Episode 116: How to Combat the Burnout Epidemic (Interview with Jennifer Moss)
On the show today, I am talking to Jennifer Moss, an award-winning author, public speaker, and expert in workplace well-being. Having recently published a book called ‘The Burnout Epidemic’, Jennifer and I will explore her top tips into recognising and tackling burnout to improve wellbeing at the employee, team and organisation level.
In this episode, we discuss:
The data insights the pandemic has triggered on employee burnout.
Strategies that people leaders can take to keep employees happy and healthy
How to build burnout proof reward and recognition strategies
How to implement hiring initiatives that create a culture of burnout prevention
Support from this podcast comes from eQ8. You can learn more by visiting:
https://www.eq8.ai/
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Interview Transcript
David Green: Today, I'm delighted to welcome Jennifer Moss, workplace expert, international public speaker and author of The Burnout Epidemic, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Jennifer, it's great to have you on the show. Can we start by, if you could provide listeners with a brief introduction to you and your work?
Jennifer Moss: Yes, definitely. So, worked in workplace culture and wellness for quite a long time now actually. It's been over a decade, but previous to that, I was working in communications and as a journalist, and focused actually in workplace issues, long before I got into this concept of data-driven insights around workplace wellbeing. And, what I was originally working on was providing happiness strategies to companies like Lululemon, and really working in the space where these organisations were already optimised, and we were helping them with their wellbeing programmes to further help high performers high perform.
Through my own experience, I started to release that there were lots of organisations that weren't even handling the hygiene properly. So, we were really just focusing on individualising the responsibility of chronic stress, and this toxic positivity was the way we were solving, or trying to solve for it badly, for people that couldn't be optimised because they were sick; and that became my goal, was to try to think about where organisations play a role, and how institutional stress actually prevents people from being well and happy. Until we solve for that, then we'll never actually solve for burnout in its entirety ever.
David Green: Burnout is a topic that's on the minds of a lot of our listeners and a lot of the organisations that we work with at Insight222. But we're also here to talk about being happy, both at work and in the rest of our lives, but happiness is a big word. What do you mean when you use it?
Jennifer Moss: Well, here's the thing: the goal is to help people find their happiness. It's just understanding that there's a continuum. I joke that I was a happiness expert, and now an unhappiness expert! That's actually just tongue-in-cheek, because we have to make sure that everybody along the way is being supported. When we really look at what are our goals as individuals, work should give us fuel, it should make us feel joy.
I know I love my job and, yeah, there are times where I'm at risk of burnout, because my passion moves from obsessive and harmonious, back and forth at times, and I'm maybe not great at self-care at moments where I'm really focused on the work; so that happens to all of us. But it should, in general, be a good part, a healthy part of our lives.
So, thinking about work and happiness and life satisfaction and all those things together, we have to understand we don't bifurcate between 9.00am to 5.00pm anymore, and so how do we make sure that those two things work together, so that we have this joy from work, but then we also have this healthy personal life that's going to help support that goal of being happy.
David Green: So, as managers, hopefully all managers, we naturally want happy employees and happy teams, but how do you convince people that you've got more to offer than simple well-meaning advice; what's the science behind your approach?
Jennifer Moss: It's interesting, because I'd started a lot of the research, it was based on the neurosciences of happiness and neuroplasticity playing a role, this intentional daily effort. It isn't supposed to be one big programmatic solution or silver bullet tech solution that's going to make us all happy; it really has to be about a mindset shift, an incremental change.
I often refer organisations and compare them as being the same way of working and organising, we're constantly reorganising our neural wiring to adapt to change, and firms are the same way. And the more that we focus on a certain habit, the more likely it is to be part of our subconscious, or a culture inside of organisations. So, it's small, tiny, intentional daily efforts, and that actually is really hard to do; it's really hard to constantly be checking and rechecking, "Am I doing the things that are going to lead to wellness?"
