Episode 191: It's the Law

In this episode of Leading and Learning Through Safety, Dr. Mark French shifts focus from technical safety to the broader issues of mental health, organizational justice, and fairness in the workplace. September marks International Suicide Prevention Month, and Mark emphasizes the importance of recognizing that mental health is real, even if invisible, and that everyone’s story matters.

He critiques inconsistent workplace practices through a case study involving alleged violations of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, FMLA, and Pump Act at a national grocery chain. The story illustrates how poor management decisions, inconsistent policy application, and lack of ethical leadership can dehumanize employees and erode trust. Fairness, Mark argues, isn’t about being lenient—it’s about applying policies equally to everyone.

Transitioning to new research from the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, the episode explores the concept of “room to share.” Employees need openness, time, and care from leaders to feel safe disclosing mental health struggles. Leaders play a critical role by offering time, creating private spaces for sensitive conversations, and ensuring resources are available when employees reach out. Mark underscores that leadership presence—not hiding in offices or endless meetings—directly impacts employee well-being and organizational culture.

The episode concludes with a call to action: leaders must invest time in people, treat them with fairness, and build space for authentic conversations about mental health. Above all, during Suicide Prevention Month, listeners are reminded: your story isn’t over—reach out, find help, and never lose hope.

Transcript

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This week on the podcast, we're going to talk about a lot of mental health and policy and practices that we can put into place, with some leading edge research to understand more about how we influence that as the organization coming up this week on the podcast. Welcome to the leading and learning through safety podcast. Your host is Dr Mark French. Marks passion is helping organizations motivate their teams. This podcast is focused on bringing out the best in leadership through creating strong values, learning opportunities, teamwork and safety, nothing is more important than protecting your people. Safety creates an environment for empathy, innovation and empowerment. Together, we'll discover meaning and purpose through shaping our safety culture. Thanks for joining us this episode and now here is Dr Mark French. Welcome to this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. I am so happy you've joined me. Thank you so much for allowing me to be part of your podcast rotation this week, taking a little different approach. This isn't going to be a lot on technical safety. It's going to be more about people overall, mental health, safety, prevention, good policy. September is the International month for suicide prevention. So I want to take a moment and remind you, your story isn't over. Mental Health. Just because you can't see it doesn't mean is not real. And so I want to talk about things that are happening in the news. And also found some really amazing new research that just came out about mental health in the workplace. What can we do? How can we help? And overall, what this also triggers in me is just fairness in the workplace, one of the items I index on very strongly is what I would call organizational justice or fairness, or something of that kind. And it's not that I believe that every policy should give everything away. What I mean by that is that everybody should be treated the same. If there is a policy that policy should apply to everyone equally. If I want to be a very tough organization, if I want to have harsh rules and really hold people to a very high standard, very low tolerance, it better apply to everybody, not just some, not just partial, everyone. It should apply the same. And that's what I believe in. I believe that as long as we stay consistent, that becomes what is fair, and that is justice in some forms of when we talk about in the idea of like, is it organizationally fair? Organizationally just now, of course, justice in other forms is a very different topic, very different discussion. This one here is more about policy and how we apply it, how we help people, and how we do what we do to make it a fair and just workplace. So I came across an HR article that I wanted to share, first of all, that just blew my mind a little bit. I'm I'm getting less to where things blow my mind, because it never, never ceases to amaze me what organizations are capable of or who makes these decisions, and I think this is what I'm going to focus in on, is who makes the decision, and how much flexibility do they have in making those decisions. So let's start. This was a nationwide grocery chain, and they have just been named in a lawsuit for basically pregnant worker Fairness Act FMLA, also the pump act. So as a former assistant store manager for this grocery store, basically was said they were denied time off before their upcoming. Childbirth. Now catch this, despite situated male employees being allowed to take that time off, so evidently, there was a patern maternity paternity policy. They allowed the males to take their time off, but not the females, not the ones who were actually giving birth. Now again, this is alleged, but it is