Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, you might already have had team members working from home, or this might be a completely new experience for you and your team. Working from home is a transition for all concerned and whether managers are seasoned in managing their teams remotely, or new to this, there is much to bear in mind to uphold effective and safe practice when working in this way.  In this blog we outline some key considerations regarding remote working. 
 
One of the biggest concerns for managers is maintaining a balance between being supportive of people who are working off-site and potentially coming across as a micro-manager. This is particularly difficult as home working removes the ability of the manager to monitor employees within the usual workplace setting.

However, you can strike a healthy balance by considering the following:

• Recognise that working from home will be new to some – if not many – of your team members, so take time to ask each of them what will help. Everyone is different; some people will be happy to use emails to check-in with you while others might feel that a daily video call will keep them on track. Be sensitive to what individuals need while balancing their preferences with the specific needs of the business.
• Set expectations as early on as possible. Explain that you trust everyone to get their work done, just as they would in the office, but that you’ll need to be able to reach them consistently during working hours. Encourage people to take short breaks during the day and have a set time for lunch – just as they would in the workplace – but ask that they let you know if they will be unavailable for long periods of time due to conference calls or project deadlines. Make it clear that emails should be answered as quickly as possible, and voicemails returned on the same day.
• Ask team members to keep their office diaries up to date and give them sight of yours where possible. It can feel unsettling not to be able to get hold of a colleague about an urgent matter but knowing that they are otherwise engaged in work can ease concerns about their availability.
• Reassure team members that you are there for them when they need you but to reduce anxiety around waiting times, suggest that anyone contacts you if there is anything urgent that they need support with.
• Schedule a regular catch-up with the whole team and use video calling if this is available. Working from home can feel lonely, especially for colleagues who live alone. Even a ten-minute check-in can be helpful. And don’t make it just about work – be sure to let everyone catch up on the news just as they would at the office.
• Encourage team members to connect with each other, whether by phone or video conference. This can relieve feelings of stress and isolation and reassure people that they’re still part of a team.
• Recognise the limitations that homeworking may present. While your organisation will no doubt ensure that key tasks can be completed by colleagues working from home, acknowledge that there may be tasks that cannot be completed as they usually would due to technological or logistical restrictions.
• Encourage team members to create a healthy workstation. Share ideas in team meetings about how individuals have setup their workstations. What images, colours, smells, inspirational quotes do they around their workstation, as much as we would consider this when working in an office. Some people have diffusers, oil burners, images of family or holidays, poems or prayers, or other comforting objects that they can see regularly throughout the day when working.
• Encourage team members to manage their wellbeing. As working from home may be a new experience, encourage your team to openly talk about how they are feeling and to seek help if they are feeling overwhelmed knowing that they will not be penalised for doing so. If your staff are trained on our ‘Stress Management and Resilient Building’ workshop get them to share their wellbeing plans with each other based on our RESPECT resilience model (Dunkley, 2018) to share ideas of remaining resilient.
• Promote a mentally healthy workplace. One of the most effective things managers can do to foster a mentally healthy workplace when working remotely is to personally role-model healthy, boundaried working practices that promote self-care.  This may mean ‘logging off’ from online work platforms at appropriate times, limiting calls and e-mails to within working hours, and being seen to regularly take breaks and annual leave.   
• Signposting & Further Support.  Know what services are available to psychologically support staff. Does your organisation have an Employee Assistance Programme (EPA), or trained PFA peer supporters? During this pandemic it may also be useful to have a trauma specialist service to refer staff to such as FD Consultants. Many organisations have asked us to offer trauma support alongside their EAP. If a member of staff losses a family member or loved one through Covid, organisations are appropriately offering traumatic grief counselling, rather than bereavement counselling. Training several members of your staff in PFA (Psychological First Aid) peer support could also significantly help build confidence in how you and your organisation respond to mental health difficulties, and PFA can be delivered remotely as well as face-to-face. Such training, which is offered by FD Consultants, is not only a good use of staff resources but it also helps promote cohesion, trust and a resilient organisation.

