INTRO: This podcast is sponsored by Microlink the UK’s largest assistive technology and
workplace adjustment provider.
George: Hi I’m George Selvenera and I’m here today with Dr Nasser Siabi the Chief
Executive Officer of Microlink one of Business Disability Forum’s partners and delighted to
be able speak to Dr Siabi today about all things Occupational health and workplace
adjustments, just because we’re very interested to ensure that this is not just a
conversation with Dr Siabi, we really look forward to hearing from people and getting
feedback and indeed questions for Dr Siabi himself, so by all means email us at
[email protected] telephone us a 0207 4033020 or tweet as at twitter
handle @disabilitysmart.
So we’re talking as I say about all things occupational health and workplace adjustments
and indeed I guess one of things to sort of start this off really is that the all-party
parliamentary group on looking at occupational health has gone as far as to say that there
is a crisis in occupational health, 64% of occupational health practioners in the UK are
over 50, over 50% are likely to retire in the next 10 years and there’s not adequate
replacements. And this happens of course at the same time as the population of Britain is
ageing fast by 2020, 1 in 3 workers will be aged 50 plus and that will be the larger
segment of the work population from about 2023/2024, but of course we can talk about
occupational health and we can talk about the recruitment crisis but perhaps there is also
something about just doing it differently as well, and that’s where we are delighted to have
Dr Siabi who’s CEO as I say of Microlink a leading provider of adjustments for employees
and students that have adjustment requirements, here with us today, so look Dr Siabi
thank you very much indeed for your time, firstly I mean do you want to tell us a little about
your experience in delivering workplace adjustments that deliver the right adjustment
quickly? Nasser: Hello George thank you for inviting me for this podcast and I think the
issue that you highlighted has become pretty dominant among the oc health providers and
we know from working with many of them that they’re struggling to recruit the right people
and also the referral rates among the people is gone up and that’s actually putting a lot of
pressure on resources.
Microlink started about 25 years ago, our prime role was to help disabled students at
university to have the right adjustment to achieve their potential and indeed in 25 years we
have helped more than 250,000 students and that’s one of our pride achievements in life
and we obviously think those people have gone on to do great things and I have very good
examples of how people have succeeded where as they would not have managed to
come out of education with anything to live with. About 10 years ago we got involved with
BDF and I was really delighted to be admitted into one of the partner organisations, we
were a small company and we certainly had something unique to offer, when we came
here we worked with big organisations like Lloyds banking group to start re-engineering
the work placement adjustment programme, it was a blank piece of paper and we’ve gone
on to do great things it’s become the industry standard the gold plated service, but I can
go through that later. George: Ok Dr Siabi thank you for that and indeed I mean it’s an
extraordinary achievement over 250,000 disabled students that you have been able to
help in this country in 25 years and as you say 10 years of being among the leading
workplace adjustment providers as well, I guess as an organisation that’s working with
organisations around workplace adjustments what’s your perspective on where employers
tend to go wrong in how they approach workplace adjustments? Nasser: Well when we
entered this market in the corporate sector there weren’t any other providers there weren’t
any organisations who were doing this end to end service provision so when we starting
working with Lloyds bank we learnt a great deal and it was really more of a trial and error
and I think what we found which is still going on with most organisations, there is not a
clear strategy in most organisations, very few organisations have top layer of senior
engagement from like the board level and certainly stake holders are not really engaged
in the process, to top it all off there is no funding, there is a lot of funding for occupational
health because they take that as must, we must, and they don’t even look at how much
they spend on that because its accepted they need it but when it comes to this very
important area which can reduce the spend on occupational health I’m afraid the funding is
always a major issue, so we’ve found that by speaking to the people who really want to do
it right, very quickly we can get them round and do a very quick process that works but
actually implementation takes a lot longer because they have to go and convince others at
the organisation so that’s a bigger problem to resolve. George: Right so tell us then ,
listening to you I mean there is a couple of key things I guess that emerge in what you’ve
just said, there’s something which is about leadership, there’s something which is about
understanding process, there’s something which is about recognising what role
occupational health has and indeed perhaps where might there be a different role for
occupational health and I guess as well just that there’s clearly this needs to be properly
funded too, so if there in some sense is some of the components as to what makes for a
good workplace adjustment process ensuring that there’s that senior engagement,
ensuring that there’s adequate funding , ensuring that there is a kind of thought through
interim process, can you tell us a little but more then? I’d like to explore each of those kind
of components with you then. Tell us more about the leadership component and why that’s
important.
