The WorkWell Podcast™ is back and I am so excited about the inspiring guests we have lined up. Wellbeing at work is the issue of our time. This podcast is your lens into what the experts are seeing, thinking, and doing.
Hi, I am Jen Fisher, host, bestselling author and influential speaker in the corporate wellbeing movement and the first-ever Chief Wellbeing Officer in the professional services industry. On this show, I sit down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations on all things wellbeing at work. Wellbeing is the future of work. This podcast will help you as an individual, but also support you in being part of the movement for change in your own organizations and communities. Wellbeing can be the outcome of work well designed. And we all have a role to play in this critical transformation!
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Jen Fisher: Hi WorkWell listeners, I'm really excited to share that my book Work Better Together is
officially out. Conversations with WorkWell guests and feedback from listeners like you inspired this
book. It's all about how to create a more human-centered workplace, and as we return to the office, for
many of us this book can help you move forward into post-pandemic life with strategies and tools to
strengthen your relationships and focus on your well-being. It's available now from your favorite book
retailer. Burnout is a word we've all been hearing a lot about lately, and I know I'm not the only one who
has had a personal experience with it. In fact, I'm sure that quite a few of you listening have probably
experienced burnout yourself. But how have we gotten to a place where burnout has become an
epidemic? And even more importantly, how do we move forward with effective strategies that address
the real root causes of burnout? This is the WorkWell Podcast series. Hi, I'm Jen Fisher, Chief Well-being
Officer for Deloitte and I'm so pleased to be with you today to talk about all things well-being. I'm here
with Jennifer Moss. She's an international public speaker, author, and workplace expert. She's the cofounder at Plasticity Labs, a workplace insights and consultancy firm. Jennifer is a frequent Harvard
Business Review contributor, a nationally syndicated radio columnist, and a member of the Global
Happiness Council. She's also author of the books the Burnout Epidemic and Unlocking Happiness at
Work. Jen, welcome to the show.
Jennifer Moss: Thanks, I'm really looking forward to chatting with you as well, Jen.
Jen Fisher: Great, so let's start. Tell us about yourself. Tell us about how you became passionate about –
and you kind of investigate both sides of the spectrum. You investigate, you research workplace
happiness and then also workplace burnout. So take us on that journey.
Jennifer Moss: Yeah, and I'd love that you mentioned that because I joked that I used to be a happiness
expert. Now I'm an unhappiness expert, and I really do feel that's accurate, but the goal is the same. It's
just determining where we give people ice cream and where we give people water. And that is really
how we're kind of figuring out and my role has been to just figure out what motivates people, how we
develop psychological fitness and social emotional intelligence in ourselves, but then understanding that
there are root causes of burnout that individuals on their own can't solve. And that's been something
that's really been plaguing me as that. All this work that we're focused on happiness, which is really
critical. It's very important, we want to optimize our lives and have increased lifespans and all these
important parts of our well-being or part of the happiness piece of our lives, but if we're chronically
stressed and those root causes are not something we can control or manage, I feel like my job is to help
people at that space. So then we can get to the part where we're really increasing happiness. So that's
been my journey over the last 10 years in this space.
Jen Fisher: Yeah, and at least for me and I know that there are others that have researched it, but in
reading your work and then following you is really where I kind of first came across some of the research
and dialogue around workplace well-being kind of being about more than just an individual problem or
being solved by more than just providing perks or more days off or mental health days and somebody
who's been burnt out in the workplace it really resonated with me. So I want to thank you for that. But I
also want to level set because I feel like burnout is a word that is being used to cover a whole lot of
things right now. And so can you give us your definition of burnout, what it is? And then I think
importantly like what it's not because I do really feel like we're using the word burnout as a kind of
peanut butter term.
Jennifer Moss: I love that explanation and it's accurate. Not enough people were talking about it before,
now everyone is talking about it. So I'm hoping that pendulum swing helps us to get somewhere in the
middle, but for everyone that's listening, we have to start understanding that burnout is consequential.