 
Please contact FD Consultants for further information on how such training might be tailored for your organisation at info@fionadunkley.com
 
If you would like access to the full guide for managing staff remotely, then sign up to our newsletter as we’ll be sharing this in next month’s edition.  To sign up to the newsletter click here: http://eepurl.com/wc4Zf
 
For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace.  FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.

Authors: Yasmin Dunkley & Nokubonga Ralayo
 
Question: “How do you spot participant distress over the phone?”

• Sub-question 1: “What are some methods to manage participant’s distress?”
• Sub-question 2: “How do we look after ourselves when participants have become distressed and more generally when conducting fieldwork?” 
• Sub-question 3: “Where can we refer participants during remote research?” 

 
Summary:
This piece of work is a direct response to the literature review “How to conduct remote research with adolescents in South Africa.” That review recognised that in changing how we conduct participant interviews (with phone based modalities) the visual clues and cues which often inform the researcher when working face to face are absent. This means that the relationship between interviewer and participant is changed, and the visual cues that show when a participant is becoming distressed are equally absent.
 
This document starts by listing considerations around phone-based interviews that researchers may need to be mindful of when conducting this research for the first time, including the increased perceived intimacy of phone based interviewing, an increase in blurred boundaries between participant and researcher, and the potential for increased disclosures. It then provides a list of techniques for spotting when participants are becoming distressed, as well as some of the techniques for mitigating that distress. This piece of work continues by looking at some of the principles of self-care, and seeks to empower researchers to stop when they feel uncomfortable or at risk of vicarious distress.
 
The intended audience of this piece of work is research assistants directly working with the Hey Baby, Mzantsi Wahko and TAG teams in the Western and Eastern Capes of South Africa. This document is intended to be a living document, to support field workers carrying out their remote research. The document will form the basis of ongoing training, supervision and debriefing around non-visual cues of distress, as well as support qualitative and quantitative phone based research methods.
 
We are living through an unprecedented time. We decided to create this document to be proactive in supporting our team during the COVID19 epidemic and beyond. We recognise that field workers, ultimately, have the knowledge, skills and expertise to conduct research. This document is a tool to support and complement the good work that they are already doing.

Moving forward and recommendations:
This section briefly outlines some already decided steps, and some recommendations for the management of Hey Baby, Mzantsi Wahko and TAG teams to consider when thinking about the future direction of this piece of work.

1. Informing training content: This content will inform training with research assistants in East London (see appendix 1.)
2. Safeguarding: To enhance this work, we reviewed existing HUB safeguarding protocols and pathways, and ensured that this document spoke to those policy documents. It may be worth considering what level of safeguarding training research assistants have received to date.
3. Mental Health/ Psychological First Aid: Training around mental health first aid may be a useful addition to the fieldwork team’s existing skillset; a mental health first aider can help guide participants in distress to the relevant help that they need. They will also have the relevant knowledge to be able to spot someone who is developing a mental health issue. Mental Health First Aiders are trained to intervene with mental health issues before they escalate. Mental health first aid is not therapy, but it recognises the impact trained individuals can have in spotting mental health distress. Although many of the measures or scales included within the T3 and T4 naturally flag mental health issues, as they are validated low mood and depression tools, research assistants may benefit from a formalised training around mental health first aid to feel empowered to flag individual mental health risk and make more robust referrals. Training around and the use of suicidal ideation screening tools are also included within good mental health/ psychological first aid. Some additional workplace resources from MIND the mental health charity are included at the end of this document.

Considerations
Research assistants will be using phone based interviewing for the first time with the Hey Baby and TAG research projects. In switching from face to face work to remote work, it is important to note that the relationship between participant and researcher can change. Here are some of the key considerations for researchers to be aware of before conducting these interviews.