Nasser: Course, well you look at the whole work place adjustment programme it’s like a
jigsaw puzzle, you might have all the components, you might have missing components,
any one of those components will have to be working with others, they need to fit into a
very perfect picture, in order for it to work properly, however you can’t design a system
unless you see that perfect picture, so I think the mistake most organisations do actually
make and we still come across them, they go to their senior engagers, senior managers or
senior directors, they get the buy in from them and they say go and make it happen, what
they end up doing is actually going out and trying to re-engineer something from scratch
without looking at the best practice, looking at what good looks like and this Lloyds case
study demonstrated it wasn’t an overnight success, we worked really hard at it with Lloyds
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bank but it’s got to a stage where senior directors will come in and say well I need this
done but they assign a team to actually make sure it happens, but the team have the
backing of the senior directors, they can go and tell all the other internal stake holders you
need to work with us, it is not an option, that is one thing missing so you could actually
have partner in a company, a chairman or a chief executive, or a disability team or a
diversity team can you make us great, the difficulty then is that HR is not engaged you get
IT saying we’re not playing ball here, so you need to actually bring them round the table
and that can happen if you have a clear picture of what you want to design ,what you want
to build and often they don’t have that picture. Now we’ve actually tried to help them to use
that template that we’ve created, Lloyds bank and several other clients, I say well here’s a
starting position, you don’t have to use us but what you can do is stop wasting a lot of
money on external consultants, internal ‘pileage’ and all sorts of other enquires to arrive at
the same decision, this is what a nice picture looks like, implement it then improve it and
that’s probably the biggest success most companies have, when their senior engagement
tells them to do it they need to go back with the plan and that plan has to be quick, and
that’s probably why most companies don’t end up doing it because they don’t really get
back to the board of directors and say well here’s the plan can you fund it.
George: I think as you’re talking as well one of the things that strikes me is that you’re also
talking about the fact that this is a whole organisation approach, you made reference to
the variety of different sorts of departments that might be, that have got an interest I
should say in wanting to be able to deliver if you like a workplace adjustment, I guess I’m
conscious of I don’t know a person with dyslexia for instance that might require an IT
adjustment which involves the IT department, which might involve the procurement
department, which might involve the recruitment people, which might involve the HR
person which might involve the line manager and indeed it might even involve someone in
communications and that just dyslexia. Nasser: It’s a chaotic picture actually George, as I
said you might have all the components separately but ultimately the implementation
comes down to a line manager, you know ‘well I’m dyslexic I need help’ well first of all I
don’t know where to send you, I know we have some programme but I don’t know where
to send you, even if I know where to send you then I have to find the money, if I find the
money then who is going to help me to implement it because I need to contact IT? who do
I call in IT and where do I buy the kit, and these are all the problems that every
organisation they come across, started with, they have occupational health managing
health of an individual it’s a kind of binary outcome you’re either well or you’re not if you
are well don’t come to us, if you are not well we’ll fix you get you back to work, but what
happens when they come back to work they are still in the environment that made them
unwell, so you need to fix that as well. Occupational health people are very good at
diagnosing your health and trying to fix it but they’re not very good at assessing the impact
of your condition on the work you do, so when you start putting these jigsaws next to each
other they really need to fit like a proper jigsaw, if you put them out of alignment you will
find that things will not work as well, and because it doesn’t work you won’t get the funding
you won’t get the backing you won’t get any you know because it becomes an
embarrassment, so what we have to really recognise is a place for a line manager, a
place for Oc health, a place for senior engagement ,a place for all the other stake holders
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but somebody needs to coordinate it and that person or team has to be either internal to
the organisation could be quite costly to put it together for a large organisation or it should
outsourced and this is where Lloyds bank decided we just don’t have the expertise, the
know-how, the experience ,nor the financial power to create the big team to manage this