It's really important. It is something that has catastrophic impacts, and it wasn't until 2019 were the
World Health Organization actually identified burnout as occupational stress. It's unmanageable stress
at work, institutional stress left unmanaged. And that occupational phenomenon definition was so
important because there's been this sort of nebulous way of thinking about burnout for a long time. So
people felt like it meant that they just weren't working hard enough, or they didn't care enough about
their company, or they weren't inspired enough. They weren't an engaged employee. And maybe
sometimes we thought of it as just like FOMO. We're too busy and we're doing too many things in our
personal lives and that's making us burnt out, but that's not the case. It is very specifically a workplace
issue where the causes, they're six of them and they are really at the root of where we're feeling our
burnout, and that's important too, is understanding that there's certain things that we can be managing
when it comes to our burnout but there's a lot of things we can't. And so that definition in its inclusion in
the International Classification of Diseases helped us in this research place say, ok, we play a role yes,
there's certain personalities at risk of burnout for sure. But then there's also organizations that need to
play a role. And when we look at it more of an ecosystem approach to burnout, then we're not making it
seem like it's just you're not putting in enough hard work, or you can solve it if you just do more yoga
and take more baths and eat better and sleep better. That is why that distinction is very important and I
think that gives us a better way to approach it. What is burnout versus what isn't burnout.
Jen Fisher: So in your book, you lay out the six causes of burnout. Can you walk us through those?
Jennifer Moss: Absolutely. I mean first it's workload that is the leading cause. It was the leading cause
pre-pandemic. Actually, in tandem with the Who announcement, the ILO had published a report that
said that 750,000 people are dying annually from overwork alone every single year. So, it has this major
impact, we've all been feeling that we're working 30% more to hit those same pre COVID goals. We are
working many more hours per day, so that's been a big outcome of the pandemic. We also see that in
lack of agencies. So just not having a choice and how we work, where we work, a lot of people are
feeling pressured to be in person and they're reacting to that because we've had this experience of
flexibility, but there's also a lot of people that are being forced to work remote, and they don't want that
either. So that lack of agency, obviously in micromanagement causes our predicts burnout. We see that
in lack of community, so where we're feeling we're disconnected from people. The loneliness factor has
been playing a real role in our predicted burnout. We also see that in lack of fairness. We saw women
disproportionately impacted in the last couple of years, working 15 to 20 more hours of unpaid labor.
Women of color were the most disproportionately impacted. We are seeing certain sectors where
women are predominantly in those roles being exited from the workforce. So that's a big factor. Lack of
value or recognition or sense of lack of compensation is a big part of it. So compensation is sort of a
table stakes stuff. It's like we should just get that right. No one should feel like they're not being paid
appropriately, but we do see that tied to lack of fairness where it's not equal pay for equal work, but
also in the lack of rewards aspect of it. People feeling like they're not being congratulated for their work,
or valued for their work and sometimes when we’re working really hard we stop saying thank you to our
peers. We stop making them feel like their work is valuable that predicts burnout and really the final one
is just that sense of feeling like that disconnection from work. And we really get that when we're not
feeling connected to our jobs. That sense of not having sort of that emotional connection to our work.
And that also plays a huge role in our decrease sense of efficacy and that's another one that's really
contributing to our sense of burnout right now.
Jen Fisher: And that one I would assume is I guess there's a lot of talk about kind of purpose and
meaning in our work.
Jennifer Moss: Absolutely, that purpose and meaning. So when we have that mismatch sort of sense of
values and skills, what happens is we're feeling like we’re this definitely happens when we're
overworked, when there's so much workload. We don't have time to feel inspired, but when we're not
sort of connected to the values anymore, we get that feeling like what is the reason why we're here? We
start to use language like it's never gonna change or I'm not good at my job or I thought this is what I
wanted to do in my career and now I question it and this is why you see again that exodus in healthcare,
for example, because patient care is so important to these people in these roles, but when they're
working these unsustainable hours, they've stopped seeing that mission piece. That they're caring for
people because they can't even take care of themselves at this point, that's not sustainable.
