106 - Jennifer Moss-The Burnout Epidemic and How to Fix It.mp3 - powered by Happy Scribe

Ruthless Compassion is a podcast about how you can turn your emotional shit into fertilizer for success and see your darkest moments as opportunities to transform into a powerful kindness warrior. If you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review wherever you listen. Welcome Jennifer Moss to the Ruthless Compassion Podcast.

I'm so glad to be here. It's going to be a great conversation.

I'm sure it will cause we're both passionate about this topic it turns out.

Yes, very true.

Yes.

Well, first of all, I think it's always great to get the guests to tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, what you do and why are you doing it.

Yeah. So I'm a speaker and an author and a radio columnist. I've been really focused on well-being and workplace wellness for a while now, probably over a decade. And I joked that my previous role was happiness expert. And now I'm an unhappiness expert with this new job of talking about burnout. I care deeply about the topic because as a co-founder of a startup and a female co-founder, especially in tech, there's just so much burnout in that field and specifically for women. And I went through my own experience with burnout. So here I am advocating for well-being and optimization and self-care. And what I came to understand is that all those things are really important. But, if you don't have the conditions, which I was inevitably creating as an entrepreneur and just because of the sort of the industry and tech in the expectations societally and within the culture for overwork, it just led to my burnout. And it seems like I was a kind of a walking irony and I wanted to change that. And so I stepped away and I really investigated what were the causes that led me to burn out and impact my relationships and feel very unwell and extremely depressed and anxious, all things I didn't want other people to feel. And that's what sort of sent me on this advocacy for getting more people to think about burnout.

That's amazing. And here we have your book, The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It, which just came out from the Harvard Business Review Press. So, that's quite a prestigious press. And it's hot off the press, right?

Yes. I started writing a pre-pandemic and then because I've been writing for Harvard Business Review Press for a while, maybe since 2012. So it was a while and I've been writing about burnout specifically for about four or five years before the pandemic hit. So basically scrapped about 20,000 words because everything just changed overnight. And so I was adding as much as I could all the way through until there was word lock. And there are still things that are happening that I keep thinking, "Oh, I just wish I could have included in the book". But there's just so much to capture, evolving so quickly.

For sure, it's a very interesting time when we're talking about chronic stress. But, I want to go back to your story because I think telling your story will really tell us a lot about what burnout is and ways that we can address it. So maybe you can share your story first.

I feel like I was kind of the right mix of personality type, plus being in a certain industry and just my own sort of need for high performance and perfectionism. All of these things combined to create a recipe for burnout. And that is really just what I write about in the book is that there are personalities at risk for burnout, those that have perfectionist concerns, not strivings, which is our desire to be able to hit goals and be sort of solution space and high performing. But, when it becomes sort of this obsessive place and your passion turns from harmonious to obsessive, that's what I was realizing I was doing. And then I had this pressure as a female because I felt like as a female co-founder and only 7% of women in the tech industry get funded. The fact that I should play a bigger role in advocating for more females in this space. So I just kept saying yes to so many different things. You're also kind of cash strapped all the time when you're in that early stage start up, so you're trying to do more with less constantly. Everyone is wearing a million hats.

You feel a lot of lack of efficacy, very little mastery. You're playing a whole bunch of different roles. And in that lack of agency and that sort of expectation around workload, all of these root causes of burnout playing into my personality just led me to feel exhausted all the time. I became sort of emotionally disconnected from the work, which was really unsettling for me because work for me is very passion-driven, and it fuels me. It makes me feel accomplished. And so that was happening. And then I was also becoming very negative and cynical like, things aren't going to change. I felt angry, sort of at everything around me all the time. It was finally when I realized relationships were suffering, that I kind of woke up and had assessed my own health. I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't eating, I was working all the time, wasn't spending time with my kids and my spouse. And so I just literally hit a wall. And I had to end the work. Like I had to leave the role and everything that I loved behind and took four months of complete recovery. And it was that after some people say that you often realize that you were depressed when you start singing again, it's kind of like you don't realize that in the middle of it that you're just so unhappy.

And it's kind of when you are able to come out of it that you recognize what you've not lived with the whole time. So that became a real reckoning for me in a new sort of path in my career.