1. Phone based interviewing can be empowering: The remoteness of the researcher from the participant (over the phone rather than face to face) can be an empowering experience for research participants. Participants are generally more in control with a phone based interview, and feel more enabled to tell researchers what they want to discuss and what they don’t want to discuss. It is also much easier to put down a phone than it is to walk away from a face to face interview. Professionals interviewed for this document described participants as having “more ownership” of the process. One example of this is when discussing sexual violence, during face to face interviews it was described that participants were likely to evade the topic, whereas on the phone, participants felt empowered to say outright that they did not want to discuss the subject.
2. Disinhibition effects: Phone based interviews are likely to lead to greater disclosures on behalf of participants at increased speed. The absence of visual cues together with the intimacy of having the researcher’s voice directly into the participants’ ear can result in the potential for more rapid and open disclosures. Participants can feel more anonymous, and without the physical presence, facial expressions, and body language of the researcher to help contain and hold the pace of disclosure, participants may be more likely to share difficult emotions or experiences at an amplified rate. In piloting the TAG interviews, we found that there were disinhibition effects with phone based interviewing. A well-known participant, who never normally speaks much in person, stepped outside the house, and was able to speak through their feelings at such a rate it surprised the researcher on the other end of the phone.
3. Boundaries can blur: Talking more is a feature of remote research, because without the visual cues, you want your participant to be more aware that you are present. This may mean that we reveal more about ourselves, or disclose more to our participants; we may self-disclose in a way that we wouldn't in person. Researchers can support themselves by holding this in mind, increasing their awareness about the potential for this to occur and arming themselves with tools to manage these dynamics. A useful tool is to be upfront at the beginning of the research about what the purpose is of the research, and to re-stress this purpose to ensure consistent boundaries. This is picked up more in the section on managing participant distress below.
4. Confidentiality and safe spaces: As researchers are no longer in the same spaces as participants, it can be harder to assess whether participants are truly in a private and safe space. Researchers described some participants as wanting to discuss sensitive topics in front of partners and children. This puts the researcher in a difficult position. If the participant is happy to discuss sensitive themes in front of others, and feels completely safe, how does the interviewer tell them “No?” Can research ever be truly confidential and safe if someone else can overhear?
   
   It can be helpful to ask at the start of each interview, “Can I just check that you’re in a private and confidential space before we begin?” In doing so, you are safeguarding against any potential breach of this later on, where you might have to interrupt the session at a later time when you overhear someone else in the room. It is also important to note that some young people will not experience their homes as a safe place and you will have to consider how to support them to manage the interview with you in such a situation. Perhaps it won’t be appropriate to conduct the interview with this young person. Perhaps you can ask the participant to step outside if there are a lot of people in the house. This is something to reflect upon in supervision and debriefing.
5. Managing interrupted interviews: At this time with phone based interviews, it is much more likely that there will be interruptions. There are some practical ways you can mitigate this risk, including asking around practicalities straight after obtaining informed consent, including: “Do you have enough battery? What happens if we get cut off? Do you have good network?” However, the nature of a phone call means that at any time, a participant can hang up. You will have to be more flexible and responsive to participants. This is partly why interviews have been shortened as much as possible.
6. Interviewer self-care: Phone based interviewing can feel more intense. You are concentrating very hard, maybe your participants’ voice is right in your ear (because you use headphones) and you are giving your participant complete concentration. Interviews can therefore be potentially distressing for researchers at this time. We have expanded this in the section on good self-care below. 

How do we identify distress over the phone?
According to Dictionary.com, distress is “great pain, anxiety, or sorrow; acute physical or mental suffering; affliction; trouble” or a “state of extreme necessity or misfortune.” It can be the result of poor mental health, historic abuse, or even physical pain, which could be triggered by the interview process. Not all distress will require a referral. Sometimes the simple process of disclosing feelings can help the participant feel supported.
 
Without visual cues, it can seem harder to identify when our participants are distressed with phone-based interviewing, however there are some techniques for assessing how participants are doing during interviews.
 
1.Assess the nonverbal: You will need to assess unspoken language to see how participants are doing. Ask yourself “Does the participant seem reluctant to respond?”
 
2.Tone of voice is a powerful form of non-verbal communication: Listen to the tone of the participant’s voice and listen to the words that they use, what could be “flag” words that identify all is not well? Listen for pauses, breathing, changes in voice patterns, background noises, as all of these will become significant. Listen to the tone and pace of the words being used, and the little inflections in the voice. On the phone, we can hear the slightest change in movement from our participants, what does that movement mean about the emotional state of the person you are speaking with?
 
