Jennifer Moss on recognizing and overcoming burnout

Jennifer Moss on recognizing and overcoming burnout

We all have experienced stress in one way or another. And for some, this stress can build up, and go far enough to where we experience complete burnout. But how can we help ourselves recognize what is causing us to feel burnout? On this episode, Jen Fisher talks with Jennifer Moss (https://www.jennifer-moss.com/about) , speaker, author, and workplace expert on finding the root causes and strategies that address burnout.

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 fiser Chief well-being officer for deoe and I'm so pleased to be with you today to talk about all things wellbeing I'm here with Jennifer Moss she's an international public speaker author and workplace expert she's the co-founder at plasticity Labs a workplace insights and consultancy firm Jennifer is a frequent Harford Business Review contributor a nationally syndicated radio columnist and a member of of the global happiness Council she's also author of the books the burnout epidemic and unlocking happiness at [Music] work Jen welcome to the show thanks I'm really looking forward to chatting with you as well Jen great so let's start um 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 yeah and I'd love that you mentioned that because I joke that I used to be a happiness expert now I'm an unhappiness expert and I really do feel that that's that's accurate but the goal is the same it's just determining you know where we give people ice cream and where we give people water and and that is really how we're we're kind of figuring out you know and my role has been to just figure out what motivates people how we develop you know 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 is that you know all this work that we're focused on happiness which is really critical it's very important I mean we want to optimize our lives and have increased lifespans and you know and all these um important important parts of our our well-being are part of the happiness piece you know of our lives but 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 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 yeah and I um at least for me and I I know that there are others that have researched it but you know in reading your work and in following you um is really where I you know kind of first came across some of the research and dialogue around um you know workplace well-being kind of being more being about more than just an individual problem or being solved by more than you know um just providing perks or more days off or mental health days um and it as somebody who's been burnt out in the workplace it really um 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 you know kind of peanut butter term I I love that explanation and it's accurate I mean not enough people were talking about it before now everyone's talking about it so I'm hoping that that pendulum swing helps us to get somewhere in the middle um but for you know for you know for everyone that's listening we have to start understanding that burnout is consequential it's really important um it is something that has catastrophic impacts and it wasn't until 2019 where the World Health Organization actually identified burnout as occupational stress it's un you know 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 and so people felt like it it meant that they just weren't working hard enough or they didn't care enough about their company or they weren't you know inspired enough they weren't an Engaged employee um and and maybe sometimes we thought of it as just like foam we're too busy and we're doing too many things in our personal lives and that's making us burned out but that's not the case it is very specifically a workplace issue where the causes there's six of them and they are really um 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 and its inclusion in the international classification of disease diseases helped us in this Research Place say okay you know 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 it's just you're not you know putting in enough hard work or you can solve it if you just do more yoga and take more baths and you know eat better and sleep better um that is why that distinction is is very important and I think that gives us a better way to approach it what is burnout versus you know what isn't burnout so in your book you lay out the six causes of burnout can you walk us through those absolutely I mean first it's workload that is the leading cause it was the leading cause pre pandemic actually in tandom 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 I mean we've all been feeling that we're working 30% more to hit those same pre-co goals we're working you know many more hours per day so that's been a big outcome of the pandemic we also see that in lack of agency so just not having a choice in you know how we work where we work a lot of people are feeling pressure 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 to work remote and they don't want that either so that lack of agency obviously in micromanagement causes or 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 dis proportionally impacted we're certain see we're seeing certain sectors where women are predominantly you know in those roles being exited from the workforce so that's a big factor um Mi you know lack of value um for or or recognition or sense of lack of um you know compensation is a big part of it so you know compensation is sort of a table stake stuff it's like you know 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 you know 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 and really the the final one is um just that sense of of feeling like that um disconnection from work and we we really get that when we're um not feeling connected to our jobs that sense of not having um you know sort of that emotional connection to our work and that also plays a huge role in our decreased sense of efficacy and uh and that's another one that's really contributing to our sense of burnout right now and that one I I would assume is guess you know there's a lot of talk about kind of purpose and meaning in our work 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 you know we're and this is this definitely happens when we're when we're overworked when there's so much workload we don't you know we don't have time to feel inspired um 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 you know it's never going to change or I'm not good at my job or you know 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 health care 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 you know that they're caring for people because they can't even take care of themselves at this point