INTRO

 

NEDA FAHIMI:

Why I really want to highlight Oliva is what you do and also how you do it.  

Which I, along the sidelines, have found really inspiring.

Could you please first give us just a very short description yourself and Oliva in your own words, if you don't mind?

 

SANÇAR SAHIN: 

I’m Sançar Sahin. One of the cofounders of Oliva.

My background is in marketing, so I've led marketing teams at high growth startups such as type, form and and hot jar.

My passion is really on the branding side of things and building content machines and and this kind of thing.

And Oliva is a workplace mental well-being platform and partner.

What that means is that we provide a digital on demand platform for employees of companies to access whenever they want or feel the need.

 

And they can access proactive mental, well-being support such as self-guided content, exclusive talks.

They can join group classes with other like minded individuals.

They can also do therapy and coaching proactively to to really strengthen and build resilience for themselves.

But they can also use us for reactive support.

So if you're really struggling with something, be it depression, be it compulsive thoughts, or be it maybe somebody in your family has passed away and you're struggling with the grief, then then we can support you with with that as well.

 

NF:

You founded Oliva in, I believe it was 2020.

SS:

Yeah, sounds about right.

Not very good with dates, but but more or less with along with Javier, yes.

 

NF:

How did this come about? I know that you also work with Dr. Sarah Bateup, your clinical advisor as well, involved from the beginning, but how did how do you know each other to begin with you Javier?

 

SS:

So I was drawing lockdown actually a friend of mine and an ex colleague who I worked with a type form, he was the CFO of type form and then he went on to be the CFO and then the CEO at Travel Park, which is the company that Javi (Javier  cofounded previously became very successful.

00:02:37 

You know like we we shared a lot in terms of values and where we saw the world but also the experience we had with mental health.

So I had burnt out previously and Javi, he had burnt out while scaling Travelperk.

So we both kind of had this similar experience.

 

And we had both looked for the support of a therapist and we both found a very old fashioned, archaic, not fit for purpose experience when looking for a therapist.

So we just had a bad experience of the whole thing.

And it just so happened that Javi, at the time he had left to Travelperk by this point, he was thinking about his next project and he wanted to do something around mental health.

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RIGHT MATCH IN THERAPY 

 

NF:

What, unfortunately, I've seen happen in a lot company environments is that people start getting access to therapy way too late on, it's like starting exercising when you're already hurt, so to say like to start when you're already burnt out.

 

And then from what I've heard and seen is that they just get assigned to a therapist through the mutua in Spain which is via the insurance, for example.

There's not really that same qualifying and matching the person, which is such a super important part of therapy, to find that right match.

 

So a lot of people not really get the benefits that I know that they could get if they were matched with the right kind of therapist.

Perhaps even some of what they've gone through even could have been prevented if they’ve would’ve had the proper tools or if they would have had access to something like your services.

 

But with Oliva, if you don't match with the right therapist, you get to change very easily to a better match, there are complications.

You have a system that really takes care of finding the the right person to work with you.

 

SS:

This was this was really important to us from day one because of our experience.

Essentially later when we looked at these statistics, we found out that 70% of people that do therapy for the first time get the wrong match the first time.

And the problem is that a big percentage of those people then think therapy isn't right for me, therefore they completely drop out.

But actually what wasn't right was the was the match in the 1st place.

So if you can solve the matching, you get many more people continuing with their journey through therapy and then getting better, better outcomes.

That was something we built from day one, a robust matching process.

And through that, we've been able to create and maintain a match success rate of 98%.

So what that means is that only 2% of everybody that gets matched requests a rematch.

And like you said, we make it very, very easy. So there's no stigma around rematching.

We make it very normal in the language. It’s fine. It's like a relationship, you know?

 

Through that we're able to one, get a much higher percentage of first time therapy users to continue with their with with their journey and two, we can actually reduce the total total number of sessions needed.

 

To get to a significant outcome because you have less wastage.

 

NF:

Yeah, you already screened what you already kind of have a system in place to begin with to make sure that it's the right specialist for you that will be looking at.

 

The other thing that is, I guess from my perspective, I don't have the numbers in the way that you do, but I can also imagine the cost I I've been a manager myself where people have been on sickly due to mental health reasons, burnout, depression, other things like that and the cost I would say also if you look at for a company's point of view to prevent that instead of waiting again until it's too late, it must be such a business case key factor as well.

