ESG in Action: How to work well in high-pressure environments with the Mindful Business Charter

Richard Martin (00:04)

Nothing in the charter is about not working hard. you know, we all come to work. We work in the organisations we work in, we do the work we do because we want to do that important high-pressured work and so on. But it's about how do we create the environment for that for us to do that in the most effective way.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (00:24)

Welcome to ESG in Action. I'm Alex Holsgrove Jones, knowledge partner and ESG lead at TLT, and today I'm joined by Richard Martin, CEO at the Mindful Business Charter. MBC, who have a stated mission to rehumanise the workplace, working with their members to identify the causes of unnecessary stress, eradicate them, and build healthier, more productive workplaces. At TLT, we've been members of the Mindful Business Charter since 2021.

And we really recognise the amazing work it does in taking businesses forward and ensuring that we have happier, healthier workplaces. So it's great to have you on the show, Richard. Thank you so much for joining us.

Richard Martin (01:05)

Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (01:06)

So, Richard, for our listeners who may not be familiar with the Mindful Business Charter or MBC, can you outline what it's trying to achieve?

Richard Martin (01:16)

Of course, so it began with a recognition that there is a mental health issue within the legal profession and and more broadly amongst professional services and more broadly into society, and that most of the efforts that had been made to address that were focused upon supporting people who were struggling, which is fine, but actually there was a recognition that very often it's the work and how we do it that is the cause of the distress. So rather than simply focusing upon supporting people who are struggling, why don't we try to stop making them ill in the first place?

Why don't we try to address the causes of the the distress, the stress that we experience in our workplaces? Why don't we look to address the unnecessary sources of stress, remove them so that we can work both more healthily and more effectively?

Alex Holsgrove Jones (01:56)

And your background is in the legal profession. So how did you come to be CEO of the MBC?

Richard Martin (02:04)

So, as you say, I was a lawyer. I had a senior role as an employment partner in the City of London. And then I got very ill myself in 2011, had a big breakdown, spent lots of time in hospital and lots of time recovering. And then did a lot of work for several years around training and kind of generally raising awareness of mental health as an issue. And so, when the mindful business charter was set up in 2018, I had a bit of a reputation as that old lawyer bloke that talks about mental health. And so the founders said, look, we're going to need some help with promoting and developing this. Would you be interested? And I jumped at the chance. So, at that stage, it was very much a small group of like-minded organisations. And my role was a day a week and then gradually it's grown over the, over the period since. So now it's a full-time role and we've got members all over the world in lots of different sectors and so on.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (02:54)

So it's great to see how that, you know, your personal story has been changed into doing something really positive. How has your background shaped your thinking about leadership, wellbeing and performance? And what have you seen change in how firms approach these issues over recent years? I mean, you said it started as a very small team, you were working one day a week, now it's a full-time job and you have members all over the world. So clearly there's an escalation there.

Richard Martin (03:19)

Yes. so I think I mean lots of lots of points in that. My career before 2011, I was moving into management and that was partly as a result of thinking perhaps law firms could be better run than I was seeing at the time. So I had a desire to see what I could do to influence that. I didn't have a major focus upon mental health specifically at that time. I suppose that sense of, well, actually, when I became ill and realized just how common these problems were, and that very little was being spoken about, very little was being done about it, that clearly made me think, well, actually, you know, there's clearly some work to be done there. I think, you know, progress over the last eight years, it it's interesting because we often joke that when we when I was first talking to the founders. And I said to them, so what's the aim here? What's the ambition? And one of the thoughts was, well, we'd like to be redundant in five years' time. We'd like to have achieved our goal, which of course we haven't.  