that's not sustainable what is it about the pandemic that changed the conversation around burnout because to your point I mean this existed long before the pandemic did there are Myriad reasons why this happened but I would say you know a big part of the the sort of explosion of these issues inside the pandemic was that they were already boiling but we weren't really we weren't really addressing them because we relied on employee loyalty we we expected that we could sort of push to a point but it it wasn't that we were engaged and and a lot some organizations are but we many weren't in this human- centered leadership where it was like okay how do we start planning for potential crisis by doing all these things that were then expected inside the crisis so those companies that had that that I'd worked with earlier that had really high trust and high empathy they tended to do really well throughout the pandemic they had high you know trust scores and employee experience scores and that was because a lot of this mentality around you know Upstream interventions and Upstream policies um that were more burnout prevention focused were already at play but what the pandemic did was this rapid Evolution and we literally went from you know like and I say that this is not the future of work we went from like in a week or two weeks to the you know to the metaverse of work there this 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 um happened all at once and and also just we were contending with a lot of adoption in general of things in our personal lives I mean remote learning exploded we you know um the increase in T theapy and tele medicine just went from zero to 100 we had you know a lot of of shift in our lives personally so our brains are already pretty rattled we're dealing with the global pandemic which is a major macro stressor that was not acute it went it's gone on for years and then we also are juggling massive distractions we're learning you know 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 too I mean everyone thought this was just going to you know kind of go away and we sort of had this this moment where we just stopped working almost for six to eight weeks and we thought okay we'll get just get back so let's kind of figure out what we're going to do with all this quote unquote time on our hands and then it just ex just completely backfired so all these these inputs has created the the recipe for what we're seeing now which is you know full burnout at the point where people are not just experiencing symptoms of burnout but they are hitting the wall wall and that's why we see the great resignation happening and do you think that companies and organizational leaders have you know kind of fully recognized or accepted the problem of burnout and and and if they haven't I mean why should why should they care about this now I would say that there there are some industries that are recognizing it um and because they have the capacity to to offer different solutions that actually help to prevent burnout like you know flexible working conditions hybrid opportunities they have um a type of Workforce that allows them to have that kind of flexibility to deal with it they're doing better than others um I think that there is a desire for this to all go away and for us to go back to before times 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 you know engagement and productivity and all these these issues so I think there's you know a hope that the 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 I mean 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 healthare 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 to be working these extraordinary hours and and there's a pride attached to it which is really dangerous and and you're seeing other Industries you know Tech on one hand are doing a really good job you know making sure that they can promote that um that flexibility and and well-being is a priority but then there's others that just say nope I want you back in the office I don't care this is what we need to succeed um and so I'm curious to see you know if they that that um group understands that there's going to be uh uh you know payback to that you know that there's going to be employees that say I don't I don't want to live in this world like this and when you ask you know women in particular and they've talked about this they said you know I'll quit before I go back into an office 5 days a week because this is not conducive for so many other parts of my life that I I prioritize and and want and other companies are going to hire me with that in mind and so I can you know I can make those choices now so I think a lot is TBD um 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 you know the Tipping Point for others yeah we um just Delight just did a uh our 2022 uh women at work survey and uh results just came out and uh points to many of the same things that you're talking about you know related to women in the workplace and 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 and also a lot of leaders that they themselves are feeling burnt out so how do we get them you know not feeling burnt out right you know how having them heal um and then what action should leaders and companies be taking or thinking about taking to help cure some of these root causes I try to emphasize that you know no one wants an overhaul right now no one has time for an overhaul and usually when we think of these big you know these big issues like burnout it seems so extraordinarily difficult to tackle and sometimes when I you know share those six root causes you see leader eyes wide and like I cannot I can't solve for systemic discrimination you mean what are you asking me to do but the the goal is to think about it more tangibly and and my work sort of preceding 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 you know 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 have to start modeling the behavior I need to start changing Legacy changing mindset if I'm going to tell my employees you know don't answer emails on weekends and and holidays then I should not be be doing that as well I need to really walk the 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're meeting how much time are people spending in you know in inefficient uh times of work I mean we are 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 um in our you know 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 an emergency we build this habit up of um urgency because that's what we had to do but it we're not in an emergency anymore this is you know 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 4-day work week a lot of what they've done there is just reduce inefficiencies had better etiquette about time