Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

Headspace for the Workplace – A Podcast on How to Cultivate a Vibrant and Psychologically Safe and Healthy Workforce with your host Dr. Sally Spencer-Thomas In our brain-based economy, we depend on fully engaged, mentally healthy teams. Organizations that have figured this out not only have a competitive advantage, they are awesome places to work. Take a listen to the lessons learned and actionable take-aways to promote mental health and wellbeing and support people through tough times – at work.

Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces is a business podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 105 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces, a business show with 105 episodes published.

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  Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

  When the Bet Comes to Work: What Employers Need to Know About Problem Gambling with Saul Malek

  Sep 1, 202618 min

  In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Saul Malek, a speaker, educator, and problem gambling prevention advocate who travels the world delivering practical programs to workplaces, behavioral health organizations, and schools. Saul brings both professional expertise and deep personal credibility: he developed a gambling addiction as a young college student and has channeled that lived experience into a prevention mission that is, as I note in the episode, reaching people at genuine scale.The framing of this episode matters immediately: sports betting does not wait until the workday ends. It sits in an employee's pocket during meetings, on break, during overnight shifts, and in company vehicles. What presents as distracted phone use, exhaustion, financial stress, irritability, or declining performance may sometimes be connected to a gambling problem that no one in the workplace has thought to ask about. Legal sports wagering in the United States grew from $4.9 billion in 2017 to more than $121 billion in 2023, with 94% of those wagers placed online. Researchers have also documented a 23% increase above expected levels in online searches for gambling-addiction help following the expansion of legal sportsbooks. This is not a fringe concern. It is an escalating, largely invisible workplace wellbeing risk. Saul is not anti-gambling. He is pro-education. The episode is not about policing employees' private lives. It is about equipping workplaces to name a risk that is systematically absent from most wellbeing strategies, recognize the behavioral patterns that may signal distress, and create a credible path to confidential, specialized support before a crisis forces the issue. The practical checklist, manager scripts, and cultural audit items in this episode give any employer something concrete to do on Monday. For more information on this episode go to When the Bet Comes to Work: What Employers Need to Know About Problem Gambling — Dr. Sally

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  Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

  Silence Is Not Neutral: How to Welcome Employees Back From Mental Health Leave With Dignity with Jennifer Moffett

  Aug 17, 202619 min

  In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Jennifer Moffett, a senior technology leader who has spent over 22 years at PayPal, a national suicide prevention advocate with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, a volunteer leader on the Nebraska State Suicide Prevention Coalition, and a suicide loss survivor. We are covering one of the least-discussed parts of the mental health continuum at work: not identification, not crisis intervention, but what happens after. How do you return someone to work from mental health leave in a way that supports recovery rather than simply declaring it complete?Jennifer opens with a framing I use every time I talk about this with employers: silence is not neutral. When a manager is so afraid of saying the wrong thing that they say almost nothing, the employee reads that silence as avoidance, judgment, or indifference. The manager's discomfort becomes the employee's burden. Jennifer's 22 years at PayPal, and the deeply personal story of how they handled her own leave two weeks into her career after losing her stepfather to suicide, give her a grounded, firsthand view of what good reintegration looks like and what it produces in terms of loyalty, longevity, and genuine belonging.The episode is short, practical, and packed with things any manager can do next week. It covers how to prepare before the employee walks back in, how to have the return conversation humanely, how to co-create the reintegration plan rather than handing one down, how to manage the disclosure conversation with consent and collaboration at the center, and how to hold accountability without sacrificing the dignity that makes recovery possible in the first place. For more information on this episode go to Silence Is Not Neutral: How to Welcome Employees Back From Mental Health Leave With Dignity — Dr. Sally

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  Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

  Are You What You Do? Supporting Early-Career High Performers Before They Burn Out with John BrownHS_John Brown_FINAL