 

SS:

So it's proven there will be many reports, you know, one in McKinsey for example that shows that for every one euro, dollar, pound, whatever you invest in, they call it scaled up mental health care.

 

What they mean is not just like meditation apps and things like that, but you know, dedicated personalized mental health care.

So therapy essentially for every one euro that you invest into that you can get between 5:00 and €10 back?

And the way that you do that is through reducing absenteeism.

So sick days, reducing the amount of sick days people take because of stress.

 

We know that up to 50% of all sick days taken at work, although they're not reported as such, they're actually because of stress and anxiety and things like that.

And two, reducing presenteeism, which is when you do turn up to work, you're in the meeting, but your mind is somewhere else.

 

Thinking about your sick relative in hospital or that argument you have with your partner or that intrusive thought that you're having.

By reducing those things you can save significant money for the bottom line of the company.

 

NF:

I think that if you most companies want productivity, they want high performance and all of that.

So investing in this way, it just makes sense to me to have that as one of the benefits available.

 

SS:

I can give you a personal example of you know my own life cycle and journey and how you know it's it's helped me.

WhenI think back to my time at type form when I burnt out, I burnt out not because of the company or you know, any external reason.

It was because I I didn't, I couldn't articulate my values well.

I I couldn't really articulate what gives me energy and what takes away energy.

Because I couldn't do those things.

I wasn't very good at setting healthy boundaries or maintaining healthy boundaries.

Those things in combination is a recipe for burnout, especially when you when you're in a high pressure, a high growth environment, right, because you just don't know which way to to look.

 

I had the kind of knowledge to be proactive about working on those things and it's just skill building that people think therapy is a scary thing.

All you're doing is filling in gaps and learning about yourself and building skills and how you function.

 

NF:

How you function. This is a part of what I work on with clients as well.

Learning more about how you function, giving you tools to know you know check in.

 

SS:

Exactly.

You know, and it goes down to little things like learning about yourself, you know, for a long time I kind of resisted the idea of me being an introvert because I thought that being an introvert was synonymous with being shy and, you know, having a lack of confidence.

And I didn't want to be associated with that.

But through my own journey I've learned and accepted and embraced.

Actually I'm an introvert and that that learning allows me to set the right boundaries for myself and and create the environment where I can be most successful.

So through doing that therapy after the fact, it was a bit late, but it it helped.

 

OLIVA INTERNALLY

 

NF:

And I would say that's the part that I admire also from again the sidelines.

Is how you've done it internally with your own company and your employees.

I mean I've been fortunate enough to get to work with your employees.

 

The environment you seem to have built is an environment where people get freedom, flexibility, challenged in a great way and they feel excited to grow. Which makes you think that there should be more companies like that.

Like they're they're getting to be in new situations and face new challenges, but not in a way where they're overwhelmed.

In some companies you notice that people are just on fight or flight mode trying to survive.

It's not that at all. At Oliva they're challenged and growing with the company but it's not in a in a overstressed, just thrown off a cliff kind of way.

 

SS:

Well, hopefully not.

Yeah, we definitely try not to do that.

 

But you know, there are of course, you know, we'd have cases where people do feel a lot of stress.

Like this is never going to be a stress free environment and similar to what we were talking about before about life, life is never going to be a a period of 90 years where you just avoid pain that this is just not the case, right.

And in a high growth startup environment where you're on a very big mission to get to a lot of people, it's never going to be a stress free environment.

 

The idea is not to avoid stress or challenging situations or stretching ourselves.

But we do need to have the resilience and the understanding of ourselves to be able to take control of our destiny and our mental wellbeing and our professional wellbeing.

So this is something we really, really preach at our lever, that our own personal, professional and mental wellbeing is is our responsibility, right?

 

What we do as a company is we make sure we provide you with the right resources, the right support, the right environment in terms of the psychologically safe environment, you know, we provide the foundations, but none of that is anything unless you take responsibility for yourself.

So we don't want to be your parent.

 

You know we're not going to hold your hand unless you ask us to hold your hand, if you know what I mean, for a particular.

And that's really, really important.

