Mental Health Awareness Month: Women at work, being kind and disability justice

Our interview with Kind HR’s founder Kathryn Gabbert

By Jennifer Cloer

Women’s mental wellness at work

When I was studying journalism for my undergrad, I worked as a billing clerk for a group of eye doctors and surgeons. I’d go into the office before classes and enter payments received the previous day, and I’d go back after classes to issue bills for services that happened that day. My sister, who suffered from a severe mental illness, would often find me there by calling into the reception desk and demanding to talk to me. Everyone at work knew my sister, but none of them knew how to handle those phone calls. 

While at work I was always worried about the next phone call, when I could get off work to go to her, see what she needed, see what was so urgent and, of course, how to bring levity to the situation with my colleagues. 

“You can’t turn off your aging parent, your needy child," says Kathryn Gabbert, founder and head consultant at Kind HR, which specializes in workplace culture and people operations. “Those things don’t turn off, even when you're at work and focused on what you're doing, you have this background. It’s like having a lot of tabs open on your computer all the time.”

Kathryn Gabbert

I spoke to Kathryn in honor of Mental Health Awareness Month to better understand what mental wellness at work looks like for women and how we can create more inclusive spaces for everyone. 

“Women are still doing a lot of the heavy lifting in our responsibilities at home, both as partners and parents and also as our parents age. Women still shoulder more of that than men. Whether we are childbearing age, pre- or post-menopausal, all of those things also affect our wellness at work. Our wellness at work is affected for a week of every month, men don't have to do that and if they did we’d probably have some initiatives in place.” 

My two cents: We’d probably have three-week work months. 

Mental wellness for women at work is about balance more than catered lunches or late-start Wednesdays, according to Kathryn. It’s about being able to focus and deliver while feeling safe and expressing your truest self. It’s about balancing all the things we care about - yes, work, and also self care, family, pets, community and so much more. 

That can be hard in toxic work environments, but it starts with culture. Changing culture is systemic and takes time, but it’s possible - particularly through a story that solidly demonstrates a company’s values and becomes a shared belief system. Even if your company is far from this, Kathryn has some good advice. 

“There should be a little bit of social service in every company,” she says. “This is a little utopian perhaps, but people are our greatest asset. How do we protect assets? Part of that is by recognizing their humanity and keeping in mind that we’re all just a catastrophe away from a catastrophe.”

“Changing culture is systemic and takes time, but it’s possible - particularly through a story that solidly demonstrates a company’s values and becomes a shared belief system.”

Kathryn’s story and her focus on disability justice

After being sexually assaulted at a company dinner where her male colleagues dismissed her when she reported it (she was finally able to work out an exit with HR that worked to her benefit), Kathryn started Kind HR to lead with kindness. Like so many of the women we talk to for our newsletter and for the Chasing Grace Project, Kathryn had a terrible experience and instead of packing up and going home for good, she rose above it to start something new, something better. 

She explained to me how being kind is different from being nice. 

“Kind is not nice, kind is a completely different thing. It’s a deeper thing. If you’re being kind, you're going to deliver hard messages but you're going to do it the right way. You won't disguise the truth, you’ll confront it. If you’re kind, you're going to be genuine.”

Kathryn has also dedicated a lot of her career to disability justice, supporting people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and neurodiversity at work. 

“There’s a movement to support and acknowledge diversity but so often this huge percentage of our population is left out of that conversation,” she says. 

“Anyone of us can suffer a stroke or traumatic brain injury and end up in an identical place to someone who can’t verbalize, who is blind, who is deaf. To confront our ideas and attitudes about disability is really to confront our own fallibility, and I think that’s what makes people struggle so much.”

If you’re interested in working with Kathryn or connecting just because she’s awesome, let us know and we’ll be happy to connect you.