“Working here makes us better humans”

A daily thought from Leandro Herrero:

I have had a brilliant two day meeting with a brilliant client. One aspect of my
work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes the culture of the company. This is a set of actionable behaviours that must be universal, from the CEO to the MRO (Mail Room Officer). They also need to pass the ‘new hire test’: would you put that list in front of a prospect employee and say ‘This is us’?

There was one ‘aspirational’ sentence that I put to the test: ‘Working here makes us better human beings’.

It was met with scepticism by the large group in the meeting, initially mainly manifested through body language including the, difficult to describe, cynical smiles. The rationalists in the group jumped in hard to ‘corporatize’ the sentence. ‘Do you mean better professionals?’ The long discussion had started. Or, perhaps, ‘do you mean…’ – and here the full blown corporate Academy of Language – from anything to do with skills, talent management, empowerment to being better managers, being better leaders, and so on.

‘No, I mean better human beings. Period!’- I pushed back. Silence.

Next stage was the litany of adjectives coming form the collective mental thesaurus: fluffy, fuzzy, soft, vague…

I felt compelled to reframe the question: ‘OK, so who is against working in a place that makes you inhuman? Everybody. OK, ‘ So who is against working in a place that makes you more human? Nobody. But still the defensive smiling.

It went on for a while until the group, ‘organically’, by the collective hearing of pros and cons, turned 180 degrees until everybody agreed that ‘Working in a place that makes you a better human being’ was actually very neat. But – there was a but – ‘Our leadership team wont like it. They will say that its fluffy, fuzzy, soft etc… In the words of the group, it was not ‘them’ anymore who had a problem, it was the infamous ‘they’.

The “difficult to describe” cynical smiles are familiar…. indeed I am sure I have perpetrated such smiles more than once myself!

Medicine can be a dehumanising profession, sometimes literally. Dehumanising in both ways – patients, especially some categories of patient, colleagues, but also we ourselves. Of course, the rationalist part of us can pick apart what “better humans” means…

“evolved strategy”: Online CBT provider Joyable lays off 20, shifts focus from direct-to-consumer to employers, providers

From MobiHealthNews:

“We let a number of talented people and friends go this week,” CEO Peter Shalek said in an emailed statement. “We did this in order to refocus our efforts on partnering with employers, insurers, and providers to increase access to evidence-based mental health care and to reduce costs. We are positioned financially to pursue this new strategy over the next several years. We’ve built a product known for having the best engagement and outcomes of any mental health-focused digital therapeutic, and we believe that our evolved strategy will allow us to reach and help the most people.”

In an interview, Shalek clarified that Joyable’s direct-to-consumer offering, an online cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and coaching program for social anxiety, isn’t going away completely: people currently using it will still be able to use it and new sign-ups will still be supported. But the company won’t put any more resources into developing or marketing the direct-to-consumer offering, and most of the staff involved in marketing and support for that product specifically were let go.

Shalek said that the company had always planned to go in this direction anyway and that, while they reached a lot of people, they recognized that the best way to move the needle meaningfully on social anxiety would be to help more people, which the company could accomplish by targeting populations that don’t need to pay for the service directly (the company charges individuals $23 per week for a 12-week course after a seven-day free trial).

With Joyable’s platform, first users are paired with a coach who has been trained in CBT techniques. Before starting the program, users are invited to speak to the coach for 30 minutes on a phone call about how social anxiety affects them and what they want to get out of the program. After that, the program helps consumers identify and understand their social anxiety triggers. Users must complete activities such as challenging anxious thoughts with evidence and developing alternative thoughts that are more helpful. Each activity takes around 10 minutes to complete.

From there, Joyable teaches users techniques to reduce their anxiety by putting themselves in anxious situations and working on applying the skills they learned. The coach supports the user throughout the program through text and email, and the user can also reach out for help whenever they want. The program is available online, and can also be accessed from smartphones and tablets.

One does wonder how much of Shalek’s statement on “evolved strategy” and the assurance “we always intended to go this direction anyway” masks a certain realisation that many online mental health providers are coming to: that, for all the hype and optimistic rhetoric about empowering “consumers”, ultimately engaging providers is a necessity for these technologies to actually reach the potential users who could benefit most.