Psychosocial Risk Management and the Three Ghosts of Christmas
The weather is bitter, the poorhouses and the prisons are full, and a money-hungry employer is keeping a shrewd eye on the company’s heating bill while his overworked and shivering clerk tries to remain optimistic in the face of inflation.
The year is 1843, but it could as easily be 2022.
Feel the fog drawing close. Stomp the frost off your boots and shut the door on the dark night. See the candlelight flickering ghostly apparitions up the walls. Smell the fruit and cinnamon wafting from a hot mug of mulled wine. Pull a chair up to the fire to escape the cold. Warm your fingers at the flames, and open your ears and your heart to a tale.
Welcome to a Psychosocial Risk Management Carol, and the lessons leaders can learn from Dickens’ three ghosts of Christmas.
Michael Caine and Kermit in the excellent ‘Muppets Christmas Carol.’ If you haven’t seen it, you must.
In case you haven’t read the original, I’ll catch you up. Note: contains spoilers.
Dickens’ Christmas Carol: Abridged
Ebenezer Scrooge is a successful money-lender, as shrewd as he is mean.
Seven years earlier, he buries his equally clever and cruel business partner Marley, and not being terribly cut up by the event, signs off on a bargain funeral and then heads directly to work.
So sharp are his features that no one in the street stops him to ask for the time or directions. Dogs who lead the blind pull their owners into corridors to let him pass.
“Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.’
Tis the night before Christmas, and Scrooge is busy counting in his counting house, with the door open so that he can micromanage his employee, Bob Cratchit, who is in a ‘dismal little cell, a sort of tank,’ copying letters.
Tesco has reportedly turned its store heating down one degree, forcing Tesco colleagues to add extra layers at work, much like Bob Cratchit who ‘put on his white comforter and tried to warm himself at his candle, but failed,’ when a cost-cutting Ebenezer Scrooge insists on locking up the coal cupboard and dolling out the heating one lump at a time.
Tesco channelling Ebenezer Scrooge
Begrudgingly, Scrooge gives Bob Christmas Day off, but not before reminding Bob that Scrooge is ill-used for paying a day’s wages for no work, and insisting he arrives earlier on Boxing Day.
Later, having cried Bah-Humbug to various well-wishers on the way, Scrooge reaches his quarters, the large, sparsely furnished house formerly owned by his deceased ex-business partner Marley.
He prepares himself a low fire and a bowl of gruel and just as he begins to enjoy both, - as much as such a miserable fellow might be considered to enjoy anything - he is visited first by Marley’s ghost and then by three further apparitions.
As we re-visit each of Scrooge’s phantoms, ask yourself what you might learn from this same experience.
Psychosocial Risk Management and The Ghost of Christmas Past
Imagine being tapped on the arm by a spirit at 1am, and then forced to watch a video reel of all your best and worst moments in vivid technicolour replay. It is the nightmare to top all nightmares, and one that Scrooge finds himself.
Leaders in some decision-critical industries use this technology now - Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service were the first in the UK to make use of body cam footage to take advantage of learning opportunities ‘to evaluate and reflect on their own performance and decisions to see if improvements can be made.’
In the absence of both body-cam and time-travel, put your imagination to use.
Scrooge sees himself as a boy, a young man at school, an apprentice and a lover, and through each of these experiences we, and Scrooge, are given a window into his evolution from a child, lonely but still in possession of dreams, to an apprentice enthusiastically engaged in his career, to a man who chooses to spurn his relationship because his ambition for work is the greater of his two loves.
“No more,” cried Scrooge. “No more. I don’t wish to see it, show me no more!” But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.”
Scrooge is effectively engaged in self-reflection. If you’re going to do this, choose a time when you feel enough of a sense of calm to reflect on your own experiences without judgement.
The Gibbs Reflective Cycle
The Gibbs Reflective Cycle gives us a framework to consider and learn from our experiences.
Below I have listed a few points that you might consider as you think about where you and your team sit now in respect to Psychosocial Hazards. Use the cycle to reflect upon where you are at now and how you might learn from past experiences and move forward.
Gibbs Reflective Cycle, diagram taken from Edinburgh University here
You and Ebenezer Scrooge
The Ghost of Christmas past gives Scrooge a painful, yet ultimately helpful, insight into what kind of person he was, what kind of person he has become, and the points along his journey that took him there. None of us will be lucky (or unlucky) enough to experience reliving our pasts quite so vividly but we can take the time to consider where we are now and how we got there.
Ask yourself:
Am I an overworker? Will Christmas eve see me with my laptop out, working on the P&L?
Does my work negatively impact my interpersonal relationships? (note, this is true for both Scrooge and for Bob Cratchit – the former out of choice, and the latter out of poverty)
Do my employees feel like they can confide in me? As we will discover, in the Ghost of Christmas Present and Future, Scrooge has little idea of the daily struggles that his Clerk is facing. Psychosocial Hazards include those hazards that our teams face in their personal lives, and the associated stressors that they then bring into work. Do your team feel like they can tell you what their struggles are, and ask for support when they need it?
Do I know what Psychosocial Hazards my team is dealing with in their day-to-day work? Can I solve them? From the brief window we have into Bob Cratchit’s day-to-day work we learn that he is cold, and he has minimal control over his working environment. The office is quiet, and he is threatened with losing his job role when he makes a sound. Overtime is expected, and his hours for the following day are given to him with minimal notice and no thought to his family situation. He is paid the minimal amount Scrooge can get away with. In short, Cratchit is overworked, micromanaged, has low job control, is bullied and isolated, and suffers from low flexibility, low recognition and low reward. It is within Scrooge’s power to solve all of these things.