whole process so we’ll go to the people who know how to and so that’s the secret is to
actually make sure all these people talk to each other and they will talk to each other if the
senior people tell them to, but they also want to fix the problem its not that they want to put
road blocks in your way, they just don’t know how to do it, and someone needs to tell them
this is the way to do it, once they learn its plain sailing. George: Well we’ll come to talk
about some of the benefits that have been realised at Lloyds bank actually from
engagement that they’ve had with you as a provider, and you know you’ve I think set out
really clearly the value of leadership the value of that whole organisational approach and
the looking and the need I guess to look for the different expertise, the different parts of
the system if you like, can bring , tell us then I mean I guess using Lloyds as an example
how do they use occupational health now compared to how they used them at the
beginning? Nasser: Right well Occupational health is used by different companies
differently , Lloyds used to use the oc health as a gateway towards their WPA, workplace
adjustment really didn’t fit very well with the role because essentially someone says ‘I have
this problem’ they say ‘yes you have this problem’ but I don’t have a solution for you so
they outsource it to another company if they are good at this to make sure somebody as
the experts do it, sadly that introduces or introduced a lot of delays and also needlessly
added to the cost because every case you refer you have to pay them an amount of
money. George: Is that for like an assessment? Nasser: No actually just opening a case
and dealing with a case is an additional cost of managing the case, so Lloyds thought, well
if people are not sick and they just need adjustment we don’t care what their condition is, if
its impacting the work we want it fixed so we’re not really too hung up about this legal
definition of what disability is, anyone with conditions whether they’re diagnosed or
undiagnosed, declared undeclared they need help, we’ll help them and so we trust are
employees, so when they came ,they set up the WPA they said ‘well anyone who has
health conditions here’s oc health anyone who goes to WPA goes to Microlink, later on
they realised they’re not using oc health that much, for two reasons, one a lot of the
referrals were really asking for simple interventions, secondly those who got the
intervention they actually never went off sick so I believe Lloyds among the sector in their
industry I’m not going to quote numbers because I don’t know this or commercial
confidential but I believe that they have the lowest budget for occupational health among
the banking sector for the same size, now someone needs to go and investigate that , and
prove it among others but I do suspect that they are not using oc health as much as other
organisations because they really are getting it right, 90% of the people we surveyed a
year after intervention told us they hadn’t gone off sick in the past 12 months and that’s a
huge drop and that’s because they’re not using Oc Health anymore. George: Well that’s
an extraordinary achievement and a really clear business benefit , financial business
benefit as well as obviously speaking to better productivity and better staff moral and
engagement, I mean tell us actually a little bit more about some of those benefits Dr Siabi.
I mean you’ve made reference to the fact that occupational health is used significantly less
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as a consequence of the kind of a much more defined role for them to handle if you like
the more complex cases that relate to specific health conditions, tell us about how costs
for example have fallen, I’m sure that our listeners will be very interested in that. Nasser:
Well we, when we started there was very little data available cause nobody captured data
and indeed most organisations don’t really have much data about health conditions, the
cause of absentees, the number of tribunals they go through these are all confidential they
don’t share public so when we started all they had was cases took several months to
complete and the average cost was north of 2000 pounds, maybe 2800 pounds, they
wanted, this is the Mark Fisher the Director of Sweden Lloyds bank said ‘I want it done in
less than 20 days and certainly I like it to be more efficient cost wise, needless to say 5
years later with all the re-engineering we did the cost is dropped to below 700 pounds per
case and its done in less than 14 days, now this is not even slightly or much better than
what’s the industry average it is incredibly substantially better than what others can show
partly because the process is so smooth for individuals to refer to , they even come to the
process for things which are not really disability related so we have to refer them back sign
post to the correct department so that’s the advantage of actually getting it right so it
becomes the people to go to, to get other problems resolved not that you want that but
actually as a side effect if I want to use it more. George: Yeah so I guess that’s a classic
sign of success that you get asked to do even more things. Nasser: Indeed yeah.
