Hello PPMA members and friends

As we get closer to our Conference at the BCEC in Birmingham, we’re continuing to share posts from some of the inspirational and knowledgeable people who will be speaking there. Anthony Montgomery, is Professor of Occupational and Organisational Psychology at Northumbria University and his research focuses on job burnout, organisational culture and healthy workplaces. His session on Thursday 25th April between 12:00 and 13:00, will look at the whole organisation approach needed to create healthy workplaces. Below is a taster of what’s in store and if you’d like to join us at the conference book your place here

How can we create healthy workplaces? Two mistakes we keep making is; (1) not being genuine about building healthy workplaces for ALL people and (2) we keep proposing solutions that ultimately lay the responsibility for ‘resilience’ squarely on the shoulder of the individual. Our decisions about how we choose to value wellbeing is crucial to where it ranks in our organisations and communities. Not surprisingly, and exacerbated by COVID-19, work-related mental health and wellbeing crises have become pervasive across multiple sectors that include education, construction, health and social care, public administration to name a few.

On a person note, I notice that many of my students and non-academic collaborators accept certain organisational ideas and concepts as hard facts, which can lead to some very sloppy thinking (at best) and dysfunctional conclusions (at worst). We, the academics, are largely to blame – we have been bystanders to these runaway trains. Myths and half-truths speed along on one track, fuelled by social media, increasingly difficult to derail as they pick up speed. The blizzard of TED talks, Tic Tok videos and infographics reveals the alchemist-like transformation of qualified research findings into mythological factoids.

Practice in the field of Occupation and Organizational Psychology has been dominated by ‘scientific management’ technological approaches – fuelling Newtonian-like fantasies about managing people like billiard balls. There is an understandable fatigue with ‘shiny’ organisational interventions that promise more than they can deliver, along with a growing cynicism fuelled by fads that seem to be deaf to the reality of food banks and economic insecurity. The accumulated evidence on employee well-being indicates that only ‘whole organization’ approaches have the potential to successfully address this significant public health challenge. The interesting question is what are we willing to do to make wellbeing an operational issue for organisations?

Anthony Montgomery (He/Him), Professor of Occupational & Organisational Psychology