amazing, but not surprising. Probably also alleged that she was forced to be transferred to a different store quite a few miles away in a more dangerous part of town, so that she was transferred after coming back from maternity leave, then carry on. They didn't give her locations to be able to use facilities to pump under the pump act, and there was no place to store it. Sometimes forced to store it in hot cars, unlocked stock rooms, mail trucks, collective break rooms, where there was food in such stashed now is, does this happen at this grocer all over the country? I doubt it. I have a firm belief that this is probably a very localized issue. There is someone district manager, regional manager, regional someone who decided they were going to run a different kind of department, and I feel that that is probably because there's no way that this is happening across like this is a corporate, corporate across the board, way of treating people, because I haven't seen that. Now, this one here is horrible. It's it's completely wrong, completely should never happen. And yet, here it is doing these things that are blatant, blatant violations of law. And I can see from and I have seen it, and I continue to see it. This is the evolution of poor management, promoting people that don't need it, that don't deserve it, that don't know what they're doing, and don't have the experience to know better, and evidently have very, very little ethical core. And that bothers me too, of being a decent of just having basic, decent human decency to think back that. Oh, I'll let the I'll let the men have that time off, but not the women. No. Fair is fair. If you're allowed time off, you're allowed time off period. No difference has to be equal, and that's going to be the the biggest thing is it wasn't applied equally across. One, it's illegal. Two, blatant, blatant federal protections ignored. How does that happen in an organization? I have seen it happen in organizations where, instead of hiring people who are qualified, people who have credentials, people who have the ability, people who have the education and experience, or those who are willing to learn and be mentored by those with experience, instead promote from within, which is not a bad thing. I'm not saying promoting from within is bad. I'm saying promoting from within with the wrong intent is wrong. Promoting someone who they know will give them the answer they want rather than the answer that needs to happen. Oh well, I've never seen that being a problem. Why don't we try it? I don't know anything about the law, but never gotten in trouble for not doing it. Let's do it. Let's try it. And I have seen this literally happen in some large organizations, where instead of going out and finding qualified people, they run out of ways to promote. So they start promoting from within, and they just give Oh, well, I mean, you can't be that bad. How bad can you mess that up? You deserve to be promoted. And you know what? You have a really good eye for productivity and cost savings. Come on in, and they give them a job in in HR, in safety, and let them do whatever they want to do with no knowledge of the law and no knowledge of how that's going to affect public image, or even how it demoralizes people, and that's ultimately what this comes down to, in my opinion, is we have dehumanized people with this we have made them feel less than human, less than what they're worth. Fifth, and there's the beginning of mental health in the workplace. Do you feel like you're a human? Do you feel like that you are someone who is someone as we have a right to be treated as a human being. Let's talk more about that as we transition into the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast, you are listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast with Dr Mark French gsda Consulting. Learn you lead others. The Myers, Briggs Type Indicator is an amazing tool. Problem is that it can be easily misinterpreted. Dr Mark French is MBTI certified and ready to help you discover your inner strengths. The MBTI assessment can help with team building, stress management, communication, conflict management, and so much more, individual and group sessions are available to help you discover what makes you great. For more information, visit us on the web at T, S, D, A consulting.com Welcome back to the second half of the leading and learning through safety podcast this week, talking about mental health and being human in the workplace. So I came across a really amazing and interesting article in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, and this is called the room to share an ecological perspective on mental health disclosure at work. What this article focuses on is the ability to have voice, the ability to speak the room and space, to be able to talk about mental health in an open way within the workplace. Now I go back to the story earlier, and I'm not we're not even reaching on caring about the total person and mental health in the workplace. The story we started with was completely dehumanizing, completely illegal and dehumanizing if the alleged allegations are true. And so now I want to transition into, how do we do better for those of us who are out there, and we want to push even further in how we create, what we will call, in this article the room to share how does that happen, and they they look at a really interesting model to be able to do that. And I want to start with reading a quote right from the