us have found that we can work at home? But at the same time during this year, it's been the year of COVID, also the year of Zoom calls like this one, a technology that was ready, but is now changing the world. But also it's been the year of Black Lives Matter, and that has changed the atmosphere in many workplaces. So we've got this confluence of issues, of expectations of business to stand up in a study that we're just about to release. We've found more and more people globally want business to talk up and speak up about social and political issues. And we know that workers are expecting something different when the new normal eventually arrives, but it won't be any time soon. Anyway, I'd like to introduce the rest of my panel. So I have, and I perhaps I'll just introduce them briefly and then let them say a few words before we kick off for the next half an hour. So can I start with you, Christy, from the UNI Global Union? Could you tell us a bit about the union and then where you are on this to start with, please? So Uni Global Union, hello everybody first. Uni Global Union is a federation of trade unions from around the world, 150 countries. We represent workers in the service industries. And we have looked at and been engaged in and been in discussions around and fights around all kinds of both physical and mental health issues during this COVID journey ranging from protecting care workers who don't have PPEs and are in nursing homes, one of the most highly contaminated places to be from the mental health issues associated with long-term unemployment in the film production and theater industry. So we have the full range and lots of positions on this and, you know, I will, you know, wait until we get into the meat of the matter for my specific proposals around what we can do going forward. Okay. Stanley, you're in the middle of my screen. Stanley Bergman from Henry Shine. Tell us about Henry Shine and where are you coming from on this one? Good day everyone. Good to be with you again. Love being at the World Economic Forum even if it's virtual and I see classes participating which is really terrific and Hilda. So Henry Shine is the largest provider of products and related services to physicians outside the hospital and to dentists. So we have customers throughout the world providing services to about a million and a half practitioners basically at the point of care. Our customers are frontline providers triaging patients from having to go into hospital and obviously the areas we've been focused on are PPE, testing and whatever happens in the office-based environment and we've been pretty busy. I can imagine. My gosh. Okay. Well, we'll come back to you. So I'm going to go now to Miranda at the Wellcome Trust, one of the largest medical charities in the world. Miranda, how does it sit for you? Hi, I'm Miranda Wolpert and I head up the Mental Health Priority Area at the Wellcome Trust. The Wellcome Trust is a large funder, gives away about a billion a year in scientific funding and we just announced yesterday our new strategy for the next 30 years which I'm delighted to say has now focused us on four areas, one of which is mental health. So one will be mental health, then infectious diseases, then climate change and then discovery research, underpinning those. So mental health is going to become an even bigger part and we see working with civil society and particularly working with workplaces to bring an evidence-based science approach to what will support mental health in the workplace as a key part of what we do. We're looking forward to discussion today. Okay. Thank you, Miranda. And it's one of the things about mental health, certainly in Britain, which of course is the country I know best, it's sitting in London, is the dramatic shift in public awareness about mental health over the last decade, but also the dropping of the taboo and it's moved right up the list of public priorities. So it shows how you can take an issue and really change the zeitgeist. Right. I'm moving on to my other panel member, Pascal Ray Hermey, who from International SOS, the founder of International SOS, I actually, we actually help you with some of your many, many clients across business. But Pascal, tell us a little bit about you and where you're coming from on this debate, please. Thank you for inviting me. I'm the co-founder of International SOS. I'm the medical doctor of the team, but we have a business guy. And so International SOS, we are a health and security assistance company. What we do, we are in 90 countries around the world. We have 11,000 people, half of them being health professionals. And what we do for our client, our client, our corporation, organization, government, and what we do for them is to be their partner in health and security, whether it is at the headquarter level where we play a role of consultant, partner, advisor, security, health advisor, helping them with their policies, all the way to the front line, the boots on the ground, where we have brick and mortar medical facilities in remote location, where we take care of the employees that also have quite a lot of the population which surround those corporations all over the world, which means that we have quite a lot of involvement with education and training, because this is part of the duty of care of many of our corporate clients. In addition, with all those people around the world, we have an air ambulance and medical evacuation capability, when it is required to move people to safety. At the moment, with COVID, the number of COVID flights is quite high. Wow. Okay, so