There's still lots more work to do. we will talk about it probably a bit later on in the context of the of the relaunch of the charter last week, but our workplaces have changed quite a lot over the last eight years. What we mean by workplaces, what we mean by working hours and all sorts of other things. Technology continues to evolve and to create change. The pressures upon people to perform, to increase revenue and so on and so forth, to be more efficient, those just keep on increasing. So we've been sort of operating against a a background of increasing pressures. But I think there is an ever-increasing recognition of the issue and a recognition that employers, responsible employers, need to be active in trying to address it. And with that, too, a recognition that if we want to be a high-performance organisation, a high-performance sector, a high-performance business community, we need to be well.  

You can't perform well if you're not well. So there's an emphasis on that. And we've always had within MBC a focus upon two things it's about working more healthily, but it's also about working more effectively.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (05:26)

Absolutely. And you mentioned there that the charter's just been updated. Can you just talk us about through why?

Richard Martin (05:33)

Yeah, so as as we've said, the the chance was first launched in 2018, a lot has changed since then. We've also had the opportunity to learn from working with it. It was originally created with lawyers very much in mind, and whilst a lot of our membership remains in the legal profession, we're increasingly cross sector. We began also very much in the UK, increasingly global. So we're wanting to make sure that we reflect those different sectors and different kinds of cultures in different parts of the world.  

Also, I think there was a sense in which some of the original charter was quite granular. So you know, do this, don't do that, which is all well and good, but some of those things might not be relevant in your workplace or in my workplace. And so, there was a desire to try to step back a little bit and and identify the principles that we're talking about, and not to lose the granularity. So to kind of keep examples and things and say, well, you know, here's a principle, but this is how it might look like in practice. I would say although you know it's been a relaunch and it's an important step - it's an evolution, it’s not a revolution. And a lot of the content, a lot of the themes that were in the original charter are very much still reflected in the the the relaunch version.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (06:49)

And so the Charter is built around three pillars, as I understand it - ‘open dialogue, mindful collaboration, and healthy boundaries’. From your experience, which of these tends to make the most immediate difference when organisations really genuinely embed it?

Richard Martin (07:05)

So, we start with a foundational piece, which is around openness and respect and says, look, this is where we start from. If let's agree that we care about ourselves and our fellow professionals, whether they are inside our organisations or in other organisations, and that we want to create that relationship of openness where we can talk about how we're working, its impact upon each other, and so on. We can push back when we need to, and so on. So that's our kind of foundational piece.  

Then, as you say, the three pillars - ‘open dialogue, mindful collaboration and healthy boundaries’ - open dialogue is really is building from that foundation to say ‘how can we create those cultures in our organisations where we are able to talk?’ and we're able to listen as well, which I think is an important part of communication. The mindful collaboration piece then talks about well, ‘how do we how do we interact with each other?’ So that might be how do we run more effective meetings, how do we use technology and various platforms that we use to communicate with each other; how do we use those in a respectful way? And then healthy boundaries, kind of what it says on the tin, but what can we do individually and between each other to make sure that we get the rest periods that we need, whether that's on a daily basis, at weekends, on holiday, and so on.  

So to come to your question, which is the most important, I think they would probably all be as important as each other, they're just focusing on different things. When we think about the Charter, we can think about it on lots of different levels. So I can think about the stress I cause myself, and what I can do to address some of that. And that probably plays out in healthy boundaries as much as anything else. Then there's how I interact with my team, and how my team interacts with the wider organisation, and how our organisation might interact with third-party organisations. And those levels are perhaps more reflected in the the mindful collaboration and open dialogue pillars. But I think as I say, they're all as important to each other. It's just that their focuses are on perhaps different aspects of our working lives.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (09:04)

Yeah, and you mentioned as an example, you know, how to run meetings more effectively and that obviously if people have a lot of meetings in their calendars, that can cause stress. So have you got any top tips for our listeners on how they could take this away to maybe run meetings more effectively? and it could be something as simple as make sure you've got an agenda so people know what they're coming to.