you know not having time theft respecting other people's um need to get work done focusing more on priority versus urgent needs always coming in and um 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 you know supporting child care we need to be thinking about more equity in our paternity and maternity leaves and focusing more on care leave what that looks like I mean these are all just micro you know changes and and there's many of them and I I share a lot of those in the book but it really is just these these tiny incremental changes even you know having more nonwork related check-ins with people to hear the language of you know 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 and when we look again at those organizations that have less burnout they have high empathy and high trust lots of good communication um access to leadership for them to be able to to answer their 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 um after school activities it's just it's it's so boring it's so work focused there's no levity and fun and and and we're all sort of working in these disconnected environments when we come to work we're just on Zoom anyways or or sorry or video conferencing um 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 you know 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 of working better within this new paradigm yeah and and I what I love so much about many of the examples you just gave and and so many of the the micro behaviors that you talk about in your book and 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 that's true it's true this is cost effective and it works so why aren't we doing it no and I mean because another one of the things that you that you point out is that you know some of the you know kind of typical Wellness programming in perks while while they're not bad um as a matter of fact they're good and they're well- intended they they often fall short because some of these other kind of cultural and Behavioral you know things don't exist in the workplace so can you talk a little bit more about that disconnect it it's absolutely true I mean we and and you're right in that that disconnect that you're describing because you know some people that I've spoken to and a lot of what we heard in the verbatims of our research that we did inside the pandemic was just this this comment of tone deafness you know like I I appreciate that they're offering me these things and in in sort of in a good time they would be very useful for me you know the ability to access you know physical outlets and you know and having access to you know to food and and all of these great things that are there on site healthy eating you know these are great things we shouldn't not have them but they they shouldn't be the only approach to to to Wellness and we need to kind of bifurcate and this is what I've been saying is bifurcate burnout prevention within the overall Wellness strategy so you're looking more at the the Upstream I mentioned this Upstream intervention where you're thinking okay if I want people to use our gym or use the gym subsidy or whatever it is that that will help them from their wellness and optimization standpoint I need to make sure that I manage workload so they can actually utilize that so those are the things that that I get frustrated with is you know 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 is how do we you know understand that the only way we can optimize is if we get our kind of hygiene rate and you would have known from the book I'm really sort of into herzberg's Theory um of motivation that motivation Factor Theory his research on that and it's this concept that and interestingly he was mentored by maslo but it's this interest this sort of way of thinking about corporate hygiene as being the table Stakes the basic needs need to be met you know we need to give that water to people we need to make sure that they have shelter and those basic needs that includes you know making sure that they go to work and are are psychologically safe and physically safe that they go to work and they have you know reasonable amount of time to have balance and so they can see their family and engage with the things that matter in their life so they all those things when they're not being met there's no way that we can motivate and 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 um their Wellness strategy that's really going to help them optimize it's all in a Continuum and so we need to start at you know preventing people from falling into the the river you know versus pulling them out after they've already fallen in yeah I I I think that that you know for for many and I I've seen it you know that that is a um mindset shift right because we tend to kind of focus on you know the treatment of versus the the the prevention of and I mean certainly that is true in in my own lived experience and so um I think that that is a a big U not you know a big mindset shifter even paradigm shift for for many um in in organizations so how do we how do we help those that are you know managing teams right I mean I find that those in the organization that aren't the most senior leaders and aren't you know kind of the newest or most Junior employees but those that are kind of in the middle that um that are getting hit from all sides you know they're getting it from above they're getting it from below um and often times we put all of the expectations on our on our managers or our team leaders so what suggestions do you have for them what leadership qualities you know should they kind of look to enhance or develop that will help them kind of be better leaders and managers this is such an important question because most people that I'm speaking to are sort of in that swiched you know place where they they are being asked to hit certain metrics and goals which is totally fair um but they're also realizing that their team is Max so it's like you know how do I actually do this and it feels very challenging almost impossible to ask more of you know the people that are already pretty burned out but you know what we've seen too is just you know market demand and massive growth within certain organizations that that are can't resource up enough and we see a vacuum of attrition which puts a lot of extra pressure on the team um so it is a difficult situation I think what managers need to you know consider is that again it's not this overhaul that it is about small programmatic shifts and a big shift in mindset which means okay how do I get better at actively listening practicing empathy because it's not it even if it's not innate we can really practice that skill and it makes a huge difference I mean when you think about you know your role as a manager it is really that you want to you