George: So as yore talking you’re talking about a more than 70 % reduction in average
case costs and also reduction in the average time that it takes for a case to be resolved,
so that when I say that I mean so the person receives the right adjustment and that’s
actually implemented and in place from somewhere between 60 -90 days to an average of
14 days for a large complex organisation like Lloyds bank that’s an extraordinary
achievement and you also kind of made reference before to the number of days lost where
you mentioned that more than 90%, there’s been a more than 90% reduction in staff
absence tell me as well I guess, I mean about, I guess you’ve to some extent hinted at it,
that if you’re being asked to do even more things that aren’t even related to workplace
adjustments that says something about the value that both line managers and staff are
placing on the workplace adjustment process so in terms of things like staff moral for
example how is that? Nasser: Well when you get the process right, absolutely you find the
line managers actually use that as a tool to improve the moral within the team, the
productivity, now the surveys we’ve done they are all in house data surveys and that’s
scientifically proven, but we have the largest data set anywhere in the world about
workplace adjustments, the number of cases, different conditions, we capture hundreds of
data and we can analyse, we’ve demonstrated that line managers, more than 65% of them
have told us they’ve seen significant or incredibly good productivity improvement from
individuals I mean from 1-5 majority put 3-5 in improvement a year before they’d actually
said their impact on the work was again 3-5 so it shows that we’ve reversed that condition,
secondly people who reported absentees from about a 1000 people survey around 12,000
days were lost a year later the same people reported 800 days lost, so again you see the
return on investment on reducing the direct cost of absentees, it was twice, two and a half
times, more than the cost of actually putting the adjustment, so the return on the
investment is just absolutely beyond doubt, but we haven’t even measured quantified the
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improvement in productivity but if something is working well that improves the relationships
within the teams not just the line manager and individual, again that’s not something we
can measure but we know that its good for an organisation for a team to work together,
there is no tension there is no stress and people actually are coming round and performing
like a team, so there’s plenty of benefits that we’ve actually shown needs to be obviously
done properly by a scientific agency to actually prove this is the way to improve well-being
of the workforce regardless of the disability or inclusion agenda this is financial benefit to
every organisation who has spent billions every year to get half a percentage improvement
on productivity yet with the very small cost it can improve it by double digits. George: Well
I think Dr Siabi a more than 90% reduction in sick days amongst a cohort that when you
were taking sick days speaks for itself. Nasser: Yeah, these are condition specific
George: Yes. Nasser: And out of those 90% 75% said it was because of the adjustment
so some people could have had skiing accident and obviously they were fixed, but 75%
said it was because of the adjustment they are now turning up to work. George: That’s an
outstanding achievement, I guess one of things, just one of my final questions really is a
lot of people will say ‘yes but that’s Llloyd’s bank they’re a large organisation the can
afford to fund this’, you’re a small organisation yourself but how much can these sorts of
principals if you like be applied to smaller and medium sized employers? Nasser: Well you
know, I think I have to say this, large organisations have a lot of money and they spend a
lot of money but they’re not spending it in the right places, they might have a big pot of
money to settle legal cases, a big pot of money to look after health and occupational
health, but when you ask them, why don’t you put that sum towards this, they somehow its
like a puzzle to them, ‘well that’s not, never been there so we are not really sure how we
can get the money for it’ so large organisations are not really all that smart I’m afraid
sometimes with the way they spend their money, if they did it in the right way I’m sure they
will get a lot more benefit, smaller organisations are much better employers because there
is that personal relationship between the senior management and the individual so the
empathy is there because most , my own personal experience, most organisations, small
organisations are set up by entrepreneurs who themselves may have suffered
consequence of disability or health condition and they get it, they actually, if they could do
it they would actually make the adjustment and it will take a long time for them to give up
on someone, so the only problem they have is 1. Lack of guidance, lack of awareness,
lack of know-how on how to fix this problem and above all they are afraid of the financial
consequences, if you were to give them that information, that there is funding, its easy to
do and there are people who can help you then I think you will have a much bigger uptake
on this on amongst smaller organisations than large ones, I’m personally convinced, if the
FD and the CEO and maybe even the legal people got together and said ‘what is this
about disability, what benefit do we get’ I don’t think they will hesitate to spend the money
in it but I don’t think they’re engaging to that level to try and fix the problem large
organisation, small organisation I’m afraid are not sophisticated enough, they don’t realise
that if somebody’s got a health condition you can still use them in many ways that would
be better than actually having people without a health condition because they are not
sophisticated they often give up early unless they know there is a solution. George: So
there is something I guess for all of us in making sure that smaller and medium sized
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employers have a better understanding of the sorts of resources and guidance that are
available to help them. Look Dr Siabi we’ve come to the end of our time I think you’ve set
out a whole lot there that I think will be really fruitful and really interesting to our listeners
and to others, speaking I think about actually a really different way of organisations
thinking about how they can more intelligently and better use occupational health, so they
are better using occupational health where they really need to, at the same time as
thinking about how they might apply a very different kind of approach a much a much more
whole organisation approach good leadership they can really deliver some substantial and
significant financial benefits, productivity benefits, moral benefits a whole lot of different
benefits! But thank you so much indeed. Well thank you very much Dr Siabi and I’m sure
there will be people that will be interested to speak further to you so they can certainly do
that, so everyone who wants to can contact Dr Siabi at [email protected] or
alternatively they can contact us here at business disability forum either because we can
put you through to Microlink or because you might have a question for us too and so for
those of you who want to contact us please do at [email protected]
telephone us here in the UK at 02074033020 or tweet us @Disabilitysmart thank you very
much again Dr Siabi.
OUTRO: This podcast is sponsored by Microlink, the UK’s largest assistive technology and
workplace adjustment provider.
www.businessdisabilityforum.org.uk
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