Richard Martin (09:28)

I think that's a very good starting point. I think also we will all have lots of meetings which are just the regular meeting that we have every week or whatever it might be. And that might be important that we do that, but let's just keep making sure that it is important. Let's make sure that the right people are invited to it. Let's make sure that that agenda is refreshed and so on, and still relevant. Let's think about the timing of meetings. Who said that meetings need to be an hour long? Could we just adjust that default and say, well, meetings could be half an hour or three quarters of an hour or whatever? Could we be more respectful of each other's diaries? So, when I'm trying to find some time in your diary for us to catch up and I see, there's a 15-minute slot between a meeting ending at 9:45 and a meeting beginning at 10, I'll jump in there. Or perhaps I shouldn't. Perhaps I should leave that gap that you've so carefully created and give you that time.  

When we're running meetings, let's just be more thoughtful about making sure people can contribute because, you know, it's great that there's a more of a recognition and emphasis on neurodiversity in our workplaces. Part of that is about how people can participate in meetings, and there's also some inclusion stuff around there more broadly. Time zones - let's be mindful of that. We lots of us now work in a kind of global environment, which is fine and all very exciting and so on. And that will mean that we have to do things at different times of the day, often unsociable times of the day for us or our colleagues. But let's at least be respectful of that and think about what the the impact of that is. And also, I mean one of my bugbears, we most of us who are employed have a contract of employment that says, you know, you're employed to work half past nine, half past five or whatever it might be with an hour for lunch. Well, why do we have so many internal meetings at the lunchtime then?

When our contracts of employment say we should be having an hour for lunch. So, it's not to say you can't have a meeting at lunchtime. Nothing in the charter is intended to be prescriptive in that way. But at least stop and think. You know, could we have that regular meeting that we've always done at lunchtime? Perhaps we could do that at a different time of the day. Or perhaps we could avoid having meetings on a Friday afternoon if we work on a Friday, because we're all trying to get our work done and and free ourselves up for the weekend.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (11:42)

So, I mean, all the examples you've given are just about being more mindful, aren't they? Which is obviously the name of the charter. So a distinctive feature of the charter is that it looks beyond internal culture and into how organisations work with clients and suppliers. So how does introducing shared expectations into those relationships change the quality of collaboration and decision making?

Richard Martin (12:08)

So great question, one of our founding organisations was Barclays. And they said from the get-go, they said ‘look, we know that we are a great big scary client. And when we phone you up, you law firms, you jump around like mad things and you carry on doing that until you fall over exhausted, which is not helping you, but it's not helping us either, because it's impacting the quality of the work you're doing for us and so on’. And so that recognition of the, particularly in the context of professional services, the client-supply relationship has always been a big thing.  

I'll tell you a couple of stories, which hopefully will kind of bring it to light. So, a little while ago, I was in a Magic Circle law firm running a a workshop with Barclays. So, Barclays legal team were having an offsite [event] in this law firm's offices. And I realized that there was a very close relationship between the the legal team from Barclays and the lawyers at the law firm. And so I said, look, I've been in private practice for 20 years. I've never seen a relationship like this between the in-house team and the private practice team. Tell me about that. And they stopped and thought and said, yes, it hasn't always been like this actually, it's only been like this for the last sort of six, twelve months or so. This was about a year after the charter had been launched, they were both signatories. They said, yeah, it's only been like this for the last six, twelve months, because we've started talking to each other as human beings.  

We've started saying things like, I can't do that call at six o'clock this evening because I'm taking my daughter to soccer or whatever it might be. I could do a call later or earlier, but I can't do six. And what that does on so many levels is it just opens up communication and you can say, Well, your daughter plays soccer, how interesting. So does mine. What position does she play? yeah, whatever it might be. Or yeah, and suddenly we're seeing each other as human beings as opposed to just cogs in an administrative institution. And so I think, what we see there is first of all an ability then to work more effectively together, but also a much stronger relationship. And that obviously is you know benefits both sides. But you know, the client, of course, there'll be times when the client needs something done quickly. That's the world we live in. And nobody is saying, don't do that. But what it is doing is saying, is it always so urgent? Is it always so necessary? And because or, can we have that conversation when you're asking me to do something where I can say, brilliant, I really want to get stuck into this. When do you need it by? Because it's the weekend or my team are busy on another thing right now, but we can pick this up on Thursday. Does that work for you? And there's a story that one of our US members tells of so Deputy General Counsel of the US Bank had emailed one of his outside law firms to say, could you give me a view on XYZ?