3.Consistently check-in with your participants: Ask them “are you still OK?” If a participant sounds vulnerable, they may not speak up about it, so you can choose to ask them how they are feeling. To really find out what’s going on, we need to engage in a conversation with our participants, ask them how they are, truly listen to the answer, and encourage them to open up if they feel comfortable. Your pauses or silences for some young people will be difficult, and participants may wonder if you’re still there or whether you’re still listening. You will need to find a balance between letting the participant know you’re still present, whilst allowing the important silence for the participant to respond to your questions. Minimal encouragements can help to support this (mmhmm) or you might want to say more, ‘I’m still here…’
 
4.Practice active listening: You will have been trained on some of the techniques of active listening (including the five key techniques to show you are listening. These are so useful when conducting phone based interviewing.

• Pay attention.
• Show that you're listening.
• Provide feedback.
• Defer judgment.
• Respond appropriately.

 
The best way that you can understand whether you participant is OK, is by listening to them, and asking them.
 
Strategies to deal with distress:
Often it will become clear very quickly if a participant is distressed. What can be more challenging is understanding what to do when a participant is distressed. There are levels to this, as if a participant is at risk of immediate harm, this is an emergency situation and requires immediate action in line with the HUBs safeguarding policies.
 
Referrals are not discussed in this document, as they are covered in-depth in a separate referral pathways document. The referral pathways document specifically looks at what to do when a participant has made a disclosure in the following areas:

• Sexual/ Physical Abuse (ongoing/in home or community)
• Suicidality/Mental Health
• Food Insecurity 
• TB Test or TB Treatment
• Cognitive delay/ Child Disability 
• Pregnancy
• HIV Test
• Special School
• School Uniform
• Substance Abuse
• Child Mortality
• Grants

 
Techniques for managing distress:

1. When you have identified that a participant is in distress, be compassionate, kind and non-judgemental. The best way to start any conversation around distress is to acknowledge the participants feelings. You can have a stock phrase that you say “It sounds like that has been very difficult for you.” Even if it is the only thing you will be able to do, acknowledging people’s feelings will go a large way to making them feel supported.
2. In more practical terms, you can help the participant assess their existing resources. Whether they are accessing existing services to support their distress, or if they have friends and family they can speak to, or what individual techniques they have to cope with their current situation. You could ask:
   - “Have you been accessing any professional services to help you manage how you are feeling?”
   - "Is there anyone in your family or one of your friends that you can speak to about this?” 
   - “How have you been able to manage these feelings in the past?” (This helps participants draw on existing strengths and capabilities)?
3. Give time: Before you jump in to “fix” the situation, which is a natural human response, we may need to give our participant some space and time to collect themselves and reflect. Perhaps you may even need to reschedule the interview. This is also part of ensuring you have good consent to continue. 
4. Finally, try and end on a positive note. Perhaps in this situation a referral wasn’t need. You have acknowledged the participants feelings, you have assessed the resources they have in place and you have given time for them to collect themselves. You can thank the participant for disclosing how they are feeling. You may find, as a research assistant, that your conversation and disclosure was a positive experience in itself for the participant.

 
What if the participant hangs up? This is a real possibility with phone based research. Debriefing can help you explore how you feel if a young person exercises their right to flee from an interview, or their emotions, by hanging up a call. Those who feel the need to escape or remove themselves from a difficult feeling or situation may find it easier to do so by putting down the phone than they would do walking out of an interview. It is important to consider what you would do and how you might feel ahead of this could, so you can mentally prepare for the eventuality if it does happen. What will it be like if you aren’t able to reconnect? When does a risk assessment come into play? How do you determine whether this was about their right to respond to a difficult feeling to look after themselves or whether there is something of a more serious nature at play that needs to be acted upon? These are questions to explore in training, debriefing and in supervision. 