article, because it starts off with a quote from one of the participants who said something in this this hit me as not it's hard, but not hard to do, but important. And here it is, I didn't even have the room to share. If you understand me, I don't have the room to share, even if I right now decide now I want to share. I don't have that I don't see. The invitation is not there, and the time is not there, the care is not there. So what I read here is openness, time. And then the care if we don't invest time, we don't care. I'll go back to one analogy that I use quite frequently when we talk about management and we talk about leadership, the most important thing a leader can give someone is their time. The most important thing a leader can give their team is their time. And your team knows where you put your time. And if we look at the four quadrants, safety, quality, delivery and cost, where is your time? Safety, if a priority, if number one should have the most time invested in it, at least have an equal seat. At least get the the time invested in it. And here we see this is time invested in people. So the article really digests looking at, how do you create room for people to be able to talk about issues in their life? If your team is willing to talk to you, you will learn so much more. You will learn what is going on. You will hear about safety. You will hear about productivity. You will hear about cost, and you'll hear a lot more. You're always going to get the extra, but in that you're getting some of the most critical pieces of information on improving and running the organization that is needed, and we have to create space for. That if we don't create space, if we don't have the opportunity and the invitation available, it won't happen. And that's, again, easier said than done. This is not something that I flip a switch, or you flip a switch in your organization, and suddenly there's openness and sharing and all the great things come pouring in. It takes work, but it's good work. This is the work that progresses the world of HR, the world of safety in the right way. We hear so many times that things gone wrong, maybe we can push it in the direction to do something right, to do it in the right way. And so as they filter through, and I love a good qualitative analysis. I love I enjoy the act of interviewing with very specific questions, letting someone digest the question and talk, and you dig deeper, and you have that deep conversation on a topic, and then you come back from a number of conversations, and you see, what are the central themes that come from that I enjoy that? So I enjoyed this article a lot, and as they digested a lot of the information that they got, there were some of the key themes that really came out was, Is there time to talk? Does my supervisor? Does my manager, or even peers, in some cases, have an influence, but leadership your manager has a much bigger effect on your happiness than some people want to admit. Is there time to talk? Is there a place to talk, if it's a sensitive conversation, is there a place we can step off to the side and have that conversation where not everybody has to hear it or see it is the managers present? And here's one of the things, instead of like, you know, a lot of managers high in their office, you don't see them, or they're in meetings constantly. They have no idea what you are about. How do we get out there? How do we make space, and even if we how do we do that? And that's not always easy. Is the bureaucratic structure allowing for those conversations? Do we have when we say we have an open door policy? Do we mean it, or is it really like, hey, the door is open, but when you come in, it's going to stay a little Yeah. Do we have that are the rules against sharing, or do we try to shut things down? And here they they reference some ideas that happen here, where maybe there's rules that have conflicting information in them, boundaries, social structure, are there go to people. But what's so important in the early part, which is kind of the critical part, do we create the time and space? Do we have the programs that once someone starts to share, what does a supervisor do in the HR world? We're kind of trained to be able to hear these things and try to guide people through it. But let's say it's a new frontline supervisor. Do they know where to go when that happens? Do you have the things in places that supervisor says, hey, you've come to me. Let me put the resources in your hand. And that's the most important part, creating time, creating space, having resources. And that's a perfect reminder again, this month is Suicide Prevention Month. Your story is not over, and I hope that if you're having issues, you reach out to someone, somewhere, get the help. It's hard to do. Totally worth it. Thanks for joining me on this episode of the leading and learning through safety podcast. As always, I'm glad to be here with you. Thank you for allowing me to join you in this podcast till next time we chat, stay safe. Thank you for listening to the leading and learning through safety podcast. More content is available online at www dot T, S, D, A, consulting.com all the opinions expressed on the podcast are solely attributed to the individual and not affiliated with any business entity. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes. It is not a substitute for proper policy, appropriate training or legal advice the. This has been the leading and learning through safety podcast. You.