Hello, everybody, thank you so much for joining me today, I have a very special guest with us today, I have Clarissa silver, who is a behavioral scientist, we’re going to be talking about what employers need to know about their employees health, post COVID-19, we’ve always been focused on how do we get people safely back into the workplace. But what are employers potentially missing when it comes to their employees health? Post COVID. So Clarissa, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you so much for Michele, it’s a true honor.

So can you tell people who a bit about you like some of your experiences, you have a vast experience in behavioral science and and I would love for people to learn more about you, in your experience.“

Thank you so much. So I spent my career in infectious disease prior to becoming entrepreneurs. So for about 17 years of my career, I was working in HIV AIDS in several different capacities, from prevention, to intervention down to co founding nonprofit. And when I started my entrepreneurship journey that started in 2016, we started a behavioral science consulting firm. And we focused mostly just on behavioral research design for companies. So thank you so much for having me, I’m so excited to be here.

It’s great to be here. It’s great to have you because I think there are some nuances that are being missed right now. When it comes to employees returning to the workplace, we’re focused on making sure people don’t get COVID, right, which is truly important. But what are some other things employers really need to be aware of a contract is up when it comes to their employee health.

So starting in late February of 2019, we conducted a study with CEOs, startup founders, and high potential personalities in both the corporate sector and startup sector. So the high potential personalities kind of cut through several areas of companies. So from executive to project management, right. So when we, what we learned from that was that we started seeing brain fog for both COVID and non COVID cases. So we found that about 92% of the entire sample had experienced brain fog over the period of nine months of the entire study. So they reported at least experiencing three symptoms, in addition to the emotional and mental health issues that they were experiencing, because of the quarantine itself. So some of the key takeaways for us was to examine how we could start creating interventions around the cognitive decline we were seeing and address some of the factors that were impacting performance and employee relations.

Michele:
So brain fog is huge. And I know I’ve experienced it personally, I love to run numbers straight through my head, and I found that Oh, wait, where’s my phone, because I need to add this up. We’re prior to COVID, I could simply do it in a split second. So I can definitely definitely relate to the brain fog. And having experienced that. But what really is interesting to me, is the personality types you focus on, what was the reason for focusing on this particular personality type.

Clarissa:
Because we start seeing two different two different patterns, we start seeing strain and in employee relations, so within the executive suite to to the junior stuff, we were getting reports of dissatisfaction with leadership and strain across the relationship, meaning we saw personality changes within different people as a result of COVID. So one of the things that that we saw being impacted and that was underlying everything was that some in some cases, we were seeing two levels of trauma, right? We were seeing the pandemic trauma, right, that was overlaying the whole the whole experience for everyone. Everyone was being impacted. 100% of the sample reported some type of emotion emotional or mental health issue throughout that period. But the other the other level of trauma that we saw was that unresolved decades long trauma that now became the forefront of the of their consciousness. They weren’t aware that it was unresolved trauma and that they weren’t coping with it. The way it was manifesting itself was within the employee management and employee relation, and right and, and just how they were managing their staff, their their personalities became much more caustic. They be they start, we start seeing more gaslighting, we started seeing different aspects of personality shifts, because of that unresolved decades long trauma.

Michele:
Wow. So is this could some of that be leading to the great resignation? Right now that we’re there, some organizations are experiencing?

Clarissa:
Absolutely, even within our own sample, we did see a that we had about about 20% that are willing to leave, because they don’t see that conditions will improve in addition to the company’s strategy, right? So whether it’s a hybridized model, or or some, or some version of transitioning back, if that it was confounded, right, because people felt like they weren’t satisfied prior to this COVID strategy, and then continuing with that same level of engagement to them wasn’t worth staying at that company any longer. So sorry. So I would say that, perhaps COVID drew this out, but it probably existed prior to COVID. And that’s something that we didn’t check across the entire sample. So I think there was higher dissatisfaction with maybe burden and, you know, over over stimulus, right, because brain fog could also the result of that over stimulus. So we didn’t see, we didn’t really tease out those two parts. But we definitely feel like there was a driver prior to COVID that, that people now feel that this was unacceptable. And it’s unsatisfactory, where prior to COVID, they were just accepting the overburden and over stimulus.