Jen Fisher: What is it about the pandemic that changed the conversation around burnout because to
your point this existed long before the pandemic did.
Jennifer Moss: There are myriad reasons why this happened, but I would say a big part of the sort of
explosion of these issues inside the pandemic was that they were already boiling, but we weren't really
addressing them because we relied on employee loyalty. We expected that we could sort of push to a
point, but it wasn't that we were engaged, some organizations are, but many weren't in this human
centered leadership where it was like, ok how do we start planning for a potential crisis by doing all
these things that were then expected inside the crisis. So those companies that I've worked with earlier
that have really high trust and high empathy, they tended to do really well throughout the pandemic.
They had high trust scores and employee experience scores. And that was because a lot of this mentality
around upstream interventions and upstream policies that were more burnout prevention focused were
already at play. But what the pandemic did was this rapid evolution and we literally went from, like and I
say that this is not the future of work. We went from, like in a week or two weeks to the to the
metaverse of work. That's just wouldn't have slowly evolved to the point we are right now if we had just
kind of chugged along as it was. It created a new paradigm and so if you were not prepared for it, it's
just like everything happened all at once. And also just we were contending with a lot of adoption in
general of things in our personal lives, remote learning exploded. The increase in teletherapy and
telemedicine just went from 0 to 100. We had a lot of shift in our lives personally, so our brains are
already pretty rattled. We're dealing with a global pandemic, which is a major macro-stressor that was
not a cube, it's gone on for years. And then we also are juggling massive distractions. We're learning
new technology all at once since our learning curve is really high, our efficacy is low. And then we also
have this massive amount of work that we have to contend with, which really was a factor of that work
stoppage for two months. Everyone thought this is just going to kind of go away and we sort of have this
this moment where we just stopped working almost for 6 to 8 weeks and we thought ok, we'll get just
get back. So let's kind of figure out what we're going to do with all this “time” on our hands. And then it
just completely backfired. So all these inputs has created the recipe for what we're seeing now, which is
full burnout, at the point where people are not just experiencing symptoms of burnout, but they are
hitting the wall and that's why we see the great resignation happening.
Jen Fisher: And do you think that companies and organizational leaders have kind of fully recognized or
accepted the problem of burnout and if they haven't, I mean, why should they care about this now?
Jennifer Moss: I would say that there are some industries that are recognizing it. And because they have
the capacity to offer different solutions that actually helped to prevent burnout, like flexible working
conditions, hybrid opportunities. They have a type of workforce that allows them to have that kind of
flexibility to deal with it. They're doing better than others. I think that there is a desire for this to all go
away and for us to go back to before time so that it's easier, because this is a very challenging thing for
leaders to have to manage a hybrid workforce and all of these issues around remote engagement and
productivity and all these issues. So I think there's a hope that economy changes. So then the employee
doesn't have as much power, which I think is really unfortunate. But I do think that we see some sectors,
like for example healthcare right now, the nursing shortage is just exploding even more. They can't seem
to figure out how to manage this issue within healthcare, which has been a legacy problem for a very
long time. You really have to change mindsets right at the top who have been in this world where it is
sort of like a badge of honor to be working these extraordinary hours and there's a pride attached to it
which is really dangerous. And you're seeing other industries, tech on one hand are doing a really good
job, making sure that they can promote that flexibility and well-being as a priority, but then there's
others that just say no, I want you back in the office. I don't care. This is what we need to succeed. And
so I'm curious to see if that group understands that there's going to be payback to that. There's going to
be employees that say I don't want to live in this world like this. And when you ask women in particular
and they've talked about this. They said, I'll quit before I go back into an office five days a week because
this is not conducive for so many other parts of my life that I prioritize and want and other companies
are going to hire me with that in mind, and so I can make those choices now. So I think a lot is TBD, but
I'm hopeful that those ones that are really being focused on the forward thinking around this, are
actually going to be successful and they become the tipping point for others.
