← Risk in Context Podcast
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- [00:02]
A
Hello and welcome to Risk in Context, which features conversations with Marsh risk colleagues, risk professionals and others intended to help you better understand key risks, build more effective insurance programs, and think creatively about risk. I'm Captain Andy James and I lead the operational risk consulting team for aviation here at Marsh. The airline industry is a deeply human centered sector and this means that the mental health and well being of all employees from pilots, cabin crew, engineers and air traffic control and all safety personnel is fundamental to operational safety and success. Central to this is the concept of psychological safety, creating a workplace culture where individuals feel empowered to speak up, share concerns and seek help without fear of stigma or penalty. I'm joined today in this episode of Risk in context by Dr. Wolfgang Siedel, workplace health expert and board advisor, who helped develop the mental health solution for pilots. In collaboration with the Marsh aviation practice and Dr. Kimberly Perkins, PhD, an airline pilot, a researcher and co founder of Involo, we will discuss the importance for the aviation industry to prioritise mental health, how mental health first strategies can improve safety, and share actions that organizations can consider. And in doing this, we're also hoping to be able to help license holders of all these areas with pathways on how to return to work. As I mentioned earlier, I'm really pleased and excited to be joined today by these great speakers. I'm going to ask both of them one at a time, starting with Kimberly to to briefly introduce yourself and then a quick word, an introduction from Wolfgang.
- [01:51]
B
Thanks, Andy. It's really great to be here. I'm Kimberly Perkins. I'm an airline pilot flying the Boeing 787 and also a researcher in human factors and aviation safety at the University of Washington, which is also where I got my doctorate. My work focuses on the intersection of mental health, psychological safety and operational performance, specifically in the aviation industry. And as you mentioned, thank you. I am the co founder of Envolo, where we're developing tools to help organizations better support the psychological resilience of safety critical professionals. And much of my recent research focuses on why aviation professionals often struggle to access mental health support and on identifying the kinds of systems and structures that we can put in place to better support them. And I'm very happy to be here and looking forward to this conversation.
- [02:38]
C
Thank you so much for setting the scene, Andy, and it's an honor to follow you, Kimberly. It's fabulous to talk to two pilots and also somebody who shares my passion for psychological research. So I'm really delighted to be here and I thank you for the invitation. I am a medical doctor, psychiatrist and psychotherapist by background. I was also running global EAPS and served on various expert panels on traumatic incidents. On a less somber note, I provide C suite and manager training in using cutting edge insights from neuroscience to manage for high performance. And I created four films on resilience, empathy, self care and engagement.
- [03:27]
A
And thank you both Kimberly and Wolfgang for your kind introductions and you're both going to be joining me at this year's Aviation Summit to be held in London next week where you and other industry experts will be discussing a number of topics. We will also leave a link to the registration later on in this show. As you know, the aviation industry is a very people focused and highly reliable industry and the health and safety of its people is of utmost importance to us, hence us getting here today. Our aim today is to outline the actions that organizations can take to protect their people and their customers. And while today's panel includes two pilots, Kimberly and myself, we have Wolfgang, a doctor of medicine and psychiatry, and we'll be talking about the aviation industry as a whole, including flight crew, mechanics, safety personnel and others, including air traffic control. Would you mind just providing an oversight of the mental health challenges that you see the aviation facing?
