9. Menopause is a Female Leadership Issue with Thea O’Connor and Prina Shah

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Hello and welcome to this episode of Ways to Change the WebSpace with myself pretty much chat. I love what I do. I'm a global leadership coach, a consultant, a trainer, a keynote speaker, a podcaster. I help you to develop your leaders, your teams, and I help you to optimize your organizational cultures. I'm here to help you find ways to change your workplace. Why? Because we spend more time in our waking day at work than we do with our loved ones. It has to be a good place to be. So in this podcast, you can expect a mix of interviews with amazing thought leaders and then some solo episodes from myself as well. Get ready. I would like to introduce Leah O'Connor. I really want to focus on menopause as a topic, Dea. Leah, why talk about menopause at work?

SPEAKER_00 1:16

Yeah, well, first of all, thanks so much for having me on and celebrating Women's Health Week. So menopause in the workplace, you know, some people think we should just keep it a private issue, but there are some pretty good actual business reasons why it makes sense to talk about it at work. Probably the most important thing is at the moment we don't talk about it at work. It's a taboo. So women feel that they have to keep it secret, they try to hide it, and that creates an enormous amount of stress, not to mention a sense of isolation, and then that's just going to impair their health and their productivity even more. So that's probably the main reason. But breaking it down a little bit more, you could just look at the sheer demographics of it. So we know that 78% of women who are aged, say, 45 to 60, 78% of those women are in the workplace. So the workplace is where we are when we go through menopause. We're not sitting at home enjoying a comfortable retirement, you know, we're at work. And we're probably going to see more women in the 50 plus category given that you know retirement ages are being pushed back, and often women's super balances aren't that great, so they have to keep working. So given you know the increase that has occurred and that's predicted to occur, it only makes sense for employers to look at how to support women through the transition, and it's really in their interests because we know that organizations that have more women at the top they actually perform better financially. But for some women, you know, the menopause transition can be a bit of a bump in the road. And we know for those who are doing it a bit tough, about one in four actually consider quitting. And they consider quitting not just because of the symptoms but because of the silence and that sense of that there's no wriggle room for a bit of flexibility and support. So, yeah, for the sake of women's health, but also organizational performance, um, there are good reasons to be talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Yeah, it's fascinating. So, my background is in human resources, and you know, within many of the human resources teams that I've worked, never once have we considered menopause in the workplace. So I know many human resources practitioners will be listening to this. Yes. What can you tell them?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

Yeah, I'm glad you asked because I actually did a short interview series with HR um practitioners, and I said, you know, what would it take for you to put this on your agenda to look at? The majority of them responded saying, Well, I'd have to know that it was a problem for my staff. Now, normally I would be fine with that response. You base your programs on staff need, but what woman is going to be the first woman to put her hand up and speak about it? So, this is an issue where I think we need to show leadership. Someone needs to start the conversation, you know, it can be in a quite a low-key kind of way, um, but maybe using you know Women's Health Week or Mental Health Month, which is coming up as an opportunity to just do an anonymous staff survey or even run a webinar and just check the response. When I ran my first webinar in the workplace, I never have received so many thank you emails afterwards, and the women were saying, Thank God, I'm not alone. So, yeah, this is an issue that I think um we need to show leadership on and not just expect you know some individual women to be brave enough to speak up.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

And while we're talking about leadership, dear, you talked about the age bracket of um people who have menopause. That's usually when we reach our peak in our leadership career as well. Can you tell me more about that?

SPEAKER_00 4:44

Yeah, so you know, a bit like you, I'm really interested in leaders and my focus is supporting their well-being. And when I started to look into this, I just kind of realized wow, menopause is a female leadership issue because just when a woman is peaking in her career, she's often, you know, of the age where she might start experiencing symptoms. And the other thing about menopause, interestingly, is that often women don't know what's going on themselves. It's not just men, many of the some health practitioners don't know, but we don't know. And and that can really undermine your confidence. You know, if you're starting to experience some of the you know the um cognitive challenges, for example, you might think you might think, oh, I'm past my peak, rather than just understand this is a temporary life stage. So that's why I think education in female leadership programs is so important so they can recognise those early symptoms, you know, realize this is just a temporary life stage, and yes, they might need a bit more health support. Um, yeah, so I think it's time to break that silence so that women can remain successful in their roles, and for those who want to keep progressing, you know, they're supported to do that.