It often starts with the simple, yet hard to develop skill that's empathy. If we really focus on leaning into what people are saying, actively listening to them and then responding to what they are saying through actions and changes, and thinking that it isn't about a big, sweeping change, but it's about connecting with people on their level and actually using that golden rule 2.0 which is, "Do unto others and they would have done unto themselves", these tiny changes over time, that is what creates a culture that survives and is sustainable. It's not what we do in a year, or some sort of value shift, that's ever going to make a real dent into increasing happiness at work.
David Green: Yeah, as you said, it's if we can change behaviours. And there's enough evidence out that suggests that if employees are happy, you get better engagement, better retention, better performance, so it's definitely in managers' interests to try and foster that culture, isn't it, and really try and drive that within their team?
Jennifer Moss: Yeah. All the data continues to point to, it's a good business case. What was a nice-to-have in a lot of different organisations pre-pandemic, and now because of the attrition, because of this great resignation and the amount of people saying that they're not leaving because of pay, but they're leaving because of lack of empathy from their boss, or that they just had unsustainable workloads, or these root causes of burnout are the reasons they're leaving, we're seeing it as a bottom-line issue.
So, it's not just that we have to do it because it increases revenue and shareholder value, and we've seen it increase MPS, I mean we've tracked all the metrics through these interventions around wellbeing; but it is also now that we have to stop the bleed of people leaving our organisations. And if we don't do that, as HR leaders and as senior leaders, we are going to really feel the economic impact from that.
David Green: You joked earlier that you'd moved from talking about happiness to talking about unhappiness, and obviously a lot of that covered in The Burnout Epidemic. Why are we, as workers, as managers and as people, so bad at knowing our limits?
Jennifer Moss: We aren't great at it, are we? I mean, there's institutional stress, there's a lot of things that are not in our control, but there are areas within our life that we can control and within our work. And I've gone through this myself as a co-founder of a tech company, there were a lot of pressures, especially as a female founder, and I went through this process of burning out, which also led me to want to write this book on burnout and research it, etc.
But what I came to realise is that I had a lot of control over that happening, and I wasn't really that great at knowing when to stop, when to slow down. I wasn't recognising that my relationships were suffering, that I was feeling all of this guilt of not being able to do things at 100%, because I was so pulled across all these different obligations and expectations. So now, I have this schematic and it's how I prioritise my life, and I look at every decision I make as being based on this criteria of, "Is it a deathbed regret?"
It sounds morbid, but I think about, "Well, if I say no to this project, it's not really in my bailiwick, it's not something that I'm really strong in, but I FOMO, I want to attach myself to that project", which I did a lot before. Now I say, "Okay, no, I can't do that, because it might inhibit time that I'm going to have with my family, and talking with them over dinner [or] I'm going to be travelling more, I'm not going to be with them". So, I start to think, "Well, in that perspective, what would be a bigger deathbed regret: this project that I say no to, or not having strong relationships with my family?"
So, we need to starting thinking about the bigger picture; we get pretty myopic in the moment, everything's urgent. And pulling back and realising, if you have this big picture mindset about it, it really helps you to frame what is important and that life satisfaction is really the most important thing over job satisfaction.
David Green: I don't know if you've studied this, Jennifer, but if I'm a leader or a manager and I actually start to pay more attention to my own risk of burnout, by extension am I then more prone to actually thinking about my team as well?
Jennifer Moss: Absolutely. I mean, the most important way that we can actually prevent burnout is if managers are modelling the behaviour. There's no way that employees can be what they can't see. If you have an invisible pressure to answer emails on the weekends and evenings and on vacation because your boss does it, even though your boss is saying, "You don't need to do it, but I'm just going to do it", then there's no way that that's going to ever change. So, leaders have to model it for their employees.
But then, once they go through the process, and I've seen this throughout my research and activation inside of organisations, when managers start to realise that there's still high levels of productivity, everyone's still getting their work done, including yourself, you're just more efficient, you're more respectful of how much you're collaborating in meetings and you're not wasting time, you find that you can get your work done in a reasonable and sustainable amount of hours.