we've got a diverse group of people here, both representing workers, lots of aspects of medical care. What's going to happen next? So what is the future of health at work? Who wants to go first? Christy, I'll let you, I mean, you're representing very diverse sectors. Is it going to be a reset that will benefit workers, or are we destined for something that was actually worse than what went before? What we've seen in many markets is actually an exacerbation of existing inequalities with people like me, knowledge workers at home, actually increasing their savings and people in insecure employment spending their savings, and if anything, more exposed to the disease and worse off. But maybe I'm being pessimistic. Well, I think you're painting an accurate picture. I don't think I would be pessimistic for the future because I think there has to be a growing recognition that we have to change our model and starting with the working poor because as you point out, they're the most vulnerable population. It's highly populated people of color, ethnic minorities, women, but when we look at this sector, which we represent, home care workers, nursing home workers, grocery store workers, cleaners of hospitals, the physical and mental health implications for them are extremely high. I know I sometimes complain about the mental health consequences for me working from home or working remotely and having my staff and how stressful that is, but imagine the workers who are potentially exposed at work, especially in the case of care, but in all of those sectors, often working two to three jobs because not one alone is not enough, so bringing the virus from place to place. Often no sick pay, which is a fundamental public health question that needs to be addressed going forward. We have to recognize we can expect people to quarantine and isolate if they are not able to live on their salary and if they won't have some financial replacement and multi-generational households and this question of where you live. All of this combines to create a very severe mental health and physical health, high COVID rates situation. I think some of these things are fixable and I know they're all fixable, but it does have to deal with addressing the precarious status of these workers in particular. And then to look at some other workers that are working during the pandemic, call center workers, large numbers of people, fulfillment centers, and we don't see them there invisible, but thousands of workers in one work site, highly contagious, low level of regulation. We need obviously to have a higher priority put on our health and safety and specter issue. That was a real failure during this pandemic in many countries. We really didn't have any kind of government intervention in some of these places. And far too many people who were dismissed for speaking out. And I have to say that we've seen in every continent, workers who say this is unsafe, we demand changes. We've seen in so many places people dismissed where they have no union protection and where the government is not really protecting workers on this matter. So that's been a casualty. But again here I think there's a growing recognition. We at least will are calling for health and safety committees at every large work site. We think that's really the only real safe way going forward in this scenario. And I know we want to move on to mental health around remote working, so I'll pause there and let you ask somebody else a question, but I do want... That's really interesting. I mean, I would just say it's interesting when we poll people across the world, one of the things that the public at large and on the planet want actually is more regulation, particularly of large business. And it's even, you know, it's incontrovertible actually. So whether they'll get it or not, it's another matter. And what sort of regulation? Another matter. But so Miranda, how does it look for you? You're silent at the moment. Now you're not. Okay, I was just thinking that I don't think we should make a distinction here between mental health as something special or different from the sort of things that you're talking about. Mental health is much larger than healthcare. And the same sort of issues that drive mental health problems as driving the sort of concerns that people have. So we know that poverty, that job insecurity, that lack of autonomy of jobs, all of those things will impact on people's mental health. So looking for an evidence base for mental health interventions needs to be looking at exactly those issues that Christy, you just been addressed as much as it means a counselor or any sort of other specialist support. And in fact, what we are seeing from the evidence reviews that we've commissioned across the world is that we need to think more broadly if and workplaces could be at the vanguard of thinking about mental health interventions that are more systemic and wider than healthcare interventions. Okay, well, that's interesting. So Stanley, you're into physical protective layers of various sorts, but how does this all fit together from your point of view? Yeah, Ben, you know, in the old days, we said it was very important for workers to have good conditions for employment, light, air conditioning, etc. The new world now requires companies, businesses, governments to provide an environment where people's infection control is handled properly. This requires deep public-private partnerships. It's not good enough to have a wish list of what's needed. You need masks, you need gloves, you need cleaning solutions. But you've