SPEAKER_01 5:55

Fascinating. And you talked about some of the symptoms. I know one of them is hot flushes, and you know, in the workplace also we've got that temperature control, air conditioning or heating during winter time, which can really affect individuals in very different ways. What other kind of symptoms um present during menopause that we don't consider for the workplace?

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Yeah, look, great question because most of us just think menopause hot flushes, don't we? Yes. But it's a really vast array of physical and psychological symptoms that can occur in the lead up to menopause. They call that the perimenopausal stage, the years leading up to the time where you finally you know stop menstruating. And interestingly, it's actually the psychological symptoms that often show up first. But we often often don't know that and therefore don't join the dots. So, you know, challenges with short-term memory, for example, or just you know, uh finding it harder to concentrate can be some. We also know that the perimenopause and the menopause transition is a time of increased risk for mental health issues. So, for example, the risk of depression is three times as high. Anxiety rates also go up. So if you don't know that, you know, you might just think, oh gosh, you know, um you don't join the dots of menopause necessarily.

SPEAKER_01 7:11

No.

SPEAKER_00 7:12

So they're often the ones that tend to show up first. I mean, the obvious symptom is you will have changes in the regularity of your periods. But interestingly, if you then zoom in on of all the symptoms, which are the most challenging in the workplace for working women, fatigue is number one. That's the number one challenge, and it's often a knock-on effect, you know, of night sweats or insomnia. Um, or some women just report just this added level of tiredness, irrespective. So fatigue is number one, then hot flushes, challenges uh with focus and concentration, anxiety and irritability, and then insomnia. So the interesting thing about those set of symptoms is if you take out the hot flushes, the remaining are experienced probably by the bulk of anyone's you know, workforce. Everyone's tired these days. We're all getting distracted and finding it hard to focus. Mental health issues we know is really common. So that's kind of the good news. A menopause-friendly workplace is going to be good for a lot of your staff, not just menopause or women.

SPEAKER_01 8:13

Interesting. And can I ask you a controversial question? Maybe controversial, maybe not. What are your thoughts on the typical nine to five workplace and menopause in this case?

SPEAKER_00 8:25

Yeah, well, one of the things that can make the biggest difference for women to help them look after their health and still do their job is flexibility. Right. So, okay, nine to five, fine, but if you can build in flexible work practices, that's gonna that's gonna cover a lot of bases, whether it's just women having the time to attend a medical appointment or perhaps change her hours a little bit if she's been struggling with insomnia. So flexibility is um is key to to supporting women during this last stage.

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Wonderful. And we're slowly getting there thanks to all things that COVID has brought. So yeah, long may continue in terms of flexibility. The you've talked about how um organizations can support their staff and how they can ask, you know, information off uh the workforce. How can individuals have the conversation or how can individuals manage this at a workplace from an individual perspective?

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, from an individual perspective, it's given the state of play, and that is that the majority of workplaces don't even utter the N-word at all, it's a little bit like the mental health issue, you know, where you do have to discern your workplace culture and if you know if you're going to get a good hearing or not. So that's always an individual's choice until we get to the point where it's you know it's totally normal to talk about it. So, um, but if you sense that you've got a supportive, you know, manager who you know has got your back, who really has your interests at heart and know that you're a great worker, perhaps just bearing in mind they're probably not going to know about this and they might feel a little bit uncomfortable, is to do your own preparation about how you might structure a conversation, which might be just really simple, you don't have to go into all the details, but this is what I'm experiencing. Most importantly, this is how it's impacting on my work. This is what I'm doing to support myself. So you're showing this self-responsibility, and I'd like to talk about just some options for how we could make some adjustments, you know, during this stage. Yeah, but as I said, given the ignorance at the moment, I'd also be equipping your manager with some information. It might even say, look, can we talk about it? Here's some information for you to read. Yeah. And so I've got some free resources people can download, but there's also really good work that's been done by Monash University, and they've created some free open source resources, including some guides for managers, and that website is menopause at work.org. And I've also got um some resources at my website, thea.com.au forward slash menopause.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Beautiful. I'll add all of the information to the show notes. And I know you've got a lot of free resources as well that you share thea, so I'll add all of that. Um, so I guess one of the summary points is that we as women have to break that taboo and have the conversation.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

