About Alan Bradshaw
Hi and thanks for being interested in the person behind this site.
As a Business Psychologist, I've been working in stress management since the mid 90s, so been around for quite a while! Mostly, that's been developing and running my own businesses, but I was also Director of Stress and Mental Health Services for one of the UK's biggest Occupational Health Consultancies for a period of time. I still work closely with Occupational Health, but as a business partner rather than employee. I enjoy partnering and collaboration. It seems to work well for my partners and their clients, and for me. I'm always up for exploring ways to work together in mutually beneficial ways.
In my time working in stress and mental health, I've worked with very many organizations across pretty much all sectors. One of the most interesting and rewarding organizations to work with is HSE, who has been a client for about 5 years. I've trained hundreds of their managers and worked with different parts of the organization to help prevent and reduce stress. Of course, they are the UK's regulator for managing health risks at work, so understanding how they work and make a difference across the UK workforce has been an education for me too. They have outstanding, committed and clever people working there and it's been an honour to work with them.
Over the years, my main contribution has been the development of tools, training and frameworks to help manage stress and mental health risks at work. Of course there are, and have been, tools out there, but not tools which helped much with the day-to-day management of stress at work - tools for managers to work proactively with teams, or reactively with struggling individuals. So I started to develop such tools in the early 2000s and they have been evolving ever since. You can find out about them on this site. I integrated these tools into training, and management training in particular. Now I'm trying to make them much more widely available. I know they make a difference, but in reality it's only been my own clients who have benefited, whereas I'd really like to see them used everywhere and by as many people as possible.
I also developed a stress management best practice framework, which my clients have benefited from. That's called APMR, and again, you can find out all about that on the framework page. That's helped provide a structure for training, but the framework really comes into its own when looking at whole-organization approaches. Policy development is a perfect application, and recently I've been working with DWP on just that, helping them develop a new stress policy and procedure, which is simpler and easier for managers to understand and implement at work.
In the last ten years or so, my work broadened to look also at mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. It's a broader issue but an important one. One organization I worked with on that was BAE Systems. With internal and external partners we developed large-scale awareness-raising events, which were attened by thousands of employees. Those events were fortunate to win a number of awards for innovation and business excellence. Of course, risks to mental health and wellbeing are increased by stress, which hasn't gone away. The risks linked to stress and mental health at work have increased if anything.
Covid has changed the world of work and how work interacts with our wellbeing. That change was sudden and fundamentally transformational, and it had massive consequences for how we work, where, when and with whom. It led to huge change for me too. I had to transform everything I did, especially training, so it could be delivered virtually. It's also been profoundly interesting though, to see how organizations have adapted; how they struggled but also how they thrived. I've been right through that with clients, looking at and rethinking how best to manage stress and mental health risks in a hybrid workplace where many people are managed remotely. Managers have particular challenges with this. They need training and tools, and a new set of competencies to manage risks to wellbeing.
I've 'lived this' too with my leadership role in a social care work environment. Covid had profound implications for social care. It was a very tough and prolonged crisis to get through, whilst trying both to manage infection risks and maintain morale. It was difficult, but we got through it. I learned a lot, including about the role of wellbeing (of staff and residents) and how that influenced organizational performance and the quality of care. That experience has helped influence my consultancy in my day-job too. Until recently. I largely saw my working worlds of stress management and social care as separate, but that view has completely changed.
I now see them as proufoundly integrated. At the charity, we have accountability for wellbeing at board level, and we're transparent about our performance in that area. We're proactive about creating a mentally healthy culture, and we do what we can to prevent stress. We monitor wellbeing and discuss it every month. And we do our very best to be responsive and supportive when people are struggling. Care is not well paid and as a job can be stressful, but we're all too aware that people have other struggles to deal with, not least the cost of living. We try to help with that where we can and we're working on a financial wellbeing strategy. Our improved culture and our approach to wellbeing has not just been good for morale, it's had huge business benefits. We rely much less on agency, have far lower attrition rates and have excellent inspection scores.
What matters most to me it making a difference. I've found that works best as a collaborative enterprise.