Jen Fisher: Yeah, Deloitte just did it at our 2022 Women at Work survey and results just came out and
points to many of the same things that you're talking about related to women in the workplace. What
I'm seeing and experiencing and hearing is that there are a lot of leaders that recognize the issue but
they don't know what to do about it and also a lot of leaders they themselves are feeling burnt out. So
how do we get them not feeling burnt out, right, having them heal. And then what action should leaders
and companies be taking or thinking about taking to help cure some of these root causes.
Jennifer Moss: I try to emphasize that no one wants an overhaul right now. No one has time for an
overhaul. And usually when we think of these big issues like burnout, it seems so extraordinarily difficult
to tackle. And sometimes when I share those six root causes, you see leaders eyes widened like I cannot.
I can't solve for systemic discrimination you mean, what are you asking me to do, but the goal is to think
about it more tangibly, and my work is sort of proceeding all this has been focused on sort of the science
of happiness and the concept of neuroplasticity and the neuroplasticity inside of organizations actually
creating those habits to make change.
And preventing burnout is exactly the same kind of concept in the tactics and the strategies that we
deploy because we need to be thinking first as managers, how do I change legacy? Well, if I'm burning
out, I have to recognize that my employees can't be what they can't see. So I've to start modeling the
behavior. I need to start changing legacy, changing mindset if I'm gonna tell my employees, don't answer
emails on weekends and holidays, then I should not be doing that as well. I need to really walk the talk
inside of this moment right now if we really want to create change. It means like very simple tactical
changes, making sure that you're analyzing and auditing how much you are meeting. How much time
are people spending in inefficient times of work. We need to do better jobs at making sure that we have
permission to say no to meetings that we have permission to not invite people to meetings. That people
don't feel slighted because they're not contributing or collaborating. We need to reduce that in our
experience of work, because right now it's unsustainable.
We also need to take pauses. We're still acting like we're in emergency. We built this habit up of
urgency, because that's what we had to do, but we're not in an emergency anymore. This is, by
definition, emergencies are unexpected. This isn't unexpected. So how do we stop and take a pause and
really look to the literature and research on the four day work week. A lot of what they've done there is
just reduce inefficiencies. Have better etiquette of time, not having time theft, respecting other peoples
need to get work done, focusing more on priority versus urgent needs always coming in, and that's how
they've been able to manage the workload. Giving people the capacity to get to their goals in their own
way, not having to micromanage how that happens. We need to start focusing on flexibility and policies
for women that are supporting childcare. We need to be thinking about more equity and our paternity
and maternity leaves and focusing more on care leave, what that looks like.
These are all just micro changes and shifts and there's many of them and I share a lot of those in the
book, but it really is just these tiny incremental changes. Even having more non-work-related check-ins
with people to hear the language of burnout, making sure that you're listening for someone that said for
the fifth time in a row that week that they didn't get a good night's sleep last night. I mean, these are
the kind of things that we need to develop that empathetic listening. When we look again at those
organizations that have less burnout, they have high empathy and high trust, lots of good
communication, access to leadership for them to be able to answer the burning questions that are out
there and making people feel like work is fun again. I keep saying that work is like going to school with
no recess or art, or gym, or after school activities, it's so boring. It's so work-focused. There's no levity
and fun and we're all sort of working in these disconnected environments and when we come to work
we're just on zoom anyways or so your video conferencing anyways. And so, we need to go into work
and use this, again paradigm shifting going to work and use the hybrid time as a way to have team
bonding. Do work sprints connect in different ways versus just going in and doing the same thing that
you would do at home. So I've given a bunch of examples, there are many, but thinking about it not as
just doing everything all at once, but tiny tactical incremental changes will create the network effect, the
social contagion effect of working better with in this new paradigm.
Jen Fisher: Yeah and what I love so much about many of the examples you just gave and so many of the
micro-behaviors that you talk about in your book and I have this conversation a lot with people is that
there's a good majority of them that don't actually cost any money.
Jennifer Moss: It's true. It's true. This is cost effective, and it works. So why aren't we doing it?