Yeah, and even you know, a starting way would be okay, we might be talking about it with our female colleagues to some degree, but the main way we talk about it at the moment is through jokes. Yeah. But if we were joking about any other issue like mental health, would that be acceptable? Totally not. Now I totally get humour is a great stress buster, and you know, when things are really bad, it is nice to have a laugh. But what I've noticed is often the humour is laced with even self-put downs, and sometimes women we will crack the jokes first to get in before someone else makes fun of us. Right. So it's even just starting to notice how we talk about you know menopause amongst ourselves and can we raise the level of self-respect in that conversation? That's a really good start, um, for sure. But also advocate, I totally understand that in some workplaces you're not going to feel safe to talk about it. You know, maybe gendered ageism, it's alive and well, but if there's any way that you can, you know, get your managers trained, that would be a really fantastic start. And that's what I'm in the middle of running in September, actually, for Women's Health Health Month. Fascinating.

SPEAKER_01 12:26

And it's bringing men along in the conversation as well and not excluding.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

Absolutely. And interestingly, I found that a lot of people assume that it's going to be the men who've all got all the bad attitudes about metaphors, but to date, it's actually been senior male HR practitioners who've opened the door to me to come in to do work. So I think it's really really good to drop the assumptions. And sometimes it's women who didn't have a hard time with metaphors who'll be saying, Oh, you know, what are you talking about? I've actually heard senior women say bringing you know metaphors awareness into workplaces, it's just got to be an excuse for poor performance. Okay. So what I'm I'm enjoying, how much this is challenging, you know, those standard gender stereotypes.

SPEAKER_01 13:13

Beautiful. Love the work that you're doing. Is there anything else that uh working women are saying that they want?

SPEAKER_00 13:20

Yeah, so when I conducted, and this is ongoing research, but confidential one-on-one interviews with working women, I said, Look, what would make a difference? What would you most value? Number one, from every woman was can we just talk about it and normalize it and stop hiding this life stage, which half of humanity goes through. So that was number one. But they also said, you know, wouldn't it be great to if you know if you give us a bit of help reframing it? Because all we hear are the negative stories at the moment. We don't hear it, it's like um what a valuable life stage it is. It's like reverse puberty. Puberty took us into adulthood, menopause is taking us into eldership, and so if we could help celebrate it as a rite of passage, wouldn't that be amazing? That was number two. They also said they can find um finding quality information difficult. So workplaces can play a really easy role in curating quality information on the intranet. And then lastly, they said, and wouldn't it be great if we had an intergenerational network in workplaces where younger women can talk to older women about what it's like. Interestingly, other research conducted by La Trobe found similar findings, but then they also you know emphasise that individual women are saying, Yeah, but I don't want to be put in the spotlight, you know, as an in so you don't want your manager coming up and going, Oh, you're going through menopause. You know, what you want is you want your manager to be trained to be comfortable with a conversation if you choose that that's what you want. Yeah, and that menopause is embedded into the culture and you know other policies.

SPEAKER_01 14:53

Rather than imposing on you as the token woman with menopause, go out and speak to the workforce.