As a Business Psychologist, I've been working in stress management since the mid 90s, so been around for quite a while! Mostly, that's been developing and running my own businesses, but I was also Director of Stress and Mental Health Services for one of the UK's biggest Occupational Health Consultancies for a period of time. I still work closely with Occupational Health, but as a business partner rather than employee. I enjoy partnering and collaboration. It seems to work well for my partners and their clients, and for me. I'm always up for exploring ways to work together in mutually beneficial ways.
In my time working in stress and mental health, I've worked with very many organizations across pretty much all sectors. One of the most interesting and rewarding organizations to work with is HSE, who has been a client for about 5 years. I've trained hundreds of their managers and worked with different parts of the organization to help prevent and reduce stress. Of course, they are the UK's regulator for managing health risks at work, so understanding how they work and make a difference across the UK workforce has been an education for me too. They have outstanding, committed and clever people working there and it's been an honour to work with them.
Over the years, my main contribution has been the development of tools, training and frameworks to help manage stress and mental health risks at work. Of course there are, and have been, tools out there, but not tools which helped much with the day-to-day management of stress at work - tools for managers to work proactively with teams, or reactively with struggling individuals. So I started to develop such tools in the early 2000s and they have been evolving ever since. You can find out about them on this site. I integrated these tools into training, and management training in particular. Now I'm trying to make them much more widely available. I know they make a difference, but in reality it's only been my own clients who have benefited, whereas I'd really like to see them used everywhere and by as many people as possible.
I also developed a stress management best practice framework, which my clients have benefited from. That's called APMR, and again, you can find out all about that on the framework page. That's helped provide a structure for training, but the framework really comes into its own when looking at whole-organization approaches. Policy development is a perfect application, and recently I've been working with DWP on just that, helping them develop a new stress policy and procedure, which is simpler and easier for managers to understand and implement at work.
In the last ten years or so, my work broadened to look also at mental health and wellbeing in the workplace. It's a broader issue but an important one. One organization I worked with on that was BAE Systems. With internal and external partners we developed large-scale awareness-raising events, which were attened by thousands of employees. Those events were fortunate to win a number of awards for innovation and business excellence. Of course, risks to mental health and wellbeing are increased by stress, which hasn't gone away. The risks linked to stress and mental health at work have increased if anything.
Covid has changed the world of work and how work interacts with our wellbeing. That change was sudden and fundamentally transformational, and it had massive consequences for how we work, where, when and with whom. It led to huge change for me too. I had to transform everything I did, especially training, so it could be delivered virtually. It's also been profoundly interesting though, to see how organizations have adapted; how they struggled but also how they thrived. I've been right through that with clients, looking at and rethinking how best to manage stress and mental health risks in a hybrid workplace where many people are managed remotely. Managers have particular challenges with this. They need training and tools, and a new set of competencies to manage risks to wellbeing.
I've 'lived this' too with my leadership role in a social care work environment. Covid had profound implications for social care. It was a very tough and prolonged crisis to get through, whilst trying both to manage infection risks and maintain morale. It was difficult, but we got through it. I learned a lot, including about the role of wellbeing (of staff and residents) and how that influenced organizational performance and the quality of care. That experience has helped influence my consultancy in my day-job too. Until recently. I largely saw my working worlds of stress management and social care as separate, but that view has completely changed.
I now see them as proufoundly integrated. At the charity, we have accountability for wellbeing at board level, and we're transparent about our performance in that area. We're proactive about creating a mentally healthy culture, and we do what we can to prevent stress. We monitor wellbeing and discuss it every month. And we do our very best to be responsive and supportive when people are struggling. Care is not well paid and as a job can be stressful, but we're all too aware that people have other struggles to deal with, not least the cost of living. We try to help with that where we can and we're working on a financial wellbeing strategy. Our improved culture and our approach to wellbeing has not just been good for morale, it's had huge business benefits. We rely much less on agency, have far lower attrition rates and have excellent inspection scores.
What matters most to me it making a difference. I've found that works best as a collaborative enterprise.