 Hello and welcome everybody. My name is Philip Campbell and I have the privilege to be chairing this session on prioritising workplace mental health. I'm very grateful that the World Economic Forum is allowing us to have this discussion. It has over several years been championing mental health as a theme and it has recently held both public and internal events about mental health in the workplace. My own company, Springer Nature, of which I'm the editor-in-chief, is a research publishing company and it too has gone on its journey. Its current size is about 13,000 employees and over the years it has graduated, if you like, from looking after the individual interests of people with mental health issues into a more company-level approach, including quite recently a very intensive survey of people where people were able to express their free text views as well as respond to surveys and also a network of champions was set up in the company, mental health champions. So that sort of trajectory is something that many companies are following and if you google on workplace mental health you will find many big companies have their initiatives. But there is a question about what the bigger perspective of all of that looks like. What are the agendas that we should be thinking of at a high level in order to make progress on that? Covid, of course, also has given extra urgency to the challenge because I'm sure it doesn't need to be said how much stress and anxiety that has given rise to on top of whatever else may be going on in companies that give rise to mental health issues or that just need to deal with those of colleagues. So let me introduce the panel, it's a very distinguished panel with people with very strong track records of interest. Miranda Wolpert is head of mental health priority area at the Wellcome Trust. That's a £200 million program at the trust which is based in London. She's a clinical psychologist by background, very much focused on evidence-based approaches towards prevention and treatment for anxiety and depression in young people. Her program includes an initiative on mental health in the workplace. Puneet Renyan is global chief executive officer of Deloitte and a member of the International Business Council. A look at his tweets highlights his strong championship of workplace mental health backed up by a recent Deloitte global millennial survey where nearly 20,000 people, young people in 43 countries, were surveyed about aspects of mental health and well-being. So I'm sure we'll be hearing about that. Garen Staglin is a private equity and venture capital investor, an owner of the owner, or the co-owner of the Staglin family in vineyards in Napa Valley, and a long-standing philanthropist and fundraiser in the cause of mental health. He speaks here in his role of co-founder and chairman of OneMind, a leading US-based fundraising and funding organization in mental health, and it has its own initiative on workplace mental health involving 19 companies. So it's a great pleasure to welcome you all, and I'm going to turn over to each of them, and then I hope towards the end we'll have time to have some general discussion. So Miranda, over to you. Do tell us about your initiatives in this area. Thank you. And first of all, thank you very much. It's great to be here. And when we were in Davos last year, mental health and the workplace were just starting to take off. And one of the exciting things, despite these incredibly challenging times, is how much that agenda has grown and developed, and how much workplaces are rising to the challenge of saying this is something we really need to address. And in that way, I think the pandemic has actually provided an opportunity to rethink and think afresh about what it means to support mental health in the workplace. So welcome. As Phil very kindly said, I used to head up the priority area. In fact, as of the first of January, I am now director of mental health at Welcome, which is a larger agenda, which includes both anxiety and depression, younger people, but will also include wider mental health issues. And the workplace we increasingly see as a key site where we can promote good mental health sites and really learn what works for who and why. Over this last year, we put out a call to the research community to say, tell us your best ideas of what will really make a difference in the workplace and review the evidence for them. We're aware that those who are running global workplaces are constantly being barraged by all sorts of companies saying, use this intervention or that intervention. This is the way forward to workplace wellbeing or mental health. And there's very little evidence base for many of them. So out of all the proposals that came in, we funded 10. And of those 10, many interesting ideas emerged. So for example, we found that a group that looked at the issue of excessive sitting in during the day, if you can break up excessive sitting by light acts activity of just one hour, in an eight hour day, it can reduce depressive symptoms by 10% and anxiety symptoms by 15%. So it's simple, effective intervention that people can think about in the workplace. Another group looked at the issue of autonomy in role and found that having more autonomy of role can have a positive impact on both anxiety and depression. But the data suggests that the autonomy may actually be a less troubling issue for the younger workers compared with older workers, although still an issue for many, and that it may also interact with personality traits of those who want autonomy and those who are less troubled for it. But a significant factor was how far it was supported within the