SPEAKER_00 15:01

Absolutely, yeah. So you still leave it up to the woman to raise if she chooses, but hopefully, you know, workplaces can do the work to um to make sure that they've got capability in that area to be comfortable in talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 15:14

I love the um uh finding off the intergenerational uh aspect that you talked about. We can learn so much from you know people who've been there and done that, and so easily implemented in a workplace, also. Really practical.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Yes, and uh, someone else just fed back to me a really astute observation. She said she found that in the earlier life stage changes, it's really easy to tap into the social networks amongst women, you know, your pregnancy, your breastfeeding group, parenting groups, but then she found a complete absence of that social support when it came to menopause, which is really fascinating, isn't it? And I thought, very good observation. So there's yeah, there's so much room to address that, to help women feel connected because just about every woman I interviewed said they felt like they were going through this alone. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 16:04

No, no. So we need to break that barrier also. Yes. Yeah, you do wonderful work, and my final question to you is why do you do what you do?

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Yeah, so in terms of the menopause work, it wasn't in my business plan, I can tell you that it was more just I started experiencing the symptoms, and then I noticed I hadn't heard one other working woman talk about menopause. You should hear about it in the health circles, but none of my professional friends, none of my older women, I thought this is crazy. When in workplaces we have everything from age, disability, whether you're gay or not, on diversity and inclusion agendas, and we can't, you know, talk about menopause. So I was just struck by the craziness of it. Um, but apart from that, it fits under that bigger theme of just really honouring and respecting the human body. This is our lifelong home, this is our foundation. Why do we persist in these working styles that ask us to work like machines? You know, that that's not good for our soul and nor is it good for engagement at work. So I've had an enduring, I guess, commitment to try and shift work cultures so that they're more body-friendly.

SPEAKER_01 17:13

Beautiful. Talk to me about nativism.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

I love it. There's another way in which we can work more in tune with our bodies. As you know, many people in workplaces they're tired, they're stressed, and they have the third or fourth coffee to get them through. And yet there's this wonderfully natural rejuvenative practice that only takes you only 10 minutes of sleep to give you another three hours of energy. So I've been interested in why do we resist true rejuvenation as a culture when we're so happy to sanction artificial stimulation, you know, more sugar, more coffee. So when I discovered the nap for myself about 15 years ago when I was a bit tired, I just thought we've got to rebrand napping because at the moment it's associated with slacking, where actually it's the best health and productivity hack around, if you like. So yeah, that's what I'm on about normalizing the nap.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Good. Yes, napping has a really bad uh reputation uh for being lazy, slothful, whatever it might be. But our natural rhythms are not that way at all. I really noticed that once you know you're not at work or if you know it's the weekend or if I'm on holiday, naps are a normal thing for my body rhythm. Um yeah, but in the workplace, it doesn't really account for that whatsoever.

SPEAKER_00 18:33

No, and I think in the West in particular, we just cannot get our heads around this idea that stopping and doing nothing for a while can actually help you get ahead. We just, you know, that just blows our brain almost.

SPEAKER_01 18:48

Compared to the siesta um culture.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Yes, and I guess I'm also I'm a realist as well as an activist, so I don't think we're ever going to integrate the siesta into our existing culture, you know, because that's so much longer. But honestly, the 10-minute power nap, you need 20 minutes to lie down to get that 10-minute sleep. That's the same as about the amount of time it takes to go out of an office, go and buy a coffee, come back, you know, sit down. So it is very time efficient. Um, people are really interested in the nap, but they're still scared to practice it. So I just say, well, start on the weekend if you can't get your head around trying it in a working day. Try an early afternoon nap in a sad day and Sunday. It's actually a healthier way to catch up on sleep debt than sleeping in.

SPEAKER_01 19:30

Thea, I have your details. I'm going to put them in the show notes. So if anyone wants to contact you, everything will be there. Thank you so, so much for your time today. I really, really appreciate it. Yeah, thanks for having me on. I enjoyed the chat. How good was that episode? If you also stand against crappy workplace cultures, lousy leaders, and toxic teams, you need to join the Ways to Change Your Workplace Facebook group, which is linked in the show notes. I'll meet you at the next episode. Ciao for now.