Getting Mo' Support Than Ever

CASSIE TWEMLOW

Over the years, Michelle Terry (1991), has held a number of positions in e-commerce and marketing roles with some of the world’s largest companies in capital cities in Europe, Asia and the United States. As of February 2020, Michelle was appointed global CEO for leading men’s health organisation, Movember. Now, based in Melbourne, Michelle ‘Zoomed’ Rowena Lester of SPOSA to talk about her role, especially as she started only six weeks prior to the pandemic.

Rowena Lester (rl): It sounds like you’ve got a big job.

Michelle Terry (mt): It's a great job, but it is fairly busy. I've got people here in Melbourne and then London, Toronto, New York and LA. [Before the pandemic] I got to meet the guys in London, New York and in LA and but had to fly home quickly before I got a chance to meet the guys in Canada. So, we've only ‘met’ over Zoom, which is slightly weird. Usually, I'd be in the UK, Canada and the US about once a quarter each.

rl: Were you busier or quieter during the time we came to know as ‘New Normal’?

mt: I think I would have been busy regardless. It just would have been a bit different. I've been busy trying to make sure that the organisation is doing the best it can both with the services, its delivery to the community and, its own financial stability. But also, our people's mental health and connection is important as well.

[Last year], we put all of our staff to work from home pretty much overnight, around the world. We were lucky because we're quite well setup from a tech standpoint. My organisation already used Zoom and Slack and lots of those tools because it's a global organisation. We were used to working across geographies, so we didn't have many problems making that happen.

But the next thing we had to tackle was how do you enable people to be socially connected and emotionally connected? We started with three pillars—first, wellness and then, connectivity. Finally, there was how to get people to work productively in a way that's entirely out of the office. We spent some time thinking about those three things and worked on that.

I think in terms of how we did it, we're lucky insofar as we are a mental health organisation as well as a cancer-focused organisation—we have some amazing people on staff that have really deep skills in mental health and they were able to make sure that we were doing the right thing and reaching out. Movember is a very caring and collaborative organisation and people really do check in with each other and do lovely random acts of kindness, like setting up neighbourhood networks and dropping stuff around people's houses and fun stuff.

rl: So, do you feel like your role has evolved during the pandemic? Are there things that you probably wouldn’t have focussed on normally?

mt: We immediately said this is clearly going to have huge impact on the lives of the community. We had to work out what was in our remit, that we should either accelerate or pause or continue. And, some of the stuff we accelerated we kept saying, ‘Okay, well, this is our time to step in and help.’

We had some digital mental health products that we were working on and we just basically threw a lot more focus and dollars toward those to get them out to market quickly. We also made sure that we were connecting with all of our supporters. I'd say what we did differently, and more of, was focusing on the community in the mental health and social connection space. We also made sure that our people were able to do [their jobs] without burning out against the background of all the other stuff they had to do in their personal lives as well.

rl: And how have you coped with the changes both work-wise and juggling family life.

mt: Because I am a mum of two small children, I was also a 'teacher' for a time. My family [had to figure out] how to be even better at multitasking, perhaps more than we were before. Suffice to say, [when my children went] back to school, everybody in the family was very happy. But having said that, we did try to give ourselves a little bit of a break and do the best we can, and [there were] fun times. We created new family rituals, like pool disco and family movie nights. We got this game, which my husband found, called Just Dance—it has an interactive dance competition. We [did that a lot] because the kids couldn’t run around as normal. Like everyone else in extended lockdown, there [were] some difficult days.

rl: What are your positive and negative takeaways from this once-in-a-lifetime experience?

mt: I think we have seen some remarkable acts of humans coming together and being innovative in the way that they work, the way that they socialise, which I think is amazing. I think the worldwide experiment of getting people to work from home and really realising that there is flexibility and people have lives outside of work...it really is a societal positive and we should think about what how we want to take the best of that forward. [The pandemic] really does make you appreciate simple things, like catching up with a friend or going to the beach.

I think on the on the negative side, there [has been ] a lot damage—this is going to have a long tail. I think we're going to see a lot of mental health displacement, a real nasty economic back-end that we're all going to have to work through. And, you know, I think people will feel very relieved about social connection, but I don't think we should lose sight of how, potentially, we as a society will need to work through those things and maybe think about, given the seismic shift that we're going to see there, how can we work through this in a way that's going to make the world a bit fairer.