organization can be supported within role descriptions. Flexible working was another area looked at by our researchers. And they found that flexible working can help reduce work home conflict, which can be a major source of stress, depression and anxiety. But uptake of flexible working is strongly affected by support from supervisors and line managers. And finally, we had a group, not finally of the groups, but of the ones I'm going to give examples of today. There was a group that looked at the issue of mindfulness in low middle income context, particularly looking at the tourism industry in Jamaica, for example, and found that whilst there's a lot of evidence for the use of mindfulness to address anxiety and depression in high income contexts, there's much less use evidence in low middle income contexts. So going forward this year in May, we'll have a second commission on the same lines inviting people to review the evidence for what they think are the best bets for interventions in the workplace. And we're really interested to hear from any of you on this call about ideas that you think you're using in your workplace that may be worth our researchers looking at. And secondly, we're then looking longer term to try and find partnerships with workplaces to embed rigorous scientific research in the workplace to actually test what works so that workplaces have become evidence informed places where mental health can thrive. So look forward to hearing other people's views and look forward to further discussion. Thank you very much, Miranda. Let me just follow up with one question. A lot of people listening might be interested in just what it means to have researchers embedded in their companies. And of course, there are issues of confidentiality and so on. So perhaps you could give a sense given that you've been doing these overviews of how this work has been going, of what those have looked like and what your listeners, the people you're encouraging, should expect. So I would say we're at the absolute early stages of thinking of workplaces as places for rigorous research to be done. So one of the main findings from almost all the review teams was the sheer positive research, particularly for younger workers. And most of it was based on sort of anecdote or very, very small studies. We recognise it's a big burden for workplaces to be involved in scientific study. But we also think there are ways of doing this that can minimise that burden and find ways where they can learn new things. I think we need to move from a position where we are now, where workplaces are asking, just tell us the evidence and we'll do it. Where we have to be honest is we don't know the evidence for most things. We need to work with you to find that evidence. We will try and do that in a completely non-burden some way, but simply sitting back and expecting the evidence to come to you may not be in your or your workers best interests. So we really encourage you, particularly those that are running in many countries, to think about whether you might partner. We will help take the pain out. We will translate for you from the researchers who took research speak to business speak and think about how this can be really effective for you in your workplace. Thank you very much, Miranda. Puneet, please do tell us about your interests in this. Well, I particularly enjoyed Miranda's comments around evidence-based research, and that is something that we certainly need to focus on. But you started off quoting the Deloitte Global Millennial Survey, and this year we focused on mental health. And there were some very interesting and stark data points that came out of that survey. 48% of Gen Zs and 44% of millennials said that they felt stressed or anxious all or most of the time. That was nearly half of the 20,000 that were surveyed, and they said that they ranked it as their number one and number two issue. 80% of the 300,000 individuals that comprised Deloitte, 300,000 professionals, are Gen Z and Millennial. So this is a really big issue for a firm like ours. You know, another data point, $1 trillion, according to the WHO, is lost every year because of mental health issues. So it is imperative for Deloitte to take action, to focus on it. And we are focused on it in three ways. One, to create a mental health baseline for every country where we operate. We operate in about 100-plus countries, so baseline, launched well-being check-ins, launched education. And then what we're doing at Deloitte is partnering with others, other entities like Deloitte, to form a global business collaboration for workplace mental health. And entities like BHB, Unilever, HSBC, Salesforce, and Clifford Chance. And the intent is to take the stigma out of this, to cooperate, collaborate, learn from each other, and really put this on the front burner because this is the time to act. Thank you very much. I mean, a notable thing about your discussion is that you are the CEO. And I think if there's one thing that really matters in businesses is championship from the very top, that this isn't just seen as an issue for the HR department. And you might want to, given your conversations you've had with other companies, you might want to enlarge on that. But another question is about the scale of the companies. You're talking about very large companies. And yet these issues are also, no doubt, really important in companies of any size. And I'd be glad to hear how you see the scale of the companies in your mind's eye for the future in this initiative. Well, there are multiple questions in what you just said. Let me start with this notion that this is just an issue for large companies. That is