Well, that's a really powerful story and it leads me to ask you for a little definition now. So we're using the word burnout, but I think a lot of people don't really understand what it is. So maybe you could start by giving a clear definition to the listener.

Yes, absolutely. And I really go with the World Health Organization definition of burnout, which is something that they defined more succinctly in 2019, where they identified burnout as an occupational phenomenon. It's workplace stress left unmanaged. It shows up in those three big signs: high levels of exhaustion, lack of emotional connection to work, lack of self-efficacy, sort of level of disengagement from work, and then high levels of cynicism, negativism, this hopelessness that you feel like you can't control your life anymore at work. And what was so consequentially thing about that definition, though, is that they did focus it in on workplace and added it to its international classification of disease as their IDC eleven, not as a medical condition, but as a syndrome of chronic stress. It's sort of not managed. And so what is really important about those two distinctions is that they elevated it, I think, in 2019 as something to be really taken seriously. And then also that it comes from root causes of work, that it isn't just we're not managing our own self-care. It's an individual problem to solve alone. It is institutional societal problem that requires institutional, societal and individual combined solution.

I'm so glad you said that, because as I was telling you before we started, one of my hats that I wear is I do psychiatric assessments for people who are off work for mental health reasons. And I have seen cases of burnout with some of the people I assess. And their primary issue was not depression or anxiety, but it was depression or anxiety that was triggered by certain workplace conditions. And I was very aware that no matter how much we treated the depression or the anxiety, if the stress that they were experiencing did not go away, it wouldn't make a difference, really, to their depression and anxiety symptoms. They were gonna still feel bad because if you're in a stressful situation, it doesn't matter how much treatment you throw at it, right?

Absolutely and most people don't have the privilege of just getting up and leaving their job. There are people, yes, and we've seen this with a great resignation, the ability to sort of reshuffle or leave their roles. But, there are quite a few people that have been trained in this role. They don't necessarily have those different types of skills that are transferable in the same way. They could be a single parent, that this is extremely important, that they keep a healthy financial flow in their home life. And so the idea that we should just put it on the individual is very dangerous because a lot of people just cannot battle going into an environment every day that is making them sick.

Absolutely. So that leads me to you talked about the six causes of burnout. So,maybe you'd like to share that.

Yes, and I really appreciate the six main causes because I think they give a lot of clarity. I think there's some other they're very nuanced. So, I mean, these six examples are if you broke them down. I mean, it's just there's so many layers. But basically, overwork is the biggest. I think we can all agree that unmanageable workload has been a big problem in the pandemic, but it was a problem prepandemic and responsible for the deaths of 2.8 million workers a year, according to the ILO. It's just really was a big, major issue. But the pandemic is often like it always does with a crisis, exacerbates existing problems. So workload is a major problem. But there's these other five. And I think it's valuable to realize that there are these other dynamics that play too. So you could have workload, but you could also have what we're seeing a lot of, which is that perceived lack of control. So, people just getting emails at 11:00 at night and expecting to have answers immediately or work done by the next morning. We're seeing uncertainty with people not knowing when they're working, how they're working, what mode they're going to be working in.

Will the company be growing massively or will they be shutting down? So that perceived lack of control has been very difficult. Insufficient rewards for effort, that's table stakes stuff. Are we paying people properly? We're seeing a lot of increase in overtime and people not necessarily being paid adequately for working these 80 hours a week. We see this a lot in our younger millennial generation at work, where they have these golden handcuffs of whatever student debt. And then they have this job that they're not necessarily getting paid really well for. And then they're asked to kind of in some industries, it's like a hazing. They have to work 60, 80 hours a week to prove their worth. So that's a big problem. And even just the recognition piece, also we've seen decreasing. It's been hard to kind of recognize people working remotely in the same way. And so that's lacking, which is leading to burnout, lack of supportive communities. So it can mean just feeling sort of othered inside of an organization or we talk about bullying, yes. It's not always overt, where someone is saying horrible things to you in front of people or bullying you.