 

NF:

So they have more freedom but with freedom, also more own responsibility.

It's like a whole slogan my dad used to always tell me when I was growing up.

You can have freedom, but with responsibility.

 

SS:

It's the one doesn't work without the other, really.

 

OUR RECURRING COLLABORATION AND WHY IMPROVING COMMUNICATION IS SO VALUABLE

 

NF:

That is something that I also can say, that you're asking companies to provide support or to provide benefit for their teams because it will help their performance and overall well-being.

 

But you've actually walked the same walk yourself, in that very early on, which is when we met, you had employees that needed support with the communication and improving their communication even though it was just a startup.

 

SS:

This was very early on, yeah.

 

NF:

And you decided that OK, I want to make sure that I I support someone that I see a value in them that they can they can get tools to to be able to communicate better.

How come? You really value improving communication with the team. Can you tell me a little bit about why?

 

00:28:30 SPK_2

 

SS:

“Communication is everything, right?

I mean it's it's it's really everything.

You know, if you communication is a skill, I think that's what a lot of people don't realize.

It's a skill, It's a muscle that needs to be built and and maintained over time.

You know, you're not just born with good communication skills.

And if you have good communication skills, even if you have nothing else, which you know is going to be very rarely the case.

But if you have communication skills, you can navigate pretty much any situation.

So as an example, let's imagine you have somebody who is completely out of their depth with a project.

You know, their skill set just doesn't kind of match what's needed for that project.

With bad communication, they'll probably say yes to that straight away, you know, they'll kind of sugarcoat results.

They won't know how to be explicit about what they need to make that happen or where they need to develop, know where they need help.

And it's going to get them into a bad situation because they'll be setting the wrong expectations.

Everybody will be kind of saying what's what's going on with this, this thing, you know?

 

But with good communication, even if you don't have that skill set, you say, look, I'm not sure I should be the one to be doing this because these are my limitations.

And then you might say, well, actually, I think you should.

I think you can stretch yourself.

OK, well, I've set the expectation that, you know, I've got these limitations.

Now, if I'm going to do this, here are the three things I need from you.

I need some coaching here because that's the skill set that I need to develop.

I need your time to do this brainstorm because I need to download your brain.

Do you know what I mean?

You start to be very explicit about your own needs.

 

So with that, good communication, you start to take control of your destiny, even if it means telling people.

I don't think I'm the right person for this, actually.”

 

MAIN COMMUNICATION ISSUES NOTED 

 

NF:

I fully agree, really.

And what would you say that in your experience now you've been working for X amount of years and different companies and now your own company.

What are the two most common, let's call it communication issues that you regularly come across, if any, if there's anything that you've seen?

 

SS:

“I mean, good question, good question.

I think not basically shying away from the from the difficult things so, so that's kind of what I've seen.

So in the honeymoon phase of the project or whatever it might be, it's very easy for people to communicate because there's no like bad news to communicate.

It's just we're all super excited.

Here's the plan etcetera etcetera.

As the project kind of goes on it and you know challenges come up and deadlines amiss and and things like that.

Without good purposeful communication, it's very easy to avoid talking about those those things and not being clear about it.

And as you start to do that more and more even if it's for seemingly small things, it accumulates over time and before you know it you've completely lost control of the the project because people don't know where to help, people have different expectations etcetera, etcetera.

So I think one problem is is kind of avoiding communicating the the difficult things the.issues you think we don't want to hear.

If actually you can tackle those things head on, it will help you, you know, 10X later, later on if you can tack that now.

 

And then the other one, is ,there’s a book called The Four Agreements, it's by Don Miguel Ruiz and it's basically kind of it's inspired by old Mexican folklore about the idea is that you know, if you agree to these four things for yourself, you will probably live quite a successful, fulfilled life.

One of the agreements is to be impeccable with your word.

 

What that means is just, you know, always be transparent, always be clear, don't avoid the difficult topics, you know, be very kind of clear with your communication.

Just be impeccable with your word.

And that's what I think is important in communication at work as well. 

Just say it as it is.

Answer questions when people ask you questions.

You know, I see this a lot when when somebody asks somebody a question and because the answer isn't quite what that person wants to hear, the person answering will list off 20 things it just doesn't answer the questions. Just just say it as it is, as a challenge.”