The post What is the link between sport and mental health in the workplace appeared first on Tom Keya.
]]>Mental health issues are major threats to our collective and individual wellbeing. And particularly over the last 18 months of the pandemic, mental health issues are very much on the rise.
Without appropriate support from the corporation, mental health issues are only exacerbated. I’m a firm advocate for facilitating sport and exercise within the workplace – pandemic allowing, of course – in order to mitigate mental health problems and promote wellness.
Firms must open up channels of communication between management and staff to discuss mental health issues. People should feel supported and free to discuss their personal battles. The most important thing is not to allow anyone to feel isolated.
This has been particularly difficult for corporations during lockdowns. There are many positives surrounding remote working, but it can lead to feelings of isolation. And for some employees this can adversely impact their wellbeing.
During my career, I have brought in psychiatrists to talk with my team. Regular communication about our mental health can go a long way to breaking down barriers, so that people feel comfortable asking for help.
Another tool I have often used is to implement sports activities for everyone to get involved with. By stepping away from their desks on a regular basis and exercising in a fun and inclusive way, employees can find that their mental health improves.
There is a well-documented link between sports and mental wellbeing. The Royal College of Psychiatrists officially deem prescribed exercise as a treatment for a number of the most common mental health conditions. This is important progress, but often misconceptions surrounding mental health still rule employer decisions about supporting employee wellbeing.
Statistics from The Faculty of Sport & Exercise Medicine (FSEM) show that mental health issues are extremely common. They are responsible for 23% of all disability reported in the UK. In England, 5.9% of people live with generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), 3.3% with depression, 0.6% with panic disorder and 7.8% with mixed depression and anxiety.
By mental wellbeing in the workplace, I’m referring to a mix of factors. These include:
Studies show that regularly taking part in some kind of physical activity or team sport can help to improve the wellbeing of those dealing with mental health issues and prevent them from developing in others.
There is evidence that physical activity alone can help to treat depression. When combined with some form of therapy and/or medication, it can help enormously. Studies show that adults who exercise every day experience a reduction in depression symptoms of up to 30%.
Evidence also exists – albeit in a more limited form – for physical activity and sport participation’s efficacy in reducing anxiety levels in people who are dealing with mild symptoms.
This is why employers can do so much more to help their employees manage mental health issues by promoting some form of physical activity in the workplace. This could be a team sport that everyone plays regularly, or it could be a step challenge using a tech wearable provided by the company.
While some companies are entirely on board with exercise and sports to boost employee wellbeing, statistics show that others remain reticent. According to a survey by risk management company Gallagher, three in five business leaders remain uncertain of their responsibility regarding the mental health of their employees.
The survey asked 1,000 business leaders across various sectors about employee wellbeing and found that 58% feel unsure about their responsibilities or jurisdiction in this area.
Gallagher points out that in the UK, employers are legally responsible for the health and safety of their workforce under the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations. This includes stress and mental health issues and applies to employees working remotely or away from company premises.
Despite this being enshrined in law in the UK, 31% of business leaders confessed they were unaware of this. This brings in a whole other concern for managers and business owners – that they could be considered negligent and risk a lawsuit against them.
A separate survey was undertaken of 2,000 employees. Around 40% of those employees said they had never had any mental health or wellbeing support from the employer. Of these 2,000, 15% were working from home and reported their mental health had deteriorated due to feeling isolated.
As the world emerges from the pandemic, there is a mental health crisis. Millions of people have reported feeling more anxious and depressed during COVID-19, and we are now seeing remote working transition back to the office.
Employers must act in a systematically supportive way to employees and understand the different challenges individuals are facing. As part of their wellbeing plan for employees, there are several practical steps employers and business leaders can take:
Sport and mental health are closely linked, and business leaders can utilise this to support their team and help them through any mental health problems they are experiencing. It’s not always appropriate for every individual, but employers have a lot of scope to ensure that exercise and physical activity are incorporated into people’s working day.
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]]>The post Can Fintech succeed in bringing impact investment into the mainstream? appeared first on Tom Keya.
