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Pinaki Kathiari & Chris Lee challenge traditional best practices in the workplace
Pinaki Kathiari (00:00)
Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work? We're having another short maybe, but honest conversation about the human side of work. I'm Pinaki Kathiari and joining me is Chris Lee.
Chris Lee (00:13)
Yeah, hi everybody. And I love how, Pinaki, you're just saying we're going to keep this short and we've, we just, we're such failures at keeping our podcast episodes short. We really get into it. So.
Pinaki Kathiari (00:18)
Okay.
⁓
Every failure is one step towards success. And so hello, Chris. And we also have our executive producer, Bree.
Chris Lee (00:28)
Exactly.
Ellen Griley (00:31)
Hahaha!
Bree Bartos (00:37)
Hi everyone.
Pinaki Kathiari (00:38)
And today we're going to talk about mental health at work. We are in May and it is mental health awareness month. And joining us today is Ellen Griley founder and head brain in charge at Equilibrious Communications and creator of Internal Calms. That's C-A-L-M-S. Ellen just published her report, Shifting Ground, Internal Communications in an Age of Polycrisis, which we're going to dig into in this episode, but Ellen.
Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been a wild ride, so we appreciate you being here today.
Ellen Griley (01:12)
It's my pleasure. ⁓
Chris Lee (01:12)
Yeah, I'm so excited to have you
as well. Sorry. So you can keep that part in. Because Pinaki said, Ellen, we're so pleased to have you. And I don't know why I thought when you said Ellen, we're pleased to have you, that was my cue to start chatting. Great. Thank you.
Bree Bartos (01:17)
Chris is just...
Pinaki Kathiari (01:32)
You are the new Ellen for today. we'll just... But Ellen, thank you so much for joining us today.
Chris Lee (01:35)
Exactly.
Ellen Griley (01:41)
Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.
Pinaki Kathiari (01:43)
So,
absolutely. For a little background, Bree and I actually had the pleasure of meeting you at ALI's Employee Experience Conference back in March. And we really haven't stopped talking about you. And actually, I've just been seeing you and your work everywhere there. So just to kick it off, mental health awareness is about awareness of your own mental health. And when we met at that conference, your talk
you started talking about neuroscience, which I am a dear fan of, and you talked about our amygdala and prefrontal cortex. And I think as a way to kind of set this stage, I'd love for you to explain this to folks, because I think it's a good way for people to just not only understand their own mental health at a given time, but potentially other people's mental health at a given time.
Ellen Griley (02:30)
Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way to think about this is the approach that I advocate for works in a variety of scenarios for the same reason. So officially, it's a trauma informed approach. And that's important because about 70 % of the United States population has experienced at least one traumatic event in their life. And when you experience trauma, it's not about
what happens to you. It's about what happens in your body as a result of it and what happens to the way that your brain works. And the really interesting thing though is that that same effect can happen because of chronic stress as well. And so when we talk about our friends, the amygdala, not always our friend, but our friends, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which I talk about a lot in my work, it's really about that threat detector, that amygdala.
kind of firing at all times. And what happens is that prefrontal cortex, which is important for long-term thinking, nuance, complexity, it ends up not being able to be as effective. And so my work really focuses on the ways that can help people feel safe and can help people feel trust and keep their nervous systems regulated in a variety of situations.
And big disclaimer upfront, I am not a neuroscientist. So this is the result of my work in a trauma-informed leadership program where I studied a decent amount of how the body and brain work in terms of threat protection and stress response.
Chris Lee (04:08)
So Ellen, I'm so curious. ⁓ So I'm to be honest with you. Mental health is my, it's my favorite thing. I guess I love that these kinds of conversations are happening. I love that we're really thinking more intentionally about what it means to the, now the employee experience. think for a long time, we've been talking about mental health as a human experience. But I think,
know, Pinaki, you and I, we've talked a lot about the workplace experience and it's a very unique, sometimes bizarre ecosystem that breeds really different kinds of behaviors with people that, you know, you wouldn't necessarily see this version of them outside of the office or on weekends. So, Ellen, I'm just so curious about, you know, a little bit about your background and
⁓ I love, I just even love the concept of internal calms And when we say calms we're talking C-A-L-M-S, calms see what Ellen did there. And I'd love to know about your background and more about your framework. What inspired you to create internal calms
Ellen Griley (05:13)
Yes, so the quick and easy answer is that from the moment I stepped into corporate out of a career that I'd had in journalism, I felt like I was in a bizarro world. I just, I could not understand the rules. I couldn't understand why all of a sudden I had to adopt this persona that was not at all like who you would encounter outside of the walls of work.