- [04:34]
C
Airline pilots are required to meet certain medical standards in order to maintain an active flying status and disclosing a new symptom or condition puts them at risk of losing the ability to work and fly, even if it's just for a short time. This is particularly true for mental health symptoms. The Federal Aviation Administration bars pilots from the cockpit if they report seeking regular talk therapy for even mild anxiety or depression. In fact, pilots are among only a handful of professions that require disclosure of any encounter with the health care system, including mental health visits. In one study, more than a quarter of pilots reported they withheld information during Federal Aviation Administration health checks. Much needs to be done to end this culture of silence to enable pilots to talk to professionals about how they are suffering so they can get treatment. There is a myth that pilots are superhuman and don't experience what the rest of us are experiencing. Every human being is on a journey with their health experience and we need to get serious about diagnosing correctly and being clear about fit for duty in a non threatening way that preserves people's livelihood. You will hear more about that and an end to end pathway at the Aviation Summit that has been mentioned earlier. But the widely reported jumbo accidents are just the tip of the iceberg. Much more common and usually minor safety incidents have to do with being human pilots, engineers, air traffic controllers and cabin Crew are all part of that pyramid of making sure everything is tested and double checked. And that's why flying is the safest mode of transport. But let's talk about being human and how a lapse in concentration can have terrible consequences. Being sleep deprived or preoccupied with your child's illness, the purchase of a house, divorce proceedings or falling in love, they are all life events that may lead to distractions at work, whether you are a pilot or a construction worker operating machinery. Some high profile cases in the finance industry, by contrast, have been celebrated to destigmatize mental health experiences of senior executives. Yet in aviation, there's a culture of silence, just for the reasons outlined above. We have come a long way though. Airlines have established pathways to facilitate pilot access to medical professionals and to raise health awareness more generally. These pathways include digital platforms, some of which include AI driven modules enabling employees to track their mood and state of mind and access self help material. In our work at Marsh, we have seen mental health pathways result in 9% reduction in number of claims for mental health, a 16% reduction in the average cost of claims on the health insurance and a 60% improvement in therapy outcomes across various industry sectors overall. We also notice that preventative interventions have provided a much better return on investment than therapeutic interventions which are much more expensive to deliver. And the last point I quickly raise is that peer to peer support initiatives are also becoming more widespread in the industry. A pilot may trust a fellow pilot to better understand what they are going through than anyone else. Employee assistance programs are often the first port of call for employees with stress or mental health concerns. And it is a step in the right direction that they have recently started to offer up to 25 sessions with a counsellor instead of the standard eight sessions to better address some of the presenting problems that we will be talking about later.
- [08:55]
A
Wolfgang, thank you so much. That's really, really interesting. And actually, you know, some of those statistics are quite scary, to be honest. When you're talking about 25% of the pilots, I would just like to add that it is true pilots are also only human. So that's a very good point that you raised there. So turning to Kimberly, could you please explain the impact of psychological safety within the aviation industry and your take on it?
- [09:27]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I'll do it in terms of like the context that we're talking about here with mental health health. But first you have to kind of understand the concept. So some people had not heard of it, some people are very familiar with it. So this concept actually first was discussed in the 1960s. And then it was popularized in the late 1990s by Dr. Amy Edmondson, where she was looking at the medical industry. And she said it's this team dynamic where the team feels like it's safe for interpersonal risk taking. So if we kind of take that concept and we say, what does that mean for aviation? In practical terms? It means people feel safe sharing safety sensitive information. They feel like they can, they're comfortable to raise a concern, offer dissenting opinion, ask for help admitting a mistake, or even say something like, I'm not really sure. So if you think about it in the context of the flight deck, that's exactly the kind of environment we want. Regardless of the tone of the flight deck or whether the pilots feel like they're getting along with the other pilot, you would expect pilots to speak up and share safety critical information. We're actually trained how to do that in crew resource management, that we're expected to do that. However, research found that when psychological safety isn't present, pilots often don't share safety information. So they're more reluctant to ask for help, identify errors, admit errors, or say, you know, hey, I don't know something, can you help me with this? So if we're seeing this dynamic where low psychological safety leads to withholding safety sensitive information among pilots who operate in some of the most like highly trained teams in the world, it's likely happening in other parts of aviation as well. So that's just setting the stage for what is psychological safety and the research that's done in the flight deck. And but let's think about psychological safety in terms of mental health reporting, because this is our hot topic for this podcast. There was a survey that was done of pilots and air traffic controllers because as Wolfgang mentioned earlier, we're the ones that have to get a medical certificate. And in our medical certificate, it's asked about any mental health concerns. So we conducted a large study. We asked, in the aviation industry, is mental health a concern? And 98% of those surveyed said, yeah, we're concerned about this. But what was more surprising is that nearly half, 47%, said that at some point in their career they needed mental health Support, but only 12% are utilizing the resources available to them. So this raises a very important question. If resources exist, why aren't people using them? And Wolfgang alluded to some of the answers here. Right. He talked about the unique fitness for duty structure. And I just kind of want to commend that we're talking about that because I, I agree this pilots are held to this strict medical certification where it really comes down to this binary choice. You're healthy, you're not healthy. And when that fear of disclosing mental health challenges might jeopardize someone's career, that leads to suboptimal behavior. And that creates a real safety paradox. So instead of addressing challenges early on, when they're most manageable, people tend to delay seeking support until the problems get more severe. Which is, you know, if you think about it, the aviation industry for decades has done an incredible job building systems that encourage the reporting of errors and operational hazards. But when it comes to mental health, that same level of psychological safety hasn't really existed. And that's a gap in the industry where we're just barely starting to address.
