Expert Interview: Victoria Doxat
In this Expert Interview, AdvancingWellness CEO Mari Ryan is joined by thought leader consultant Victoria Doxat to discuss the topic of healthy communications in the workplace.
Mari Ryan: Welcome to the Workplace Wellbeing Essential series, I'm Mari Ryan, I'm the CEO and founder of Advancing Wellness. It is my pleasure to welcome you today to this expert interview where we explore topics that impact employee wellbeing. My guest today is Victoria Doxat.
Victoria is a thought leadership consultant and an executive ghostwriter, and she helps her clients increase their authority, impact, and income with strategic thought leadership campaigns. She's also a fully qualified philosophy lecturer and enjoys applying the philosophical approach to business communications. She's a contributing author on the recently published book Winning the War for Talent in the 2020s, of which I am also a contributing author. Victoria, welcome. I'm so excited to have you here today.
Victoria Doxat: I will. Thank you for having me. It is great to catch up with you and I'm looking forward to our chat today.
Mari Ryan: Always fun to be together.
Victoria Doxat: Yeah, always.
Mari Ryan: So let's explore some elements around this idea of talent management and values. In the opening of your chapter in our new book, you state, what better way is there to attract talent than to identify those values that you want to see in your employees and to exude those employees in yourself. So I'm curious from your perspective, why is it important for an organization not only to have values but to live those values?
Victoria Doxat: That's a really good question, and I think it's, I mean, I like applying a kind of philosophical approach to business communications, as you've said, and I think when we look at businesses, I think it's quite easy to stop seeing them as kind of organizations which have a heart and a soul and sometimes especially the big corporates, you kind of see them as a as a business rather than as an individual, I guess. So I like to think about business values in the same way that I think about individual values. And I think it's about having consistency and congruence, and about having the values that you want to see in your employees and having those values yourself, so you are trying to be the best that you can be and then that way you will attract people who want to help you grow and want to be part of that journey for you.
Mari Ryan: How does having and living these values help employers compete in today's war for talent?
Victoria Doxat: I think people are becoming more discerning and I think people are not stupid. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. And I think especially with social media, there is no hiding place now. I think if you are not showing who you are and being consistent in the way that you show who you are and doing things in a way that is appropriate, I think people are not going to want to work with you. Because people have been more selective and more discerning, they want to work somewhere that's going to help them to grow and help to fulfill them, not just financially anymore, but also morally. There’s a kind of moral compulsion, I think, to businesses to attract people and help people grow and become better. I think that's what attracts the war for talent in the 2020s and beyond. I think it's having an ethical framework, having a sustainable framework, and seeing people as individuals who you are responsible for in a way, rather than seeing people as workers who will help you get a bigger profit.
Mari Ryan: Right. Well, this is so interesting because one of the things that I talk about a lot in terms of how we create cultures of wellbeing in the workplace, we know that millennials, and well everyone really, wants to have meaningful work. It's not just about the compensation. We want meaningful work, but they also want to feel that connection to something that's bigger to that purpose that that organization fulfills. And to me, values really work in service of the purpose that that organization fulfills and profits, not the purpose, profits and outcome. Just curious about your thoughts.
Victoria Doxat: Yeah, absolutely. I think with the pandemic, we've seen a real shift in working environments, haven’t we, and the way that people work. I think now that you can work anywhere from around the world, you don't have to necessarily physically go in the office. You have to if you're a business, you have to be much stronger in who you are and much more conscious of your own personality, I guess, as a business in order to attract those people to work with you. I think communication is a part that I think you have to have a much clearer communication now than you did before because you are communicating with people in different places and across different continents often, too.
Mari Ryan: You do a lot of work with leaders on communication-related topics, and I'm curious, what role do you see communications playing in an organization and how it influences those values?
Victoria Doxat: Actually, it’s a bit massive, isn’t it? In fact, the reason why I first fell into communications because as you said in your introduction I’m a philosophy lecturer, so I'm a teacher first and foremost. I've been doing that for 15 years. So I only really fell into communications four or five years ago and that was as a direct result of being on the receiving end of very, very poor communications. I was working in an environment at the college. We were going through a restructures and redundancies and nothing was being conveyed in a meaningful way. There were no values at all being shared by employees. The business that we ended up working for, there was no kind of philosophy that bonded us together. It got to the point where emails were being sent and then recalled. So some people had some information, other people had other information, and there was a real lack of cohesion. It was awful. It was awful because you didn't know whether you're being made redundant or not. You didn't know if your colleagues were being made redundant. That really was the catalyst for me to get more involved in communications with the college.
I ended up doing a lot of work in the union, and then through that, I kind of started working with businesses because I think … I know in The Thriving Hive, you talk about the importance of communication in a thriving hive, and it's absolutely integral. I think if you have open, honest, and clear communication, even if that communication is not always going to be well received, you still have a duty of care towards the people that you are employing, to be honest with them. You know, it's not easy to tell people that they are at risk of redundancy or that there's financial issues on the horizon or whatever. But you are responsible for these people who are giving you their hours and their days and their time, so communication is really very important and failure of communication, it can be catastrophic on so many different levels.
Mari Ryan: You and I are so aligned on so much of our thinking in this way, and I've seen, especially during this time of the pandemic where there are so many unknowns and things are changing so quickly. We have this, what people keep calling the “new normal” and I prefer to refer to it as the normal for now. We only know as much as we know today and this could change tomorrow. We see literal changes from week to week going on where we think we know what path we're on and then we're not on that path anymore because something else has changed.