It's more like exclusionary behaviour. We also see that a lot in the loneliness piece right now, people are just not feeling connected. A lot of young people, too. And our data showed that they were saying, I don't feel like I've met my boss or because I haven't met my boss and I started this job in a pandemic, and I haven't met my coworkers. My career is atrophying. I don't see anyone. So that's playing a role. Lack of fairness is the fifth one, and that's systemic discrimination. Women were hugely impacted during the pandemic this year because of the fact that they were disproportionately working these unpaid labour hours. We're looking at 1988-level female labour force participation because of that, it's a big problem. And then finally the 6th one is mismatched values and skills. So do you feel like you were hired into the right role? Sometimes we move people managers into people leadership roles, and that's not really what they're great at. Or do we feel just this emotional disconnection from work? We train to be a teacher, we train to be a nurse, and we get in there and it's nothing like what we expected it to be.

And it's hard, and we're getting treated badly. And so that passion is really now disconnected from the work, and that can lead to burnout.

There's a lot of stuff that people have to deal with.

It's enormous. There's just so much and I think I go through this and it can be lengthy to go through these six causes. And really, I'm just barely touching what people are dealing with in all of these different categories. It's a lot. And again, when you read the list, you see that it's system-based, it's policy-based. It's things that are happening at work that are causing burnout. And so that can't be solved with some of the tactics that we're using, like meditation apps and more yoga and asking people to use their gym memberships more. I mean, it really is more further upstream. Don't get me wrong. Those things are important. It's just they don't attack burnout.

Yeah. I remember talking to somebody who there was a new hire who happened to be an nepostism hire. Right, so this person could not be fired, and this new hire was wreaking havoc on this person's life that I was assessing. And no amount of yoga or meditation was gonna fix things because this person who was never going anywhere was really creating an enormous amount of stress for the patient I was seeing. So that's the kind of thing that I understood that there was nothing that I could do medication wise or recommending psychotherapy that would really make a difference until the systemic problem got solved.

It's absolutely true. And we're in environments where we protect physical safety so so rigorously. And we have all these protections in place to make sure you're climbing up the ladder in a safe way. But we don't necessarily consider that potential risk of people's psychological safety can be just as harmful or more harmful. And so those kind of measures to put in place for someone being completely bullied to the point where it's abusive is a dangerous way of thinking about those two protections inside the workplace.

Do you have any stories of people that you've spoken to who had burnout because of the way the organization was running or people that they had to encounter at work.

Many many examples. I did so many interviews for the book and have done just the work within data collecting and serving over the course of the last decade. And it's been a problem. Like I said before, the pandemic and people described being completely excluded from their team or their boss, only highlighting problems with that person over and over again. And a lot of it was discriminatory behavior. I mean, you have this over bias. There was a lot of women that I spoke to, and I did some research for the book around this where it was called like the late penalty. So basically, a lot of women end up taking the primary role of care giving. And so they're the ones that come in or have needed to come in a little bit later after dropping kids off at daycare and their male counterparts are there arriving early and getting that kind of access to the boss. And a lot of the women inside of one group continued to see their counterparts moving up. And once they started to do some assessment, the manager was basically saying, "Well, the guys show up on time". And so you see this bias, these things that even though the manager totally understood and supported the fact or said that they supported the fact that these women had to come in at a certain time and they were flexible, we can track that often that does reduce the likelihood of groups getting promoted. And that's one micro example. We also have heard one person who was saying that they had just been working in this organization for a really long time, and they thought they had some sort of respect within the group with the boss, and they had lost a parent during COVID. And the way that the grief policy was handled was so horrible, they basically were told to be back at work. They were getting emails while they were burying their mother. The grief policy issues have been really analyzed in this last year, and you're seeing more companies step up because it was such a problem. No one knew really how to deal with grief at such a mass level during the pandemic, and it highlighted how badly those policies were existing inside of organizations when they were tested like this.

I actually have spoken to a number of people who I assessed who has exactly the same story about the way their personal losses were not dealt with and how they were already traumatized by the loss of the loved one. And then they were retraumatized by the way their workplace refused to give them some time to process their loss.

It's so interesting to see how when I was looking into it, how few days people get to deal with this massive amount of grief, and there's some kind of protection around it, but very little. And when you're looking at like an average of two to three days off. I think you're not even processing, you're not even functioning. And then I've heard people come back and then people were demoted or they were put on basically like on an exit strategy because they were underperforming. And I just think the way we think about grief really has to change because humanly I mean, it's impossible to square that away and still be expected to function at the same efficiencies and the same productivity levels as before the death of that person that you care about so deeply.