- [13:08]
A
Brilliant, Kimberly, thank you so much for that. So just to carry on, what sort of actions are the industry or what are we hoping that we can try and take to address them? So Wolfgang, briefly, can you explain the role or the use of an employee assistance program program, the peer to peer support that you mentioned, what are they trying to achieve and does it work in aviation compared to other industries?
- [13:37]
C
Great question and Kimberly, thank you so much for those hard hitting statistics. Really sort of brings our discussion to a head. But just to explain, employee assistance programs, I mean they started over 80 years ago. Initially those programs aimed to help employees with alcohol problems. Still a highly relevant issue in the conversation that we are having today. But everything they do is meant to improve productivity and employee satisfaction. So today EAPs provide a broad range of services addressing substance use, as we just talked about, mental health, family issues, work stress, financial and legal concerns and other personal problems that can affect job performance. Regarding Pilot Mental Health, EAPs can offer confidential counseling, stress management, risk interventions and support services tailored to the unique pressures and mental health challenges faced by pilots, helping to maintain their well being and job performance. One good thing about EAPs is that they are accessible 24, 7 so at any time and they are able to assess and triage a great number of issues. But for very serious mental health concerns, they are not the right type of service. So for those diagnoses they should be part of a stepped care pathway that also offers access to more in depth psychological or psychiatric support. Their strengths overall is that they adapt to various workplace situations and hence they are so relevant to many industry sector. And their goal can be described, if you like, as improving productivity by addressing emotional and practical issues that distract employees at work. And a brief word also about peer to peer that we mentioned before. The peer to peer support is to some degree a variation on that same theme, but it's provided by non clinicians, namely by peers who know the workplace better than any third party counselor ever could and as such significantly reduced the barrier to entry. The as long as confidentiality is well defined when looking after pilots, I would like to have both EAP and peer to peer support in place. I would also like a stepped care pathway that addresses deeper mental health problems and going further upstream at the other end, I would like to see resilience and self care programs that obviously are aimed not just at mental health, but also physical health and social well being. And if I am allowed another wish, I would also add that overdue change from a culture of silence to a culture of health and proactive well being to the list of my wishes.
- [16:39]
A
Thank you very much, Wolfgang. That's really interesting to hear. I'm actually just going to ask Kimberly a quick question. How do you feel that the peer to peer works within aviation?
