S3 E46: There isn’t a silver bullet, so we need a flexible approach to workplace burnout
with author Jennifer Moss
Key Takeways
Before having kids, it was just me and my husband and we were on an adventure and then you have kids and you realize, what is so consequential to their lives and that's having a village and that brought us home. So I think all those things made me care more about my work and made me committed to finding something that I cared about doing so that I could pass on to them that work can be fuel. Work can make you happy. Work can make you feel a sense of accomplishment. It doesn't need to be a drudgery. It doesn't need to be something that we just live for the weekends and just check in and check out. And I think that's been a big part of my career is making sure that my kids follow in their passions as well.
Maria Asberg, is a professor at Stockholm University, what she talks about is extreme exhaustion disorder. And when we hit the wall, there's like a real drop and then we have to recover and that can take a while. And that's what I think we're seeing right now in the great resignation people are at that point.
And so it was real passion driven work, but that passion became obsessive for me. And I could not stop working. I had a hard time deciding what my priority was. I had to be in everywhere, in everything I had to be everywhere at all times. And I also felt a huge responsibility as being a female in this technology co-founder role because there's so few of us I had to be on every board and, talk about women in tech. I just completely lost my sense of prioritization.
It's different than burnout within an organization where that work is being, forced on me. As an entrepreneur we deal with burnout in a different way, cos we have more choice, but we just don't see the signs. I had to really reset my priority structure. And it was probably not until maybe about two years ago now where I felt like I had fully recovered. As individuals when our passion becomes obsessive how dangerous that can be.
It is obsessive because you really enjoy the work. I love the work and I have to put boundaries on myself constantly or else. It becomes paralyzing because you realize, wow I've stepped way too far to one direction and it's hard to pull yourself back out of it.
I learned a lot from that episode in my life. And I became very humble. This definitely did help me think more clearly about what my needs were and, before I would do things entirely on my own and I had a hard time giving up the work. And just ensuring that now I have a good team of people around me that do the things that I'm not good at. And that's a privilege for sure, to be in a place of having a support team and be able to hire a support team. I'm a creative person and, I'm very detailed about specific things, but what it comes to administrative work and just, running a business that's not what I'm good at. And so it's really propping myself up cause people around that have those skill sets and finding, that I have to let go of certain things has been really helpful.
So learning how to get expectations managed is one of the things that I've really had to develop and asking the right questions so that I can identify what people's urgent needs are. So I don't just react all the time. And that's been a skill that I've had to develop because my natural reaction is, to just jump.
Burnout it's about your company, not your people. And I think a lot of folks put their hand up to say, oh my goodness, thank you for not making me feel like I'm to blame for my burnout, because I'm doing all those things that they are telling, like in doing more yoga I know that they have this really great app that helps me to meditate and take pauses. And, I have unlimited vacation and all of these great things that people feel like, oh, if I do these things, then I'll feel better and then they don't feel better. And then they feel ashamed of that. And so I think that what is so important for people to understand and organizations and firms and leaders to understand is that it isn't about self care alone. We can't solve burnout with self care alone.
When it comes to solving for burnout, it's looking at the root causes of burnout, understanding that they're policy driven, that they're systemic it's societal and a global pandemic is also gonna play into that. So how do we solve for the things that we can within our control inside of our organization, so that actually deal with the much further upstream causes of burnout versus just trying to tactically bandaid them way further downstream.
Anyone that demonstrated agile leadership, I found was very effective inside of the pandemic. I think too, when I saw, for example, one case study that I provided, where there, there was a CEO that, was giving Fridays off because he was noticing people were checking in a lot and working really hard. And when he started to look at the data, just to make sure it was working, he noticed all of his employees are still, now then working on Saturdays and Sundays to fill in the gap of having this Friday off. I need to look at it as like amount of workload so that you can do what you need to do within four days. And within the hours of those four days, so that you aren't having to just whatever, work on Saturdays to deal with those Fridays off, because it doesn't make any sense.
A big problem is a lot of leaders feel like they're biting off too much that they don't know how to action the data. They don't know what interventions to use to fix things. They feel like it has to be really programmatic and they need to design some sort of silver bullet solution that's gonna deal with, all of the things that they learn. Also, they might not wanna hear the things that they learn about themselves, is that in many situations where leaders have a total different understanding or perception of how they think their employees are doing versus how their employees are actually doing.
Direct managers should really be professional eavesdroppers, that they need to just be listening for the small data. And, if you have those non-work related check-ins every week, if you're looking for specifically around mental health and wellbeing, that you can be listening for the language that someone might be feeling exhausted or stressed, or if you're noticing that someone's withdrawing or irritable, you can start to provide them and drip them information that is available within the organization to help support them. Developing that skill of active listening so that you can respond in a nuanced way to each individual who is dealing with whatever they're dealing with.