Jen Fisher: Yeah, yeah. No and – because another one of the things that you point out is that some of
the kind of typical wellness programming and perks while they're not bad, as a matter of fact they're
good and they're well intended. They often fall short because some of these other kind of cultural and
behavioral things don't exist in the workplace. So can you talk a little bit more about that disconnect?
Jennifer Moss: It's absolutely true. I mean, we and you're right in that that disconnect that you're
describing because some people that I've spoken to and a lot of what we heard in the verbatim's of our
research that we did inside the pandemic was just this comment of tone deafness, like, I appreciate that
they're offering me these things in sort of in a good time. They would be very useful for me, the ability
to access physical outlets and having access to food and all of these great things that are there on site,
healthy eating. These are great things. We shouldn't not have them, but they shouldn't be the only
approach to wellness, and we need to kind of bifurcate and this is what I've been saying bifurcate
burnout prevention within the overall wellness strategy. So you're looking more at the upstream I
mentioned upstream intervention where you're thinking, ok, if I want people to use our gym or use the
gym subsidy or whatever it is that will help them from their wellness and optimization standpoint, I need
to make sure that I manage workloads so they can actually utilize that. So those are the things that I get
frustrated with is. We gave a week off to our burnout employees. Well, if we're not managing what that
vacation debt is going to look like or they come back and it's just the same amount of unsustainable
workload, then that week off is going to do nothing for them other than add more work. These are the
things that we need to be considering as how do we understand that the only way we can optimize is if
we get our kind of hygiene right. And you would have known from the book, I'm really sort of into
Herzberg's theory of motivation, that motivation factor theory, his research on that. And it's this
concept and interestingly he was mentored by Maslow, but it's interest this sort of way of thinking
about corporate hygiene as being the table stakes, the basic needs need to be met. We need to give that
water to people. We need to make sure that they have shelter and those basic needs. That includes
making sure that they go to work and are psychologically safe and physically safe, that they go to work
and they have reasonable amount of time to have balance and so they can see their family and engage
with things that matter in their life. So all those things when they're not being met, there's no way that
we can motivate and that's where those other perks come in. So thinking about what are the basics that
people need to utilize the other aspects of their wellness strategy, that's really going to help them
optimize. It's all in a continuum. So we need to start at preventing people from falling into the river
versus pulling them out after they've already fallen in.
Jen Fisher: Yeah, I think that for many and I've seen it, that is a mindset shift right because we tend to
kind of focus on the treatment versus the prevention of and I mean certainly that is true in my own lived
experience. And so I think that is a big mindset shift or even paradigm shift for many in organizations. So
how do we help those that are managing teams, right. I mean, I find that those in the organization that
aren't the most senior leaders and aren't kind of the newest or most junior employees, but those that
are kind of in the middle that are getting hit from all sides. They're getting it from above. They're getting
it from below and oftentimes we put all of the expectations on our managers or our team leaders. So
what suggestions do you have for them? What leadership qualities should they kind of look to enhance
or develop that will help them kind of be better leaders and managers?
Jennifer Moss: This is such an important question because most people that I'm speaking to you are sort
of in that sandwiched place where they are being asked to hit certain metrics and goals, which is totally
fair but they're also realizing that their team is max. So it's like how do I actually do this and it feels very
challenging, almost impossible to ask more of the people that are already pretty burnt out, but what
we've seen two is just market demand and massive growth within certain organizations that are can't
resource up enough. And we see a vacuum of attrition, which puts a lot of extra pressure on the team.