- [16:53]
B
I think it's a great idea. Having someone who actually understands the flight deck context I think is important. And I think aviation has made a lot of important progress over even just the last decade on the concept of peer to peer support programs. Personally, I would use a peer to peer support program before I would probably use my company's eap. But both of these systems are designed to provide confidential help and create pathways for people to talk to trained peers who understand the operational environment. But even though we have both these options, we see a significant usage gap. Right. In many airlines, participation rates in these programs remain relatively low compared to the number of people who report experiencing high levels of stress, fatigue, emotional strain. You know, I threw out those stats to you earlier. The 47% have raised their hand saying, yeah, at some point I need help. And only 12% are actually utilizing the programs. That's based off a survey, academic survey from last year. And there are a few reasons for that. You mentioned trust as one. Trust is a major, major concern, right. So even though the programs say that they're confidential, I know a lot of employees worry about how that information is is used and whether it could eventually affect their medical certificate. But another factor is this cultural stigma. We found that psychological barriers, when we looked at this gap between this 47% and 12%, we wanted to kind of quantify why. And so we looked at all of the responses across structural barriers. Like a structural barrier would be, I don't have a program in place. And then psychological barriers would be this trust or the stigma. And what we found is that psychological barriers were about 66% of the reason why. So they were more significant than the I don't know how to access the program or we don't have a program. So aviation has traditionally valued this toughness, this self reliance. Right. Pilots were so good at compartmentalization, but we don't necessarily unpack that later on. And those traits are super beneficial operationally, but they can also make it harder for people to ask for help when they need it. So while peer support programs I think are extremely valuable, they work best when they're embedded within a broader system that builds trust and normalizes help seeking behavior. Which is why I'm excited to share that. Hot off the press it's just recently came out is some academic work by Dr. Billy Hoffman and his team. And the title kind of says it all. It says it's the title of this academic paper is Integrating Mental Health and Wellness into into Aviation Safety Management Systems Current Knowledge and Future Direction. So in that that paper, which is open source, you can access, there's some excellent direction about how we can de stigmatize accessing these support systems and how we can measure and mitigate psychosocial risk.
- [19:46]
A
That's brilliant. That's really interesting. I'm going to come back to Wolfgang. You gave a really insightful chat there at Wolfgang on EAPS and your view on peer to peer support. You briefly mentioned sort of pathways. How do you see the pathways within the industry working?
- [20:05]
C
Yeah, I feel very strongly about them. So that's why I have mentioned them a couple of times in this discussion already because there is not one service that is covering everything right end to end. So I think it needs to be a pathway and a stepped care pathway in line with what the presenting problem is. And fit for duty is that aspect that I don't hear enough about in aviation safety conferences because there's a lot of conversation about prevention, quite rightly so, resilience and so on. But what we are really talking about here and what our audience is most concerned about is of course what happens when somebody isn't fit for duty. So we need to define quite clearly what we mean by that and that is when it's medically indicated. So somebody has voiced that they have some problems and then you need to assess them if it's a serious problem they have. But why not nip it in the bud and have some regular and unthreatening check ins with health professionals who understand both psychology and the specific demands of the aviation industry. So that would be a form of proactively checking in on Fit for duty. And these check ins need to be better defined, as I said earlier, to allow also the employer to discharge what's called, and I mentioned that now for the first time, their duty of care. So on the one hand we want to make it as easy as possible, as destigmatized as possible for the person concerned. But on the other hand we also need to be cognizant that we have two clients here. One is the organization and, and one is the individual.
- [21:52]
A
Thank you very much Wolfgang. All really great points and things to sort of mull over as an organization as well. Now talking of surveys, I keep going on about facts and figures. I think data speaks for itself. Kimberly, I know that you've recently carried out a survey with regards to the traveling public. Would you mind just sharing that, those insights as well, sort of data that you receive from them?