The lawyer replies within about five minutes saying, Thanks, Ben, for your email. I'm just finishing my family vacation. I'm at JFK about to board a flight. I'll look at your email on whilst on board and you'll have a response by the time we land. Because that's often how lawyers, other professionals think they have to respond to client requests. Ben replied saying, please don't. It isn't urgent. I'd much rather you have your rest, come back to me next week when you're refreshed and so on.  

So I think there is a part to be played here by certainly by the the professionals themselves. We all need to take responsibility for the way we work, our business models and so on and so forth. But there is also a piece here for clients and others to s to help out with that.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (15:41)

Yeah. And as you say, that sort of seeing people as humans, that human connection helps build relationships. It's not going to destroy them if you, you know, are transparent about what you can do and also about, you know, the fact you do have a life outside of the workplace. Just sort of continuing on from that. obviously legal work often involves complex matters, tight timetables, so things may be urgent. And also significant responsibility.  

How does the charter help teams to maintain high professional standards while working in a way that is considered, proportionate and effective? And you've already touched upon, you know, some of that already.

Richard Martin (16:25)

So just picking up something you were just saying,  a few years ago, we were asked by some of our litigation members to have a look at the way in which lawyers litigate with each other, because there's an awful lot of quite aggressive and unnecessarily unpleasant behaviour that goes on between law firms in the context of litigation. So we worked with a group of senior litigators to come up with some guidance around litigating in a more humane way. Recognizing, and one of the kind of principles that we enunciated, which is not rocket science, was remember that the person on the other side is a human being that has probably got a life, is probably honest, is probably trying to do the best job they can and and so on. Because too often what we see in the way we treat each other is it seems to be utterly disrespectful of somebody else's humanity.  

So I think there's a, you know, a piece around that. We've talked about how nothing in the charter is about not working hard. You know, we all come to work. We work in the organisations we work in, we do the work we do because we want to do that important high-pressured work and so on. But it's about how do we create the environment for us to do that in the most effective way. And we know, and all the science tells us, that although a little bit of pressure is good, once that pressure builds into stress, then that has all sorts of negative implications for the efficiency of our work, for the the accuracy of our work, for our ability to make good ethical decisions and so on.  

And so if we if we want to do that high-quality work in the most effective way, what we're talking about is how do we create the environment for that to happen? And I often use an analogy with motor racing, where you know, those guys, those men and women driving at ridiculous speeds around tracks, for hours on end, that's inherently, you know, high pressure, risky, dangerous. What the teams do and what the the sporting organisation does is to create all sorts of things around them to make that as safe as possible. And, you know, they're certainly not having to think about other races at the same time. They're not answering text messages, they're not, you know, whatever. It's focus upon what you need to do. And I think there's a bit about that in our professional service environments to say, we want to be high performance. So what do we need to do in order to create the environment for that to be done on a sustainable basis as well? Because again, you know, it's one thing to have a short period of time where you've got some really intense activity on a particular project and you're, you know, it's all guns blazing and and so on. And then to have a long rest period where things are, you know, you can take it easy and so on.  

That's not the reality of professional services life. We go from one really high-pressure context to another, with often very little space in between to recover. And so there is that piece where I'm okay, if that's going to be how we operate, how do we do that in the most safe, and sustainable way?

Alex Holsgrove Jones (19:13)

Yeah, absolutely. Having that support structure is so key, isn't it? And leading on from that, Richard, some sceptics really see wellbeing as a bit soft and fuzzy. But really it's about real-world outcomes, isn't it? So, as you've already highlighted, to work at a high level, to be highly efficient, people need to be well. So for leaders who want to understand the value of adopting the charter, what indicators or outcomes should they look at to know it's making a difference? And that can be in terms of quality, retention, collaboration, or overall performance, or all of them.