What happens then is you're modelling behaviour and you're feeling the benefits, and then your employees are as well. That is what I think is the only way that we're going to break the legacy of burnout, is if we're all acting in the same way, leading to the same goals.
David Green: When we come back in just a moment, Jennifer delves into the most common causes of burnout, the impact the pandemic has had on employees regarding burnout, and finding the Goldilocks zone of hybrid working.
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Welcome back to this episode of the Digital HR Leaders podcast and my conversation with Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic.
Jennifer, could you walk us through some of the most common causes of burnout? What are the major things we need to look out for in ourselves, those we work with, those we manage?
Jennifer Moss: Yeah, so it was really important in 2019, when the World Health Organisation actually identified burnout as institutional stress, it's occupational stress left unmanaged. And for those that are leaders, HR leaders, who are looking to create policy around it, it gave some guidelines; because before, burnout was considered nebulous, it wasn't anything that we were treating seriously, and that was a big problem, except in Sweden. Sweden was treating it seriously there, and there was pharmacological and therapeutics related to this issue.
But when the World Health Organisation identified it as this occupational stress and it's included in their intentional classification of diseases, what they found is, again, not a medical condition, but a syndrome of stress that shows up in these three major signs, and you'll see this in levels of depletion. So, we're exhausted at the end of the day, we're having a really hard time getting motivated in the morning. A lot of people talked about that feeling of just almost feet in cement, they couldn't get to their shower. Actually, interesting data, showers are down in 2021 by 30%, which is an interesting data point, I think. We've lost hygiene and routine, and a lot of that is because we're burned out, we're chronically stressed.
Then too, we see this in drinking more coffee, or having to relax in the evening. We've seen alcohol sales go up dramatically. All of this is, again, signs of burnout. And then, we see this too in this emotional distance from our job. So, we used to feel really good at what we do, and now we're so overworked, we feel this lack of efficacy, we're not valued, we don't have purpose, we're not inspired. We saw that a lot in healthcare, teaching. Tech companies are all of a sudden this remote work, and they're working three hours more per day, because they're always on. All of this makes us feel less effective.
The third way that it shows up is cynicism, so this high level of negativism towards our job, and using fixed mindset language, like "always and never", "It's always going to be like this, it's never going to change", a lot of "I", it's very myopic, "It's my problem" and, "I can't do anything about it", so a sense of hopelessness.
So, these three signs are really something that we need to see in ourselves if we're thinking that we may be burning out; but also, we tend to misdiagnose our co-workers or our colleagues, or even our subordinates, as being underperforming, when they are likely chronically stressed, because it shows up in presenteeism and absenteeism, more sick days, more mistakes, irritability, just not a great co-worker, they're not as friendly. And more than likely, in most cases, that person is actually experiencing symptoms of burnout, and that's what's contributing to their issues in their performance at work.
David Green: So, if you've got what was previously a high performer who's not performing so well, then check for burnout?
Jennifer Moss: Check for burnout, because you had this passionate person that was really great, they were friendly and excited and passionate and driven and performing really well, their sales goals were being met or exceeded, and then all of a sudden they just hate their job and they're acting out. That's probably not the case; we have to look at all the underlying reasons why someone can get to that point.
When you're exhausted and you're overworked and you're feeling a lack of agency all of a sudden, you're being asked to answer emails at 11.00pm at night and solve problems the next morning by 8.00am, you're going to feel a little disillusioned with your job and maybe you're not going to perform at that same level. So, those are the kinds of things we need to start taking a moment in HR and leadership and taking a pause, and then asking, "How did this person get to this point?"
David Green: Which leads on nicely to the last couple of years, or two and a bit years, the pandemic. So much of what would previously have been up in the air, you mentioned that data point about showers going down in 2021 as an example.
Jennifer Moss: I love that data point!
David Green: What are you hearing from HR professionals or business leaders about the impact it's had on employees regarding burnout? Has that word taken on a new meaning in the last two years, for example?