- [22:18]
B
Yeah, and I'll say that, I mean it's just recently closed. So this is really new, new data. So we plan on, you know, cleaning the data and then sharing it academically. So let me just give you some high level, some interesting stuff. So this survey looked at, we had about nearly 3,000 passengers. So the stipulation was do you travel via airplane? And if it's yes, then you can fill out the survey. And we asked a series of questions. But one of the things that I think is really interesting to share here is we asked would you be more likely to choose an airline if you knew that that airline invested in mental health and resilience resources for pilots and flight attendants? And here's what we found. We found that 80% of passengers said yes, they would prefer to fly on an airline that actively supports mental well being of its crews? 80%. So then we asked a follow up question. How much more would you be willing to pay for a one way ticket? You know, considering all things were the same, you're departing the same place, arriving at the same place. And then we analyzed that, that response across different airlines that they work. So we asked people, what airline are you flying on the most? Who did you just fly on? And then we analyzed the responses and so we, we looked at mostly US carriers, although there was an option to write in. So we have some representation internationally as well. And when we average them all out across the different airlines, we find that most people say they're willing to pay up to $25 more for a one way ticket. So now when you scale that up to a size of a major airline, if you just think about one of the big ones that are carrying roughly 500,000 passengers per day, the potential impact becomes pretty significant. So that $25 extra on a one way times all these passengers we're looking at, that translates to 3.7 billion in annual return. And that's B with a billion. So even if an airline invest invested, say a million dollars or a couple million dollars into improving mental health resources and resilience programs for pilots and flight attendants by adopting new tools, redesigning some of the current systems, that potential return is enormous. But there are two important pieces here in making it work. One is transparency of the airline. Right. Because the passengers are saying we recognize the safety concern and we want solutions around it. So there needs to be a communication strategies for the airline. Right. They need to be transparent with the passengers, what they're actually doing and how they're investing in mental health support and how these resources are being used. Ideally, that message should not just come from the airline itself, but also from employee groups, which adds credibility. But the second most critical piece is that it really does need to provide real change. It can't just be the status quo on paper, where we say we have the programs. Right. Airlines need to be able to move beyond what we currently have and adopt new support systems in place that are actually accessible and effective. And critically, there needs to be this feedback loop so airlines can evaluate whether these programs are actually being used or whether and whether they're closing the gap between the resources that exist and then the people who feel comfortable accessing them. Because ultimately this isn't just about well being. It's about building a stronger, more resilient aviation system.
- [25:41]
A
Brilliant. Thank you so much, Kimberly. That is unbelievable. And again, those numbers are just crazy. I think when you talk about the money people, CFOs, I think they might get quite interested in that when you do it. But no, that's been really amazing and great to hear from you both on those points. Now we've sort of painted a bit of a picture of the challenges, the concerns that we see. I just want to spend a little bit of time talking about some of the practical actions that organizations can consider. Note we will be talking about some of these things during the Aviation Summit next week. So please do take notes, listen and at the summit, if necessary, please come and find us to ask some questions. I'm just going to turn to Kimberly and then Wolfgang and just ask you to sort of share one action or process that you see that may help in these challenges that we do face in the industry.
- [26:48]
B
Yeah. So I want to bring up AI enabled support. You Know, AI is a hot topic. I think it needs to, we need to approach it cautiously. But some of the AI enabled support tools can create this low friction, confidential pathway for aviation professionals to access help. And that's where our startup Envolo kind of comes in. We've developed a platform called Crimson, which is designed specifically for the aviation environment with a lot of academic rigor behind human factors, human performance, and coming from pilots for pilots. But I want to be very clear here is that the goal isn't to replace human support or peer programs or clinical care. Instead, it's meant to act as an early intervention layer that sits alongside the support systems that already exist. And more importantly, Crimson is designed to empower the individuals that use it with resilience tools and how to operationalize those concepts of psychological safety in the flight deck. In their teams. Also AI tools, they can provide things like confidential self assessments, short resilience exercises and guidance that helps someone recognize when they might benefit from additional support. Because those interactions are private and available anytime, they lower that barrier to getting help early on. At the same time, when managers at an airline kind of look at how users are using these tools, they can look on the back end of aggregate de identified data. And it will help organizations identify emerging psychosocial risk patterns that might include things like fatigue trends or stressors related to scheduling, team dynamics, operational pressures, but that gives them insight to then adjust training or adjust systems. So the idea is not that again, I'm going to be repetitive here, that AI doesn't replace anything, but that AI helps people access the right resources that are there so that we can help organizations also understand the support systems that could be strengthened by the AI. And this is where the broader industry work really becomes important and relevant. I was recently asked to chair the new academic committee for the International Peer Aviation Assist Coalition, where I am very excited to share that Wolfgang will be on as well. So IPAC brings together airlines and regulators, peer support programs from around the world, focusing on how we can improve mental health support across aviation. And one of the goals of the academic committee is to identify where there's research gaps in aviation mental health and psychosocial risk and to help ensure that the research does not exist just in singularity, but that it's actually translated into practical, meaningful ways. So we're working on things like curating existing research into meaningful categories and identifying best practices from peer support programs and helping connect researchers with industry stakeholders so that the future studies address the questions that we're talking about and the questions about this utilization Gap. But ultimately, I think aviation has a long history of improving safety by using evidence based system design. And I think AI can really help us do that more effectively.
