9. Brigid Schulte on the pursuit of happiness

Show Notes

Does working longer and harder make you more productive? Our society seems to think so. But studies show that an overworked culture can actually negatively impact productivity as well as employee well-being. On this episode, Deloitte chief well-being officer Jen Fisher discusses modern work culture and how it impacts our ability to live a fulfilling life with Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America.

What is WorkWell?

On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.

The pursuit of happiness

Jennifer Fisher (Jen): Today's professionals feel overwhelmed, overworked, and exhausted. For many, the expectations of work don’t align with the realities of life. There is a constant demand to do more and it seems harder than ever to joggle a successful career with a fulfilling life. So, is working more actually making us more productive? This is the WorkWell podcast series. Hi, I am Jen Fisher, Well-being leader for Deloitte, and I’m so pleased to be here with you today to talk all things well-being.
Teaser— Brigid Schulte (Brigid): We are just squeezing families all across the board. We are making it really difficult. We are supposed to be about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It seems like we have forgotten the most fundamental thing that this country is supposed to be about and that's living a good life.
Jen: I'm here with Brigid Schulte. She is a journalist, author, and speaker on work life, productivity, and gender issues. She is also the director of the Better Life Lab at New America. Let's just dive right in. Tell me a little bit about yourself, how did you become passionate about work life and productivity?
Brigid: Through utter ignorance and really through my own experience. So, I have been a journalist all my life and I think I got into daily newspapers because I was such a perfectionist that I never finished anything, so I needed daily deadlines to really force me to actually get the work done. So I got used to a very intense pace and like most other overachievers or Americans, because we are the sort of overachieving culture, I always wanted to be really good what I did. So I poured myself into work and then I got married and I had two kids and I just felt like my hair was on fire, because I was also trying to be kind of the supermom. Everything to everyone, I was trying to work like my dad. He was sort of the solitary breadwinner and he was always working or always thinking about work and always seemed very preoccupied. So I thought that was the right way to do work and then I was trying to be a parent like my mom. And she was a stay-at-home mom and she drove the field trips and she didn’t bake the cookies. So I had these sort of, kind of ideals in my head about who I needed to be. I didn’t have any good role models about how do you

realistically combine these two roles and be really good at them. The stress was just off the charts.
Jen: Did you believe it was possible to do both and be good at them?

Brigid: No, I didn’t. And everyone I talked to, friends, sisters, family, it seemed like the conversations were always the same, "how are you doing?" "I’m barely making it." Nobody had it figured out. I remembered after I had my son, I had a lovely, it was unpaid, but I did have maternity leave, and I loved that time, just being able to wake up in the morning and all you have to do is bond with this brand new baby and try to figure out how to make life work in this completely new situation. It's like what did that mean to be a mother, what did that mean to be a family, and that's all you have to do. So I am such a huge proponent of paid family leave, everybody should have that opportunity. And then I remember going back to work and it was just like, I was slammed into this wall, like nobody understood what I was going through. And I remember somebody at work saying "Oh, you will have a hard day, March 15th, but you’ll be fine by March 17th or whatever, it’s like "What?" like I was supposed to, of a sudden, just flip back to who I was. And I had really gone through this massive transition. And there was this expectation that I would go back to work and be the same hard charging reporter, kind of trying to hide your family. And I remember bragging to one of my editors- I have backup childcare, and backup backup childcare, so I am always here. If there is something like deadline, I am here and the expectation was like of course you will be, yes, work comes first. But then I would go home and just this gooey, lovely, little baby and I was just like, how could I ever be away from this child and wanting to…
Jen: Backup backup childcare didn’t seem like such a…

Brigid: Yeah, not a good idea, there was no option for backup backup work. So I just felt really torn and everyone I knew felt that way and I remember going back to work and talking to one of my working mother friends and sort of, kind of getting weepy, driving to work, and I hate it to leave my child and feeling really guilty and torn, and today all of the other mothers in my mothers group, because many of them decided to stay home. They had sort of the financial resources that we didn’t. Being reporters, it was tough to make it on one salary, so I went back to work. And specially in this Northern Virginia area, other places you could probably do it, but that also wasn’t the right choice for me. I didn’t want this either- but I remember just being so sad one day that they were meeting and my friend, she just said "honey, you are working mom, this is as good as it gets.” I was like driving talking to her on my cell phone in the car. So I was always feeling pulled in different directions, really inadequate, like I just couldn’t be good enough at work, couldn’t be good enough as a mother, or at home, you know, never mind trying to keep house. I just went out the door, never mind trying to take care of myself, that also was the first thing went out the door. So, I broke out in stress-induced eczema and I wasn’t sleeping, really burning my candle, I would say at both sides and now at the middle, it was more than just burning a candle at both ends.
Jen: If you don’t mind me asking, how many years ago was this?