Jennifer Moss: I definitely see that shifting. I mean, when you look at the fact that we had 4% of people identified as remote workers, and then suddenly it's 26%, and that looks like it's not going to change, there's an expectation that number's going to rise; so, there was a response right there in just creating more flexibility. But we're also noticing that people are leaving their companies. So, like I said, that attrition piece is getting a lot of leadership to wake up to the issue.
I think too, you can't ignore the fact that we're looking at numbers of 80% to 90% of people across the global workforce saying that they're feeling chronically stressed or burned out, 41% of the global workforce is saying they're planning to lead their job in three months, according to Microsoft's trend report; there's reasons for that. We see it a lot in things like the pandemic creating this over-collaboration and this meeting fatigue.
Meetings went up 258%; that's how many more meetings we're having every single day. It's just astronomical we're just connecting and using Zoom, and we're just exhausted, and I think there's no way to ignore that. And it is impacting even just disability claims, we're watching more people taking time off because of the chronic stress, and for a solid length of time that's going to impact the bottom line there too. So, what's happening is that there has been a response, there has been a necessary response, because it's for business reasons, but just in general. A lot of leaders and human-centred leaders and HR leaders that really care about their people, which most do, they are.
I mean, bosses get a bad rap and organisations as a whole might get a bad rap, but individual leaders really do care, in what I've seen, in many cases about their people and they want to see change. Sometimes when you swing the pendulum really far in one direction, like this crisis has forced us to do, you have this opportunity to realise some things that maybe you've been wanting to, to make change, and you haven't had the buy-in, and that's one of the things I keep hearing from HR leaders when in comes to their senior executives, that they're finally getting buy-in for the things that they wanted to be able to do around mental health and wellbeing.
One of the things we've seen more so is that mental health is being treated differently, there's more teletherapy options, even just the acceptance and usage of teletherapy has gone through the roof, so we're accessing that more; we're looking at more upstream interventions, so it's less about the perks, it's more about, "How do I get mental health first aid inside my organisations? How do I train up ambassadors, so that they can be highlighted as people that can support?" so you are seeing this shift in response to burnout, and it being treated much more seriously by having these upstream interventions versus downstream tactics.
David Green: Yeah, it's interesting, I don't know if you saw the research that Microsoft published recently about, they've seen that there's a triple peak now as well, the product use, apparently just before lunch and just after lunch, and they've seen a new peak now around 8.00pm, 9.00pm in the evening, when people were getting on, I guess responding to a lot of messages. Now, whether that's healthy, of course, is another thing.
Obviously, a lot of companies we work with, and I'm sure the companies that you work with, Jennifer, they've got people analytics teams, they've been paying a lot of attention to how employees are feeling at the various stages of the pandemic, many are shaping their approaches to hybrid work based around employee preference. Looking ahead to some of the challenges and opportunities of hybrid working, what challenges and opportunities do you see? I think one opportunity you've said there is that opportunity to almost reset, but what else are you seeing, or thinking about, as the hybrid work era potentially, hopefully, comes through?
Jennifer Moss: You know, there's pros and cons to this, this shift, and like I said, you swing it really far in one direction, you do have to find a way back to that Goldilocks zone, or else it's just a different problem that you're dealing with, and loneliness and isolation is a big factor; and lack of community is one of the root causes of burnout. And, I was writing this book before the pandemic, and I was fighting for flexibility and remote access, and we need to get more companies feeling okay about remote workers, and then 13 March happened and 300 million people went remote, and there's been different feelings about this.
So, I think we need to figure out, how do we have relationships, really healthy relationships, in this post-pandemic experience of hybrid work. We need to be able to still see people in person. The idea that we can only be remote, for me I feel like that isn't the healthiest approach. I think that we still need to have some way of connecting with each other in person; it doesn't need to be some declaration of two days a week, or three days a week, or one day a week, it can be that we connect for three weeks and onboard, and then it's a top-up of connecting every six months, or whatever that looks like for your organisation.