- [30:07]
A
Kimberly, brilliant. Thank you so much. Again, really interesting and something that I think you're going to be talking about maybe a little bit more next week. So thank you very much for bringing that up. Obviously, Wolfgang, from your side, what sort of action can you share that we might be able to look at doing in the industry?
- [30:29]
C
Well, you know, a number of actions that I referred to earlier. All the steps in the mental health pathway need to be worked through and they need to provide evidence based solutions and outcome metrics so that we really know when we provide counseling, whether we have really moved the needle. And we need to be able to object measure whether somebody has benefited from that intervention and where it's necessary to go a step further and have a clinical psychologist or a psychiatrist. Again, it's the same. In order to destigmatize, we need to define what it means to be well and what it means to be in need of treatment. Otherwise we have this gray zone environment and that culture of silence that we talked about. Also I think, you know, we wanted to revisit psychological safety in the context of all industry sectors, if you like, not just, just aviation. So I personally think we can't talk enough about that concept and Kimberly defined it so beautifully for us and I'm a huge fan. So I just want to distinguish here that psychological safety, incidentally means two different things. One is protecting psychological well being at work, similar to how we protect health and safety at work regarding physical hazards. And this approach to psychological safety is very well summarized in the ISO standard 45,003. So a really, really good checklist for everybody who wants their organization to avoid accidents and also psychological accidents. We don't go to work to be psychologically injured, just like we don't go to work to be physically injured. They the second interpretation is that one that Kimberly used before, which is that beautiful progressive concept of psychological safety developed by Amy Edmondson at Harvard Business School. She defines it, and I want to repeat that if I may, as a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves and have a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking. What does that mean? That means that people are encouraged to bring their knowledge and their skills to work and to speak up, I repeat, speak up culture, right? When something is wrong, for instance, a nurse feels comfortable speaking up when the surgeon makes a mistake, for instance, Forgot a small surgical sponge in the patient's body or a young pilot spots a possible serious mistake by a senior officer or a senior exec plucks up the courage to speak up in the boardroom to question the rationale of a planned takeover. And that could save you millions later on if that observation was a helpful one. So the team overall benefits from that speaking up culture, incidentally, environments with high psychological safety show measurable improvements in productivity and also success of the team.
- [33:36]
A
Wolfgang, thank you so much for that. That's again, you know, from both of you, really insightful information and knowledge. Should I say that we're sharing with the public? As I would say, it's also very important to create that non punitive environment where we feel that it's possible to return to work and the correct way, return to work pathways that you've both so eloquently discussed and spoken about today. We need to look at the correct plans that are documented and filed and you know, the correct training needs to also be applied throughout all of that. You know, we haven't really mentioned sort of insurance or insurers, but you know, we are currently talking to a number of insurers that would be hopefully be able to help offer certain funding options that we could devise to help on these mental health programs aimed at reducing risk, not only obviously to the individuals, but to the organization. And this, if we can manage this, will be a hugely important step for us and for the industry. Interestingly, as we're coming up with some quotes, I was reminded of one from a, from a friend and colleague the other day from, from by Desmond Tutu, which I think is probably very apt. So I'm just going to read it out now. There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out where they're falling in. So I think, you know, some of these things are really interesting. We want to be at that point. We want to be able to be at the point where we're stopping upstream rather than having to utilize all these solutions. But we do need them there in place. So anyway, we're approaching the end of our podcast and what I'm going to do is always what happens on stage and podcasts and webinars, we always invite our guests to give us one sort of takeaway to remember before we leave. So can I just ask Kimberly and then Wolfgang to just give me one takeaway from the conversation we've had today, which has just been absolutely fascinating.