Self-care strategiesSelf-care is very important when you are engaging with participants. This includes practicing self-awareness; when you feel overwhelmed and you are not OK in the middle of a conversation, don’t be afraid to take a step back. You can make any excuse to stop the call and find the time to look after yourself. Some of these measures may help you look after yourself during an interview:
 
1.Set clear boundaries: When you call your participant you introduce yourself and the purpose of your study – it’s a type of contracting. Do not be afraid to revisit the purpose of your call. We are not trained counsellors, therefore when you can sense the conversation is getting deeper than you are able to hold in your capacity, be honest with the participant, and tell them you can hear they are going through a lot, but that you are not a trained counsellor. You can then explore with them some referral pathways. Offer that resource to them rather than trying to bear the burden yourself.
 
2.Keep your team updated and debrief: It is OK to not know what to do. Take the time with your manager or a colleague and discuss your interviews.
 
3.Take time for you: Take a step back often. Being on the front line means being in the heat of the moment, and we always need time to reflect and flush out the heat. Take your time and give yourself space when interviewing participants. Take a break when you feel frustrated. Know that you are allowed to pause your interviews to collect yourself. Stop, go for a walk, whatever makes you feel relaxed. When you cannot keep calm, make any excuse to take your break and find that calmness. You don’t have to let it all in and listen and you are not there to fix all of the problems that you will hear. You need to look after yourself, so that you can be the best researcher possible for your participants.
 
4.Use a counsellor or call a helpline: Do not be afraid to use the services on offer for yourself. In many ways, hearing what are participants are going through will remind us of what has been happening in our own lives. You are going through this COVID19 experience as well. Do not be afraid to reach out.
 
5.Find out how to build your resilience and develop a resilience toolkit: Attached to this document, is an article about the RESPECT model. This is a model of self-care that suggests ways of building ourselves up to be able to withstand or manage stressful or traumatic experiences. The model suggests that we find ways to do the following when we feel overwhelmed:

• R – Relaxation: Find out what makes you feel relaxed and do more of it. You could learn simple breathing exercises. One simple technique is to make the out breath longer than the in breath, which does the opposite of the stress response and activates our parasympathetic nervous system
• E – Education: Understand the stress cycle, by identifying our own symptoms and triggers and building this resource list for ourselves, will all help us to feel more in control.
• S – Social: Speak to people, call your family and friends. Kindness is another wonderful resource. It builds a sense of worth, and a sense of control over a situation that feels out of our control. It keeps us connected.  
• P – Physical: We need to consider our diet, and monitor our alcohol, nicotine, sugar and caffeine intake. We often reach out for these substances when we are under a great deal of stress, but they can make us more stressed.
• E – Exercise: Exercise, go for a walk. It will release endorphins, making us feel better in ourselves.
• C – Creative: Activate your creative brain, by writing or singing, drawing or painting. Maybe you can spend time drawing with your children if you have them.
• T – Thinking: Many neuroscientists state that we have a negative brain bias. When we are stressed, we are going to have some of the following thoughts, ‘I am not coping’, ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am powerless’. A common stress thinking patterns at this time would be catastrophising, ‘something bad is going to happen to me or my family’ or ‘this is never going to end’. Identify what negative thoughts are being triggered for you at this time, write them down, and write a counterargument or mantra that helps you to challenge the negative thought.

 
6.Finally, be kind to yourself: You are not going to get it right all of the time. It is OK to make mistakes, and we can all learn from them. 


MIND Resources

• Offer free online training to build employee confidence about mental health.
• Provide Mind Training, Workplace Wellbeing Index, and information booklets.
• Additional tools include Mental Health at Work coronavirus toolkit and information on coronavirus and managing your mental health.

 
References
The content in this document was informed by the following professionals and agencies, and we are grateful for their support.

• Nokubonga Ralayo
• Dr. Heidi Stoeckel
• Felicity Runchman
• Fiona Dunkley
• Off the Record, Youth counselling service.
• National Health Service (Low mood resources)
• National Institute of Mental Health (suicidality and Mental Health First Aid)
• MIND, the mental health charity

 
For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace.  FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.

“85% of individuals felt stigma was still a problem in the workplace and prevented people from reaching out for necessary support” (Dunkley, 2018)
 
Instigating mental health peer support programmes into an organisation can help challenge stigma and create a healthy organisational culture. Peer support programmes are cost effective and can help reach staff that are in remote locations or have limited access to psychosocial support.
 