And I think employers … I've seen some good examples of employers who have worked hard at communications. One of my clients, when the pandemic started, they began a daily email to employees to be able to tell them, here's what we know now, here's how we're responding, here's the situation so that they could at least share that information and reassure people that this is what's happening. As you well know, in the absence of that kind of communication people are going to make up their own stories.
Victoria Doxat: Absolutely. I think sometimes communication that says, do you know what we don't know, but we're working on it, is fine. That to me is good communication. It’s much better than radio silence. It’s much better to hold your hands up and say, you know what, we're all in this together, nobody knows what the future's going to hold, but we're working on it. We are thinking about it. At least we're working on it rather than radio silence, which people always interpret negatively. If you don't hear anything you think it’s bad news, that's human nature.
Mari Ryan: Yeah, exactly. In the book, you describe an excellent business. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on what does it mean in in this changing world that we're living in, what does it really mean to be an excellent business?
Victoria Doxat: Yes, another good question. So in the book, I try and look at it from a philosophical angle, which is my background. I was looking at excellence in relation to the ancient Greek culture, and they have a virtue as being very high up as a good measure of excellence. They would say that being virtuous and I guess we would say now that would be bravery and honesty and being truthful.
I think, to be honest, it's not that much different now for businesses. I think you can still attain excellence. I think for today, business is really about sustainability. I think that excellence, that virtue, that bravery, that truthfulness comes down to being sustainable. And it's not just about planting trees or doing good things for the environment, although that is a part of it, I think it’s about making sure that everything you touch goes on to be better as a result. And that's not easy to do, but truly excellent businesses, I think, are aspiring to do that. So they're not just doing what they can for their employees, they're also trying to do what they can for their community. They’re also giving back to charities or giving back to the world in some way, whether that's planting trees or supporting refugees or whatever.
Also I think that the products or the services that they provide should also be sustainable in some way. They shouldn't bring long term damage to the environment. You should be looking at better ways to do things to make people's lives better or easier. So many businesses are doing that. I work with entrepreneurs and purpose-driven entrepreneurs and they are incredible. There is so much good that business is doing. I think governments leave a lot to be desired, don’t they, and businesses are stepping into that gap and really doing a lot of good. I think for me, that's what excellence is in business now. I think it’s about leaving a legacy and making sure that you give more than you receive.
Mari Ryan: Well, it certainly contributes not only to the wellbeing of the people who are there in the organization who can align with the purpose, but it also it supports the wellbeing of the community and the world at a bigger level. So it's all around wellbeing for all parties.
Victoria Doxat: Yeah. And it's a win-win for everyone, isn't it? Because if the business is successful, then you get more profit and you can then increase your revenue and how it will be. I think most forward-thinking businesses know that. And I think most forward- thinking businesses are trying to do something that is sustainable in that way, which is a really good thing. It's an exciting time to be working in business there are a lot of very exciting initiatives that are happening. And technology is a massive help in that respect. I think there's this stuff now that we can do just in terms of supporting agriculture, for example, in developing countries that we couldn’t have done 10, 20 years ago. So there's lots that businesses can do, and I think it's an exciting time. I love working with clients and seeing the innovations that they're coming up with because it's inspiring and it's really inspirational.
Mari Ryan: That's really fun. It is exciting, very exciting times. Challenging in some ways, but very exciting times.
Victoria Doxat: Absolutely.
Mari Ryan: So you also mention in the book that there's mounting pressure for businesses to look after the health and wellbeing of their employees. So, of course, that caught my attention, and yet many are still playing catch up. So what do you think it will take for employers to see wellbeing as being -- the individual employee wellbeing -- as being both urgent and necessary?
Victoria Doxat: Yeah, another great question, I think to be fair, they're already seeing that it's necessary. I think the pandemic has given rise to lots of talk about mental health, which is a really good thing, really positive thing. Lots of talk about equality in the workplace because it tends to be the women that are doing the home schooling, whereas the men don't tend to. I know that's a sweeping generalization, but it has been a lot of noise around the way that work is divided in the house, especially during lockdown in the pandemic and stuff. I think sometimes it became more extreme.
So there's been a lot of dialogue about this, which is a really good thing. I think employers now know that it is necessary to look after your staff, to look after your employees and to make sure that they are as well-supported as they can be. I think the urgency is missing. I think it's not been tackled as urgently as it should be, but I think it's kind of like pushing a snowball off a mountain, isn't it? It takes a little while to get the momentum going, but then it will pick up and it will pick up and it will pick up and then it will kind of roll under its own steam.
I think we kind of saw that with and with the Black Lives Matter movement. We saw a huge amount of equality and diversity conversations, which is really good. I mean, it's about time, isn't it? You know, it’s late. You should have been done a long time ago. And I think we're seeing the same thing now for employee wellbeing. So yes, I think the necessary, I think it's seen as necessary. I don't think it's seen as urgent. So that's something that perhaps we need to work on.
Mari Ryan: Well, I'm on that mission and glad to have that mission with me. So thank you for making those contributions. If our audience wants to learn more about you, Victoria, and the work that you're doing, where can they find you?
Victoria Doxat: The best place for me is LinkedIn and I'm most active on LinkedIn and you can just search for me under my name, Victoria Doxat. You've mentioned the book we both contributed to, that's on Amazon. So your audience is very welcome to go and have a look at that on Amazon. And you can also find me on my website at www.victoriaDoxat.com, but LinkedIn is probably where I'm most active, so please do connect with me on there and I look forward to having a conversation.
Mari Ryan: All right. Thank you so much for being here today. As always, it's just a delight to spend time with you.
Victoria Doxat: Thank you for having me on, Mari. It's been great. Thank you.
Mari Ryan: Thanks.
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