got to make sure that they're available. Businesses can't do this on their own. Businesses need to work with the government. At the World Economic Forum in 2015, we founded the Pandemic Supply Chain Network, which advocated for ensuring that PPE was available to all those that needed it around the world. Sadly, it wasn't listened to. And now I think we've got the attention of the world. I think we will address it. But we need to make sure that when the virus goes, as it surely will, we don't go back to the old. And we have to make sure that we protect the environment of the workers' employment with PPE infection control. Because this could be the first of many serious zoomorphic diseases we now face. So I mean, there's various arguments about whether we just got lucky so far, I guess. But I would defer to the medical experts on the call. We got lucky, shall we say, from a global point of view. We had a bowl of pork and it could have spread. These infections do not carry passports or visas. We need to make sure that the entire world is dealing with infection control, and specifically in the workplace. Can I ask the panel a general question? I mean, one issue, if we're worried about health, what about the physical working space in terms of moving? And of course, we can't do this for distribution centres in quite the same way, although you might. But do we move to a more distributed sort of workspace? It's too soon to talk about the death of Manhattan, or the death of central London, or the demise of office space. But you might, you could see a future of the world where because we're now using this type of technology, you don't need to bring thousands of people into tower blocks to do their work every day. They can do it in a much more distributed way. You have the 15 minute city that the mayor Hidalgo in Paris has been talking about people living, not commuting quite as much in their normal working lives. We'll still need all the people to do all the work, of course, Christy. But is there another, is there something else more profound happening, rather than just protecting everybody in the existing setup? That's one question I had for everybody. Well, I'll just jump in on that. I think that there is something profound happening, which is that a lot of workers have always wanted more flexibility, and white collar workers have always wanted the option to have some days working at home. I think the sheen is wearing off of it. And people are realizing that full time remote work for most people does not a preferred option. It's not preferred for work in terms of integrating with colleagues for getting that motivation that you have when you're part of an organization that's joined up. It's not as efficient. There's drawbacks. So I read a lot of that many people are saying you need to be in your with your colleagues three days a week or half time. Some people will want to work remotely and there will maybe your 20% is correct. But I think there's a set of stresses attached with remote working that also need to be the division between home and work, the right to disconnect. Many governments are legislating that some health and safety issues for a home environment. The right to return to the office is another one. It really should be a voluntary choice. And I don't want to diminish the impact on women and young people, who are just starting out in their careers, who have no contact, no network. I mean, for mid career people, you know, it can be a moment where that's a welcome relief from the commute. But I for one, do not. I don't think that the future will be everybody dispersed. I do think no, I agree. And I think off personally, I think we need but offices might become a little bit more like a club that you really want to go to. I heard the head of manpower on TV the other night saying, no, offices are here to stay. We might get a few more days working from home here. But, you know, let's not. This is a pandemic and just response. But in most predictions, most predictions about the future are wrong. As we know, if for anybody who's read any of Philip Tetlock's books, Pascal, could I bring you in in terms of how it looks to you and what might change? You're there providing reassurance to thousands of businesses. What what's going to change or what should change in your view? Okay, I may not predict the future. Yeah, that's good. Is what we are witnessing now, our client. Just to go back, September 11 for us has been after September 11, the duty of care, the way employers see the duty of care when it comes to security has totally changed. The responsibility of the employer goes much beyond making sure that much beyond making sure that nobody gets injured on the workplace. So the trigger was September 11. And this is still at the top priority of the security duty of care for the employer 19 years later. What we have witnessed since the beginning of the so what we have witnessed since the beginning of the pandemic is a complete change in your first before the pandemic. There was no as long as an employer was following health and safety regulation. No one was expecting the employer to prevent an employee to get Susan and flu at the office from a colleague. It was not the expectation today. It's not tomorrow. Today, when we are talking about return to work, there is it's not an expectation. It's a demand from everyone. How do you make sure that I go back to another element? I will not get infected with COVID-19. And how do you make sure that I don't get infected when I permit? And so what we are seeing in the organization is that the duty of