absolutely not the case. We are starting with six well-known companies, certainly, but our intent is to invite companies of all sizes all across the world to participate. And as I said, the intent is to raise the profile of the issue, to collaborate, to learn from each other, to learn from entities like Miranda's and others, and to build a common set of best practices that we can implement in our companies. HSBC, Unilever, that have been focused on this, like Deloitte, for quite some time, have some best practices that we're going to certainly leverage. So it is focused on both large and small companies. Your question about the CEO issue, go back to the point that I started with. If half my workforce, 80% of my workforce believes that this is a number one or number two issue, it's certainly a very critical issue for me as a CEO. I know that retention of individuals, Deloitte is only successful by hiring and retaining the very best individuals. So retention becomes a very big issue as well. So this is a top CEO issue for me to address and address all elements of it. Miranda talked about work-life balance. Work-life balance certainly in an entity like Deloitte is a very big issue and something that the CEO and the senior leadership team can actually address to create a culture where individuals believe that they can have some semblance of balance between work and life, particularly in this environment that we operate in today with the pandemic where there's a real blurring between work and home life. And that is something that we're also very focused on. Thank you very much, Kunit. Garan, you do tell us about the One Mind initiatives that are engaged with those 90 companies that I mentioned. Well, thank you very much and thanks to the World Economic Forum as you say for highlighting this very important topic and Miranda and Kunit, I'm honored to be on this panel with you. Let me begin by sort of that same reminiscing that Miranda did. I can remember a sunny day in Davos last year where we started and began these conversations and lo and behold COVID happened. If there's anything good about COVID it has reshaped and I believe accelerated the priority for mental health not only among corporations but governments around the world. This is important to me because this topic is very personal to me. I think many of you who don't know me would know that 31 years ago my son Brandon had a psychotic break and that caused us to start running towards the problem. And we've been doing that ever since, working on science and accelerating services but more recently in society. Five years ago we launched One Mind at Work with the effort to really try to understand that if you're going to impact discrimination and stigma the best place to do it is the workplace because we used to say you spend 70% of your waking hours at work. Now you spend 100% of your time at work because work at home are the same thing. So it's even more important. Our five-year anniversary is coming up. We now have over 90 employers and partners covering almost 8 million employees from Singapore to Geneva and soon Beijing working under this charter of principles. I think it's clear now everybody understands it's the right thing to do but I think we're now proving that it's also good for business. And Puneet to your point it's impossible to build a global force today that excludes people with mental health needs. And I think the understanding that we're all on a spectrum of brain health now and that spectrum is likely lower for all of us given COVID the racial tensions that exist, political divisiveness and economic uncertainty. So I'm going to talk very briefly about the responses that we're seeing from our employers or what are their four top priorities, what are they're doing about it and why this is built a call to action to recognize the new term for many of you which is neurodiversity. And we believe that neurodiversity must be a pillar alongside your DNI programs along with gender, racial and sexual orientation. So to this point about what are the responses that are happening as a result of COVID, let me go through four that I think are important. First, it's important that there's increased awareness about mental health needs and not just the conditions themselves. You must normalize the idea that it's okay not to be okay and everyone needs to have an option to improve their own mental health or brain fitness. This idea of brain health and brain fitness I think allows people to focus on the positive side of this issue as opposed to the negative. Second, a culture of connection needs to be established. We now in this work for home environment have to look at closely at ways to connect and collaborate different than how we would do on just a Zoom call. Third, new tools and resources are being developed. We all know about telepsychiatric services which are now not only growing more prevalent but also being reimbursed. We have guides to digital health on apps to take advantage of neuroplasticity and interventions that Miranda is leading in this effort by the Welcome Trust are certainly going to lead us to new ways to bring this together. And finally, to Pune's point and to others, it needs to be a strong and consistent message from leadership. Our charter requires a C-suite signature and it is really important if you're going to change culture you must do so on a broad and global scale. And empathy versus autocratic I think is the new leadership style. So these factors plus others come back to my point. I believe it's now a mandate for recognizing neurodiversity as an equal priority. So what does that mean? Each of you may have your own definition but