Michele:
So what can employers do to determine their employees health? Right now?

So there’s this, there’s a few different ways that companies are structuring it, right. So so we designed an intervention and system that starts to address some of this brain fog, because we untreated, sure the symptoms go away, but cognitive decline isn’t guarantee that that is going to disappear, right? We we can almost with certainty project that the cognitive decline will have impact in the future. Right. So the first thing that that many of us are advocating for, and not just with the COVID cases, but in general, we’re all advocating to start evaluating this over stimulus. So some, some companies are designing schedules where they’re blocking out time, right, and that is something to help, some are taking complete mental health breaks, some are already designing cut offs at a certain point in the day, so six o’clock, you lose access to everything, right, five o’clock, everything gets cut off. So a lot of different places are trying out different strategies to see what would be the, the most optimal for them. But in general, we, you know, it would never ever hurt any company to do an assessment against brain health for for all employees at every level to and design interventions and bring in consultants to start addressing some of that, like work burden, because that’s just, we’re just talking about work burden, there will also work life prioritization and management issues that some companies have taken into account, right? So childcare services, you know, just different, different aspects of different parts that you didn’t disconnect from when you were working from home and homing from work, you know what I mean?

Michele:
Exactly. So, this runs into what it sounds like employee engagement, employers need to go and really find out where their employees are, how they’re engaging with the organization, where the gaps are set, really start making a gathering that data first correct, right. And then Go ahead.

Clarissa:
Right. And I think you know, that’s also a larger issue too, right? Because they’re not collecting that data, because it’s just like what you described earlier. So we were getting, so brain fog was impacting performance, right? Just like you gave the example. We also had examples from like Excel sheets, right? simple calculations that they were able to do within minutes. Now I was on a three, three week lag startups, you know, they’re a deck, a deck that would take them four days was taking them four weeks, but because you’re still capturing overall deliverable overall, so by the end of one month, hey, as long as it got done, right, it didn’t matter. They weren’t reporting, hey, I’m having issues getting it done. Um, they were just, they were just experiencing it and saying, okay, it’s sleep deprivation, right? So many of our, many of of our sample sought out primary care, right? Because when they started experiencing some of these issues, right? They were going to their doctor, and they were being told, okay, yes, it’s the overall stress of the pandemic, or Yes, it’s like, temporary deprivation. So they were getting scripts for different aspects, just to cope with doing the next things. People were not, however, accessing mental health. So one of the things that that, you know, we, we all need to do is like, yes, normalize mental health, right, and normalize the ability for employees to have a dialogue with whomever within the organization to say that these are these effects are occurring, because these do have future much more deleterious health outcomes in the future. So. So it’s not that the employees on their side wasn’t, weren’t trying to resolve their issues. They were, and they were given scripts to deal with, you know, anxiety, depression, sleep. Right. But that doesn’t eliminate the cognitive decline. And because of the over stimulus, and because of the overburden that everybody was experiencing.

Okay. Good to know, I want to go to something you said, and it’s really important, which is making seeking mental health, normal, normalizing that, and I want to speak on that through the lens of the black community and Hispanic community, where that has a high stigma, how can we get more employees that fit into those racial and ethnic communities to seek mental health? Because they’re seeing that the highest number of deaths in during COVID and loss, and they are not necessarily speaking about in the workplace, and sharing that, because that’s just culturally what we don’t do. But what are some things that can happen, or how are things that employers should be considering in order to get more cuz usually a small percentage of their employees, but they’re still in, they’re still their employees to engage and really utilize those services.