“85% of individuals felt stigma was still a problem in the workplace and prevented people from reaching out for necessary support” (Dunkley, 2018). Another factor preventing staff from reaching out for support is due to feelings of ‘guilt’. One aid worker informed me it took her five years before she reached out for help after suffering from vicarious trauma symptoms. Due to the time it took her to get support her vicarious trauma had now become a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. She said to me, ‘I felt guilty if I informed anyone I was suffering. How could I complain, when I was faced with such despair in my work, and others were suffering from so much more than me?’
 
A manager that had gone through organisational restructuring and had to make some of his team’s roles redundant, had found the process very stressful. Previously he had been working to a tight deadline to complete a campaign he was working on supporting individuals who had been falsely imprisoned. By the time he came to see FD Consultants his stress had turned into burnout. ‘I would find myself bursting into tears or be overcome with anger at the slightest thing. I felt constantly on edge, had difficulty sleeping and had awful vivid thoughts of people trying to get to me. It took me several months before I admitted to myself, I need help.’
 
Peer support programmes train peers to offer early and good quality support which can prevent an individual’s vicarious trauma developing into post-traumatic stress disorder, or stress developing into burnout. If someone goes off work with stress-related issues they may be off work for a few days, if someone goes off work with burnout, they may be off work for weeks or even months and may never return to the workplace. Additionally, research shows that when an individual receives support early, they will recover quicker, therefore preventing long-term health problems.
 
Training mental health peer supporters in the workplace enables staff to feel equipped to recognise the warning signs and symptoms of ill-mental health in themselves or their colleagues and feel prepared to offer the initial support and signposting to specialist psychological services if necessary. In our workshops we provide simple and practical tools to support individuals in distress. The training also builds individual’s resilience and understanding in how best to support themselves when under high levels of stress, whether from workload, the nature of the work, tight deadlines, a rapidly expanding organisation, or organisational restructuring.
 
I visited an Occupational Health service in Nairobi to train staff in responding in a crisis. During the training I referred to the word, ‘Ubuntu’ (a Nguni word and Southern African philosophy) – ‘I am, because we are’. Healing from workplace psychological challenges should be a collaborative process; we need support from mental health informed organisations, with implemented best practice psychological support services and well-trained mental health peer supporters. This alone can create a healthy and resilient organisational culture. Van Der Kolk, a psychiatrist, also refers to the word Ubuntu: ‘my most profound experience with healing from collective trauma was witnessing the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was based on the central and guiding principle of Ubuntu…. that denotes sharing what you have, as in “my humanity is inextricably bound up in yours.” Ubuntu recognises that true healing is impossible without recognition of our common humanity and our common destiny.’ (Van Der Kolk, 2014, p. 349).
 
I leave you to reflect on how well your workplace integrates the word ‘Ubuntu’ into the values and principles of the organisation.
 
If you want to help to implement a peer support programme into your organisation, please email info@fionadunkley.com.
 
Fiona Dunkley
(Founder of FD Consultants)

For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace.  FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.

“When we are impacted by trauma, we may feel chained, restricted, fragmented, subdued, and penned in by unmoveable obstacles. The process of Post-Traumatic Growth can free us from those chains.”
(FD Consultants)
 
The image of an elephant, in its original habitat, roaming through the Kruger Park, South Africa, is imprinted on my mind today; watching the magnificent stillness, at sunset and sunrise, as the red blanket radiates over the landscape. I have also witnessed elephants in India during festival times, although equally magnificent creatures, this was a harder observation, as the elephants had large chains around their ankles and had become subdued to the loud bangs of celebration all around them. In Hinduism, Ganesha, one of the most worshipped Gods, is easily recognised by his elephant’s head. Ganesha is characterised as the remover of obstacles. The large elephant headed deity, removing that which is negative in its path.
 
When we are impacted by trauma, we may feel chained, restricted, fragmented, subdued, and penned in by unmoveable obstacles. There is a great deal of research now that shows when we recover from trauma, we can experience post traumatic growth. My book “Psychosocial Support for Humanitarian Aid Workers: A Roadmap of Trauma and Critical Incident Care” (Dunkley, 2018), is full of case studies of aid workers who have suffered acute stress, burnout or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The last chapter focuses on each and every one of these stories and describes a process of ‘post traumatic growth’, where many of these individuals have gone on to use their experiences to help others.
 