care which is related to the health and well-being of the employee and I fully agree also to the mental health which is now out of the closet in the company of the employee has completely changed level in many corporations. We have we are of course tracking who is contacting us. The contact that we are getting from the C3 of our clients has doubled in the past months. So who is responsible? It's not anymore the health nurse, the security, but the top executive of the company, the C3, is still responsible for it. And we are seeing a big change and we are also seeing companies taking this opportunity to rethink how the people work together. As you mentioned, what is the purpose of coming back to an office? If it is to do what you can do at home for the one who can work from home. And I fully agree that everybody should have the right to go to the office because for young people, for single mother, having the right to go to the office is a way to have an alternative to the environment which can be not so positive for them. But why if you have the choice and we are seeing this already on the way people rethink their office space with less huge open space, more meeting space, say, well, I may want my people to come only three times a week, but if they come is to meet together to socialize with each other, to work with each other, not to go into a critical and spend hours with a headset. So we are seeing this big change. Okay, that's really, that's good. Miranda, I'm going to bring you in. Could I? No, I was just going to say, I think so, we've got this change in sort of responsibility. Miranda is making some very good points in the chat about the need for employers to almost, you're almost suggesting an audit of physical and mental health and also protection and resources, et cetera. So it's a big step in a way. It's like employers going back to the past in some ways. If you think about Cadbury in Britain, before we provided housing and sometimes schools for employers, for employees when the state didn't, but now we're taking a different, you're talking about a sort of almost different level of responsibility and care Miranda or not. Have I misunderstood? Not necessarily. I wouldn't go as far as to say we're reinventing a sort of Cadbury's all-encompassing social world. I think that the pandemic gives us an opportunity to be more explicit about things that we've been able to have implicit around what work is for and how people function in work and what makes people productive workers. And so, for example, the social connections that younger people have, the networks they build, those were all implicit in the old system. We didn't need to make them explicit. Now, when people are stuck at home and you're joining your organization and you're 25 and you know no one, we have to find explicit ways of an organization to help that person create those networks. So I don't think it's changed the nature of the relationship. I think it gives us an opportunity to make those things explicit. And as others were saying, that may mean different ways of thinking about the workspace. Not as a place you come as a sort of 19th century automaton to come and use a desk because actually no one needs a desk anymore. You need screens and there so even the whole way we think of the physicality of the workplace has changed. But I agree with what people are saying. The chances are the danger is we won't use this pandemic. We'll just go back to the old way. And actually, this is an opportunity to rethink and recalibrate and to think about physical and mental health as both elements of the productivity of workplaces and the productivity of society. And one point is that as a company, in getting involved with the life of the people outside the office and in trying to protect the people against possible infection from the other, we need also to develop technology which makes sure that we because a lot of rules will be set a lot of rules will be set up and people will need to be compliant with those rules. However, if you want to check whether the people are compliant or not, there is a significant risk to start to increase in personal information. And how do you support people on mental health and everything which are getting too much into information that a company is not supposed to be aware of? And what we are seeing already and is a lot of development on how to support companies and to be able to fulfill this duty in a very efficient manner, but also in respecting the privacy of the people. I would just like to mention with the International Chamber of Commerce, because we are in the same country as a lot of the world, we have developed a small application which is based on blockchain technology and we call it AOK because we say because of the rules that you need for the company to just verify that this person is OK with the rules without having any information and collecting any information on why those people are OK with the rules. If the vaccine arrived, does the company have the right to discriminate between the one who are immunized and the one who are not immunized? Well, I think this whole question of work of people's relationship with their employees, employees' relationships with the company, clearly coming under some, it's clearly going to change and there are expectations on both sides. I think the risk of people feeling they're being monitored, keystroke by keystroke by their employer, even some people will even claim, of course, Miranda, they can detect the mental state of people by finding out what they're doing on their laptops. But Stanley, in