Brigid: I would say probably it was about 10 years ago.

Jen: Okay, and do you feel like anything has changed? Has it gotten better?

Brigid: Oh, absolutely, it's changed enormously, but how I got here was just really experiencing, just how difficult it is, in this country in particular, to try to combine work and life. In my case, I really experienced it through motherhood, but other people experienced it through eldercare or their own illness or just having something else that they are passionate about.
Jen: Right, just wanting to have a life?

Brigid: Just wanting to have a life and we don’t make it easy. We have these jobs that are demanding and exciting, but really ask too much of you and the culture is such that it's very difficult to push back against that because somehow your seen as not good enough or you can't hack it, not committed. And at the other end, we really put people through such a ringer because we don’t have jobs that have living wages, we don’t have benefits that can actually help them combine work and life. And so we are just squeezing families all across the board, we are making it really difficult, we were supposed to be about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it seems like we have forgotten the most fundamental thing that this country is supposed to be about and that’s living a good life.
Jen: And you have talked about work, life, and work and life, and work life balance is a common term that we all hear especially in corporate America, but I think generally in society, this whole notion of work life balance, but I think the balance is kind of one of those things that's never really achievable and maybe this kind of goes to what you are saying. I mean, can you talk a little bit more about that? I mean is balance, I don’t want to get stuck on terminology, but can we ever really expect balance? Is balance the right thing to have or is it flow or rhythm or is that changing because the way working is changing, can you talk a little bit more about that?
Brigid: Well, it’s so interesting that people have a problem with the idea of work life balance because you have this idea, well like a teeter-totter or see-saw, and it has to be at this 50:50, and it’s not. And I think that's a misunderstanding of what the term work life balance means. And I think if you look at your life kind of zoom out a little bit, if you look not just a day as a day 50:50 or is the week or the month, but are you giving energy and time to the different parts of your life that make it worth living. The subtitle of my book came from Erik Erikson, Harvard Psychologist who said the good life, the people who live the richest and fullest lives make time and give energy to, he called, the three great arenas of life, "Work, Love, and Play," meaningful, purposeful work, the time to connect with other people, the social connections that really form the basis of human happiness, all of the studies in the world of happiness show that we are happier when we are connected with the other people.
Jen: Socially, yeah, I mean it’s part of our being.

Brigid: Exactly and then time for leisure or play, something that gives you just pure joy and I would argue that we don’t make time for that at all. So, you are asking, like do I believe that it can change and I absolutely do and the reason that I got so passionate about work life and the reason that I believe that I can change is because I had an experience that led me to writing a book and I literally was given time to use my skills as an investigative journalist to really investigate modern life. Why is it so overwhelming? Why do so many people feel the way that I did? Sort of personal failures that they can't figure out how to

make their life work. Why is it so hard? What is it about America and is it different anywhere else? And I really wanted to know why are things the way they are, and how can they be better? Were there places like the blue zones where people live long healthy lives, were there places, bright spots for people who were combining work and life in better ways. And so I have the gift of time to investigate and then write this book and that’s what changed. It changed me entirely, it changed me personally, but more importantly I think more than anything that changed my…it changed what I believe is possible because I saw how it could be different.
Jen: So tell me a little bit, like give us some of those examples, I’m dying to know.

