S4 E60: Preventing burnout by rejecting the ‘always on always available’ culture
with active participant Dad Eric Arthrell
Key Takeways
I think it was really a wake up call specifically when my wife and I were talking about having children and trying to understand the different roles that we would play. We obviously both believed in trying to be equitable and equal between ourselves and balancing career and parenthood. And it became clear quite early on that the trajectory in these highly demanding careers are difficult to balance with also being a parent, especially a new parent.
I would try to work up to literally the very last second in my desk and then throw everything into my computer bag and sprint full out sprinting in my dress pants and dress shirt down the street to catch the Go train. And running onto the Go train and, being in a big sweat cuz I've just run down there to try to get home. And this would happen every single day. And then, you get home, you do dinner and then you're trying to get back online and finish any other work that maybe you didn't quite wrap up for the day. And then you rinse and repeat that, days, weeks, months, over and over. And it just comes to a point you have to make a decision for yourself is what is going to be the way in which you balance your time.
I always felt who gets to benefit from my “overwork” if I'm gonna be putting in extra hours on weekends or evenings, extending myself beyond the nine to five, Monday to Friday, who gets to benefit from that? And I found with entrepreneurship is that me and my family, we are the ones that get to benefit almost exclusively from that. And so that's made it far easier for me to wrap my head around.
We tend to seriously devalue the importance of paternity leave. And when I did research, I found all these positive correlations with men taking more parental leave. In societies where men take more parental leave, the wage gap between men and women is smaller. More women end up on boards, more women are in manager roles, more women are employed full time. The gender equality index is more equal. And so I was like, why are we not talking about paternity leave?
I think men are typically positioned as allies to gender equality, which I think that allyship is like the lowest bar that you can be. I always talk about men as active participants in gender equality. And the reason why we should be active participants is that we as men get to benefit hugely from more freedom of expression and freedom of role and freedom of showing up in new and different ways that we've never allowed ourselves to experience.
This is the Design of Everyday Men Report. And in it we talk about how the always on, always available workplace can actually be a hindrance to gender equality.
And I think so often these senior male leaders are used to approaching gender equality from an allyship perspective. This is about someone else. Gender equality is about, helping women succeed. So I will be a champion of this and I'll stand up for it and let me learn about it. And then you tell them The Design of Everyday Men report and it's actually about how men can make decisions that might be to their own detriment, but they do it because that's what the organization values. Oh, this is about me.
The biggest things that I heard actually from some of the more senior men that I talked to is that this report gave them license to have these conversations now to reflect on who they are as fathers on how they show up as a father on how they measure success and status within the organization, what kind of behaviors they place status on.
To be honest, I was a little bit floored around the amount of research that shows that overwork leads to lower productivity and that there's a reason why the eight hour workday exists. And beyond that productivity wanes. And for knowledge workers, it might even be shorter than that. It might only be six hours a day of truly productive work before your productivity starts to drop off. And all the research around burnout and worse outcomes as a result, whether that's employee turnover or employee sick days, or just mistakes overall that need to be remedied like no good comes from overwork.
What do you do as a new dad to show up in the most equitable, pro productive way. And the thing that I always say is you are never going to be invited into the parenthood conversation. And as a new dad, if you didn't decide to engage with that, you could just go on your merry way, keep working, pass off all the parenthood responsibilities if you're in a heterosexual relationship to your wife, and that might just work just fine for you. And you could continue on that path. I think that for dads that want to know how to engage in a more equitable way you have to do the work yourself. You have to explicitly try, research, understand like what are the responsibilities of a new parent?
But for a dad, your dad probably didn't show up in that way. Your buddies your bros are probably not having that conversation as explicitly. Your male colleagues that work, especially the ones that are more senior than you probably aren't having that conversation with you. And so you might never be exposed to that. So that's my biggest recommendation is if you wanna show up, you're gonna have to do the work and you're gonna have to want to do the work.
You need to take paternity leave. Full stop. My recommendation is at least three months solo. Your partner is back at work or doing whatever they do full time, and you are the sole stay at home parent for at least three months, somewhere within those first 12 to 18 months of your child's life. Because that's when you're establishing routines, that's when you're establishing default parenting to whichever parent is in charge of something. And it's when you get exposed to the mental load.
I'm giving her the space and empowerment to like truly step away from the kids. And also on top of that she internally feels like I have permission to step away from the kids and I can do so in a meaningful way. I think because we live in a world where the perception of whether or not you're a good mother is so closely tied to whether or not you are hands on raising your kids 24-7.I think because that perception exists so strongly, it can be really difficult for mothers to like truly step away from their kids.
If we want to have a world where the woman is the person that gets to succeed more often at work, then what that means is that men are the ones that have to show up differently. And so we can't think that we live in a world where, you could have two CEOs, that are married to each other without some kind of third party that takes care of the family and household.
Do I really want or desire or need my children to achieve more than I have achieved I don't think so at all. I want them to not feel burdened with the idea that they need to have some big career aspiration at the expense of things like personal time or exercise time or family time, or friends time. I want them to experience fully at every stage of life all there is to offer, which means a diversity of experiences. And I think that's really what I want and that's what I try to role model for the kids as well, is you do not have expectations gendered or otherwise around how you need to show up in this world
I think one kid was tough and then two kids was like being hit in the head with a brick two kids was incredibly difficult. And for me personally over the past two years, to be able to find mindfulness and humor as a way to just deal with like incredible amounts of stress and frustration and quite frankly, anger as well has been such an important thing. And sometimes that means you're finding humor at the expense of your kids with Dad jokes. Cuz that's sometimes the only way to manage through it. Sandwiched neatly within empathy, obviously and understanding which is incredibly important for your kids.
Bio
Eric Arthrell is the cofounder and COO of Mouche Bamboo Facial Tissues that he runs with wife, Erin, while raising two young children together. Previously, he spent close to 10 years in Management Consulting with Deloitte where he focused on corporate strategy and innovation. While there, he also researched and co-authored a report on men's involvement in gender equity called The Design of Everyday Men. Eric is a speaker and subject matter expert on how men can be active participants in diversity, equity, and inclusion at work, at home, and in our communities. He consistently strives to find the right balance in his own life between work, family, and personal growth in equitable and inclusive ways that allow his wife and family to grow and succeed as well.
Links to Additional Resources