]]>Major trends uncovered by the survey also show that diversity is still the watchword for impact investing. The sector is growing all the time in depth and maturity, and while management and measurement have improved, there is still a lot of opportunity for refinement.
And, despite an enormous growth in impact investment over the last decade, much more needs to be done to address its many challenges. Could fintech start-ups be the answer to bringing impact investing into the mainstream consciousness?
While sustainable investment is, as we can see, hardly niche these days, it does come with various problems. From greenwashing to a lack of transparency and trust, there are reasons why investors are holding back.
But, to bridge these gaps, it looks like new fintech start-ups are coming up with innovative solutions. These financial tech companies are managing to attract investors and clients in new ways. This rise in impact investment platforms is significant, with Dealroom registering 14 impact investing tech companies in the B2C sector. Between them they’ve raised a total of £49.6 million.
As with all tech trends, not every impact investing platform will make it through, of course. However, there is a clear opportunity for fintech start-ups to create a new sector within impact investment. Through apps dedicated to savings and investment, these fintechs will be able to attract new clients and investors by tapping into their growing interest in impact investing.
Investors at all levels increasingly expect their money to go towards a project or initiative that does some external good, as well as bringing them a return. So how will these new platforms work for customers?
Trust is one of the biggest concerns for individuals who are new to the world of sustainable investing. They need to be able to trust the app or platform with their money, and know that it will be going to fund the causes they’re interested in.
For this reason, they will be absolutely on top of evaluating the relevance and trustworthiness of the impact investment platform. Without clarity and transparency, investors will just not use them. Customers will expect to know that full accountability is underway and that the fintech platform or developer itself is also sustainable, inclusive and totally fair.
Examples of the rising trend can be seen with the likes of Clim8. This is an impact investment app that launched in March 2021 on Android and iOS. Clim8 has collectively raised £10 million in funding (including £2 million from Channel 4 Ventures). The app is designed to be easy to use and allows people to make real-life positive changes through investments with a focus on clean water, the circular economy, smart mobility, clean tech and clean energy.
Other success stores include Cooler Future, which has raised £1.2 million in funding from VC firm Lifeline Ventures and a group of angel investors. Cooler Future’s tagline is: Invest sustainably. Earn returns.
Clearly there is a demand for an increased number of sustainable investment options and fintech companies are coming up with the solution for this. However, these impact investing platforms are also giving brand new investors an entry route into the market.
According to Tickr, a sustainable investment platform that has been going since 2018, around 90% of its clients are totally new to investing. This points towards the sustainability features of the platform being the main draw. People want to make a difference and want their money to go towards projects that can change the world.
This transition of impact investment into the mobile generation will only ensure it grows exponentially over the next few years. As people become aware of how easy it is to access an app to make sustainable investments that will benefit the world and themselves, it will only increase interest.
I think that it’s very likely that sometime in the not-so-distant future, impact investing will morph into simply ‘investing’. There will be a time when almost every investment opportunity will come with some kind of sustainability benefit.
Accessibility and accountability are the watchwords for this new breed of investment platforms. For example, Clim8 clients can choose to invest in three separate portfolios that are each focused on a different level of risk. Also, investors can get started with as little as £25 outlay.
The highest risk portfolio invests 77% in equity and 20% in fixed income and these are split across Clim8’s stock picks and fund investments. Of the six investment themes offered by Clim8, the platform says that clean tech and clean energy are the most popular.
Individual investors are looking for smaller, more accessible opportunities that can be proven to be specialist and workable. And it’s about absorbing this mindset into every aspect of our lives, including where we put our money. It’s about making every individual investor a climate activist. This needs transparency, measurability and proof of the difference each investment is making to climate change.
These platforms are certainly attracting a lot of attention with the likes of Tickr signing up more than 100,000 impact investors. However, there is plenty of room for this sub-sector to grow and grow, and that’s what I expect we’ll see over the next couple of years.
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]]>The post Why the current role of the family office must adapt to survive appeared first on Tom Keya.