Brigid: Yeah, well, so let's look at work, love, and play like how it can be better. So in the United States, I would argue that work doesn’t work here. We work really long hours and we are productive, but we pay a huge price for it. And we are not as productive per hour as other countries that have similar rates of productivity per hour and work less. If you look at international productivity comparisons, the most productive country is Norway and they work under the European work time directive of 37.5 hours a week by law unless you have certain exceptions. We are about as productive as Denmark, we are about as productive per hour as France, and we love to make fun of France and people who are drinking cappuccinos all day at the café, taking six weeks of paid vacation. Oh, my god, having paid family leave! And yet we are about as productive per hour as they are. And I think that's the message we need to start thinking about. So, here in the United States if you work a crazy long shift or we work crazy long hours, there is research that shows that if it's voluntary, so mainly for knowledge workers, you don’t have to, you are not being paid over time. We actually give that person greater status that we tend to think that they are better or superior or more interesting. We celebrate them, we want to be like them. Interestingly that same sort of status effect doesn’t happen if you have to work overtime, if you are sort of at the…
Jen: or you have to work two jobs or three jobs just to make it. We are not celebrating that…
Brigid: We are not celebrating that busyness, and yeah, we are celebrating this bizarre gifting of our lives back to our corporations or Corporate America or companies, which is fascinating and troubling and bizarre. It's like we are exploiting ourselves, talk about worker exploitation, we are doing it willingly, I was doing it willingly.
Jen: Yeah, so what can we as individuals and as leaders and as organizations, I’d loved to go as far as society, but we can't boil the ocean here, but like where do we start in fixing this, I think in some respects perhaps I would like to say we are on the journey?
Brigid: Well, and it's a lot of what I’m doing here at the Better Life Lab, is trying to figure out how do you push that change, how do you change policy, how do you change practice, how do you change culture? How do we shift our mindsets to thinking that it is possible?
And one of the things I find is when I go to give workshops and you’ll go into a corporation or company and you’ll ask people, “all right, you are all struggling with work life conflict, you are all feeling overwhelmed, what's your vision of what it would look like if you had work life balance or flow or fit or time for the things that are most important in your life which includes work, what would that look like?” Nobody knows, because nobody takes the

time to figure it out. And so that's probably the most important thing that you can do as an individual. It's just, disrupt that cycle of busyness! We get in this cycle where we just going, going, going, going. I love this term, behavioral scientists have actually looked at “busyness” and what they found is that because you are sort of in this time scarcity mode that it actually tunnels your vision that you literally lose about 13 IQ points because you cannot see beyond the tunnel. So you are only able to see the fires right in front of you, so you no longer are able to think strategically or creatively or outside of the box. So we are all tunneling and so what I would love to see is people themselves taking time out to figure out how to get out of the tunnel, disrupt that cycle of busyness, and really become clear on what is most important to you in that day, in that week, in that month. Think about work and love and play, and giving love and play as much importance as work. And then what I would love to see is Corporate America and business, and the business community really understanding that by frying your workforce, you are actually harming yourself. That probably one of the most pro-capitalist pro-productivity kinds of things you could do is really take care of your workforce. And I think as a society, we absolutely need to think about what is this society that we are trying to create. A nation shows what it values through the policies that it holds.
We have really no policies that support work and life. No policies that support the good life, if you will, very few. We have one unpaid family medical leave, which took 10 years to pass, it was vetoed twice and doesn’t really work very well. It doesn’t cover some 40 percent of the work force. Very few people have access to paid leave, if you are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, you can't afford to take unpaid leave. And so that’s why you get this really horrendous situation where one in four US mothers go, they go back to work within two weeks of giving birth. There are more than 20 states where you can't separate a puppy from its mother before eight weeks. How can we have laws that treat puppies better than we do human children? So, I think that we need to be having these larger conversations. In the United States, we have always thought of families and work life, sort of somehow separate from political discourse or the public sphere. That its a private issue and family should take care of it. And I think that the work force has changed so much, we really need to be thinking much more broadly and holistically because really right now we are just running ourselves into the ground.
Jen: So, do you think it's going to get worse before it gets better?

Brigid: I have a hard time predicting, I do see certainly bright spots like here in the United States, you do see conversations. You are the head of well-being at a major corporation that’s a really exciting and positive trend that there are conversations, recognition, there's more and more research that’s going on about how this is important. You have got professors from Stanford and Harvard coming up with algorithms to look at more than 200 studies like work, stress, and psychosocial issues that lead to ill health and we are beginning to really take seriously the human element in the work life conversations. So I do see that there are signs of hope.
Jen: And do you think that this is a place, maybe it’s my role where I sit, I believe that this is an area where Corporate America should be or has the opportunity really…maybe not should be, but I think corporate American can impact change here that can trickle down if we are not getting it from broader society. So it’s almost a call to action to those of us that are in the space to create a more humane work environment.