So it is a difficult situation I think what managers need to consider is that again, it's not this overhaul
that it is about small programmatic shifts and a big shift in mindset, which means, ok, how do I get
better at actively listening, practicing empathy. Even if it's not innate, we can really practice that skill,
and it makes a huge difference. I mean, when you think about your role as a manager, it is really that
you want to be the best leader you can be for your team and make sure that they are at peak efficacy
and efficiency and productivity, but also they have high job satisfaction, they're not going to leave. So
there is that place that you have to kind of keep people. And the way that you do that, and I love this
because I interviewed this woman, Dr. Martha Bird, and she's a chief anthropologist with a large
organization. And what she's so incredible at is looking at culture from an anthropological lens. And she
says the more that we can get to actively listening to people stories and actioning what we're listening
and then sharing those stories across the organization, the more that we can then be really excellent
professional eavesdroppers, and I love that concept. So we're all supposed to be professional
eavesdroppers and what that means is we are supposed to be listening for the sounds of burnout and
the sounds of motivation and looking at it in that non-shared language kind of way. The way that we
used to communicate through semiotics and hand gestures or stuff, which can be difficult on zoom
conferencing, but you can hear it and also between the lines, kind of ways of thinking about it. So she
says and I've really encouraged this non-work related check-in and the way that you start with managers
is just having this consistent and frequent meeting every single week and some people are doing it. But I
really recommend a format around this. And the reason I say this is because these coffee chats for a lot
of people, like if you see managers rolling their eyes saying it's just not working, no one is speaking and I
have too big of a team, so I'm not connecting with people. Just feels like more workload. I kind of hear
that pushback, but I say ok, create it as a formalized meeting that it's every week, make sure that you're
sharing to you ask three questions. One, how are you, people are going to lie. So then we say, ok, let's
figure that out because a lot of people say they're fine when they don't mean it. We have to dig deeper.
And so we ask name one thing that was a real stressor this week and name something that was kind of a
high, like, what were you really excited about in your life, in anything? I mean, it can be professional, but
the goal is to really talk about some things outside of work. You're going to hear a lot of things at first it
might not be that open. There might not be that level of openness, but overtime, if you're a manager,
that's saying I'm going to ask every week and I'm going to share my vulnerability and I'm going to come
into this conversation to you ready for a conversation. Then you go around and you listen. You
eavesdrop for the signs of burnout, like, I haven't slept in a week or I'm really worrying about putting my
mom into assisted living. It's been a real stressor, or I'm putting three kids through university in the next
five years. I'm sort of freaking out. I've been at home with the kids. They've been sick from school and so
I've been really juggling.
You as a manager, then don't need to be a mental health professional, but you can be a mental health
conduit. You can know within the EP what kind of resources are there to help with financial help. Can
you give a break to your single mom who is juggling kids by having more flexibility around hours or
maybe they don't need to attend meetings this week. You have this capacity to kind of be a conduit for
that support. And then on the flip side, when people are sharing their motivations, like, I'm really
pumped about this Broadway show that I'm going to go to. I can't wait to see it. I've been waiting for the
last six months. These kind of things that light people up, you can start as a manager really focusing on
how do I have this nuanced approach to getting that person lit up more inside of their work. And again,
not overhauls, it's a 30-minute weekly meeting and that ends in this third question. What can we do for
each other to make next week easier? So, then you have shared goals. It's about easy wins. It's about
actioning the listening, so people feel like, people actually care about what you're saying and what you
need, and every week you commit to that. That's always my first step approach for managers. So just
start to think in a very simplified, easy to operationalize way of listening, better developing your
empathy skills, making it a team goal and then bit by bit creating trust because that is going to be what
ends up really predicting healthier, more well and happy individuals in teams.
Jen Fisher: And, I have to assume that after you do this for a while, you do create a sense of comfort
where people even outside of this weekly check-in are more willing and open to ask for what they need
or to share kind of what's going on and ask of their teammates for help and I guess in a sense creating
that psychological safety on a team.
Jennifer Moss: That's exactly what the goal is that it permeates outside of that weekly check-in. And I
mean, again, I always say this isn't a diet, it's a lifestyle change. It's an overtime kind of building up and
because we naturally as humans and, even more than ever, want sort of this instant gratification. I want
burnout solved next weekend and I don't want it to be a problem anymore. Well, it's taking one
intervention, and then taking another intervention and building on it, and then over time there's a shift
in attitudes and behaviors. And you do that this in through that concept of miracle, the plasticity where
all of those kind of practice habits become part of the subconscious, become part of the culture of the
organization. And then you feel it and then other people see it and see – you can start to measure. I
mean, you can take this non-work-related check-in and ask people to start off a three month cycle.
