Say Goodbye to Burnout

So our topic for today, super simple solutions to bring more positivity at work. I thought this was a perfect topic since it were new in the new year, so we're still sort of like new Year, new you. And it's one that I'm personally really passionate about for two reasons. One, I firmly believe that positive, connected and committed workplace cultures is the differentiator to business success. I believe that firmly. I also believe if you want to transform your culture at work to be more positive, simple solutions are often the best solutions. Because if something is easy to implement, it actually gets implemented. And I say this having been a management consultant for a very large management consulting firm for many years, and I've seen with my own eyes, sometimes you come up with these big grandiose strategies to transform your culture. And they look really good in PowerPoint, they sound really good. But leaders struggle with like, how do I bring this strategy to life on a day to day basis consistently? Because it's really those micro moments that employees experience that creates the entire employee experience. So if you can't move it from the strategy and the PowerPoint to reality, then you have a disconnect between what leaders are saying they want to do and what employees are feeling, which creates a bigger problem. So sometimes simple is better and easy to implement. Solutions sometimes can have really big impact. So we're going to combine those two and we're going to brainstorm together some simple solutions to build more positivity in your workplace. So simple that literally you'll be able to have one or two, at least that you can take back to work after lunch and, and implement them. So that's our goal. All right, so if we're going to talk about how do we build positivity at work, unfortunately, we got to start with burnout, which is one of the biggest impediments to having a positive workplace culture. So burnout is a thing. So according to O.C. tanner, their global culture report that is fresh off The Press For 2020, 79% of employees are experiencing some form of burnout. 79% either mild, medium or severe burnout. So that means nearly eight out of 10 of us in this room are experiencing burnout. All right, so why is this a problem for companies? Well, for individuals who are in a state of burnout, there are a lot of implications and costly implications for companies. Right. So for any one individual who's experiencing burnout, of course that can maybe foster bad morale on the team, but also just in terms of health care costs, low productivity, and also the cost related to turnover. So if these are stats for one person with burnout, and I just said nearly 80% people are experiencing burnout, that adds up to be expensive for companies. It's an issue. To me, 80%, anything sounds like an epidemic. So how do we recognize burnout in ourselves and in others? Again, according to this global culture report, if you are experiencing any one of these three dimensions, you would want to kind of consider whether you're suffering from burnout. And in many cases, it's sort of a combination of these three factors. So the first one is just exhaustion, being mentally and physically tired, waking up in the morning and not wanting to get out of bed, maybe having a really hard time sleeping at night, just not mentally, physically feeling your best or having low energy. The other common one is avoidance. So if you find that you're feeling a sense of dread about going to work, that would be a good indication that maybe you're suffering from burnout. So looking for reasons to not come to work. If you see people at work who are calling in sick frequently, could be a really good indication that they're suffering from burnout. And then futility. Just a sense that, why does it matter? Nothing's going to change anyway. I give up not even wanting to care anymore. So these are good indicators of burnout. All right, so root causes of burnout. So according to the same report, really, they're saying that the lack of certain things at work that help to make us feel valued and that we're thriving are very root causes for burnout. Right. So it could be you feel a lack of appreciation for your work, nobody notices, nobody cares. You don't feel like you have the opportunity to learn and grow. You don't feel connected to a higher purpose. Why are you doing all of this? For what? Lack of connection with others? Certainly lack of work, life balance, and then not trusting your leaders, Feeling like there's a disconnect between what they say and what they do. So all those on the list were from the study. And when I looked at this and sort of like evaluated my own experience with burnout, I. I added that last one with the emoji on there. Self induced. Because if I'm being real and honest, I would say much of my root cause for burnout first begins with me in the sense that I am a type A personality. Who else is out there? So you know what comes with that, Right? So perfectionist tendencies. You take on a lot of responsibility. You care deeply what other people think about you. Now, these are not all bad qualities. I Mean, it has served me well in my career, but it also means that type A people are really prone to stress. And I would have to say throughout my entire working career for me, work and stress were pretty much synonymous. I felt like I always walked around with just like a low grade thing of burnout. It was like always there. I never really paid much attention to it because I just figured that's just how I wired and it's my own personal baggage. But then what happens is if I'm in a work situation where I feel a lack of appreciation or a lack of work life balance, it immediately catapults me into maybe more immediate and severe forms of burnout. And I have absolutely left a job because of a lack of work life balance. So I definitely fall into those statistics when burnout gets too severe, the cost of turnover. And then I would also say a warning sign in terms of the indicators of burnout for me are I struggle to be present at home with my kids. I take work home with me a lot anyway. Like, not even physically, but I think about work a lot. But I know I'm starting to get