Brigid: Yeah, absolutely, I don’t know if you can see my head nodding. Yeah, absolutely I think that when you look, there are all sorts of different pieces of the puzzle that we all need to work together to make real positive change and Corporate America has a huge role in this leading by example, showing how it's possible. You are asking about bright spots, some of the bright spots are companies and corporations who are doing things differently and showing that it's possible. So I think that there is absolutely a role to play a national policy to make sure that the sort of good life benefits if you will, is not just available to the few or the lead where the people with the knowledge or educational resources but really is who we are as a nation. It's a citizenship right, it's basically, if you are American you have the opportunity for good life and we need to figure out how to make that much more possible and within the grasp of so many more people, and then there are the things which you can do as an individual. And one of the things you can do right here and right now and I saw this when I was traveling, talking about bright spots, I worked again newspapers for so much in my career and if I would pulled in all night or I work late, I come in and I grumble in the morning that it was a bit of a humble brag, but it was like…it was certain like aren’t amazing and I’m so dedicated and as much as I was complaining about it, I was also unconsciously signaling, look at me, I belong, I’m important, and the funny thing is when I was in Denmark and I was reporting for a chapter in the book, I went in something like that and I got this really bizarre quizzical look from this guy and he said you have to understand, we work 7.5 hours really intensely a day, but when we leave, we leave, and anybody who works late, we ask "why can't you get your job done in the time you have allotted, what's wrong with you?" And there was an American, I met over there, and she had a real struggle with that. She said when she had first got to Denmark, she worked like an American, first in, last out, ate lunch at her desk, she would leave so late, but in Denmark that is not part of their culture, every place was closed, restaurants were closed, all the lights were off. She said she could go to the gas station and buy crackers, that was the only thing that was open. And then the time came for her performance review and she thought she was going to get this big bonus and she didn’t because they said, you have to understand that one of the top three things that we measure our employee performance on his work life balance and you don’t have any. So, she had to go home and learn how to have a life and it started with her taking time and going out and riding Icelandic ponies with her family and taking time off.
Jen: I mean, so that's a huge called action through employers, right, like I mean put it as part of her performance metric, I mean we know that we achieve what we measure, right?
Brigid: What gets measured gets done and instead of having this conversation about, like did you go above and beyond, well, you’ve really given a 110 percent, 150 percent, have that conversation that we really value you bringing your whole self, all of your energy to work. How could we make sure that that's happening because I kind of see you starting to burn out. Because when you burn out, you are going to make the easier choice, you are going to put the fire out right in front of you. I saw that in myself, I was so tired that I would do the smaller, easier story that would be like the quick hit, look at me I have got the byline in the paper, check that off my byline count whatever. But when I left the post to come to New America and I was cleaning up my files, there were big thick files of half- reported stories. But if I had just had a little bit more bandwidth, if I had just had a little bit more energy, maybe I actually could have pulled them off and pulled them together and done something right. I don’t want to say I didn’t do extraordinary things, I did, but I could

have done more, if I had been less frantic, busy, and stressed out. If I had just created that space to think a little bit more creatively.
Jen: You and I have talked before about some of your travels to other countries and I’m fascinated with some of your stories around the work culture in Japan and what there is to learn from that, can you talk a little bit about that?
Brigid: Yeah, so this has been one of things, so after I wrote my book and I became really passionate about it, I felt like the book helped me understand what was going on. I became really passionate about trying to figure out how that changed, how do you make this better, and how do I use my skills now as a journalist. This is what I do. And so I really began focusing on work culture and overwork because I was just seeing so much pain out there and I was seeing that work was really what was driving it, it's not like people didn’t want to be at home, it is not like life was causing the conflict. Work was really the source of so much of the conflicts, so I wanted to really dive into that. And as I was looking around and again looking at international comparisons, one of the things that really caught my eye was that Japan and South Korea as well, they work among the longest hours. I mean actually longer than the United States. So, they are working long hours and they are not having children, they are not getting married, they are not only not having lives, they are not reproducing their own society. They are in this really precarious position.
Jen: So, they downstream impact of that is huge?

Brigid: Huge and they are not being productive. And so I was really curious, like why is that that a country is really eating itself alive in work hours, what's driving that? And so I was lucky enough to get a fellowship and so I went to Japan and I spent six weeks and my whole focus was really on the overwork culture and I have to admit it, I overworked a little bit writing about that overwork. But I did get to go to the hot springs and the public baths, I would make time for myself. It was a devastating experience, I met so many people, you couldn’t go anywhere, and I’m really lucky I had a wonderful translator who really understood this issue, you couldn’t go anywhere, you couldn’t talk to anyone who did not have some kind of story of a family member or a friend or a coworker who actually overworked to the point of either death or serious illness or losing their job or getting depressed or suicide. Everybody had a story and it was so pervasive. And one of the things that I found so troubling is that the young people they’re really suffering from depression because they don’t want this life, but they don’t have a choice, or they don’t feel that they have a choice, there is no other way to work. They call it the one road. You work really hard, you graduate from University, you get a job in one of these big companies. And then it used to be you are set for life and the company would take care of you and now the one road leads you basically one road right to an early grave because they expect these endless work hours. I talked to this one young guy and he said part of the culture is you can't leave until your boss leaves and he said “I was at work the other night at 11, I had nothing to do, so I just xeroxed blank papers to try to look busy.” So, this is part of where some of these long hours don’t really mean anything other than to sap the life out of you, sap the life out of your company and your country. So I spent a lot of time with a group of people who are trying to change it and sort of tragically the group of people who are trying to change it are people who have lost someone to overwork, death by over work. So a lot of widows, a lot of mothers, but sadly increasingly there are more woman, Japan has…in their push for trying to get more women into the workplace really, what they have done is created the