Clarissa:
So the first thing that I that we always recommend is structuring a real diversity, inclusion and equity programs, not just a one time thing, or annual event or, or part of a smaller division within aspects of your company, what we need to do is create better levels of support because because like you said, Michelle, the issue for for our communities, is that we we suffer more health disparities across every single disease. So you, you just nailed it on the head. Many, we weren’t even allowed to grieve in a proper way during COVID. That impacts of course, right? People were dealing with the same issues across everywhere, trying to balance out everything in one space while you’re trying to be productive, and you’re dependent on that income. That also has level of chronic stress, chronic anxiety, that creep that produces chronic illness in the future. So some of the things that we could start with trying to address for the Latino and black communities is first, just understanding that when there are issues that you’re experiencing, it’s not it’s not them in the moment that that is the most crucial, right? You think it will it will just get resolved or you have coped with many things right. We are a community that copes with so many different elements. And we adapt to it. But the problem is the future, right? So when we talk about health disparities, it is projected that in 30 years 50% of the black and Latino community will have Alzheimer’s or dementia, that doesn’t start 10 years prior, we’re finding cases that are starting a pre dementia at 30. So we, we can’t just adapt to what is sub optimal and adapt to the the circumstances that we’ve been enduring. You know, we’re challenging like we keep I have said so many times that we were running three separate pandemics, it were all they were all parallel. And, you know, and if we really ever look at many of us that were in mental health, and look at what we’ve argued for, we’ve always been constantly arguing to have racism effects be part of core mental health, right. So that means the DI programs should definitely include aspects that offer this consistently not as a one time thing, not as an annual, not as a, you know, a wellness day. And, and it can’t be just about these mental health breaks of overall, it has to be something that tries to deal with the centuries long adapting to everything, right. And that’s just what we understand about how we cope. But to deal with inequity every single day, and deal with just knowing that we’re, we’re always going to struggle. And it’s part we’ve normalized that where it should be the opposite. companies should be normalizing true equity, true, true programming that helps support every single employee of gendered programs, racialized programs, everything should be part of just in just fostering the that employee, because we could do plenty of cost benefit analysis, that shows the the value of diverse opinions, value of diverse contributions, right? Overall, right. But we’re not necessarily treated like we are high contributors all the time. So I think if we could just shape some of the way that these programs are being held, and how we’re how social support systems look in companies, so people don’t feel like they’re going to be penalized at the HR level, be penalized by upper management, that would be a better way to start structuring out programs that help with productivity, help with retention, and help with overall long term success of product vertical, you know, just just anything.

Michele:
I always, whenever I’m talking to clients, or potential clients who are looking at coming on board or recruiting services, they always say that they have great benefits. And I always questioned them, who says you have great benefits? And I said, What do you mean, I said, if your population of employees are mostly white, and then how do you know those who don’t? And have you looked at the data like those who have issues or questions about your healthcare benefits, are they you’re under estimating employees, and in to dig into that data, you don’t know who’s really saying you have great benefits, because the people that you’re, you’re saying you want to create an ethical workplace for I telling you, these benefits are not for me, they do not help me. And one of the things that have come out in the pandemic is for telehealth. And so so often we focus on what you can just drive or go to your, your provider with certain providers aren’t in your neighborhood, right? Certain providers aren’t on a bus route, it’s taking you an extra hour to go to the provider in that particular employers benefit plan. So now this extra two hours to and from and that’s only if the employee is sick. If it’s a child, they still have to transport the child to it from home and then maybe they can come into work. But pretty much they’ve missed the entire workday, if you’re even if this was in the office, assuming they can work remotely and they may not be able to. So I like the changes that we’re seeing in the aspect of telehealth becoming normalized, but there’s still a lot of data and analysis employers really need to do on their overall benefits their overall employee engagement is to understand who is not benefiting from those benefits. And I put that in air quotes, because it may not be a benefit to those, it may be more costly for them, because they’re losing a day of pay when they can’t afford that. So, um, thank you so much for that input. So employers are saying, we’re going to open up September 1, August 1, Sunday, June first he started, people going back to work. And we’re seeing more people. What how are we seeing, I should actually what has been some of the the responses from employees, as employees are migrating back into the workplace.