You know you talk about poor corporate hygiene. And when I think about some of the people I've assessed and how they were treated not like humans, but like machines, right. And I've said this line to so many people, I said, "You're a living organism". And if you stress a living organism enough, it breaks, it stops functioning. And I said, for that matter, if you stress the machine enough, it'll stop functioning too. And these workplaces don't have a good idea about how to retain staff, how to motivate staff, how to get the best out of their staff. They just drive them and drive them and treat them with awful disrespect at times to the point where these people end up on long term disability. And so they've lost a staff member and their insurance rates are going to go up because their insurance are paying for people to be off work because they can no longer function. And they don't want to go back to that workplace because they're so traumatized by the experience. So they are going to fight tooth and nail not to return. And that, to me, is such a counterproductive strategy for dealing with employees.

You're absolutely right. What you're saying is so spot on because we don't look at things often. What I've seen within these organizations that are looking very short-sighted at solving the problem with very quick band-aid solutions, okay I'll just deal with this in this way or we have to maximize productivity and this is how I measure productivity. But it's showing. It's proving in the last couple of years that that mentality has pushed people to a breaking point and that the workforce has created a lot more power. So in some way, I guess there has been a pendulum swing in a better direction for employees to some extent in that they have more power because they're saying it's enough. I'm done. And with enough people creating that tipping point, it's making it so that there's more opportunities. We're seeing mass levels of attrition in tech and health care and other organizations, where some companies I've spoken to, they are looking at 30% turnover, which is astronomically expensive. It is so expensive to think of that kind of level of turnover. And it's kind of at a point where if they don't address it, they are going to be an obsolete non-competitive company.

And it's sad that it had to become a bottom-line issue and that now that they're addressing it because it really is so expensive that they're dealing with it. But like I said, sometimes these situations exacerbate existing problems and sometimes they fix them. So I have this cautious optimism that may be being put through this and realizing how expensive it is to not take care of your people will be a lesson that changes the future of work.

That would certainly be good for everyone. That would be a win-win.

Right, I'm hopeful again, cautiously optimistic, but we do tend to repeat our behaviours that are patterns. So don't quote me on this being for sure thing here. It's definitely my hope that we'll see some changes.

Well, you talk in your book about leadership, right? How to lead with curiosity, how to lead with empathy. And I think we're talking about that right now. So can you say a little bit more about the importance of good leadership in preventing and addressing burnout in the staff?

It plays such a huge role, and I'm sure you've probably seen this in just your conversations and work. And a lot of what we were doing before when I was running the startup was trying to demonstrate data that is already being tracked and metrics of success that are being tracked inside of organizations and mapping them to improved well being. Once we apply these interventions really focused on the science of sort of neuroplasticity combined with positive psychology. If we can increase sort of empathy across the board and cognitive optimism and emotional social flexibility and hygiene obviously has to be there already because you can't motivate without the hygiene. But if we increase all of this, that leads to more well, healthier people, then we see these other metrics that we've been measuring improve, like EMPs, like MPS, sales, productivity, all of that we mapped and continued to demonstrate over and over again that there's a good business case for it. So, we should be doing that. And then I think from a learning moment through the pandemic, we're realizing that the opposite of doing that has some real drains on shareholder value and negative financial impacts.

And so what we need to do is start to do more, measure again of what really does improve sustainability across the workforce, but also making sure that the interventions that we do have empathy and human centered leadership at the root, and then map that to the measures that matter to people where they are the numbers people speak all languages to all people across the organization, and then you're going to have more buy-in. And I think that's what we need to go back to is just focusing on what's good and right and then also being able to prove that there is a business case for it.

You mentioned corporate hygiene. And I read in your book that you said that poor corporate hygiene was one of the root causes of burnout, but you haven't defined what corporate hygiene is. I thought maybe this would be an opportunity to do that.

