Between 2014-2022, Stephen wrote a number of articles for The Conversation, a leading publisher of research-based news and analysis based on a collaboration between academics and journalists. The topics that Stephen covered included health and wellbeing, the rise of presenteeism, obesity stigma, executive pay and supporting employees returning to work after serious illness.
'The UK was supposed to be facing a spike in unemployment after the pandemic furlough schemes ended, but instead the job market is the tightest in a generation..'
'Corporate giant Amazon is taking heat over reports of its WorkingWell initiative, a physical and mental health programme intended to improve employee health in the retail giant’s fulfilment centres..'
'Has working at home during lockdown made people more productive or not? This has been the subject of some lively debate recently...'
'When I lost a relative to cancer in the late 1970s, people usually viewed a cancer diagnosis with horror. At the time, many treatments were both brutal and unsuccessful. Only 24% of patients survived ten years after treatment. But when I received my own cancer diagnosis over 40 years later, it felt rather different..'
'Obesity is one of the most pressing and controversial public health challenges. It has the distinction of being a crisis about which most people have an opinion – often based on a simple diagnosis – but for which nobody has found a correspondingly neat solution..'
'It is just over a month since I received my diagnosis of oesophageal cancer. I’ve had better days, I admit. After spending a significant part of my career looking at how to help working people living with chronic conditions such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis and musculoskeletal disorders, I’m now faced with the immediate challenges of treatment.'
'There has always been something inherently grubby about the executive pay debate. Many of us are happy to accept that the responsibility of running a big business should be handsomely compensated. But many are also left with an uncomfortable feeling that too many top executives are being rewarded for greed or failure, or both.'
'Since the coalition government was elected in 2010 the UK public sector has become a political battleground. For some, it is complacent and bloated, with a culture of entitlement, gold-plated pensions with generous early retirement options, automatic pay rises based on “sitting tight” in your job and levels of job security which contrast with the precariousness of the “real world”'.
'There can be no doubt that the job market has been more resilient since the financial crisis than many imagined. Unemployment did not rise as far as was feared and the recovery in employment to pre-recession levels has been quicker than forecast by even the most optimistic labour economists.'
'Amid all the talk of the UK’s economic recovery it is easy to forget that workforce health is a productivity issue. Over the next 20 years, as our workforce ages, retires later and the risks of more chronic and work-limiting health conditions increases, the pressure to invest more energy and resources in preventing those conditions will become more intense.'