Clarissa:
Now, you know, we also have to remember that not everyone wasn’t employed the entire time. Right. So you’ll see a lot of the service sector within these companies have still were employed. So so a lot of a lot of the ways that I think, I think companies tried to, to bridge the gap between what was happening overall, and that was served their employees is the idea of expanding their mental health portfolio, right, expanding out the different emotional wellness programming that they had. Right. But one of the biggest things that that we have seen is that people don’t access that’s across across race across gender, people weren’t accessing those benefits, because they didn’t see the need, right? Like, if you can attribute what’s happening to you. Parallel to another process, like the pandemic, you’re not gonna think something’s clinically wrong. Right? You’re, you’re thinking that everything is okay. But the argument within the company is, okay, well, we are trying to address need, because we’re seeing all these different reports, right. But it wasn’t just the anxiety and depression that was occurring, because it was COVID induced. The other part too, was that people felt there’s to break there’s, there’s risk tolerance levels that we have to also remember, that creates anxiety for staff, right? So people that were, were doing the hybridized versions, or are looking at transitioning starting in August, right? They are having issues with perhaps COVID COVID strategy within the workforce, right, because of the, because of the difference in risk tolerance, right. So those that are going to be triggered triggered by I was compliance, I was super cautious. And now, you know, we have a blanket approach that I could possibly get infected, and I did everything to avoid it. So you know, so all of these things start to trigger, the way people will start planning for themselves and planning for the future. And if it doesn’t, because one thing that that most employees will always feel is that if, if a policy issue is is now in place, right, there’s not much choice that the employee will have to deviate from that policy shift. So So it’s almost like they are, they are forced to choose between different things that sometimes don’t seem like any good options at the end of it, right? Because either they’re triggered, or you know, they’re dealing with mandatory different things that they’re, that they’re comfortable with, but other people are fighting about. So therefore, you know what I mean. So there’s a lot of combinations that are causes anxiety trigger, and, and it’s starts. So if we look at anything, right, we look at, where does dissatisfaction start? Well, being forced to go and subject yourself to, to maybe not certain, like not the ideal situation for yourself, but they have to go, right? That’s if you track that that’s where you see dissatisfaction, that’s where you see attrition, that’s where you see a loss in performance or loss of productivity, right. So so these are good indicators to follow. Just so we could project into the future. Alright. What can we say was, was the primary cause of dissatisfaction? Right and if it’s, perhaps you didn’t listen to us employees, like you didn’t do it in the past? Maybe that’s, maybe that’s the ultimate answer, and start structuring things around. Well, okay, there is evidence for these aspects, right? Like, there’s evidence to show that you can implement this. And you’ll have higher satisfaction within the employees. And you know what I mean? So, so these are all good data points, but it’s like you said, Michelle, and part of why all of your work is so vital is that so many of these data points aren’t collected, it’s COVID, is making us look at things differently. Because there is now much more vocal lis around what’s sub optimal, right? And there’s so much more vocalist. And even if it’s not vocalist, they are leaving, right? They’re quitting, right. So that’s the outcome to that’s a data point,

Michele:
it really is, I want to, I know, we need to wrap up. So HR has been through the gauntlet and back in March, February, here in the US starting, let’s say, March, they are tired, right? But they still are supporting employees are still supporting the executive team. They’re supporting clients, what support can be provided to HR so that they can now help their employees with with these with coming back into the workplace, when it comes to the employee health.

Clarissa:
So a few companies are structuring support around HR, that helps the employee right, like outside of aaps, outside of what is part of the normal protocol within companies. So there’s, there’s a lot of these new programs that are addressing some of that work life prioritization. And management aspects. Right. So I mean, some some of the financial sector has gender transitioning programs, they have a food, like they have food shopping programs, right? So grocery shopping programs, right? And food preparation programs, so So things that even the smallest, like even the smallest incremental difference that you make, that saves time and money, right? Like if, if they if you can eliminate one aspect that is burdensome, right? So but not having it be reliance on HR. Right, you would need a, a, an additional EAP, almost
EAP employee assistance program.