I love Herzberg's theory of the motivation factor theory and hygiene factor theory. It's just basically this concept that you need to have the basic table stakes stuff met before you can motivate. So, a lot of people are at that. So they're skipping the hygiene and just focusing on the motivation. But hygiene is like basic needs met. It was interesting because Herzberg as a researcher was mentored by Maslow, and Maslow did talk about our hierarchy of needs and what is fundamental to us survive the basics, but we also need friendships and touch and all those kinds of things. Organizations need the same thing. And what we're doing is we're giving employees ice cream when they just drastically need water. We are forgetting that there are some basics that have to be occurring while we're motivating. You can't have people work 70 hours a week and then give them a gym membership that they can't use because they're working 70 hours a week. So those optimizations don't actually work because people don't have the time for them. You want to make sure that people have balance, work life balance. But if you're creating this life on site constantly, where everyone has to just be seen to prove that they are valuable, then that's a real problem.

You don't then have balance and people end up burning out. They don't actually get to spend time with their family. You see that again, too, in this concept of making sure that you have paternity leaves and maternity leaves, that's great, but are they equitable?

And are you encouraging males to take that time off the same way that you would female? So then you have or whoever is deciding to be the primary caregiver over that's identified, whatever that is. We need to make that equitable so that everyone takes it. So having policies there that's not actually taking care of the root cause, which is the hygiene. That is what ends up leading to those programs and motivations not being used. And it's a huge waste of money, but also it's not solving the problem.

I'm glad you explained that. And toward the end of your book, you talk about creating an empathetic leader, becoming an empathetic leader, and the need for self-care among leaders. In your story, obviously you were trying to be empathetic, but I think there were some issues with self-care. So maybe you want to talk a little bit about balancing being an empathetic leader with the ability to have self-care in that leadership role.

Absolutely. And in healthcare in particular, that industry creates a lot of empathy and compassion fatigue. And we see that as a real problem where our passion and I mentioned this other really great research, and I mentioned it before, but that harmonious passion is really healthy for us, but when it becomes obsessive, it's dangerous. And we as leaders tend to care a lot about our people, and we also care a lot about being perfect and stoic and making sure everyone feels okay and calming our teams and making them feel assured and that we've got their backs. And when you're dealing with high performers on your team, leaving and creating this vacuum, what you're doing then is trying to manage the team by taking on that extra work. And then we're also a big caveat. We're in a global pandemic, and it's really difficult to continue to have stretch goals and all these other things that we're still doing, which I think is almost ludicrous to ask people to have stretch goals when they can barely deal with the chronic stress that they're dealing with all day and hit their goals that they had pre-pandemic.

But now, your leaders are taking on these stretch goals and high growth industries that have grown a lot of the pandemic and all that together makes leaders really exhausted. And they are also bad at taking care of themselves, like really bad at it. Self-care is hard for a lot of people already, but someone that is a solutions-based person, very driven, they don't see that they have to do the same work as maybe they'd like their team to do. And so meters need to get really good at modelling the behaviour that they want to see within their teams. And so that means they have to also not answer emails on vacation or weekends. They also need to have sort of guidelines around when people can disconnect and how to protect the entire team from clients just asking them for anything at any time. They need to create those same protections around their selves. And they do need to take time away and off and represent that to the team so that everyone follows suit. And if they don't, then nothing's going to change. So they have a responsibility, but what I say to that is that in time they'll actually reap the rewards of modelling self-care because they'll have to practice what they preach, which in the end will be really healthy for them.

Absolutely. And I as a professional have got to learn a very specific word, which I'm sure you're very familiar with, the word no. I'm working on that word a lot these days, learning how to say no to working on the weekends, for example, things like that. So it's really important to recognize that we don't have to be working seven days a week. We don't have to be working until 11:00 at night.

Right. It's exactly what you're saying is I have the privilege. And you have the privilege probably of being able to turn down work, even though it's hard. But if we do that, then our teams and individuals will feel more safe in saying no to us if we're maybe thinking that they can take on more bandwidth and not recognizing that they need space or they're not good at letting the rest of their team know that they aren't, that they're overworked. We need to get more people to feel comfortable and permit that ability to say I'm overworked, I can't take on more of this project.