And that notion really stuck with me, that notion of, you know, before we had Severance, the, innie and the outtie And so I've done a couple of grad school programs thinking about it because I'm a big nerd. And so the first time I went to grad school, I studied how to reconcile this ⁓ bifurcated self, this inside versus outside self through storytelling and to help employees feel connected to the company.
Pinaki Kathiari (05:49)
You
Ellen Griley (06:10)
And importantly, help them feel connected to the strategy. So how can we use storytelling as a device to really help people see their work in a company's strategy? And I even wrote a little capstone project called C-SWAT Run. So it was all about helping the MBA managers communicate with employees and see themselves in the strategy. That work deepened as I got older because work again, the more roles I took on,
the different doors I walked through, I always carried this notion of, this still feels so strange. Why does it feel so strange? And through a series of events in my life, I found the words for trauma-informed work. I encountered it through yoga, which we can talk about if that's at all of But some of the language that I was hearing in my yoga classes started to sound...
really like what I'd been searching for in terms of my practice as an employee communications professional. And this notion of meeting people where they are and this notion of giving people options and allowing them to really, you know, see for themselves how to move through a class. thought, God, that's so profoundly kind. And I was literally on a vineyard outside Santa Barbara doing yoga. And afterwards I talked to the instructor and she said, you know, what do you
What do you do? And I told her I work in employee communications and I think a lot about our inside and our outside selves and all the things I just said. And then, um, and I said, but I really have been loving yoga and I've been loving this trauma informed approach to yoga that I've been, I've been experiencing. And this light bulb just went, and I thought, Oh, I wonder if there was a way that I could do this trauma informed approach to communications. And so that's really what kind of led me down this road and a second master's degree.
in trauma informed leadership, where I spent time understanding how leaders can look at their own stress responses, look at the stress responses that they may be experiencing with their staff or seeing within their staff and understanding how to help people feel regulated, how to help people feel safe, how to help people feel trust, all of the things that can happen when you apply a trauma informed approach to your leadership. I took that and applied it to
Bree Bartos (08:29)
I love that. Especially because something that I've heard you say often that sticks with me is that employees are showing up with their nervous systems already activated before they even open their laptops. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that and what that means so that maybe companies could understand like we live in a poly crisis world and there's a lot going on.
Ellen Griley (08:42)
Yes.
Bree Bartos (08:54)
outside of our nine to five, what our project management system says we have to do that day, you know? There is so much going on and like, how do we communicate with our employees in such a
Ellen Griley (09:10)
Right, absolutely. mean, that's kind of the sole focus of my work at this point. And there's two things I want to talk about before I move into the strategies. One is the word you mentioned, polycrisis, because a lot of people might be experiencing this as a new term. And it's been around for several decades. It was popularized by a historian, Adam Tooze. And it really describes what happens when you see crisis upon crisis that interact with
Bree Bartos (09:21)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (09:39)
with one another without having discrete endings and beginnings. And so one way to think about it is when we think about there was ⁓ in Greece in like the early 2010s, they had a series where they had financial crisis, they had an immigration crisis, they had all of these crises that kind of compounded what it was like to be living in Greece, right? Now coming out of the pandemic, we've started to see that with climate disasters, with
geopolitical events now with war and all of these other things on top of something, a little thing called AI. So it's this notion that these don't have discrete beginnings and endings and they're all interconnected. And so I think about polycrisis a lot because I think it's indistinguishable from the environment that our employees are walking into every day. When we see studies like Microsoft with their infinite work study,
And they're showing the amount of employees who are checking work, checking email after hours or waking up and checking email at 6 a.m. before logging on. And that's not counting how our employees are interacting with social media, what they're watching, what they're seeing. The totality of that is our employees are coming into work with activated nervous systems. What does that mean? That means they might be feeling fight. They might be feeling feeling flight.
fear, like freeze or fawn. And when you have that coming into the workplace every day, opening an email can provide a variety of different experiences, right? And if you're not thinking about that, if you're not thinking about what your employees are carrying or the world that they're experiencing outside, that urgency,
that can even be applied with an exclamation point. I'm sorry, y'all, but we need to be thinking about our exclamation points. That urgency can activate that threat response. And so all of a sudden that employee is opening up the email and maybe it's an email where you had to cancel a meeting. Maybe it's because the CEO couldn't attend your all hands and you have to move it, right? And they get that meeting cancellation and they open it and they think,
my God, what does this mean? Why are we canceling this? Is the company okay? What's going on? my gosh, am I going to be like, I have that, you know, that trip scheduled next year, or I have that, that college fund I'm worried about for my kids. And so we are arriving with these activated threat detection systems that really make it more important than ever to think about and be intentional with your communication. And that's the approach that I advocate.