The idea that we are just going to atrophy those mirror neurons that we share with each other, that non-verbal communication, the serendipitous moments, that can be fully replaced virtually is scientifically proven to be likely not to be realised. And I like, for example, really great research out of Stanford Media Lab, and Dr Jeremy Bailenson was looking at Zoom burnout, for example. One of the reasons why there's Zoom burnout is that the only time we would be this close up to someone face-to-face in real life would be if we were mating them or fighting them. So we have, what he says is this hyper-aroused state subconsciously all day long, and that's why we're feeling so tired.
Also, we're so much more self-discriminatory, we're looking at our faces all the time, which is not healthy. We need to be in person and looking at each other actually in the eyes to develop trust, because that's how we needed to survive on the Savannas. There's a lot of things that cannot be replaced. And so I'm not saying, again, people be shouting, "I don't want to go back to work, because I'm comfortable in my home", I don't think that needs to be taken away; we just need to figure out how to come together, and then use technology to augment relationships versus replace them.
David Green: And I guess it's going to be so important to collect the data, listen to employees, be prepared to adapt and iterate and again, particularly leaders, who maybe have a non-databased idea of what the workplace should look like, there's so many things that we get when we're together that we don't get when we're sitting in our chairs in a spare bedroom in the house, if we're lucky enough to have a spare bedroom in the house. So, yeah, really interesting, very good stuff there.
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I hope you're enjoying my conversation with Jennifer Moss. In this final section, we turn our thoughts to Jennifer's advice on building more effective recruitment, and rewards and recognition strategies, to create a psychologically safe culture that prevents employee burnout.
I'd love to ask about the value of reward and recognition on burnout, and the evidence that often companies get this wrong. How can we help leaders build more effective recognition, feedback and compensation strategies?
Jennifer Moss: This is an interesting dilemma too, because we are going into a remote and hybrid environment, and we might not see people in the same way. What's been so interesting around relationships is that in person, you could have relationships with people that weren't based on work. You met lots of different people and you collided with them. But now, the only context that we connect with each other, if we're only hybrid or if we're remote, is that we are only developing those relationships in the context of work, because that's how we've started those conversations. So, that's changing how we can expand our relationships with people.
But also for those people that are in the office that we're seeing more, there's this fear that maybe they'll get promoted more, that they'll get recognised more for actually physically being there versus those folks that are choosing to be more remote, which creates issues around diversity and equity. So, there's a lot of things that we need to be thinking about as we move into this new paradigm, because we might have these biases that we don't even realise are existing, and so we're promoting and compensating and advancing and recognising more people that we are to be proximal to.
So, it has to be very deliberate, we need very strict guidelines about how we think about promoting and rewarding people in the organisation; equity is still very important, we should be doing audits on our pay, making sure there's no pay gaps, that's table stakes stuff. But also, it should be that we aren't making it so that there is this debt of working remote if you're offering it, and you need to check yourself as a manager that you're not doing that.
I think overall, pay has become a different kind of beast, because before it was so transactional. You paid people, they came into work, they did their job, they went home, and that social contract has really changed. So now, pay might include a lot of other benefits. It used to be, "You'd better not be involved in my personal life, I don't want my boss involved". Now it's, "If you're now involved somehow and caring for me, I'll quit", and that means that compensation involves a lot of other things, "How strong is your EAP; what kind of mental health benefits do you have; what kind of training do you have around these conversations; what kind of support for my financial wellbeing are you going to offer?" which is a big part of not just financial wellbeing, "You're paying me well, but what kind of support tools do you have for me saving; are you making sure that I have an effective retirement savings plan; are you going to help me put my kids through university?"
These are things that, it's becoming the whole person that we need to consider in these strategies, and not just basic pay and some other perks. It's much more nuanced, and it's very much about a series of tools that are going to fit a lot of different folks, because again, you have to remove bias, you have to make sure there's inclusion, and that means things that some people might use, others don't. So, how do you make sure that everyone has access to the tools that they need to feel like they're being compensated properly and rewarded effectively for the work that they're doing?