- [35:50]
B
Yeah, and thank you Again, for the invite here. I'm really excited to be here and be talking about this. It's so such an important topic. So I'm so happy that Marsh is highlighting this conversation. My biggest takeaway is that mental health and aviation should be treated the same way as any other safety risk through system design. So if you look at how we talk about fatigue today compared to even 15 years ago, the shift is remarkable. We've moved from viewing fatigue as an individual weakness to recognizing it as a predictable operational risk that has to be managed through a system. And I think it's time that we actually approach mental well being in the same way. Aviation is an industry defined by high stress, constant vigilance, and high consequence decision making. And in, in environments like that, psychosocial risks are inevitable. So the real question isn't whether the risk exists, it's whether we're measuring them and managing them effectively. For decades, aviation has improved safety by identifying risks early and encouraging reporting, building layers of support around human performance. Mental health should follow the same model. And I'll just, I'll add here as well, is that the really interesting part is that passengers are willing to pay for this. So the argument around, well, we don't have resources. That doesn't really hold up. Airlines are already spending money trying to solve this problem, but because current programs are often underutilized, a lot of those investments aren't delivering the impact that they could. So what we need to do is redesign the system. New tools, better access points. You know, we talked about a lot of solutions on lowering the stigma support structures where people actually feel like they're comfortable using the resources. And there's a business case here too. Airlines care deeply about brand loyalty and net promoter scores. If passengers begin associating certain airlines with stronger support for employee well being, that becomes part of the brand. So if an airline isn't motivated to rethink mental health systems for the sake of safety or employee well being, I mean, hopefully they do. But if they're not, they should at least recognize that their competitors will and passengers are going to notice. Because ultimately, when organizations create environments where people feel safe to speak up and access support, support early, we're not just improving individual well being, we're strengthening the entire aviation system. And there's a lot of brand loyalty associated with airlines that can do that.
- [38:21]
C
I would say the need for enhanced health and wellbeing services for pilots and other employees in the aviation industry is clear and urgent, not least for the reasons that Kimberly just so impressively laid out in front of us. And also Kimberly mentioned that passengers are willing to pay for it and earlier she also said that employees are asking for it. So there is plenty of evidence from Marsh studies that shows that particularly younger employees check very carefully what the health and well being benefits look like before they join an organization. So that is probably cause for optimism that we are evolving in that direction where it is being taken more seriously. And when we get this right, it not only elevates aviation safety but also sharpens our approach to health and well being programs across other industries. After all, the impact of these programs is most profound in aviation and hits the headlines which should remind us to rely on evidence based solutions rather than passing trends when it comes to health and well being, which can be a really interesting and exciting science driven enterprise or it can just follow sort of fluffy fads that we want to avoid.
- [39:49]
A
Wolfgang, thank you very much and Kimberly both for your final takeaways. It's much appreciated. I mean, all I'm going to say on this is as briefly as I can because I think you've both covered everything so well, is that I've got two exceptional professionals and experts that have sat with me today in this recording. I've said it many times. I get bored going to conferences and seeing people acknowledge and listen to everything that you guys are saying when you're on stage and talking about it and not necessarily actioning it. So mine would be please take this really seriously. Not just acknowledge what you see on stage, but support and action programs to help build these pathways for the benefit of more most importantly the individuals, but also your organizations. So I just want to thank Kimberly and Wolfgang today for joining me. It's been really, really interesting. I hope you've all learned a lot. I think the stats that the figures, the data, everything that you've heard today should sort of keep us on our toes. That's all for this edition of Risk in Context. We hope that you enjoyed our discussion and thank you for listening. You can rate, review and subscribe to Risk in Context on Apple Podcasts or any other app you're using. You can also follow Marsh risk on LinkedIn or X. In addition addition to your podcast feed, you can find more episodes of Wristing Context and more insights from Marsh Risk on our website marsh. Com. Until next time, thanks again for listening.