Chris Lee (12:18)
I like Ellen, what you were saying about discrete endings and beginnings. I was talking to somebody just at a conference recently about the difference in the dynamic of working from home and working in the office. And one of the observations is really about how when you work in the office, at the end of the day, whatever time it is, let's say five o'clock, six o'clock or whatever, you shut down your laptop, you pack it up.
you jump on the subway and then you walk home, there is a very distinct, clear ending to your work day. And then you can just be a dad again, or you can just be, you you're a different version of yourself versus what I find when I'm working from home, the laptop never gets shut off. It's always on, there's always pings, there's always...
Ellen Griley (12:50)
Yeah.
Chris Lee (13:07)
There's never really like a well-defined, this is the end of my day. so, know, Ellen, are your thoughts on how communications should think about this new dynamic now that's introduced with working from home where there's just no clear end to your work day?
Ellen Griley (13:28)
Two thoughts on this. One is a little bit of a spicy take. ⁓ And that's based on some research that I read as I was thinking about grief, which I think is a emotion that so many of us carry, not only due to the loss that we've experienced in our lives, but to the way that life is so maybe perhaps different than we expected it to be.
Right? And so I locate a lot of grief in myself as an elder millennial who was told I would have a peaceful world, who was told I would have equality in my world, who was told, you know, I could solve climate change by, you know, not using hairspray. Right? I have all of the, I have a lot of this grief. And when I read a study about grief at the workplace, there was a line that really stuck out.
to me and it was talking about how work has a two-way flow. We experience communications at work and then it comes home with us, right? It comes home with us because your boss sends you a text. It comes home with us because maybe you opt in and you check that email, right? But you can't always take that back.
you can't always bring your emotion back into the workplace. You may not always be able to bring, you know, if you're feeling heavy, if you're feeling a sense of, you know, something being off, or maybe you are just experiencing grief due to loss, you can't always bring that back. it's, it's, it's one, it's one way, but it doesn't flow back the other way when it comes to us and how we can, how we can show up at work. And so I thought that was,
really interesting. I think the ways that you establish boundaries between your work and your home life, it can't be this individual onus. can't be this, you're responsible for setting your boundaries. need to manage, know, we get told that so often, right, as part of, you know, overall wellness approaches and education, make sure you have good boundaries. But the
That's wonderful to think about, and boundaries are super healthy, and they're super important. But if you don't have a system and a community of commitments that are inside your organization and norms that kind of give you an overall sense of, hey, how do we really want to be doing this? What's the expectation for me if I see that email come in after hours? Allow people to be individuals. If they work better at 9 PM at night because they've got to go pick their kid up at 3 PM,
That's great. Allow them to be individuals, but also make it very clear what the expectations are for people so that they do have that choice to opt into that kind of blending of their work life or to opt out of it.
Chris Lee (16:21)
You know
Pinaki Kathiari (16:21)
And kind of keeping it fair
as well, because it's kind of like to put the onus on a person to put the boundary up that the fear that might be there is that somebody else won't have that boundary up or someone else might be okay with it. And so then now I'm at a disadvantage as compared to my peers and might lose out on other opportunities, which is why we were saying is the organization has to have some onus or some like understanding and balances for that as well.
Chris Lee (16:48)
You know, know, it's interesting, Pinaki, is that it just it just literally occurred to me at Ellen as you were talking about this, that, Pinaki, you and I, spent a lot of time, almost all of our time talking about specifically the employee experience. And sometimes we forget that managers are employees as well. And so one of the things that I recognize here just now in this conversation, and I hadn't really thought about it before, but
I'm an employee, I go home after five o'clock, I'm on my own time listening to my podcast on the subway. Of course I'm listening to Why Does Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work? That's the best podcast. it occurs to me, people managers also can struggle a lot with their own mental health. And so if I'm a people manager and there's something that feels really, really urgent to me and I'm really stressed out about it,
Ellen Griley (17:24)
Always.
Chris Lee (17:40)
and it's 5.30 and I just thought about it. I'm just now realizing like from 5 p.m. to 9 a.m., 16 hours is a really, really long time. I'm gonna send a note to my employee, Pinaki, and hey man, I was just wondering about this. And so now I'm not gonna be able to sleep at night because Pinaki, of course, deserves that time to himself. He's not on company time anymore.
