'You Don't Know What You Don't Know': Management Exposure,
Understanding and Commitment in Lived Experience Workforce
Development
What is needed for management to better advocate for Lived Experience roles?
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Byrne, L., Roennfeldt, H., Wang, L., & O'Shea, P. (2019). 'You don't know what you don't know': The essential role of management exposure, understanding and commitment in peer workforce development, International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 28, 572-581. doi: 10.1111/inm.12562
Take home messages
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Management plays a key part in helping develop the Lived Experience workforce.
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Management exposure to Lived Experience workers leads to greater understanding, greater commitment and increasing employment of roles.
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Employment of Lived Experience leadership positions improves the ability of Lived Experience perspectives to influence and increases support and supervision of Lived Experience roles.
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Champions at all levels of organisations can advocate for Lived Experience roles.
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Barriers such as workplace culture can impede the growth of the Lived Experience workforce.
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There is a need for training and accessible information for management to increase their knowledge and to help them build networks for advice and mentoring opportunities.
Aim
To explore management understanding and attitudes towards Lived Experience workforce. The paper also aimed to explore workplace culture considerations that impact on Lived Experience roles and how management contributes to this culture.
Background
Lived Experience workers are people who have had life-changing mental health challenges, service use, periods of healing and are employed in diverse roles to use this ‘lived’ or living expertise to help other people accessing services.
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The Lived Experience workforce is growing quickly and is key to ongoing mental health reform. However, challenges still exist, including attitudes of some mental health professionals.
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Management commitment is important for driving and implementing successful diversity initiatives by influencing workplace culture and beliefs.
Method
A total of 29 people participated in the study. All participants were employed in a range of management roles including executive and senior management, in the Mental Health sector in Queensland Australia. The 24 participating organisations had different levels of exposure to Lived Experience workers – from no experience to significant experience employing Lived Experience workers.
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Twenty-five interviews and one focus group including four new participants were completed. The data collected was then examined for common themes.
Results
For organisations without any Lived Experience workers, the reason for not employing them often reflected a lack of exposure to the roles.
Eagerness to employ and a commitment to the roles was often due to exposure. Having more Lived Experience roles led to more advocacy for the roles and more being employed.
Visiting other organisations with a Lived Experience workforce helped those who were considering employing Lived Experience roles become more motivated and committed.
Management buy-in was key to meaningful and supported employment of Lived Experience roles.
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The role of champions or allies who promote and support Lived Experience roles were also seen as important to build an effective Lived Experience workforce.
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Champions with decision making roles were seen to help push for Lived Experience roles to be prioritised and resourced. Champions could be either Lived Experience management or people in positions of power that did not have an identified lived experience.
Roles where Lived Experience workers were employed at a management level were seen to provide greater influence to effectively build and support Lived Experience workforce.
These roles were noted by participants to help advocate for Lived Experience workers, develop relevant frameworks, policies and recruitment processes, as well as increase training and development opportunities. Lived Experience managers were also seen as role models and demonstrating the importance of Lived Experience perspectives.
Views and acceptance of Lived Experience workers impacted the employment experience for both Lived Experience workers and management who championed the roles.
Particularly in organisations with small numbers of Lived Experience workers in comparison to non-Lived Experience staff, the workplace culture was seen to be largely created by the non-Lived Experience staff. A need to culturally prepare the workplace for Lived Experience roles via top-down support and valuing was clear.
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To achieve readiness a number of strategies were used:
Roles where Lived Experience workers were employed at a management level were seen to give those workers greater influence to build and support the Lived Experience workforce.
These roles were noted by participants to help advocate for Lived Experience workers, develop relevant frameworks, policies and recruitment processes, as well as increase training and development opportunities. Lived Experience managers were also seen as role models and show of the importance of Lived Experience workers.
Champions of Lived Experience work
‘Lived Experience management’ roles
Organisational Culture & Acceptance
Discussion
Differences were found between the attitudes and beliefs of management depending on how much experience they had with Lived Experience workers. Higher levels of exposure to Lived Experience work and concepts led to higher commitment and a greater understanding of the roles. Greater understanding led to higher perceived value for Lived Experience.
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A lack of exposure was associated with lower levels of commitment and understanding and was a barrier to the employment of Lived Experience roles.
Commitment of management was found to be important in building organisational understanding of the roles, but active valuing by management was also needed to advocate for and employ Lived Experience roles.
Champions at all levels of the organisation were key to driving the acceptance and valuing of Lived Experience and expansion of the workforce throughout the organisation.
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In addition to the need for buy-in, advocacy and action from management there is also a need to address other barriers such as:
Discriminatory attitudes and behaviours
Appropriate
remuneration
Clear job roles and responsibilities
Helpful initial strategies include workforce-wide training and specific management training to better understand the roles and their value.