How're you feeling? Ask them to share how burnt out they feel in their sense of job satisfaction, I mean
simple ask. And then in three months after practicing this consistently, ask how people are feeling.
There you've got data now to reinforce why you're making these decisions, and that then allows you to
go to upper management and say this is a tactic I've been using. It's been really useful people’s
likelihood of not leaving in the next six months is really improved. And that's how you then create
advocacy to make these changes. And over time you just start to feel it like cultures felt kind of in those
proverbial walls. Now that we're not in office, if you feel it in the walls where you just, we know when
things are going well and when we're connected and we're trusting and that is something that is
pervasively felt across the whole organization.
Jen Fisher: Yeah, I love that. And I get a lot of requests that how can we fix burnout tomorrow? And I tell
people, well, first of all, it took us a while to get where we are, right? Like burnout doesn't happen
overnight as individuals or as an organization. So, we've been working on getting to this place for a
while. It's going to take us a little while to get out of this place, unfortunately, right. I wish there was a
magic switch.
Jennifer Moss: Me too. For every problem in the world, I wish there was a magic switch.
Jen Fisher: Yeah, exactly. So, we've talked about leaders, we've talked about kind of managers, team
managers. Let's talk about the individual, right? Because you described how it's this ecosystem, right? It
kind of requires everybody to prevent and protect all of us from burnout. So what can we do as
individuals to protect ourselves from burnouts?
Jennifer Moss: It's important first to be able to identify what burnout looks like. Its high levels of
exhaustion, depletion, feeling completely wiped out. Even if you feel like you've slept the night before,
the next morning you're sort of dragging yourself to go, to get up, you're not motivated. Symptoms can
also include depression, anxiety. So burnout is not necessarily depression or anxiety, but it can cause
that. So you want to pay attention to that.
We also see it show up in just our behaviors. I mean I just heard a stat couple months ago that showers
in 2021 were down 30%. And I thought that was such an interesting statistic and data point and it's
funny in a lot of ways, but at the same time it's also like a byproduct of being so burnt out, so exhausted
that you stop caring about those things where you're not spending time on things that make you feel
joy. You're not spending time with your friends. That is something we need to recognize, that's
happening in ourselves. We also see that show up and just not feeling like we're effective, we are not
good at our jobs. And also, we're very cynical where we start to think nothing is going to change. It's
always going to be like this. I can't. I'm hopeless. I can't make an impact. That really is how it shows up in
ourselves and so we want to be able to first identify it and give ourselves the compassion in the right
label for it. It doesn't mean, oh, you're just not a good employee. You're just disengaged. That's a
byproduct of being burned out.
So first, that self-compassion. And then second, understanding that we've all gone through this
experience of facing our mortality for several years, and a lot of our priorities have shifted. We've
learned these amazing skills like cognitive optimism and social-emotional flexibility and we've had to
adapt to change. We need to recognize and pat ourselves on the back for just every single day, doing
what we do in such an extraordinary way in the middle of this experience, this global pandemic that's
still around us, and reminding ourselves of that. We need to step back from toxic productivity. A lot of
what happened in that first part of the pandemic was, oh well, here I am for example, I'm a mom of a
14-year-old, a 12-year-old and an 8-year-old, and our kids were at home for extraordinary amount of
time. Like in Canada, it was just a long shut down. I think the kids were out of school for almost 16
months in total, which is really long. And so what I found at the beginning was I'm barely able to unload
and load the dishwasher until its capacity every day. And I'm trying to juggle writing a book on burnout
in the middle of a global pandemic. I mean, that was extraordinary and ironic. And I think that and this
sense of always having to urgently respond to everything that's coming at us, has made us feel this
threat of urgency now. Every time we hear a ping or a noise, we feel like we have to respond, we feel
like we need to manage client needs urgently or above all else. We have to constantly feel the sense of
above and beyond and we need to pause that and pull back on that. I keep reminding people that what
are your deathbed regrets? Will it be not sending that e-mail out to a client at 11:00 o'clock at night or
not responding to your boss at midnight or is it that you didn't get any time with your family and friends
and you disconnected from the things that matter to you. Trying to create some sort of boundaries
around that is necessary, and appreciating that once when we've gone through all of this that what
matters in the end is our capacity to keep going, our health and well-being and the health of our family,
because we shouldn't waste this crisis. We can't just look at it and think, oh well, that was that, wipe our
hands, let it just be the past. We need to say, ok, what are we going to take from this that's
transformational and useful and shaping the benefit of our future and the future of our kids and our
family because that's actually what's more meaningful and until we get to that point, I think as leaders
and changing that mindset about ourselves, there's no way that we're going to be able to prevent
burnout for our teams. We have to adopt that mindset because if not, like I said, there will be invisible
pressures consistently that we are, whether we realize it or not, are placing on the people that we are
leading. So that is if you want to stop burnout today, you better prevent burnout in yourself today by
taking on a lot of those changes in your mentality.