My own story of post traumatic growth is described in my book, and perhaps is the main reason my work specialises in trauma care. I am able to sit in the most uncomfortable places and hold hope that each individual will recover. I strongly believe everyone can recover from trauma with specialist support. Unfortunately, there are many therapists that state they work with trauma but are not specialists. The risk is that someone’s recovery of maybe six sessions, develops into years of talking therapy. Many of our associates at FD Consultants offer EMDR and TF-CBT trauma therapy (as recommended by WHO, APA and NICE).
 
At FD Consultants we offer a half-day ‘Trauma and Vicarious Trauma Workshop’. Staff that are identified in ‘high risk’ roles, possibly through the location or intensity of their work, or the risk of being exposed to traumatic material, whether directly or indirectly, would benefit from this workshop. It is a more in-depth look at the neuroscience of trauma, physiology, symptoms and building resources, than our stress management workshop. There are many myths and misunderstanding about how to best treat individuals who are traumatised. There is also a great risk of re-traumatising someone, who is suffering from trauma symptoms, without the knowledge from this workshop. Therefore, this workshop is also helpful for managers supporting staff who may be suffering trauma or vicarious trauma, and staff who have been impacted by a critical incident.
 
Over the last few years at FD Consultants we have supported staff who have experienced sexual violence, hostage and kidnapping, civil unrest, assault, bullying and harassment, road traffic accidents, natural disasters, death of colleagues, and the impact of organisational restructuring. We have supported organisations’ whose staff have been impacted by the Ethiopian plane crash, conflict in Yemen and Syria, earthquakes in Indonesia, floods in India, the Persian Gulf crisis, further Ebola outbreaks, and the Myanmar Rohingya refugee crisis. Last year, due to Coronavirus, we created a series of workshops and services for organisations to specifically take care of their staff through this unprecedented and challenging time.
 
But not only do we, as FD Consultants, recognise the direct impact of trauma, we also make sure organisations do not overlook the corrosive impact of vicarious trauma, sometimes known as secondary trauma. Research states that by listening to stories of trauma, we can start to be impacted by trauma symptoms, especially if we are empathic or intuitive, as our mirror neurones start to fire in the same way as the person telling us the story. Listening to the media or reading traumatic material can impact us vicariously. Organisations do not necessarily know what lies in someone’s past and whether they may have a deep-rooted trauma that can be triggered by the work they do.
 
We have carried out psychological debriefings for staff who completed research on human rights issues, such as torture, false imprisonment, sexual violence or suicide. We support researchers, journalists, IT social media analysts, and legal staff. We have also helped frontline staff, such as reception staff, who may experience direct threat in the office, or indirect threat through social media or email. For one large international NGO (non-governmental organisation), we have started facilitating ‘threat communication’ workshops alongside security consultants, as personal and organisational threat is significantly increasing on social media.
 
If you want to find out more about our workshops, please email info@fionadunkley.com.
 
If you are working in an environment where there is risk of being exposed to traumatic material, or you are managing staff that are at risk, please become trauma informed.
 
Fiona Dunkley
(Founder of FD Consultants)

For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace.  FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.

“Try to give yourself the gift of time, even for one day, and listen to your inner truth when sitting in your silence.” (FD Consultants)
 
The beginning of my 2020 was starkly different from the beginning of my 2021. At the time little was I to know we were about to head into a global pandemic. When the boarders were freely open, I was fortunate to start 2020 in Kerala, South India on a working holiday. My 5am alarm clock was music and chanting coming from the nearby temple. I would take an early morning stroll, before the heat of the sun zapped my energy, through the local village to the fishing port. Here, time seemed to stand still, as I watched the fishermen rhythmically lowering and raising their large fishing nets into the water, intuitively knowing when the time was right to catch their fish. Watching these men created a space for a pause; a moment deep inside myself. I took a deep breath in as the nets lowered, and a completed breath out as the nets rose. A technique I have needed to turn to often whilst supporting myself through this pandemic.
 