know be the best leader you can be for your team and make sure that they are at Peak efficacy and efficiency and productivity but they're also you know they have high job satisfaction they're not going to leave um so there is that that place that you play or 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 at a large organization and what she's so incredible at is is looking at culture from an anthropological lens and she says the more that we can get to actively listening to people's stories and actioning what we're listening and then sharing those those stories across the organization the more that we can then be um really excellent professional ease droppers and I love that concept so we're all supposed to be professional ease droppers and what that means is we are supposed to be listening for the sound of of a burnout and the sounds of motivation and and looking at it in that nonshared language kind of way the way that we you know used to communicate through semiotics and you know hand gestures and stuff which can be difficult on Zoom conferencing but you can hear it in also the the the be between the lines kind of ways of thinking about it so she says you know and and I've really encouraged this nonwork related check-in and the way that you start with managers is just having this consistent in 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 I see managers rolling their eyes saying it's just not working you know no one's speaking and I'm not I have too big big of a team so I'm not connecting with people uh it just feels like more workload you know I kind of hear that push back but I say okay create it as a a formalized meeting that it's every week make sure that you're sharing two you ask three questions one how are you people are going to lie so then we say um okay let's you know 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 you know 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 you know in anything I mean it can be professional but the goal is to really talk about some things outside of work and you're going to hear a lot of things at first it's might not be that you know open there might not be that level of openness but over time if you're a manager that's saying I'm gonna ask every week and I'm going to share my vulnerability I'm G to come into these conversation to ready for um a conversation then you you go around and you listen you ease drop for the the signs of burnout like I haven't slept in a week or you know I'm really worrying about putting my mom into assisted living it's been a real stressor I'm putting three kids through University in the next you know five years I'm sort of freaking out um I've been at home with the kids they've been sick from school and so I've been really juggling you know 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 EAP what kind of resources are there to help with financial help can you give a break to your you know 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 know you have this capacity to kind of be a conduit for that support and then on the flip side when people are sharing their motivation 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 you know 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 to getting that person lit up more inside of their work you know 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 you know what you're saying and what you need and every week you commit to that that's my that's always my first step approach for managers to just you know 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 um really predicting healthier more well and happy individuals and teams and and you know I have to assume that um after you do this for a while you do create a sense of you know Comfort where people you know even outside of this weekly check-in are are are more willing and open to ask for what they need or to you know share kind of what's going on and you know ask uh of of you know of their teammates um you know for help and you know I guess in a sense creating that psychological safety on a team that's exactly what the goal is is that it it you know permeates outside of that Weekly checkin and I mean again this isn't I I always say this isn't you know a diet it's a lifestyle change it's it's an it's an over time kind of building up and and because we naturally as humans and even more than ever want sort of this instant gratification I want burnout solv next week and you I don't want it to be a problem anymore well it's it's it's taking one intervention and then taking another intervention and building on it and then over time there's a shift in in attitudes and behaviors and you do that this through that concept of neuroplasticity where all of those kind of practice habits become part of the subconscious become part of the culture of of the organization and then 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 at the start of you know a three month cycle how are you feeling ask them to share how burned out they feel and their sense of of of job satisfaction I mean simple ask and then in three months after you know practicing this consistently ask how people are feeling in 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 you know likelihood of not leaving in the next six months is is really you know improved and that's how you then create advocacy to make these changes and over time you just you just start to feel it like culture is felt kind of in those proverbial walls now that we're not in office but you feel in the walls where you just we know when things are going well and when we're connected and we're trusting um and that is something that is pervasively felt across the whole organization yeah I I love that and you know I I I get a lot of you know uh request that you know how how can we fix burnout tomorrow right and and I tell people well you know first of all it took us a while to get where we are right like burnout doesn't happen overnight as individual ual or as an organization so you know we 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 so so you do have to you know you have to unfortunately right I wish there was a magic switch me too for every every problem in the world I wish there was magic switch right exactly so you know we've talked about leaders we've talked about kind of you know managers team managers let's talk about the individual right because we've you know you you just described how it's you know it's this ecosystem right it kind of requires everybody to prevent and pro protect um protect all of us from burnout so what can we do as individuals to protect ourselves from burnout it's important first to I be able to identify what burnout looks like you know it's high levels of exhaustion depletion feeling completely wiped out even if you feel like you