]]>The combination of increased and more specifically tightened regulations, along with a generally litigious world and all risks associated with a prolonged period of global instability combine to make these challenging times for family offices.
Each family office is individually designed to deal with the client family’s personal needs. However, we do see some trends that have emerged from the previous 20 years that should be take into consideration when setting up a new family office. It’s equally useful for existing family offices to review their operations and work on their role.
In some ways, the enormous changes experienced across the wider socio-economic world are challenging the very concept of the economic viability of traditional family offices. It’s now vital for every family office to define its objectives and to come up with an individual working model. The end goal is, of course, to meet the objectives of the family in question in the most efficient way.
When we think of a traditional family office, it’s obvious that many have evolved over time. So, rather than a purpose-built entity read to take on the economic and political challenges of the world today, many family offices have grown organically. This means that new functionality has been tacked on to the existing model as events have unfurled.
A large number of traditional family offices may have started life as add-ons to a family estate office or even a family business. Their original role would have been mostly administrative as well as giving advice and communicating expertise to family members.
However, over the last couple of decades the role of the family office has evolved from primarily administrative to something akin to an advisor forming a bridge between the family and professional advisors.
This change may sound subtle but it’s a significantly different position to that of the original family offices. There are various reasons for this change in the role of the family office, including:
One of the biggest evolutions in the functionality of the family office is that families need increasingly complex advice. They need specialist and complex advice from a family office that is able to act as the legal gatekeeper for any issues or challenges they’re facing.
Many families expect their family office to be able to locate the kind of specialists they need and to interpret the advice they’re given by these specialists. In a way the family office can be seen as a translator and a conduit through which other advisors flow their information and advice through to the family.
Wealth management is almost unrecognisable from its structure 20 or so years ago. Today’s wealth management is complex and includes endless structures, strategies and products. All of these need the expertise to manage and analyse how they’re working to make sure that the best solutions are implemented for the family in question.
It’s highly unusual to rely on a single investment manager, but rather a myriad of different specialists bring something to the table. And a family office must administer, monitor and manage all of these different functions.
The wider economic environment is unstable and will be so for the foreseeable future. This instability means that family offices must be able to deal with sophisticated and complex risk management across every part of the family’s financial concerns.
As families have become more international and more complicated within themselves, this necessitates a higher level of skill and management by the family office. This is also added to through many different business interests from the family, something that was less common 20 or 30 years ago.
Given all of these changes and the need for advice spiralling, it’s not surprising that some of the current family office models don’t fulfil every requirement. The combination of factors described above along with increasingly complex compliance with regulatory changes and tax issues, many family offices are finding that they are struggling to keep up.
So much day-to-day firefighting across these issues leaves little time to plan ahead and think about the overarching strategy and succession planning that are also part of running a family office.
I think that this issue can be highlighted by the looseness of the definition of a family office and the difference between it and any external specialist advisors. This can cause duplication of work, or conversely, that certain areas aren’t pursued or managed in the way they should be.
The main aim and the core responsibility of a family office is to implement the wider wealth strategy for the family in question. Attempting to duplicate asset management roles, for example, can lead to inefficiency and a lack of focus.
Family offices and their role can be tricky to define, particularly as different families want different services. By analysing the family’s needs and the extent to which they want the family office to manage its wealth (as opposed to specialist advisors they have a direct relationship with) this definition should be clearly defined when setting up a new family office or reviewing an existing one.
The services provided by a family office depend on various factors, including the history of the family itself. For example, how far does it go back generationally and how many members of the family are involved currently? Other issues to consider include:
For example, it’s very different running a family office for a family that goes back six generations and has 200 members located all around the world compared with a first-generation entrepreneur who has three kids. In every area, the precise role of the family office must be fully defined. How is it responsible for investment management, for example? This analysis can then be applied to every other area of collective and individual activities and assets within the family.
Adapting to today’s world means accepting that wealthy families are likely to be subject to more tax in the future. This will mean higher costs for wealth management in order that they avoid any risk. While this may not be what families want to hear, it is realistic and will ensure that their wealth is managed in the most efficient way.