David Green: Yeah, really good point. And, for anyone working in the field, there's a kind of two-way process I guess constantly going on. HR needs to be able to spot problems emerging, and employees need to be encouraged and enabled to voice those problems; we need to create a psychologically safe culture that people feel they can speak up. For those two sets of people, what advice do you give to where you see that work well in action?
Jennifer Moss: We're seeing psychosocial supports being extremely important within organisations right now, and it works well if we can give everyone access, which means you have to have anonymous data-gathering. You need to be able to give people the ability to provide their insights where you're going to action them. We can't take data and then not do anything with it; that is maybe the worst thing you can do, because every time you try to gather data after that, then it's useless, because you're not getting what you really need to know from people.
Also, understanding that there's certain demographics that just won't answer surveys. There's different ways that we need to be able to connect with people and give them that ability to communicate to you, without it feeling like you're gathering personal data that's going to be used somehow, or leveraged against them.
That's a lot, and when it all boils down, it boils down to trust being developed in the first place. I've seen really great examples, and I write about one in the book. Hewlett Packard was a great example of, right at the beginning of the pandemic, honestly, about six days a week, they would just have their senior C-level executives go in this AMA, Ask Me Anything, style of conversation, communication with people. They'd give about 15 minutes of detail around just the basics of what was going on within the pandemic and what they were doing in the organisation.
But then, there was a full hour where employees could have put in questions beforehand, and ask questions in the moment. And there was this access to leadership, and their employee trust was really high. They did employee experience scoring and trust scores, and they were really high because they felt like they were being listened to; and then you're able to gather way more data from people, because they believe that you're going to action it in a useful way.
So, that is how you create a lot of safety, and it's also about trust built over time. We can't just expect that someone's going to onboard, especially those that onboarded in the pandemic; they were more disconnected from their colleagues, were finding still that they don't feel as connected to the values and the mission if they were onboarded after March 2020 versus being onboarded in January 2020. So, we're already dealing with this mistrust.
It's about intentional non-work-related check-ins every single week, asking people how they're doing, create some sort of format to make sure you're listening for the language of stress or motivation, and then getting together and asking this question, "What can we do for each other to make next week easier?" This simple meeting hack, 30 minutes, just finding out how people are feeling; you might get someone that doesn't really answer for six months or eight months, they just say basic stuff, they're not sharing.
But if you're committed to this and this is something that you do every single week, and it's part of developing your relationships, but also letting down your vulnerability as a manager, you'll see that over time, people start to share. So again, broadly making sure that there's trust, but data-gathering, anonymous data-gathering, and then every single week, consistency and frequency, and then access to leadership team for them to be able to be transparent with the entire organisation. You bundle that together, and it increases psychological safety significantly.
David Green: You talked about those onboarding after March 2020, so it leads us quite nicely to the next area, which is around recruitment. So, when it comes to recruitment, how should we be thinking about the importance of hiring individuals with shared values and beliefs with the company that they're joining, and helping people find purpose in their work from day one? And, what's the role of leaders and HR in this?
Jennifer Moss: It's interesting, and I love that you ask this question, because I've been writing and researching on both sides what we should be looking for, to make sure we're not joining another burnout culture; because, this whole great regret that we're hearing, or the great reshuffle, why leave something and think that the grass is greener and not actually go to greener grass? I mean, we want to make sure that's the case.
Within HR, we want to make sure we're creating a culture that is focused on burnout prevention so that people don't feel regret in moving into this other organisation, because we are dealing with a huge amount of post-traumatic stress disorder from what we're hearing now, and self-reported social anxiety is on the rise; it was around 4% to 5% of self-reporting high-level generalised and social anxiety, now we're looking at around 36%. That's significant.