So So those of you who don’t know what, EAP employee assistance program,

yes, sorry. So, you know, we need to, we need to start looking at, you know, different ways that we could support different verticals, just so that we could capture those employees that are, are going to be overburdened, and continue to do and perform as they always did, and have this fear of, of going to HR with issues, right? Or utilizing an EAP because of that, that relationship to HR that they’re, they’re worried about. So, you know, when we look at different programming, and if we could create small incremental changes to to alleviate some of the burden for the for the employee, for the purpose of getting higher productivity, you know, what I mean? It’s not, okay, yes, let’s just give everybody a little vouchers to go get, you know, food, that’s not going to be helpful either, right? Like, it needs to be, it needs to be assessed, and it needs to be examined within the companies like what would help your employees with whatever it is that x design, a small thing. There’s tons of consulting firms out there, that, that work on different aspects, tons of apps, tons of software that could provide even partnering up with emotional wellness apps and programs. Even that could be helpful, right? So we don’t have to look at it nice. Every time we do things. It needs to be a blended version. It needs to be both physical and digital, it has to be blended with with different aspects, because not everybody will utilize things in the same way. Right? Some people won’t use it. Some will only use digital, some will be happy with a blended model. So so we have to just start thinking creatively. And

Michele:
I would say this, I know early on, it was a lot have children in our age range Gen Xers, maybe early millennials, who were trying to figure out how to get their parents groceries delivered, you know, how do they get their medic like everything online, so their parents didn’t have to leave. But now their parents are stuck like all of us in the house. And you said something really important about our brain health and dementia. And we have older parents, and we’re seeing the dementia speed up, when we may have noticed them forgetting small things. And now it has escalated in the last 18 months. And I think employers need to also understand that additional burdens that are outside he was thought sometimes the household of their employees, especially to women, especially Latino, and black communities and indigenous communities that we pick up culturally, and understand that our elders are everything to us. And so we feed back into our communities. And making sure you understand some of the services may not be a service they use for themselves, but they have to utilize it for their extended family because that is truly their mental health to know that their their mom and their grandmother are getting food delivered, and they’re not going out to be further exposed. And I think sometimes that is left out in understanding often how our cultures work, how our communities are built, and how we communicate without, because this is very difficult for us. Because we had to stay away from my loved ones to keep them say it any other time for us culturally, when there something difficult going on, we come together as a community in person. So for us to be separated, has been a huge emotional and mental, not barrier but drawn us as as communities. And I think a lot of employers that aren’t familiar with our communities in our culture, don’t understand that. How much more difficult it has been for us in the last year and a half.

Clarissa:
Absolutely, absolutely. That exacerbated everything. And it’s funny that, you know, we’re looking at the example of what we had to structure for our families. And many of us have our families living with us while we take care of them. Like we’re that sandwich. We’re that sandwich, right? Yeah, so so but now, I mean, it’s up to now we need that type of support, too. So it’s, now we’re hit with with that sandwich. And we got to come up with a new term, because now we’re all trying to figure out how we adjust to different aspects of just working and living.

Absolutely. So Clarissa How can people connect with you to definitely learn more about what you do with behavioral science, especially as it pertains to COVID an employee’s post C OVID because the workplace is going to be a new error. And I don’t think enough employers understand where they need to start with collecting data, and especially creating workplaces virtually, and in in real life that to how to really be prepared for their employees.

Yeah, thank you. So my site, Clarissa Silva comm has my latest research, including the study that we talked about earlier in the in this talk. And if you want to reach out to me, it’s info at Clarissa Silva calm.

Michele:
Thank you so much for joining us. Clarissa and I have been talking about this, I don’t know since probably December last year. And understanding how our work really overlap. Um, it really is important for for the black and brown communities globally. And it really I don’t we generally know we get left out. We’re the last study if we’re studying at all, and we need to be the first study, because the impact on us is much is at a higher level than it then it has been at any other point in time. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Michelle. I truly appreciate it.

Michele:
Everybody, if you’re catching this on the replay, be sure you also connect with corissa here if you’re catching us live, you can connect with us here as well. So that’s if you’re watching this on LinkedIn, you can definitely connect with her on LinkedIn as well. So everybody, have a great week, and I will talk to you later. Thank you. You’re welcome.