Precisely defining the role of the family office will go along way to ensuring it can manage today’s demands. Each division should be clearly delineated and responsibilities between external advisors, banks and professionals stated. This allows every part of the picture to fulfil their own role and that a complete service is rendered.
Family offices often work best if there is a trusted advisor that the family knows and can work with and that they reside in the office itself. Having someone like that making the key decisions improves every part of the process and will likely save costs and confusion over conflicting advice.
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]]>The post Mental health problems are increasing rapidly in the wake of the pandemic appeared first on Tom Keya.
]]>While the world’s Governments and business leaders have been battling to keep the economy open, and minimise the damage caused by COVID-19, an unseen pandemic has been running in parallel. And while the eyes of the world are on vaccination rollouts and economic recovery, millions of people are suffering from mental health problems.
According to the Royal College of Psychiatrists (RC Psych), England is already in the grip of what they term a “mental health crisis”. Experts link this crisis directly with the pandemic, which began to take an effect in the UK in March 2020. Furthermore, it’s young people suffering the most.
Record numbers of adults and children turned to the under-pressure NHS in 2020, desperate for help to alleviate their declining mental health. Problems recorded by the NHS include eating disorders, depression, anxiety and people who reached a mental health crisis.
This sharp increase in mental health problems started along with the first UK lockdown at the end of March 2020, according to data from both the NHS and the Office for National Statistics (ONS). President of the RC Psych Adrian James says that the crisis is “terrifying, but it will likely get a lot worse before it gets better.” He goes on to report that health services are in danger of being completely overwhelmed by the sheer number of people who need help.
Between April and December 2020, the number of under-18s referred to mental health services run by the NHS increased by 80,226 in England alone. This increase is compared with figures for the same months in 2019. Problems with accessing help and care are also making the problem worse. The team at the college found:
These figures are devastating enough, but a further number of under-18s in need of urgent care or even routine care for eating disorders were left to wait. This is obviously a circumstance that could – and likely did – cause deaths.
It’s perhaps not difficult to understand why the mental health of the youngest generation has been so profoundly impacted by the pandemic. The fear and uncertainty caused by the virus itself was exacerbated by school closures, lack of socialising, isolation and anxiety for a generation of children.
Adults have also suffered enormously in terms of mental health during the pandemic so far and will continue to do so. If we look at figures from before the pandemic, we see that about one tenth of adults in England suffered from moderate to severe depression before March 2020. After the pandemic hit, tis doubled to just under one in five by June 2020.
A corresponding increase in mental health treatment sessions for adults can be seen in the data, rising from 15.8 million to 17.5 million. And during the same time period, there were record high numbers of adults being referred to urgent care for mental health crises. This figure hit 159,347 people, which is a 2.2% increase on 2019’s numbers.
It’s clear that this concerning increase in mental health issues is linked to the pandemic. There are myriad reasons why the events of the last year and a half have led to a mental health pandemic. As well as traumatic experiences such as bereavement due to the virus itself, there have been huge rises in social isolation, exposure to inescapable abuse, financial insecurity, job losses, money worries and much more.
Experts at the Centre for Mental Health estimate that around 10 million people now need help with their mental health. This number includes 1.5 million children. However, it’s important to recognise that about two-thirds of these people were already dealing with poor mental health even before the pandemic.
So, what’s being done to help? It’s difficult to quantify the exact assistance offered to the millions of people dealing with poor mental health. The UK Government’s mental health minister Nadine Dorries has been quoted as saying that she is “absolutely committed to supporting the mental wellbeing of everyone.” She points to the £2.3 billion that the UK Government has pledged to expand mental health care as evidence.
However, mental health provision in the UK was already stripped to the bone even before the pandemic. It’s unlikely that this provision by the Government will be enough. Either way, it’s clear that the added burden of mental health issues created by the pandemic will be felt for many years.
COVID-19 has also put the spotlight on social inequality in the UK and around the world. People who have less access to economic and social resources have suffered more. Those forced to work on the frontline or healthcare workers have suffered more. Along with young people, it’s these sectors of society that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic.