So, HR teams need to understand that they are bringing in a worn-out workforce, they are bringing people in that have some emotional baggage from the last job that they worked at. So, there is going to be a sensitivity to that, and so we need to be much more aware and think about that in onboarding, how we're going to maybe extend onboarding, maybe it's not going to take as short of a time as you had planned before, making sure that people feel really caught up on their skills, making sure that they're fully resourced. We have to imagine that when you're looking at stats like 80% to 90% of the workforce being burned out, you're pulling someone in that has been just effectively going through that.
So, what does that look like; how do you extent a couple more weeks of training; how do you make sure that you have a peer support that's there to help them make it more successful? What about an employee resource group; should we put people in contact with an employee resource group right away, by knowing what it is that lights them up and gets them inspired and excites them? So, there's lots of different tactics for that. But I think the most important part that we need to understand is that we are hiring in burned out people.
Some people have taken a pause, but some people have not been able to do that for financial reasons, and so what does that also look like? And, we also need to be looking at onboard specifically with the context of females being disproportionately impacted through the pandemic; we can't ignore that. Again, it's understanding that they were juggling demands, some are still are dealing with that, and that's going to be a perpetual issue in any crisis. More what it highlighted in the pandemic was that women are just going to take on more unpaid labour. It went from 4 hours to 15 to 20 hours in the pandemic that they added to their weekly work life, and that's why we're seeing 1988 female labour force participation levels.
So, if we're bringing those women back, we need to be thinking about, "What are the spinning plates that they're dealing with?" and understanding that that changes potentially how we -- and again not to be creating any sort of inequity, but helping to make sure that they're most successful as they come back and re-enter the workforce, or they switch into an environment that's supposed to be healthier for them.
David Green: There's lots for HR leaders and managers to consider, I think; that's clear. We're in a different world of work now than we were. With all the thinking you've done, Jennifer, around this subject, do you ever find yourself accidentally ignoring your own words of wisdom? And, is it possible to be constantly on top of your happiness game, or entirely immune from the prospect of burnout?
Jennifer Moss: No, and so I have to tell you that it's effort, like anything. A fitness routine is effort. Even just drinking eight glasses of water a day. These intentional efforts to do healthy things for ourselves, they're not as easy of a habit to build as a chip habit, or wine habit. That gives us a lot of really great input when we're creating habits that are maybe not healthy for us. So, we have to work at it.
I think for me too, there were moments, writing this book on burnout, with heavy irony, in the bedroom, because it was the only place I was able to get quiet, writing a book in the bedroom. And the thing is, I was working remote for a long time before the pandemic, and it was a quiet house, there were very little distractions. Then, all of a sudden, as a mother of three, trying to juggle where we were too, we had almost 16 to 18 months off of school. I mean, our kids were home a lot. And so, I was trying to badly home-school and write this book on burnout and still do my public speaking, and all the other pieces of my work.
There were moments that I felt so burned out, but I do believe in the dialectical theory of opposites, I'm a big fan of that dialectical therapy, and this idea that opposites, two things can be true at the same time. Yes, I'm really feeling burned out from being a mum, and my dishes seem to just have their own mind, and they just grow spontaneously inside of the sink, and I'm unloading and loading the dishwasher like Sisyphus carrying the rock up the mountain. And there were moments where I was just like, "I want to pull my hair out!"
But then, there were these other parts where I realised we weren't engaged in a million different things, we didn't have kids in all these places, I wasn't travelling all the time, I was able to spend more time and just really focus on the basics, and realised a lot about what we were doing didn't really have a value or a priority in our lives before. So, these two things, I think, for a lot of us, these theories of opposites, were the pandemic in general.
I think we have to think about that, even just Zoom burnout, technology, all of these things that we feel exhausted by, technology did allow us to force a social experiment around whether we could be productive working flexibly, and I think that in the end is going to be a good thing. We did burn out, but are there more discussions now around burnout than ever before? Now, we had to deal with major stressors and people quit, but that's changing the lens for leadership, that are now activating really good upstream programming, and it's not about diminishing the challenge; it's just about changing the narrative, so that we can see what are some of the things that were benefits, and knowing that it was hard, but what is going to come of it.