I would like to suggest it's the difference in how we all receive interpret process and express information. It influences how each of us responds to communication with colleagues, our ability to deal with change, our ability to deal with stress, and our approach to problem solving. So given that definition how can we all support neurodiversity in your own workplace? Well first I would say we must remove barriers to entry and advancement. Targeting recruitment of underutilized groups such as autism, veterans with post-traumatic stress and others is an important way to go forward. Fostering a culture of inclusion is another one. Understanding we're all on this spectrum of brain health we all need to not only be open about our condition but also seek help to do so and finally emphasizing flexibility and customization of how each individual needs to be treated. One size does not fit all when it comes to this issue. So I hope this has been helpful and piqued your interest, enthusiasm to support neurodiversity. I would invite you to join a virtual working group that we are putting together to explore and develop neurodiversity metrics and narratives ultimately for ESG reporting which but not only the International Business Council as well as the World Economic Forum that just produced new guidelines. This working group in addition to being chaired by ourselves will be chaired by Marnero Chappelle is supported by the World Economic Forum and we have a number of confirmed participants and we would invite many more of you to join. If you'd like to participate please let me know or my colleague Katie Riddick at infoatonemind.org. This will be in the second quarter we'll be happy to share a paper we've done on neurodiversity. So again I'm passionate about this and persistent and I think the time is exactly right for us to pursue neurodiversity as an integral pillar of diversity and inclusion across all employers. Garen thank you so much. I think you've got some slides which you're going to post after the session. Yes I do. That presumably has contact details for those people who are interested and I'm hoping also that the other two speakers who might want people to contact them can find a mechanism with the World Economic Forum to help that. I do want to talk to both Puneet and Garen about communications in companies and I mean this is something that may be worth studying if it isn't already being studied by Miranda's initiative but you know communication is sound so easy to talk about but there comes a point especially when the company is at the very top level struggling in the time of what we're in at the moment to meet its financial objectives and it can't always be open about how that's going internally or externally and yet at the same time if employees are not in the picture about that that can lead us to attention. I don't know whether that's reflected in your experience and your views of the company but I guess the question I'm asking of both Puneet and Garen is where is that a problem where do you need to be most thoughtful about that or where is that a problem a challenge in terms of communication particularly in the current era so Puneet let me ask you that first. First off communicating is incredibly important and certainly starting with the CEO to destigmatize the issue again going back to the data that I cited it is a it is not only the right thing to do it is the right business thing to do and so we have communicated in terms of the issue whether it is work-life balance or inclusion and try to destigmatize it. I've also tried to communicate the leadership buy-in that this is not just a CEO issue but the entire leadership team is behind this and view this as in this environment particularly the right thing to do and the right business thing to do so we certainly have taken this as a has a really important issue and are very consistently communicating across our organization. And is Covid putting giving you extra dynamics in that if you like is it giving you extra challenges that because your meeting number going to help you in the future? Absolutely I mean Covid is certainly very challenging on multiple dimensions the fact that you can't actually meet with somebody interact with somebody provide mentorship and apprenticeship complicates it you can't address all of these issues through zoom I think that's why communication destigmatizing the issue providing the tools and techniques that are available to our professionals takes on added importance. Right and Karen do you want to comment on this? Sure I would echo Pune's comments I mean it's really important that they hear from leadership that their own personal experience and their own activities and engagement on this topic are equal to theirs we like to say that everybody has somebody and that if you think of the illnesses from early autism learning disorders eating disorders on through my son's illness and late life illness there isn't anybody that doesn't have a friend a family member a neighbor a workmate or potentially themselves with issues along the spectrum and to the extent that you can do a fireside chat I've done these with Brian Monahan at Bank of America with Tim Arnold at the capital group of the CEOs of Merck Nasdaq and others where we to their entire employee base I talk about my own condition our family condition and once you have this openness about the fact that it's personal to everyone there's a cathartic effect where the barriers to talking about a drop people come forward and you constantly hear you know I've never told anybody but you know I come to work every day worrying that my daughter with eating disorders won't be there when