As business leaders, employers have a duty to increase their support for employee mental health. Taking the right steps within the workplace, whether that’s virtual or in person, is essential for mitigating the impact of the pandemic on people’s mental health. I believe that by taking control in the corporate arena, business leaders can make a real difference to the mental health and wellbeing of their employees. And this is needed now more than ever as we begin to reopen society and the economy.
The changes we will undergo during 2021 will continue to impact people’s mental health. There will be anxieties surrounding opening up for some people, and fear of another wave of the virus for others. Employers must work with Government bodies, mental health charities and other stakeholders to support people through the rest of the pandemic and out the other side.
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]]>The post What impact investing means to me as a business leader appeared first on Tom Keya.
]]>This is why I’m a member of Impact 17+1., a group of business leaders who are taking action through impact investing. But before we look a bit more closely at what impact means to members, here’s a brief introduction to impact investing itself.
The simplest explanation of impact investing is that it covers investments made into funds/organisations/companies that will make a return and create a positive social or environmental impact. These investments direct money into initiatives to improve the environmental and social challenges facing humanity.
Impact investors, therefore, are looking to put their capital into non-profit organisations, investment funds and businesses that can demonstrate their environmental social and governance (ESG) credentials. This could be in renewable energy, micro-finance, sustainable agriculture, healthcare, education and much more. This type of investing goes across all asset classes, including fixed income, private equity, venture capital and debt.
While regulatory standards and philanthropy traditionally attempted to mitigate the damage done by the corporate world, there have long been individual investors choosing to be socially responsible with their strategies. This is now becoming more mainstream for both individuals and institutional investors.
It took until 2007 for the term ‘impact investing’ to emerge, and it’s now used to describe an investor commitment to measuring the social and environmental performance of financial decisions. Today, impact investors apply the same kind of analysis to the ESG impact of their investments as their financial returns.
Over the last five years, the number of funds actively engaged in impact investing has grown significantly. The sector’s growth is at least partly due to the vagaries of traditional philanthropy and international development. Add in a global pandemic, and there has been a distinct shift towards impact investing at all levels.
Compared with the global equity market, impact investing is still small. It’s currently estimated as being worth $715 billion according to the 2020 Annual Impact Investor Survey. The biggest sectors in terms of asset allocation include financial services, micro-finance, energy and housing.
The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) defines the key characteristics of impact investing, based on the following four tenets:
There must be an intent to contribute to measurable social and environmental improvements through the investment. Impact investors want to actively grab opportunities to solve problems. This is what separates impact investing from other approaches that may still include some considerations.
When designing strategies, impact investors will use evidence and data to create intelligent investment decisions.
Again, this is about the intention behind the investment and includes measuring the performance. Investors must therefore implement workable feedback loops to understand how the investment is performing.
Investors that use impact investor practices share best practice and learnings to encourage the growth of the industry sector.
Back to the Impact 17+1 Club and my involvement in this forward-thinking, innovative network of impactors. Essentially a think tank incorporating a community of business leaders and like-minded impactors from around the world, Impact 17+1 evolved from the motivation of taking responsibility to create a better future by taking constructively compassionate action right now.
We intend to build a global network of impactors, determined to nurture, support and grow impact leaders throughout the world. The club provides iTalk, which is a platform for impactors to raise awareness and share challenges and opportunities. The aim is to continue to forge close collaboration with businesses, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), other investors and any other stakeholders to promote social innovation.
To me, impact is about making a real, tangible difference to improving our surrounding environment and creating solutions to the challenges facing us all. The pandemic has pushed impact investing further up the agenda, as governments and corporations everywhere recognise the urgent need to meld financial returns with measurable benefits to the world around us.
While the traditional assumption has been that impact investment and impact businesses make less money, the opposite its true. By structuring a business around purpose rather than profit, you actually end up making more money. For example, businesses with at least 50% female board members tend to do better financially than those that don’t focus on diversity. Impact does not come at the cost of profit, but rather increases it.
Find out what impact means to members of Impact17 here.
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