Danielle Mik:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the Pearls of Wisdom. Today we’re going to chat with Professor Con Stough about the role of emotional intelligence in the mental health of workplaces. Professor Stough’s has been a Professor of Neuroscience with Swinburne uni throughout the last 25 years. Amongst a number of other research areas, Professor Stough’s completed two decades of research in emotional intelligence and its application to mental health.

Danielle Mik:

Con’s the co-founder of GENOS an organization responsible for developing measures of EI in the workplace. And Professor Stough’s current focus in EI is working with schools in Australia and New Zealand, primarily, measuring and developing emotional intelligence in children, adolescents, and teachers. So welcome Con, thank you for joining us on the Pearls of Wisdom today.

Prof. Con Stough:

Hi Danielle. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Danielle Mik:

Con, we can see you’re well credentialed to talk about emotional intelligence that’s for sure. And its application to the workplace. Obviously mental health in the workplace is a big topic right now. We know one fifth of Aussies are experiencing mental health conditions. Three quarters of people actually say mental health is an important consideration when applying for a job. And the PWC report that did an investigation into the cost of mental health showed that for every dollar invested by employers, they get $2.30 return. So the fiscal reasons are there for employers to invest in mental health in the workplace.

Danielle Mik:

So we need to try and understand why that’s not happening or not happening as fast or whatever, and what are the implications of not doing it, obviously from the research, we know that increasing a person’s EI improves their ability to manage stress and develop their resilience. So today we want to explore with you, who’s a master of this topic, what are the implications for that. So what do you see is the role of EI in a workplace and what role do you think that EI can have in improving the mental health of a workplace?

Prof. Con Stough:

Yeah, sure. So EI or emotional intelligence refers to really our abilities to understand, use and regulate and manage emotions. And so emotions are really fundamental to absolutely everything we do. Emotions tell us what’s right, what’s wrong. If we’re on the right path, if we’re on the wrong path. They help us understand people. They help us develop empathy and communicate with others. So really everything we do, every transaction with somebody else, every time we have to manage a difficult situation, we have to draw upon our emotional intelligence. And so emotional intelligence is really key to some of the things that you mentioned before.

Prof. Con Stough:

Managing our stress, regulating our emotions, which is incredibly important for things like anxiety and depression, dealing with empathy and transacting, discussing things with others, so great things like better leadership for instance, and people with very low emotional intelligence in the workplace, the research has shown that they’re not very productive. They tend to experience stress and anxiety at much higher levels, have higher absenteeism, are very poor leaders and so on. Emotional intelligence has really profound effects for the workplace.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. In your experience, do you think employers are well versed in what emotional intelligence means and why it’s important to develop it in a workplace?

Prof. Con Stough:

Look, I think we’ve made some progress over the last 10 years, but I still think we have a very transactional type of workplace in Australia. It’s not very innovative. It’s not very adaptable. It generally shows very poor leadership. And when I talk about leadership, I talk about what we refer to as transformational leadership, leaders who really enable others and manage and develop others.

Prof. Con Stough:

And I don’t think we do that very well in the Australian workplace. We’re getting better and we’re starting to understand that’s really important, but we’ll be forced to do this I think because I think the younger cohorts are demanding much more emotional intelligence from their bosses and from the organization in general. And if over a period of time, the organization can’t provide those developmental opportunities, then they tend to find other jobs, other places they will.

Danielle Mik:

And one of the things that the research is showing is that increasing the mental health of a workplace actually decreases staff turnover and it reduces absenteeism and those sorts of things. So it would seem that if employers want to secure and retain the people with the best skills they’re going to have to lift their game in that area, that would be-

Prof. Con Stough:

Yeah. It’s not really rocket science that somebody with high anxiety or high depression or some other mental health issue such as high stress, I know you work in that area, will try to find ways in which they’ll remove themselves from that toxic environment.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

And so absenteeism is definitely up but we’ve also seen that workplace productivity is down-

Danielle Mik:

Yes.

Prof. Con Stough:

When those traits are very high. I think organizations have to be much more proactive, it’s too late really to try to fix people when they’re… I mean, we still have to do that obviously, but it costs much more money. It’s much more difficult if somebody’s critically stressed, if somebody has extremely high anxiety, extremely high depression, and they don’t have the skills to deal with those situations. So that’s the medical model that we find ourselves in-

Danielle Mik:

Yes.

Prof. Con Stough:

Trying to fix disease and disorders. And what we really need to do is be much more proactive in the workplace. And I used to do some work around EI in the workplace. And I realized that we have to be even more proactive than the workplace and start off at schools because they’ll be the next generation of Australian leaders and workers. And so we have to build the capacity of the emotional intelligence children and adolescents, and people in the workplace in general.

Danielle Mik:

So obviously if we’re teaching kids in school, they’re going to be coming out of school with those greater expectations of employers. So as we go along in time, obviously yes, those people that are coming out and entering the workforce are going to be looking for employers that demonstrate higher expectations and behaviors in those areas.