terms of anything from you on the physical changes we might see, people are talking about keeping everybody safe, but is that going to be enough on itself? Well, Ben, obviously the safety matter will have to be dealt with and we have great technology and it can be advanced in an inexpensive way, but we have to be committed to that. I'd like to state two very obvious points, maybe not... Quickly, because we're running out of time. The first is that there is no doubt that people are social animals and so much happens around the board meeting or around the table, the conference table and at the conference table. And second, I, for one, am worried about the state of mental health within businesses. It's not necessarily taken care of and people are not necessarily encouraged to deal with mental health as much as they may be encouraged to deal with other kinds of issues from mammography to having a vaccine. We've got to deal with both of those issues. I think probably everybody on this call would agree that mental health is, you know, it's come up the agenda so dramatically over the last decade. But I think, and I guess it varies, Miranda, across the world about people's willingness to embrace it. It does, but also I think we have to be careful not to fetishise mental health as something big and scary and highly confidential. There is that end of things, but actually we all have mental health. Most people will have mental health challenges at some point or others and most of the things you can do as a workplace to support mental health are sensible things that will be helpful for everyone. So I don't think it has to be turned into the equivalent of a severe disease concern. There are all sorts of things that can be done in the workplace that can really promote and reduce anxiety and depression without feeling it's a specialist medical endeavour. I mean, in some ways this sounds remarkably positive. So I'm going to try and be positive in the sense that we seem to have a sense of a recognition by responsible employers around the world about both mental health and physical well-being and more interest in these things this year along with issues like gender equality, diversity, etc. which is also in my, certainly in my work, I've seen that grow across this year. And in some ways that's actually positive. So we may be facing a major recession, we may be facing job losses, but actually the culture of work seems to be changing under our feet and the epidemic might even be accelerating some positive changes. I'll leave us, I think we're going to go to a private session, but I think that's a positive state, I think. We do, I think we might do. We're shifting over, but I think, yeah, go on Pascal, let's see what happens. All the changes ahead, if I may say, what the company and the corporation are doing at the moment and the organisation are doing at the moment is to try to break the style of occupational health, public health, HR and the large company are creating the role of a chief health officer which at senior level, which can bring a more holistic approach of all those issues. Smaller company, it will fall on HR on some time, even the general management, but there is quite a lot of resources which are available on our side to support those companies to help them putting protocol together, putting communication, because this should not also take 90% of the time of the senior management. So you need to get organised. At the moment, you can, in cooperation, we have to advise people to say, we don't want all your senior management to spend two hours a day reading and listening about COVID-19, but someone, you need credible resources, you need to organise it and but you still need to run your business. Okay, so long live the chief health officer, but I think that's actually an amazing change if that happens. I feel much more, for the first time today, I feel more positive after going on a Zoom call with a load of people than when I started, so that was great everybody, really appreciate it. Miranda. I just want to say, I think we should applaud the younger generation who are bringing these changes to the workplace, and I think that we need to make sure that we're listening to the workplace and listening to them, because they are the ones that are pioneering less stigmatising versions. There's definitely a generational shift going on this. Sorry, Krista, you wanted to come in. Can I just make one short comment, because we've heard about the new health officers, which we've seen in many of our employers around the world, but I just want to stress that health officers, the HR function, the responsible functions, really need to talk to the workers, because we've seen a lot of times that there is this idea of how we can fix things if the workers haven't bought into it, if there's, and again, I come back to, we need health and safety committees led by workers to actually bring people along. When you talk about social distancing or wearing masks when people don't want to, social distancing is very hard to enforce without buy-in. Everybody needs to feel like they're in it together, so I just want to stress that point that the workers need to, we're good canaries in the coal mine, so to speak. And can I make just a quick point, and that is, we have town hall meetings every two to three weeks and we've added, since almost the beginning, two experts. One is on public health and the other one is a mental health expert. We have a psychiatrist that addresses our team every two to three weeks. Yeah, so we've completely changed, yeah, things have changed.