  Aug 7, 202619 min

  In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with John Brown, a licensed marriage and family therapist, executive coach, and sports psychology specialist who works with early-career professionals, faculty, and athletes at Stanford University and in private practice. John brings a rare combination of backgrounds: years in corporate leadership at Apple, graduate training in therapy, and a practice that sits at the intersection of performance, identity, and wellbeing. Our conversation centers on one of the most urgent and misunderstood dynamics in the modern workplace: what happens to early-career high performers when the systems designed to support them quietly overload them instead. The opening framing of this episode matters: having a strong professional identity is genuinely protective. Research shows it reduces burnout, anxiety, and depression. But when professional identity becomes the only identity, when who I am collapses entirely into what I do, the same dynamic that drove success becomes a vulnerability. We see it in medicine, where identity misalignment produces anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. We see it in elite athletics, where overidentification makes transitions and setbacks hit harder. And we see it in the workplace, where the push-push-push culture targets the most motivated and capable employees first. John's practical experience as a manager at Apple and as a therapist working with the next generation of professionals gives him a clear-eyed view of what early-career employees actually need from their workplaces, and what they are no longer willing to tolerate. The episode delivers two immediately actionable takeaways for anyone managing early-career talent: shifting from the we to the me, and building relationships as the core infrastructure of team performance. For more information on this episode go to Are You What You Do? Supporting Early-Career High Performers Before They Burn Out — Dr. Sally

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  Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

  Beyond Narcan: How to Build Overdose Prevention Into Your Workplace Safety Culture

  Jul 8, 202613 min

  In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Dr. Virna Little, co-founder and CEO of Zero Overdose, a national initiative bringing overdose safety planning into workplaces, healthcare systems, schools, and communities. Dr. Little and I share a long history through the Zero Suicide Initiative, which aspires to eliminate suicide deaths in healthcare systems. This episode brings that same upstream, systems-level thinking to one of the most urgent and underaddressed safety crises in high-risk industries: overdose. The statistics I share in the opening of this episode stopped my construction clients in their tracks, and they stop me every time: for every 1,000 people who die on a construction job site from physical injuries, approximately 5,000 to 6,000 are dying by suicide, and over 11,000 are dying from overdose. Overdose deaths are outpacing suicide deaths in the construction industry, and yet most workplace safety cultures still treat overdose as a reactive crisis, equipping job sites with Narcan but doing little to prevent the event that requires it. Dr. Little's work with Zero Overdose begins where Narcan ends. Working in rural community health centers, she saw firsthand how workplace injuries, particularly in construction, fishing, and law enforcement, created pathways into opioid dependence that were never adequately planned for at the point of injury. The episode delivers two concrete, immediately actionable takeaways: an overdose safety planning framework that can be integrated into any existing workplace safety culture, and a clear articulation of what leadership must do to make that planning real rather than aspirational. For more information on this episode go to Beyond Narcan: How to Build Overdose Prevention Into Your Workplace Safety Culture — Dr. Sally

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  Headspace for the Workplace with Dr. Sally: Helping Leaders Build Human-Centered Workplaces

  Systems, Not Slogans: What It Actually Takes to Build a Veteran-Friendly Workplace

  Jun 23, 202624 min

  In this episode of Headspace for the Workplace, I sit down with Alicia Scovill, President of Scovill Construction & Contracting Services, a veteran herself, and a construction workplace mental health expert. We open with a sobering reality: veterans in the United States die by suicide at rates higher than the general population, and most are working at the time of their death, or have immediate family members who are working. That makes the workplace one of the most cross-cutting systems available for veteran suicide prevention, and yet most organizations have no real strategy beyond hiring veterans and calling it a day.Alicia and I connected through the Construction Mental Health and Wellbeing Summit, where we co-chaired a leadership roundtable on construction mental health. In this episode, Alicia brings a unique combination of perspectives to the table: her own military background, her experience building and running a construction business, and the firsthand vantage point of having seen, from inside multiple organizations, the well-intentioned ways companies unintentionally cause harm to their veteran employees.The core argument of the episode is that veteran mental health at work is rarely about trauma or transition in the way most people assume. More often, it is about systems failures: unclear accountability, mismatched authority and responsibility, inconsistent communication, and the absence of the structure that helped many veterans survive and thrive in the military. Alicia and I walk through concrete examples, including a construction-specific scenario involving an estimator and a project manager, to illustrate exactly how these systems gaps create burnout and isolation for veteran employees, even when those employees appear to be high performers on the surface. For more information on this episode go to Systems, Not Slogans: What It Actually Takes to Build a Veteran-Friendly Workplace — Dr. Sally

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