But for people managers are super stressed out. I was wondering about your take on is there any sort of way for communicators to sort of acknowledge or resolve the fact that if we're to be really honest, it's no longer a truly a nine to five environment anymore. But it's somehow you're right. Like there does have to be boundaries. And so I think nine to five was always set up as that boundary. And I don't think companies really enforce it. But at the same time, it's also
It's also really challenging for people that are trying their best to stay within those boundaries.
Ellen Griley (18:41)
smiled as you were talking about this because I think that there's so many things that are, you know, the marvels of the modern era and the schedule send is a great friend, right? When you are feeling that way, you can write your email and you can schedule send, right? And put it in your employee's inbox at a decent time their hour, right? And you can schedule send on
I think most messaging apps, really can, you know, respect people's boundaries that way. But I would argue also that it's really, really, really important for managers to do. I don't want to say every manager needs to go to therapy, but I can share my personal experience and say, for me being in therapy, I began to understand.
Pinaki Kathiari (19:25)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (19:33)
how my own anxiety was showing up for my employees. it wasn't always, sometimes it was, you know, I have this great idea. I get a lot of ideas. I get very excited about them. So sometimes it was that, right? And I would feel that energy inside my body and feel my brain being tingly. And I'd be like, ah, I gotta go message everyone. So I'd pick up the phone and I'd get on WebEx and I'd ping everybody, you know, 8 p.m. because I think about work.
Pinaki Kathiari (19:57)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (20:03)
constantly and I find that fun, right? There also was my own anxiety in terms of thinking about my day and being like, shoot, I wonder if that went over okay. Or I wonder if they really understood what I was saying. Or I wonder, and then I would also just fire off a message and be like, hey, you know, and figure out a, you know.
Pinaki Kathiari (20:06)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (20:29)
⁓ a reason to message someone, just checking in, know, something like that. And that would happen on hours and off hours and every hour in between, because that's a natural thing for someone who experiences anxiety to contend with, And so working through that, being aware of that, acknowledging that I carry this energy inside me most times, and then working to figure out how do I pause?
Pinaki Kathiari (20:34)
Mm-hmm.
Ellen Griley (20:57)
And how do I ask myself, is this something that really needs to be sent right now? Or is this something that I can make a note on and follow up with in my next one on one or follow up with the next day? And is this something that I even need to address at all? And can I give myself a half an hour and come back and think, am I really that focused on this right now? And so understanding
You know, that's your own nervous system regulation, right? And that's a big part of what I advocate for at the leader level, at the communicator level, and at the organizational level is really understanding, okay, what is this energy going on inside of us? And do we need to act on it? Because once we act on it, it becomes everyone else's urgency. And you can't take that back.
Bree Bartos (21:47)
I love that. I love that a lot. And I just, we're running out of time here today, unfortunately. But before we wrap up, I really want to take some time and talk about your paper that you published today, your research that as of recording this, it is May 1st, you published it this morning. Congratulations. This is your first one for Mental Health Awareness Month. Is that correct?
Chris Lee (22:06)
Woo!
Ellen Griley (22:06)
Thank you.
It is. This is my first research that I've ever done ⁓ under Equilibrius, so it's very exciting.
Bree Bartos (22:18)
Yes, and I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about shifting ground, internal communications in an age of polycrisis.
Ellen Griley (22:27)
Yes, so this really came out of my curiosity about how communicators and organizations and employees are experiencing this time.
Truly, how do we communicate when it's just nonstop, one thing after the next, after the next, after the next? And this came out of my own curiosity as a practitioner. It came out of the conversations I was having with my friends and my colleagues. It came out of, you know, when I was still in-house at Cisco, it came out of what I was observing managing my team and just thinking through, my God, how is this at all sustainable?
And what can we really do to mitigate this? What are our options here? So the first thing I wanted to understand was, is this just me or is this, is this real? And so I did some research with, it ended up being about 24 internal communications practitioners, fairly senior in fact, over ⁓ five years or more experience for all of them. And in many cases, director level VP and above.
Chris Lee (23:06)
you
Ellen Griley (23:33)
in terms of what they had been dealing with for the last 18 months. And a hundred percent of the people that I surveyed had managed through three crises and the over 50 % of them had had more than five. The highest was nine. These are, and we defined crises as, you know, it could have been an organizational change. Now an organizational change is not a crisis in a vacuum, but in this context, in terms of this one after the next, after the next.
It is. we looked at restructuring. We looked at AI adoption. We looked at layoffs. We looked at there was over 20 % had experienced some kind of climate disaster. And we looked at all of these things to just say, you know, how are people experiencing this? And what the data showed was that our communicators are overwhelmingly burning out doing this and they're burning out because of the pressure to communicate this.