slept the night before the next morning you're sort of dragging yourself to go to get up you're not motivated ated um symptoms can also include depression anxiety so it's not burnout is not necessarily depression or anxiety but it can cause that um so you want to pay attention to that we also you know see it show up in just our behaviors I mean I just heard a stat a couple months ago that showers in 2021 were down 30% you know and and I thought that was such an interesting you know 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 burned out so exhausted that you just you stop caring about those things when you know where you're not spending time on things that make you feel Joy you're not spending time with your friends you know that is something we need to recognize that that's happening in ourselves we also see that show up and just not feeling like we're effective we're not good at our jobs and also we're NE very cynical where we start to think you know nothing is going to change it's always going to be like this I just 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 and give ourselves the compassion and the right label for it it doesn't mean oh you're just not a good employee you're just disengaged that's that's a byproduct of being burned out so first that self-compassion and then second you know understanding that you you know we've all gone through this experience of facing or mortality for several years and a lot of our priorities have shifted we've learned these amazing skills like you know cognitive optimism and social emotional flexibility I mean we've had to adapt to change and um and 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 and reminding ourselves of that we need to step back from toxic productivity you know a lot of what happened in that first part of the pandemic was oh well you know 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 shutdown I think the kids were out of school for almost 16 months in total it was just really long and um and so what we you know what I found at the beginning was I'm you know 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 this threat of urgency now every time we hear a ping or a noise we feel like we have to respond um we feel like we need to U manage client needs urgently above all else um we we have to constantly feel the sense of above and beyond and we need to pause that and pull back on that um I keep reminding people that you know what are your death bed regrets will it be not sending that email out to a client at 11 o'clock at night or not you know responding to your boss at midnight or is it you know that you didn't get any time with your family and friends and you've disconnected from the things that matter to you I mean trying to create some sort of boundaries around that is necessary and appreciating that you know 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 you know wipe our hands let it let it just be the past we need to say okay what are we going to take from this that's transformational and useful and and um shaping like the benefit of our future and the future of our kids and our family um 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 pre prevent burnout for our teams we just we have to adopt that mindset because if not like I said there'll be invisible pressures consistently that we are whether we realize it or not are placing on the people that we are leading so there that is if you want to stop burnout you know today you better stop you know you better um prevent burn Ting yourself today by taking on a lot of those um you know a lot of those changes in your mentality you know I just had like a major like aha moment because um you know my story and and the way I ended up as Chief wellbeing officer for deoy is through my own story of burnout out and you know I have been um you know 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 you know some of the kind of easier differences is that you know we're talking about it more seven years ago we weren't talking about it especially in the workplace you know it just was something that like if you were experiencing it you didn't talk about it but I but what I what I've noticed is a real difference is what you're just saying about this you know this energy this you know 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 and and I think that's you know part of what's driving the great resignation too is like you know until until we change things and it's a we it's not a 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 um then I'm not going back to you know what got me burnt out to begin with um and and to me that's kind of the biggest difference at least that you know I'm seeing now from what I went through right is there's this you know this common desire to recognize and this you know need to to change things to so that we can all move forward in a better way and um I 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 uh end our conversation today because that just meant so much to me personally I I love you know that sentiment and I agree and I think that is what has been so I don't know um 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 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 um a rallying cry and an energy behind um someone and often the way that we build resiliency actually not often always you know resiliency is built is by going through trauma that's how we develop the the skills to rebound and this could be a post-traumatic growth moment for you know for workplaces and work the workforce overall because it's going to 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 um 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 I love it I love it well Jen thank you I I feel like we could keep talking for for hours and I hope we get the opportunity to do that in person one day but this this was this was so great thank you so much for your time and your wisdom and for being on the show today I'm so grateful I I really enjoy myself thank you 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 dee.com or you can visit various podcasters using the keyword Workwell all one word to hear more and if you like the show don't forget to subscribe so you get all of our future episodes if you have a topic you'd like to hear on the Workwell podcast series or maybe a story you would like to share please reach out to me on LinkedIn my profile is under the name Jen Fisher or on Twitter at jf23 we're always open to your recommendations and feedback and of course if you like what you hear please share post and like this podcast thank you and be well the information opinions and recommendations expressed by guest on the this deoe podcast series are for general information and 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