It wasn’t too late for Scrooge, and it isn’t too late for you. If you identify with any of these points, ask yourself how you might solve them in the future and make a plan.
Psychosocial Risk Management and The Ghost of Christmas Present
In the Ghost of Christmas Present, Scrooge sees his employee as he really is, right now, and he sees how Bob Cratchit (and Cratchit’s wife) see him ‘an odius, stingy, hard, unfeeling man’. He has a direct window into the psychosocial hazards experienced by both Cratchit directly and his wider social network ‘how many hours she had to work at a stretch, and how she meant to lie-abed tomorrow morning for a good long rest’. In witnessing Cratchit’s situation and his family’s challenges, Scrooge learns what Cratchit’s needs are and then sets about fulfilling them.
Scrooge is given a bird’s eye view into his employee’s wider needs.
How can we experience the same learnings?
We may never be granted quite the open window into our teams’ wants and needs that Scrooge has into Cratchit’s, but we can make do with the next best thing.
Ask them.
In business, the Golden Rule, ‘treat others how you want to be treated’ is better applied ‘treat others how they want to be treated.’
None of us is the same, and one of the complexities of identifying and controlling psychosocial hazards is that psychosocial hazards and their controls are different for each of us.
Would Cratchit have shared with Scrooge what his challenges and needs were, prior to Scrooge’s rehabilitation at the hands of the three Ghosts?
Unlikely.
Cratchit barely utters a word to Scrooge in the opening scene. ‘The clerk in the tank (Cratchit) involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.’
Don’t extinguish your team’s last spark. Build trust, so that they talk to you. Find out what their needs are, and then meet them.
Cratchit does not share his needs with Scrooge. Can we blame him?
The Ghost of Christmas Future
Think of the Ghost of Christmas Future much like a business plan with a predicted outcome.
In his future, Scrooge sees the culmination of the worst acts of his life coming to pass, in a lonely death. Worse, he sees the results of his failure to act during his life. The Cratchits’ son Tiny Tim, lacking any form of private healthcare, succumbs to a poverty-induced illness for which Scrooge and his money might have prevented. Bob is understandably depressed.
Scrooge sees something else – possibility.
The most frightening visions of all are scenes of the future that Scrooge is creating.
“Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”
The Spirit neither confirms nor denies this possibility, but when Ebenezer awakens on Christmas Day and discovers that he is still alive, he realises that changing the future is in his power: “the Time before him was his own, to make amends in!”
As for Cratchit, Scrooge raises his salary, buys another coal-scuttle, provides for his family, and suggests that they sit down together and have a conversation over a Christmas bowl of smoking bishop.
Identifying Psychosocial Hazards and controlling for them can feel overwhelming. More than likely, we are not Scrooge. We might not have either the money, or the power, to create these kinds of sweeping changes in another person’s life.
But we can do something. And if we are in a Leadership role, that something might amount in a hell of a lot.
For Scrooge, ‘his offences carry his own punishment,’ and quite the reverse, knowing his good deeds, ‘his own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.’
The same is not quite true for Leaders. A lack of awareness of psychosocial hazards, and poor control of them, can lead to regulatory action, in addition to the cost of poor retention, presenteeism, and low engagement. Conversely, mitigating these hazards bring more than a feel good ending, by way of high retention and better performance.
A happier Cratchit leads to a happier Scrooge.
What can Leaders do right now, to address Psychosocial Hazards of the Past and Present, and build a Psychologically Healthy Future?
Ebenezer Scrooge learns three things through his nocturnal time travels into Christmases Past, Present and Future.
Empathy for himself, empathy for others, and the power of self-reflection.
You too can learn these things, without flying over London chimneys hand-in-hand with a muppet.
Begin by considering your own experiences. Use the Gibbs Reflective Cycle to consider your own Psychosocial Hazards and what strategies you have in place to handle them. What factors have shaped your own story? What can you learn from that which can better help you to help others?
Then, consider what Psychosocial Hazards your team members might face. There’s an excellent saying I discovered in this post on LinkedIn by Marni Stevenson ‘don’t throw a fire extinguisher at a drowning person.’
Don’t guess what hazards your team is facing – talk to them. If you do not currently have a culture of trust in place to enable these conversations, create it.
Change your Present to Build your Future
Scrooge began by working with what he had, the moment he woke up in the morning and realised that change needed to happen and that as long as he was alive, change was possible.
Reflect on the past, and then plan to build a healthier workplace in the present, and the future.
As long as there is life, there is possibility. Be like Scrooge. Change your present to build your future.
Slippers and Smoking Bishop optional.
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Blog by Ngaire Wallace. Follow me on LinkedIn here.
Need some help with identifying Psychosocial Hazards? Check out our Psychosocial Risk Assessment service here.
Quotes have been taken from 'Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings’, with introduction and notes by Michael Slater. Penguin Classics, 2003.
I also heartily recommend the Audible version performed by Hugh Grant.
Dickens gets a bit of a bad rep for being ‘literary', but his writing is hilarious, entertaining, and contains many sharp-witted observations that are as relevant now as they were then. I personally believe he would have heartily approved the Muppets version.