Health in the Workplace
Kulwinder Bhumbra, AAC Clyde Space
Thanks for that lovely introduction, it’s great to be here today. I’m here to talk to you about health in the workplace. I need to warn you, though, there’s a little bit of jumping around, so you’re just going to have to bear with me as I do that. It starts with someone’s journey. There was someone last year that developed an autoimmune condition and, for them, that was a life-changing thing, because of the nature of it. That person had to just adjust their whole life, and that was quite terrifying for them. There was a lot of questions. There was like, “Why me? Why now? What did I do to deserve this?” There was a lot of those feelings happening.
There was a lot of emotions involved when the person was going through that. There was a lot of tears, a lot of confusion. When people get some diagnoses like that, depending on the nature of it, it also does mean that they have a degree of low mood, so I started going on this little journey, because it was quite… I thought I knew about autoimmune conditions, but I actually really didn’t. There’s a whole host of them out there and you don’t realize how it impacts people’s lifestyle, the people around them, and it’s quite complicated. When those things happen to people in those areas, depending on the nature of it, you have to go through all of this, and they talk to you about things like the impact with the condition, like fatigue.
They’ll talk to you about medication plans and things that might happen to you as a result of those, so it’s quite a lot. What does that actually then mean for today’s world? It means that, all of a sudden, you’re talking to people, you’re getting all this information, and you actually end up with more questions surprisingly, because you’re just overwhelmed. Now that’s then got me thinking, “What does this mean for people in the workplace and what can we do about that?” Not in terms of just sharing information and knowledge and just bringing it all together. I thought, “To do that effectively, I need to then…” I started learning more about other types of topics. These things all came to hand when I was researching, and you learn more and more. You see people’s experiences, there’s a lot of talk just now about things like pain, and we then go to stats that we know about autoimmune conditions in particular, based on the Lancet, but it varies.
The one thing I want to draw out about this is that it affects more women than men, and that everyone’s experience is individual to them. Now, what we don’t know is why it happens, which means we don’t have a cure, and that essentially then means it’s about managing symptoms and there’s a huge area in health that we don’t know about. Also, on top of that, we’ve also then got conflicting information, depending on what source to go to and what practice of holistic, et cetera. You’re thinking, “Why am I talking about it and what’s this all about?” I’m talking about it, because when that happened to that person, it was a complete shock to me, I didn’t know of it happening to anyone in my circle, in my network, and outside of work. I didn’t realize all the challenges that come with it.
It’s so unpredictable, and then that impacts on your confidence, impacts on the people around you, because they’re worried about you, you’re worried about yourself, and you’re worried about the impact you have on them. Then it also impacts into your workplace as well, because you’re thinking, “Can I do it?” People in that situation often need time, and that’s sometimes time that businesses can’t always afford, because you have your own challenges to go through as well as the ones in your business as well as the ones outside, so something to balance there. Then I thought a little bit more about, “How does this impact furthermore into the workplace?” So I started looking at some more information and I thought, “There’s one million people not working in the UK,” and I thought, “That’s a big number.” What about the people in the workplace?
Then when we think about dealing with people in the workplace, we think about our standard HR toolkit, which is great, it’s individual, and we need that, because people are individual, and that’s important at heart. Then I’m then starting to think, “Well, actually, maybe we need something a little bit wider than that. Maybe we need to be talking about it more, so people don’t have the shock that I did when that came to me.” Then that maybe means that we can think about things like, how do we influence our own businesses or the people around us to shape culture and make an impact in society? Might as well do it now, we’ve just been through COVID, we’re going to be dealing with all of this. I’m thinking, “This is the time to maybe just plant some seeds, not start a campaign or anything about it or do any extreme initiatives, but just be thinking the background, because we’ve got all these opportunities,” and it’s about these opportunities that means that we can think about how to look after the people with the hidden conditions in today’s workplace.
We can shape it, so that we can see them, and we can tap into maybe the people that are unemployed and maybe we can support the people around us both in and outside the workplace. That’s me. Sorry for all the jumping around, but I hope you got there.
Watch Kulwinder delivering her session over on Vimeo >>> DisruptHR Glasgow 6.0 – June 19 2025 on Vimeo