Jen Fisher: I just had like a major, like A-Ha! moment because my story and the way I ended up as Chief
Well-being Officer for Deloitte is through my own story of burnout. And I have been kind of trying to
figure out like there's a difference in the burnout that I'm seeing now versus kind of the burnout that I
felt. And I think some of the kind of easier differences is that you were talking about it more. Seven
years ago, we weren't talking about it, especially in the workplace. It just was something that like, if you
were experiencing it, you didn't talk about it. But what I've noticed is a real difference is what you were
just saying about this energy, what we need to take away from this, like I've been seeing and noticing
from people that are experiencing burnout or kind of coming through burnout. This real passion and
energy to change things. And I think that's part of what's driving the great resignation too is like until we
change things, and it's a we, it's not an until you change things, right. There's not pointing fingers, but
until we change things for the better, for the greater good of all of us, then I'm not going back to what
got me burnt out to begin with and to me that's kind of the biggest difference at least that I'm seeing
now from what I went through, right. There's this common desire to recognize and this you need to
change things too so that we can all move forward in a better way. And I wasn't able to actually
verbalize or really describe that in the way that you just did. So thank you. I don't know if you have a
response or reaction to that, but I can't think of a better way to end our conversation today because
that just meant so much to me personally.
Jennifer Moss: I love that sentiment, and I agree. And I think that is what has been so, I don't know,
elevating for me, or what has just made me want to be engaged in this conversation even more, is that I
felt myself a level of hopelessness that no one was going to be really paying attention. And I hate that it
took this crisis to get people to pay attention, but sometimes it does take a bottom-line issue.
Sometimes it does take a rallying cry and an energy behind someone, and often the way that we build
resiliency, actually not often, always, resiliency is built by going through trauma. That's how we develop
the skills to rebound, and this could be a post-traumatic growth moment for workplaces and the work
force overall because it's going to remind us what work is supposed to be. It shouldn't be that only 20%
of the workforce is engaged. It should be that we are happy at work. It's fuel. We spend 50% of our
waking lives there. It should be what drives us and makes us excited and we want to show up to work
and everyone plays a role in making that happen. And when that happens, it's like super fuel. It is so
exciting and transformational. And so, if we can take what we've learned and just power up the future
of work with that learning, I think it could be really exciting. It's just that everyone has to recognize that
there's a long way to go to get that, but don't ignore what happened. Take the learning and apply it to
the future of work.
Jen Fisher: I love it. I love it. Well, Jen, thank you. I feel like we could keep talking for hours and I hope
we get the opportunity to do that in person one day, but this was so great. Thank you so much for your
time and your wisdom and for being on the show today.
Jennifer Moss: I'm so grateful. I really enjoyed myself. Thank you.
Jen Fisher: I'm so grateful Jennifer could be with us today to talk about happiness and burnout at work.
Thank you to our producers Rivet 360 and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on
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