I come home and these personal stories propel the momentum forward to eliminate the discrimination that people might feel from accident so it's absolutely critical and it needs to be consistent yeah um Miranda Garand in his talk was talking about the new technologies and tools that are available and I don't know to what extent those make a difference in the business content over and about the way in which they're helping everyone in psychiatry and dealing with mental health the digital telehealth etc so I'm interested to know whether there is a particular angle of those within the company context that is of interest to you and and related but different as the issue of social media and how they can be both positive and negative in these circumstances and that too may be something that you're looking at so I'm just inviting you to comment on at least those two issues you're on mute I think yeah I have the privilege of being part of a Lancet Financial Times Commission chair by Lena Kirk which and others around looking at the issue of digital technology and health more generally for the current generation and so there's some very interesting cross sections as you say around digital both as an enhancer and a radical opportunity to roll things out at scale to large numbers of people across the world and then real concerns about how some access to social media may actually harmful or if I'm mediated may be difficult I think the jury's out on both aspects there's certainly opportunities here and there are things to be concerned about I suppose the main message I would want people to take from today is that we don't yet know so much about what really helps and I think there's a real danger that workplaces in a well-meaning way think this is the way to do it and you know whether it's people talking to each other or not talking to each other there is so much yet for us to learn about what helps different people and we have to take the rigorous approach we take to other interventions to mental health in the workplace so one of the things we've been discussing with colleagues today is the fact that for physical health there's almost an assumption expert will know better than you and there's almost too much assumption that experts should know and that you don't know yourself whereas with mental health it's almost the other way around there's an assumption that we all know intuitively it's just a question of doing it but actually there's so much for us to learn from the science about actually what will make a difference for different groups of workers in different contexts and it may not some of it may be talking some of it may be training but there may be other interventions some of which can be digitally mediated some of which is to do with physical activity some of which is to do with sleep some which is to do with workplace packages and pay and working conditions so we need to think of health mental health is bigger than health care and the opportunity for the workplace to trial different ways of helping mental health that don't focus purely on psychological interventions is something we're particularly interested in. Can I just add to what Miranda just said I think the point that she's making is an excellent point which is there's so much more to learn and that's why we've formed this global business collaboration. These are six world-class entities and we are suggesting that we can learn from each other we can learn from Garen and from Miranda and we want to share this in a transparent way because there's so much that we don't fully understand and I think this is a really important point and the reason why we formed this collaboration to get these six firms together put our experience and then be able to share it with everybody. So I'm probably going to give Garen the last minute the last word given the word running out of time but let me just ask you your point of view on that. I've been working with 90 companies clearly people are doing things so over to you just for the last minute. I would echo that exactly because listen when you where all companies all employers are on a journey of of where best practices and where it is right for them and the thing that you can't afford to do is pay this a tuition fee twice so why not learn from others you develop the aha ideas and that is our coalition is really a network and the power of that network is the sharing and the working together to get to these ideas. So we absolutely welcome that collaboration and learning. I would just say one thing quickly up to Miranda's point and then to emphasize Pune's Gen Z and Millennials did not there are many of them will not take a pill they don't want a pill as an answer to their health conditions. So neuroplasticity and positive feedback loop apps have actually proven well to others. Meditation mindfulness yoga exercise. These are all elements of a therapy for people that we need to continue to explore. And as Miranda says there's so much more we don't know that we do. We have to keep trying a lot of stuff and keep what works. I think that's a very good point on which to end. We have three people here who obviously now are in contact even if in some cases they weren't before and the working together of research and companies and learning from each other's experience is the key message. So the above all the key message is that the World Economic Forum can I hope help everyone who's listening to this contact whoever they want on the panel to help things to happen in their own context. So thank you all of you speakers. Thank you Garan Puneet and Miranda. Thank you to the World Economic Forum and thank you all for listening. Thank you.