The more we do that, the more I think we'll be able to be transformational leaders. So, that has been my experience, I think, is just constantly reframing and looking at, what is the narrative that I'm ruminating on, and what is the narrative that makes me feel more optimistic.
David Green: Yeah, I think we need to be intentional, don't we, about making sure that we are stopping work at certain points and spending time with our families, and I see companies, Microsoft and Uber, have both published some of the work that they've done. Yes, productivity went up, but there were times when well people were reporting that they felt less productive; or wellbeing, when they started analysing the data, one of the big causes was a lack of focus time. People were constantly in meetings, they're not having that fixed two to three hours a day maybe to really get big work done.
We're not going back to exactly what it was before March 2020, it's going to be new again, isn't it? So again, we need to experiment, we need to analyse the data, take action, we need to communicate, we need to be conscious of burnout. And, maybe you're right, maybe what the pandemic has done is really elevated the topic of burnout now to executives, who are concerned about it, and they see the negative impact, not just that it has on people, but it has on the business as well. So, really interesting.
So, Jennifer, this is the question that we're asking everyone on this series, and you may end up summarising some of the stuff that you've already done, you may pick something knew. What do you believe to be the two to three things that HR will need to do to really add business value as we hopefully come out of the pandemic?
Jennifer Moss: I think that you always add value, and HR leaders are extremely valuable, and I see them actually playing an even bigger role right now in strategy, in culture, in business. And, I think that's a good thing. I think there's been a shapeshift around what that role is. A lot of HR teams had to just go right to the front lines and communicate constantly about what was happening. They became the go-to people where we gathered our learning and our information, and to feel assuaged of our stresses. So, there's been a higher profile, I think, put on those folks inside of our organisations and that's a good thing.
I think that this is an opportunity for anyone in leadership to look at change as being this incredible power that we now have, that we can make those changes we wanted. Anytime you faced your mortality for two years, you're going to feel the effects of that. And I think that what HR leaders are leaning is that that is a very human emotion, and people are feeling really shifted in their priorities and what means to them.
So, HR leaders are going to have to adjust to that very nuanced way of supporting people, that it's a one-to-one sort of support that I know has already a concept that has been rallied around for the last few years, but it's going to become even more so, because people are not as identity-connected to work in the same way; they see that there's other priorities that matter, because it's been tested. And so, how do we bring inspiration back; how do we leverage relationships; how do we make sure that people are still connecting in a way that's meaningful; how do we make sure that people aren't just moving from one place to the next, that they realise they could quit a job after 20 years?
You see that, when someone's tested that, that now they're more likely to leave this current role, because they have realised that they can. So, attrition is going to continue to be a major issue and people are realising that they can. I mean, you're seeing major career pivots from teachers to nurses to physicians, people leaving their massive retirement on the table, because they just don't want to do this work anymore.
If you can make that decision, then you can make a decision to move again. So again, it's going to be around retention as a big issue too. And I think, all rooted in empathy, this human-centred leadership role that we're going to have to develop, and culture around that, around empathy, and psychological safety I think is that next big strategy that HR leaders are going to have to start to build into their organisations.
David Green: Well, thanks so much for being a guest on the Digital HR Leaders podcast, Jennifer. Burnout is such an important topic, and as you said, I think it's going to hopefully stay very top of the agenda within organisations. Please can you let listeners know how they can stay in touch with you, follow you on social media, find out more about your work?
Jennifer Moss: Yes, and I'm on quite a bit of social media. Sometimes I'm sporadic, but LinkedIn is one where I'm always there. My website is great, it has lots of different articles that I've published and blogs, and it's jennifer-moss.com. And you can find my social media contacts there too.
David Green: Well, that's easy to remember, Jennifer. Thanks again so much for being on the show, and look forward to reading more about your work in the coming years.
Jennifer Moss: It was so great chatting with you, thank you. Those were excellent questions, I had such a joy, thank you.