Richard Martin (19:51)

So I think I answer that in lots of ways. One of the things we've recently introduced is a wellbeing survey that we can help organisations run internally to say, look, how are people? Because if we want to take well being seriously, we ought to know what we're dealing with. But looking at it from the other end of the telescope perhaps, we wrote a paper last year which was looking at the business case for wellbeing and saying, look, here is here is the data, which is all out there. We're putting it into one place to show all of the, all of the costs that businesses are incurring currently through poor wellbeing, as well as the opportunities that exist to increase revenue and productivity and so on through better wellbeing. And there is some striking data in there. I won't bore you with all of it, but one figure one piece of data talks about how poor wellbeing seems to be costing law firms at least ten percent of their annual payroll per year.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (20:49)

Which is astonishing, isn't it?

Richard Martin (20:52)

That's a really big number. You know, if you were to speak to your CEO or your managing partner and say, hey 10% I mean, yeah, your salary cost is one of your biggest costs and 10% of that is going straight out the door, which I'm sure that she or he would want to do something about it. The problem is too often that you know we see bits of data like that and think, yeah, but that's sector wide, that's business community wide, that's not my business, is it? Well, actually, maybe what we should be encouraging people to do is to actually explore what their own numbers are, because very often our leaders, our boards and so on are not aware of the data that does exist internally, either because it's not being collated or because it's not been fed up to them at board level. And if we were to, I think, have more honest and open reporting of data to boards, then I think you know more would be done about it because there it would be impossible to ignore it.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (21:47)

Absolutely. So Richard, you've covered so much there and I'm conscious of time, but to finish, we always like to leave our listeners with a practical action that they can take to drive positive change. So, if you had to pick one or two tips for our listeners, what there would they be?

Richard Martin (22:10)

So I'll give you two. First one - one of the things we often hear about is people's overwhelmed with their email inbox. If I look at my email inbox, more than half of the emails that are in there are replies to emails I've sent. So, if I want to receive fewer emails, I should send fewer emails. So, one of the things that we could do is if you know, at least maybe once a day, when you're about to press end or about to draft an email, stop and think. Could I get this communication happening in another way? Could I just pick up the phone or go and see the person? So that would be one thing, send for your emails.  

The other is we're recording this in June. So, for the UK at least, we've got a holiday period coming up, or for a lot of people at least a holiday period coming up. Could we start thinking now about what we need to do in order to be able to take a break without being disturbed? Or at least being disturbed as little as possible. And could we think about what we can do to enable our teams to do the same thing? Because we seem to have got into this rut, which just assumes that we're just available, you know, even though we're on holiday for two weeks or whatever, we will, yeah, of course I'll check in. Why? And what you know, when we all know that it's a sensible break and the ability to kind of really shut off is really good for our wellbeing, why don't we do that? And part of that is a lack of planning. And if we start that thinking in well in advance and think, okay, you know, let's think about how who's going to look after my different projects when I'm away, let's get them up to speed and so that when I yeah, when I put on my out of office, I really mean it.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (23:48)

Yeah, I mean that's such a good point, Richard, they both are. But you know, this sort of remote working is great in so many ways, but it does sometimes create the assumption that even if you're out of office is on, you're going to be checking that and responding, which as you say, doesn't give people the proper break that they need in order to be well and perform well.

Thanks so much for joining us for this episode. It's been great to hear about the Mindful Business Charter, which obviously as the name says, we just need to be more mindful, more mindful of the emails we send, more mindful of the invitations that we send to meetings, and just treat people as human beings. I think that's such a such a simple but important point for everyone to remember in their working day. Thank you, Richard.

Richard Martin (24:39)

Thank you very much for having me.

Alex Holsgrove Jones (24:41)

And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe and share. And until next time, keep driving positive change and putting ESG into action.