That humility and vulnerability that leaders had to learn to develop. And also to admit that they don't know because they didn't, they had no frame of reference and to maybe admit they were wrong was such a good, I think it was such a good skill building, emotional intelligence skill building experiment that we went through in the last two years, which as maybe an optimist, I think it's gonna play out as a benefit to the future of work.
Women are more at risk of burnout, just in general. You see this, especially female physicians. It's just extremely catastrophic for their burnout. And I did include Dr. Lorna Breen's story in there because she is an example of the entire issue with women in healthcare, especially female physicians, their suicide rate is 130 percent higher than the average. The compassion and empathy fatigue that happens with women in healthcare is really challenging.
What I thought was really distressing about that is so much of it is about not recognizing that productivity is not the measure of success. And we measured productivity and showed, oh I guess we can work remote because we're just as productive, but not understanding the nuances between how much extra men would have to work to get hit those same, pre COVID goals to how much women had to work to hit those same pre COVID goals. There was still stretch goals. It was still business as usual. There was no response to the fact that this is a global pandemic and everybody's experiencing this differently. Particularly women. And women are more at risk now of long term unemployment.
We're looking at some, half a million women in the US, maybe not returning to work. Just really big consequences of policies, not really working for women. And especially when it comes to burnout prevention. So I've been focusing more of my conversations around how we can deal with that specific need, how we can pull women back into the workforce and what kind of strategies will we need to be able to make sure that they stay and are able to stay with their wellbeing in check.
One of the goals of the book has been to elevate the conversation and the urgency of this, of burnout as a problem. And chronic stress is a problem that isn't just, people wanting more of work life balance, and they're just complaining about having too much work. There's catastrophic impacts to overwork, it's the reason why 2.8 million people die each year from overwork. This is a big problem to solve. So my goal is first of all to elevate and have more people talk about burnout as a serious, highly stigmatized issue.
And then it's also for every individual start to model the behavior, particularly, leaders can't keep saying, don't answer emails at 11 o'clock at night, but I'm still gonna send you one. I'm just gonna tell you, you don't have to answer it or work being piled on you at midnight and you expected to have it done the next morning. We have to end the legacy of overwork and healthcare and tech and finance, where you just get hazed in those first, 10 years , starting out your career where it's survival as a fittest, we need to be thinking about more sustainable ways of working.
We need to get leaders to really start modeling the behavior. You have to be doing it too. You have to walk the talk. You have to take that time for yourself. You have to not answer emails late at night or send them, you need to actually take vacation days without answering, emails or being on meetings or working. Like we need to do those things so that it becomes part of the culture and lives within the culture. And isn't just, do, as I say, not as I do.
I think for women like us and women all over the world is that, we have a hard time giving ourselves self compassion and grace. So we first need to be able to do that. We need to forgive ourselves for those things that don't get done, because we do not have the actual capacity to do everything. We need to get better at creating a priority structure that reduces the sense of false urgency in our lives, pair down what we're committed to. That's really important for us as well, even paired down what our kids are committed to. How do we make it so that our lives are just a little bit more fundamentally geared towards spending time with each other, having downtime. So that they can be, more efficient so we can be better at work. So we can be more clear so that we meet chaos with calm because we're not, so highly volatile or emotional we're setting good examples for our kids. And we're also, doing better at work and a lot of that just stems in really taking the time to give ourselves that space, that and acceptance that it's okay to take care of ourselves.
For leadership to completely pause and stop behaving like we're in an emergency anymore. We need to be thinking about, what does it look like now? And really pausing and taking a lot of questions, not designing policies and programming in the image of ourselves, but designing it in the images of people we serve. And that means taking a lot of data and asking questions, giving space for anonymous feedback and creating a cycle of anonymous feedback and learning right away.
What our data showed us is that burnout is universal. And when 89% of the respondents said that their wellbeing had declined I think we can hazard a guess that most people are dealing with some level of chronic stress. So just assume that, and then be more empathetic to that in how we support each other.
That's going to make it more easy to have conversations around our mental health, that we're gonna be able to deal with these problems in a more mature and responsible way in the future. And that's gonna lead to more programming and policy and advocacy in the future. That's gonna change work for the better.
Bio
Jennifer Moss is an award-winning journalist, author, public speaker, and expert in workplace well-being. She is a nationally syndicated radio columnist and writes for Harvard Business Review. Her newest book, The Burnout Epidemic, is now available.
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