185 | Cancer at Work: How to Support Employees Through Diagnosis, Treatment and Beyond (with Tara Ferguson)

HR Coffee Time

This episode explores the critical role HR professionals and managers play in supporting employees facing cancer diagnoses and long-term treatment

Key takeaways

• Over 1.5 million working-age people in the UK are impacted by cancer, a figure higher than annual first-time maternity/paternity pay claims.
• Cancer is a protected characteristic under the Equality Act from the point of diagnosis and remains so for life.
• Effective support begins with pre-existing trust and strong relationships between line managers and employees before any crisis occurs.
• HR should implement a three-pillar strategy: Awareness (reducing stigma), Capability (training managers), and Support/Prevention (policies and early detection).
• Work can act as a vital psychological stabilizer for employees during treatment, provided workloads are adjusted to match unpredictable capacity.

Main topics

• Cancer in the workplace
• Line management and empathy
• Equality Act protections

Notable quotes

Work is often part of somebody's identity and it's a part of their life that they don't want to lose when it feels like their whole life is focused on cancer.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a practical guide for HR leaders to move beyond

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) HR Coffee Time is proud to be sponsored by SeeMe, a behavioural profiling tool designed to help people understand themselves and their colleagues better. Arranging for everyone in a team to complete the SeeMe questionnaire and then explore their SeeMe profiles together in a workshop afterwards is a great solution for helping teams bond and find ways of working brilliantly together. And there's lots of support once the workshop is over with access to the CME digital platform and CME is also built into Microsoft Teams. More than 250,000 CME profiles have now been completed across hundreds of organisations. And if you'd like to try it for yourself, you can get a free profile at colour-profiling.com forward slash. hrcoffeetime. That's colour c-o-l-o-u-r hyphen profiling.com forward slash hrcoffeetime. Cancer touches almost all of our lives at some point, whether that's through our own experience, through someone we care about, or through a colleague, friend or family member who receives the diagnosis. And because so much of life is spent at work, there will inevitably be times when managers and HR teams are supporting someone who has cancer, is going through treatment or is living with the long-term impact of cancer or is caring for a loved one who's affected by cancer. But knowing that support matters and knowing exactly how to provide it can be two very different things. What should you say when someone tells you they have cancer? What support might they need from work? What should managers understand and be aware of? And what can HR put in place to make sure that people are supported well, both during their initial treatment and in the years that follow? That's what today's episode of HR Coffee Time is here to help with. If we haven't met before, hello, I'm your host, Faye Wallace. a career and executive coach with a background in HR. And if you have listened to or watched the podcast before, welcome back. It's wonderful to have you here with me again. Today, we're joined by Tara Ferguson. Tara spent more than 20 years in senior in-house HR roles at organisations including PepsiCo and Unilever, before she then founded her business Onward With You. In August 2023, Tara was diagnosed with breast cancer. That experience combined with her background in HR led her to create the Cancer Confidence Framework, a clear and practical approach to helping managers and HR teams to support the people at their workplace who are affected by cancer at work. In our conversation, Tara shares what her own manager did that made such a difference to her. She shares why work can sometimes play an unexpectedly positive role during cancer treatments. what we need to understand about reasonable adjustments and legal protections. And she also shares really practical steps that HR teams can take to make sure that their organisations are better prepared to support people affected by cancer. I'm so grateful to Tara for joining me to share both her expertise and her personal experience so openly with us. I hope you're going to enjoy meeting her and learning from her as much as I did. Let's go ahead. and meet her now. Welcome to the show, Tara. It is so wonderful to have you here. Thank you for having me, Faye. It's a pleasure. You are very welcome. And I thought I would start us off by asking if you'd be happy to share the story behind your business and tell us a little bit about it. Speaker 2 (3:48) Yeah, absolutely. So I spent over 20 years working in HR roles in corporate, but I'd always wanted to set up my own business. I'd always planned that one day I would do the things that I really loved and not have to do the things in HR that I didn't really love doing. And a few things happened that meant one day came a couple of years ago. So I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2023. And the treatments that I had, the experience that I had taught me a huge amount, but also the experience that I had at work taught me a lot. I thought I knew a lot about how to deal with an employee with cancer from all those years in HR. But it turns out that there was a lot more that I didn't know. So it made me feel really strongly that I wanted to do something about that when I was better, when I got through my initial active treatment. Speaker 1 (4:37) And the context within which cancer exists is very different now Speaker 2 (4:42) to even what it was a few decades ago. It was very much if someone was diagnosed with cancer, it was seen as certainly in the workplace, it was either treated like an acute illness and people would go off, have their treatment. There wasn't that many treatments available. So maybe chemotherapy, radiotherapy, surgery, and then they would come back when they felt better and that would be it. Or sadly, for a lot of people, it ended up being an exit from the workforce. So either an early old health retirement or in some cases, a death in service. However... The context now, earlier detection and advances in medicine mean that cancer is very different now to how it was. People are much more likely to survive, which is great, but there are also lots more treatments available. So I would like workplaces and the HR profession to really start thinking of cancer as a chronic condition that has to be managed often over a long period of time. And so that was the idea behind setting up my business, Onward With You. And in 2024, the business that I was part of was being sold. So I took the opportunity, took redundancy and set my business up at the beginning of last year. Well, Speaker 1 (5:53) thank you so much for sharing all of that with us, Tara. And it sounds like you've been through such a difficult time, although it's resulted in you creating this fantastically supportive business. I want to make sure that at this point I check in just to ask how you are now. Speaker 2 (6:09) Yeah, absolutely. And as far as I know, three and a bit years beyond my diagnosis, I'm cancer free. I have regular scans that confirm that. So from that point of view, all is good. However, even after all of that time, my diagnosis still has an impact every day. So the kind of cancer that I had was a hormone receptor positive breast cancer, and that's one of the most common cancers to be diagnosed. And because it's common, there's been a lot of research and a lot of science into the treatments and also into prevention of recurrence. So all of the things that are available now mean that I finished my chemo, finished my, had my surgeries, and I was then put immediately onto a 10-year medication plan to try and stop any recurrence. So for me, that means I was put into an immediate medical menopause. I take tablets every single day. I have injections regularly to suppress my ovaries. And I'm dealing with the side effects of all of that, plus menopause side effects. So although... I feel well generally, and I live a really kind of full and active and busy, happy life. Cancer definitely hasn't left my world and it takes up a significant amount of my time and my headspace still. And I think just to note as well, if I was still in employment and not self-employed, it would be having a huge impact in the workplace. And I would really need my manager and my employer to Speaker 1 (7:39) understand that and support it. Gosh, every time that I speak to you, Tara, because we've had a couple of conversations before recording this interview today, I learn so much and you make me realize how little I really knew about cancer and the impact that it can have. So firstly, I'm so pleased to know that you're okay. But secondly, I am genuinely a little bit surprised by how much of an impact cancer is still. having on your life and how long the treatment is. I just wouldn't have been aware of that at all. And it does make me think back to when I had my HR career, I now think, although I always really did try to do my best when it came to supporting employees with cancer, I think knowing you and hearing more about your work and your experience, whether that's your personal experience or your work experience, makes me realise there's so much that we could all learn and... and be doing to make sure that we are supporting our colleagues at work who may have cancer or supporting the managers that