I have had so many clients say to me in their assessment sessions, “I feel like I haven’t breathed properly for years”. How precious our breath is and how we take it for granted. It is our life source and so much healing and good health comes from breathing properly and mindfully. One exercise I teach participants in FD Consultants stress management workshop is to take a deep breath in and make the out breath longer than the in breath. This activates our parasympathetic nervous system, helping us to relax. For one client it took a full month before she could make her out-breath longer than her in-breath, which showed me she had been living life in the stress lane for a very long time.
 
At FD Consultants we offer a half-day Stress Management and Resilience Building workshop. We recommend that “ALL” staff who join an organisation where workload and work pressure is high, or there is a risk of being exposed to traumatic material, whether directly or indirectly, should attend this workshop as part of their induction. Staff need to be given the space at the very outset to build strategies for managing stress, and to recognise the signs in themselves and their colleagues. We want to encourage organisations to build into their framework preventative measures to best support their staff. These workshops improve an organisation’s culture and create a healthy and resilient organisation. By giving staff the tools to recognise the signs of stress, trauma, burnout or compassion fatigue, we enable them to reach out for support when necessary. Research has shown that the earlier someone gets support, the quicker they will recover, and this can prevent long-term illness.
 
I had time to digest a healthy dose of reading material whilst away. One of the books I read was, Joy on Demand, by Chade-Meng Tan. He believes, "we can develop major mental skills like the ability to access joy on demand, and in doing so, improve every single aspect of our lives. The mental equivalent of physical exercise is meditation" (Tan, 2016). By learning techniques to calm the mind, we can be more prepared during stressful times, and keep ourselves mentally well. Another book I enjoyed reading was Momo (Ende, 1984), a beautiful story about where time comes from. It is full of poignant messages about what we value in life, "time is life itself, and life resides in the human heart." In the story “time thieves” strip humans of time, humans start working harder and faster, and avoid at all costs sitting in silence.
 
It is not until we learn to sit in our own silence that we can change unhealthy patterns, as the noise of “doing" drowns all other reason out of the mind. I have heard people attend our workshops stating that they never have time for themselves, as if it is something they have just come to accept. We need to listen to our self-talk and hear the warning signs loud and clear. If we are saying we never have enough time for ourselves, then something has to change, or we will become ill. It took me a week into my break before I could fully relax. I found myself feeling "guilty," and saying to myself, "I should be doing more". One of the topics we cover in the stress management workshop is the eight common stress thinking patterns, the eighth pattern being stuck in thinking of what we "should", "ought to", and "must" be doing.
 
Many of the Keralan people I met through my work seemed to have embodied this wisdom. Lakshit, a life coach, said to me one morning "the more you chase the money, the unhealthier your lifestyle becomes, and the more you have to spend on putting yourself right again". His statement reminded me of the stress cycle, the longer we are in it the harder it is to see, and the more difficult it is to break. He also taught me to focus on the "experience" I offer to people. My dream is to setup a retreat, but at present I can’t work out how that can happen financially, but an “experience” can be gained anywhere, and anytime through human connection. His statement helped me to reframe my thinking by bringing my mind back to appreciating the present, rather than stretching too far into the future.
 
Another beautiful soul I met who manages a small Airbnb by cooking, cleaning and driving his Tuk Tuk, Mr Jobin said, "I love my job, I constantly see the scenery change around me, it refreshes my mind each and every day." Enjoying being in the moment and connecting to nature are such simple and rich resources for calming the mind, and don’t cost us a single thing.
 
If you want to find out more about our workshops, please email info@fionadunkley.com.
 
Try to give yourself the gift of time, even for one day, and listen to your inner truth when sitting in your silence.
 
Fiona Dunkley
(Founder of FD Consultants)

For organisations looking for employee psychological support, FD Consultants are the trauma specialists and well-being service who will best deliver a reliable, quick, and bespoke support system in the workplace.  FD Consultant’s team of accredited specialists will offer ongoing support to help manage stress, prevent burnout and provide specialist trauma care where required, enabling your staff with the tools to cope, and recover more quickly.