Yeah. I think we have to support one another, and absolutely leadership has to model good self-care and also have to really think about what people are capable of. I think one of the things I see over and over again is this extremely distorted idea of what a human being is capable of doing in the workplace. I hear of certain call centers where people have to do a call every X amount of seconds, and they can't take a bathroom break for several hours, and they're just like, these machines just go, go. And then they're, of course, on disability leave because everything has piled up. And I think we have to have realistic perceptions of what a human being is actually capable of. And if they want to increase productivity, they don't know that expression, whip the horse till it dies. They have to encourage and also have a realistic sense of what is possible and what is too much.

I completely agree. And I have heard a lot of these sort of sort of inhumane environments where workers are treated very much like that, like they are machines. And every person is so unique that to kind of assimilate them as one big sort of working piece of machinery. Again, it just seems so bizarre that this is how we think about our employees today. And I understand the factory mindset is still around. The idea that it is just a very transactional relationship between employee employers is still out there, but it has to change because there's a revolt happening. And when you start to see this increased lower unemployment numbers and a lot of people really looking at acquiring talent and people can start to work in various places. They can get up skilled and be able to work remote and virtually all around the world. The amount of jobs that are going to open up to people and the access to education that they have is much different than it used to be, and that you can upskill in a way that doesn't actually force you to go to school in class anymore. There's just all of this new technology and the democratization of our workplace and our workforce that has been a struggle because it's a lot of technology that we're adopting, and it makes people feel a bit like they've been left behind.

But there's a lot more of opportunity that can come for people that you know don't wanna deal with this kind of horrible treatment at work.

One way the other leaders are going to have to start considering things because if not, they're going to end up losing their workers.

Exactly. So don't risk it. Treat people right, right away, instead of waiting until they're sick and then trying to pull them out of the river downstream. Let's stop people from falling in the first place.

Well, we can definitely put out the message, right? We can share our story so that people are awake and aware of the issues. I think it's such an important topic.

I agree. I think that our passion, even if it gets a few people thinking about the topic, then we're doing our job.

So if people are interested in learning more about you and what you do, where can they find you?

Well, they can go to the website, Jennifermoss.com, but I'm all over social media. I love to talk on LinkedIn. I'm on Twitter. But go to the website first, there's lots of really great articles and blogs and stuff that people can read and read more about me there.

Wonderful. And are you working? I know obviously you've just put out this book, but are you working on any new projects or considering any new projects or any new adventures down the road?

Yes, this year feels like a real growth year for me and just expanding the work and the conversations across different platforms. But I am starting to produce a LinkedIn learning course, which will be great to be able to be in new places within workplaces and then also just getting deeper within the research. Obviously, I'm a glutton for punishment. So I'm thinking about the next book, but I really want to understand what the paradigm shift of this last two years has created. My cautious optimism, I want to measure to see how things actually changed. Are things looking like they're changing and really dig into the research around what that might look like in the future of work?

That's wonderful. That's a great project. And just before we end, I always ask my guest for a call to action. So what would yours be to the listener?

My call to action. And I've been saying this as much as I can is, there's no right way to feel right now first. So cut the guilt. Give yourself some self-compassion, give yourself a break. And keep reminding yourself that we're in a pandemic and we are being asked to do a lot and even more than you can possibly imagine. And we haven't stopped to pat ourselves on the back. We don't realize that we've survived something pretty major, and we're continuing to be in a state of survival every day. So, if you feel bad because the dishes didn't get done today, or if you feel bad that you weren't the perfect mother, parent or father, or if you feel bad that maybe you didn't get that project in on time, it's okay, give yourself a break. Give a moment of pause to say you're doing really, really awesome in spite of all of these circumstances that are keeping you from being at your best some days.

Well, Jennifer Moss, thank you so much for coming on the Ruthless Compassion podcast today. And talking about the burnout epidemic and the rise of chronic stress and how we can fix it because I think this is really the topic of now and the future and it's so important to bring this to light.

Thank you so much for having me. It was a as predicted, a really wonderful conversation. Thank you for hosting me.

This is Dr. Marcia, Sirota. Thank you for listening. Please leave a review and your comments wherever you listen to podcasts and don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter@marciasorotamd.com, where you'll learn about upcoming online events as well. Also we love getting referrals from our listeners about future podcast guests so please email us at info@marciasrodamd.com.