Bree Bartos (24:17)
you
Ellen Griley (24:29)
change after change after change. But it's not just the mental health toll of that. What was more taxing for the communicators was really a lot of the work behind the scenes. It was the urgency behind communications. It was the constriction that we sometimes feel when organizations want to mitigate risk and want to use just very high level language or hold back from saying anything at all and acknowledging what's going on at all. That that was really taking a toll.
And then I said, so we got through that. did eight follow-up deep dive interviews. And then I said, okay, but maybe this is, this is a small sample size. So let's take a look at what else is going on. And so I pulled a bunch of recent surveys. I pulled Gallagher. I pulled Deloitte. I pulled Adelman. I pulled some individual vendor surveys that had been done on wellness. And what you found when you looked around all of that was that the data held true.
Chris Lee (25:14)
you ⁓
Ellen Griley (25:27)
and that this really is something that is starting to impact our employees substantially, this notion of polycrisis. What I found was fascinating was that you're starting to see things in Google Trends. Like people are searching for burnout from life. Burnout from life. They're searching for.
You know, cortisol, they're learning, they're learning how to manage their own nervous systems, right? They're seeing all of these things and we really need to be aware of this and understand this so that we can figure out how to mitigate it and move through it and continue to move through it. Cause I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. And my framework that I introduced in the report helps that.
Bree Bartos (25:52)
Yeah.
Yes, your framework is steady, correct?
Ellen Griley (26:14)
Yes, yes. So, steady is six principles and it's safety, trust, environment, which is really about taking consideration of the history that your people are like have experienced inside their organization or maybe outside their organization. So that context. So environment. And then we have agency, which is about, you know, how can you give people choice or give them some kind of meaningful action to take in response to what you're communicating to them?
We have dialogue, which is about two-way communications, but also that peer-to-peer because people do well when they are learning with peer-to-peer or in peer-to-peer environments and people really want that sense of community. And then the why is you. And that's really about what we just talked about, Chris, in terms of understanding what's kind of going on with you, what you're carrying and really, you know, working to think about that.
to think about how that impacts your work, to think about what you need to bring yourself back to emotional regulation and to do your work effectively. And also when you need to take a break and care for yourself because this work is really heavy.
Pinaki Kathiari (27:28)
That's so much, so much of that is true. And so much of that when we kind of dig into and start getting into like, at least being aware of it makes you aware that we need to do something about it in all different directions. So as we said, we are running a bit out of time here. So Ellen, thank you again for joining us today. This was such a great conversation and man, I wish we could just keep going on this one.
I have stuff that I want to add into the mix. we are going to see each other in August at the ICology Flyover Festival. So we'll look forward to that. before we wrap up, maybe we could just tell our audiences where they could find you and your work.
Bree Bartos (27:58)
Yes.
Ellen Griley (27:59)
Yes, yes I can't wait.
Absolutely. I understand and acknowledge fully that equilibrious might be a mouthful. So I made it a little easier on everyone. And if you go to internal-calms C-A-L-M-S, internal-calms.com, you can find me and all my work and everywhere that I'm publishing and speaking about this.
Pinaki Kathiari (28:14)
Do it.
Chris Lee (28:32)
I really appreciate that because I was never going to find equilibrium.
Pinaki Kathiari (28:36)
this.
You
Bree Bartos (28:39)
I
had to make sure it was spelled right so many times. I'm like, okay, is that an I or an L? I, L, okay.
Ellen Griley (28:42)
Yes!
Chris Lee (28:42)
Yeah.
Ellen, want to... That's true. It only takes 10 minutes to type out. So it's not that bad. Ellen, I thank you as well for this. And of course, a big thank you to all of our listeners for turning into this week's episode of Between the Seasons, Human at Work. If you enjoyed this conversation as much as Pinaki and Bree and I did, make sure you follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Bree Bartos (28:46)
Okay.
Pinaki Kathiari (28:46)
We have
a podcast called Why Does It Feel So Wrong to be Human at Work? That's a mouthful.
Ellen Griley (28:50)
You
Bree Bartos (28:54)
Thanks guys.
and we'll be leaving Ellen's links at episode description so you don't have to spell equilibrious or comms right. So definitely click those and check those out.
Chris Lee (29:21)
Roy it. ⁓
Pinaki Kathiari (29:22)
Do you?
Take care everybody, we'll be back next week. See y'all soon.
Chris Lee (29:29)
See ya.