opportunity now for women to basically overwork themselves. So I spent time with a mother whose daughter worked such insanely long hours that after only two months she became almost delirious and the mother said that she spent the evening and bought some like toiletries, not the behavior of somebody who is suicidal, but then literally just jumped off a building and killed herself. Just so tired, so delirious, and they do track these statistics. There is a process whereby you can apply for like a Workmen's compensation payment. And so looking at the government reports, we tend to think of the middle aged salaryman who works for a white collar company, keeling over from a heart attack at his desk. But actually when you look at the statistics, one of the fastest growing areas is strokes, and the people who suffered the most are doctors and teachers who worked just insanely long hours. For younger people, suicide and depression are huge factors that would lead to…pertain to this overwork and death. And I spent some time, you can actually apply for Workmen's comp benefit if you’re too depressed to go to work and then they will send you to this like depression school where you can try to learn how to go back to work. And whether trying to teach people as how to say "NO," I kind of want to shake them and this is like you can't expect people to say "NO" to a system. You can't expect the individual to be what can change that system. There are people who are just dropping out because they see that that's the only alternative. I was talking to one young college student who is part of this movement to try to make change, part of very small labor union and I was talking to him and he just said, we just want to work, we want to have good jobs, we want to work 40 hours a week, we want to be able to get married, have children. He said, we just want to have a decent life. But the ironic thing is he never told his parents that he is working for this labor union, because his parents expect him, and are putting pressure on him, that he will go to work for one of these prestigious companies. It’s kind of one road and down this path to overwork and early death. So, it's really a troubling phenomenon and when you look at how do you change that, it’s got to come from something much bigger, you need to press it on all sides. But it’s really got to come from leadership creating the space to say “what we are doing now isn’t working, how can we change?”
Jen: That’s really powerful. I almost feel like where do we go from here? Do you feel like the US is marginally better or perhaps a lot better, but maybe going down the same path in some ways or just different?
Brigid: Well, I do think we need to look at the rising sense of insecurity or precariousness, because that does drive a lot of overwork. In the knowledge work area, you certainly saw that after the 2008 recession and you saw people doing more with less, but you also saw overwork really spike just like it did in the 1980s because people were worried, there wasn’t that same sort of sense of job security like, oh my god, if these big banks can fail, I can be out of work, so I’m going to work really, really, really hard to show that I shouldn’t be the one laid off next time. So it fostered that overwork in kind of the high-wage area and then in the low-wage area, the social contract is gone. There are so many crummy jobs without benefits and you are just stringing together your Uber hours with maybe some care work, maybe something else, but it's so difficult to just try to make it work. So I think we all need to be thinking very seriously, particularly as we think of the future work, what does that uncertainty and precarity do and how can you bring back a sense of security? When you look at the United States versus Japan, I think we like to think of Japan as always this weird place and we are not like that at all. Or they have the samurai tradition and so they are all full of self-sacrifice and that’s not really what I saw at all. Overwork is a pretty new phenomenon in Japan, just as it is here, people didn’t over work in the 50s and 60s.

Jen: No, when they left work, they left work.

Brigid: I have interviewed so many people who would say my dad was a lawyer, my dad was a doctor, he would be home for dinner at 5. And that was also a very productive era, so we have done this before, we know how to be productive and also have life. So I think we need to make this a much more serious conversation about what's happening. And frankly in the United States, we don’t know if we have the similar sort of Karoshi or overwork statistics because we don’t measure it. You can't necessarily apply for Workmen's comp for a heart attack that's tied to a certain number of hours of overwork the way you can in Japan, so I don’t know if we are any different or any better here.
Jen: I’m so grateful Brigid could be with us today. Thank you to our producers and our listeners. You can find the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword “WorkWell” to hear more. If you like the show, don’t forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes.
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