Prof. Con Stough:

No doubt about that. And opportunities to grow and to be heard and for their emotions to be managed effectively. So they can experience positive emotions, not negative emotions in the workplace. It’s all about developing the right culture in the workplace.

Danielle Mik:

So Con, what are some of the things that you think employers can do, specifically sort of nuts and bolts? What are some of the nuts and bolts things they can do to improve the mental health of their workplace and develop EI?

Prof. Con Stough:

Well, definitely structured programs around giving employees the skills around understanding emotions, managing emotions, giving employees the opportunities to learn and to develop are key structured programs around transformational leadership, incredibly important that people are starting to look after each other and understand each other and not band-aid programs either. These are competencies that some people really struggle with and we have to help them gain them, but they also really have to develop the right culture in which employees are heard and understood.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

And we know employees want adaptable workplaces and not stressful workplaces. And they want to feel like they’re listened to, and they’re developing, they’re growing. They have great opportunities for learning and work-life balance and to really experience wellbeing.

Danielle Mik:

So Con, I mean, you’re doing a lot of work in schools obviously, and with teachers and whatnot. So do you see in the requirements for those roles that schools have and I mean, obviously teaching is dealing with students, there’s a lot of administrative roles and whatnot in those places as well, but do they all require EIs? Is it one of their PD components, job description requirements that they’re looking for?

Prof. Con Stough:

No, look, I think progressively the various governments, educational bodies are now starting to use emotional intelligence as key type KPIs.

Danielle Mik:

Yes.

Prof. Con Stough:

But they’re still not really embedded in teacher programs at universities.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

So emotional intelligence for universities is almost nonexistent and I’ve worked at a few universities over the last 20 years. There’s no real programs around emotional intelligence for students. And we really need to develop the skills that can help teachers be more resilient-

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

At the earliest possible stage. So that has to be done when they’re learning at universities and training to become teachers or that has to be done as an induction almost when they come into a school.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

Because as you know, teachers have very high burnouts and very high workers’ compensation claims is stress, I think they are the highest in Australia at the moment.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. It’s one of the highest for sure.

Prof. Con Stough:

One of the highest.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

And as you know, it’s so hard to really reverse that when they experience those really heightened levels of stress and burnout. I think it’s so important that schools start to really employ strategies around identifying teachers who have high emotional intelligence and developing emotional intelligence in all teachers. And next year we’ll be releasing an online emotional intelligence program specifically designed for teachers.

Danielle Mik:

So it’s interesting. You talked about at university, it wasn’t in the teaching program. Are you aware of any degrees where emotional intelligence is taught to as a component of the degree of people that are working with people, at least?

Prof. Con Stough:

Not really, but I mean, there are some emotionally intelligent lecturers and professors scattered throughout universities in Australia and-

Danielle Mik:

Is it serendipity? It’s just serendipity, isn’t it that they are-

Prof. Con Stough:

Absolutely.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

Absolutely. And in fact, probably the way that academics get selected is usually not to consider emotional intelligence. It’s really about their academic skills, their number of papers and-

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. How much they’ve been published. Yeah.

Prof. Con Stough:

Yeah. Things like that. And…

Danielle Mik:

And I think that gets back to what you were talking about before with a lot of employers, the leadership roles are still more focused on being able to do the technical side of the job properly rather than actually have the leadership skills.

Prof. Con Stough:

Yeah. I think Daniel Goleman, who’s one of the great people who popularized the construct of emotional intelligence in the ’90s. He’s talking a lot about this, that essentially your IQ or your cognitive ability really help you get into an organization, but they’re not really helpful so much so helpful once you’re in that organization, because really you’re competing against similar people with similar IQs and cognitive ability. The thing that’s differentiating people once they’re in an organization, are their interpersonal skills such as emotional intelligence.

Danielle Mik:

Yes. Yes. Well, that’s great, Con. Look, that’s a lot of food for thought. I mean, it reinforces a lot of what I’m hearing in this space. You talk about being proactive. It’s about being preventative. It’s really being preventative in this space and making those changes rather than waiting to be reactive after someone reports an issue that they’ve been bullied or mistreated in some way or stressed or whatever.

Prof. Con Stough:

Absolutely. And obviously we can make a huge difference to people’s lives in terms of the experience of positive emotions and how they deal with stress, but from an economic perspective as well, it’s so much cheaper for us and cost effective to have proactive programs around teaching children and people in the workplace, these skills, than to deal with the consequences of not having those skills.

Danielle Mik:

And we spend far too many hours of our day at work for us to spend them being in a place where that’s toxic or not positive for us or in a negative space. So it’s definitely something that is a detractive for people in workplaces and will drive them out.

Prof. Con Stough:

Indeed.

Danielle Mik:

Yeah. So look, thank you very much for your time, could talk to you all day about this, as you know, it was lovely to speak to you. So thank you very much and hope we could do this again sometime.

Prof. Con Stough:

Thanks Danielle for having me.

Danielle Mik:

No worries. Thanks Con.

Prof. Con Stough:

Yeah.