into like dangerous burnout zone when I'm obsessed with work and I can't shake it even when I'm with my kids. So an example would be about three years ago, I was at my daughter's soccer game and I'm like watching her play. All of a sudden, everybody starts cheering and patting me on the back and I'm like, what's up? They're like, lola just scored. I didn't see it. I'm watching the game and I didn't see it. Has anybody had an experience like that that you're so disconnected with the present that you're just not. You're not there. So that was actually a wake up sign for me that I gotta really check in with myself because I'm probably getting to the severe levels of burnout. All right, well, I think we all agree that burnout sucks, so. All right, we're supposed to be talking about positivity at work. What are we supposed to do about it? How do you create more positive cultures where it can lessen burnout or ideally prevent it altogether? And so when I do consulting on this topic with companies, I really do believe building positive, again, positive connections, committed co chairs, you really gotta be operating at all levels, right? So there's sort of the enterprise systematic level. A lot of these initiatives are led by your HR function. I think leaders have a huge responsibility because leaders, more than anybody, you are impacting Those micro moments, those day to day moments of the employee that adds up to their overall employee experience. So leaders have a huge accountability in this space. And then of course, all of us have accountability too. We have to take responsibility for our own career advocacy and self care. So we're really operating on all three levels. But for the conversation that we're going to be doing at the tables, we're really going to focus on the leadership slice of it. I believe all of you are leaders in the room. Whether you are in a formal leadership position, you've got people reporting to you, you are in a role where you're influencing your organization so you can play a pivotal role as, and bringing more positivity into your workplace culture. So that's where we're going to focus now. One of the, just one of the tools in the leader toolkit that I think is important to use in terms of bringing more positivity into your workplace culture are best practices that are rooted in positive psychology. So by show of hands, how many people are familiar with positive psychology? You've heard that term before? All right, a few people. So for those of you who aren't familiar, positive psychology is the scientific study of what makes humans thrive. And it really started to take off in the 1990s as a discipline within psychology because the head of the American Psychology association at that time said, you know what? To date, psychology, we are only focused on what makes humans broken our dysfunctions and our mental illness. To be fair and to have a well rounded view of psychology, we have to study mental wellness as well as mental illness. We gotta understand what makes people feel fulfilled and a sense of joy and happiness and purpose and meaning in their lives. So since then, this field of positive psychology has totally taken off. Tons of research is out there around it and I want to just touch on some of the pieces of the research so that when we're brainstorming ideas that you can take back to work, you have an appreciation for what they're rooted in and why they work. All right, so one of the things that the positive psychology research tells us is that as humans we have a negativity bias. So that means we are simply wired to focus more on, care more about, put more import on negative news experiences and information more so than positive stuff. And that just dates back to the early years of human development when we were confronted with new things. They certainly could have been life threatening. And so our brains went into fight or flight mode, conditioned us to think that everything was horrible. And as a survival technique so fast Forward to modern era. Most things that we encounter that are new or unfamiliar with us won't kill us. But again, our brains are hardwired to expect the worst. So we just kind of fall into a negativity cycle. So that's kind of depressing when you think about it. And, you know, it's one thing, I get that there's a lot of research that says this, but it's also kind of intuitive for me. So, for example, by show of hands, if you were given both a compliment and a criticism at the same time, how many of you would focus more on the criticism? I definitely would. I would ruminate like, oh, what did they mean? Like, oh, my God, that's horrible. I would forget all about the compliment because again, your brains are just wired to naturally more gravitate towards the negative. All right, bad news for positive psychology. So what's the deal? So the other piece of research around positive psychology is that we have a tremendous amount of influence over being able to override that negativity bias by simple actions, thoughts, and behaviors. So when they studied what really comprises our feelings of positivity, Interestingly enough, only 10% is directly related to the circumstance that you find yourself in. I thought that was shocking. Only 10%. 50% is just how you're wired. Some people are more glass half empty. That's me. And some people are more wired to be glass half full. But a whopping 40%, that's almost half. 40% is due to our daily habits and choices. And I found that to be super encouraging. And so there are a lot of best practices in positive psychology that if you incorporate them into your routine more consistently than not, you can boost your overall positivity and you can sort of move from a negative mind to a positive mind more quickly. So I think of it as almost your brain is like any other muscle in your body. If you want to have toned, strong arms, you have to lift weights. There's no getting away from it. If you want to have a strong, resilient mindset, you have to practice at it just a little bit daily, and you will see the benefits from it. So I call them happy habits. In positive psychology, I call it interventions. That sounds too clinical for me, but happy habits, and there's lots of them. The ones that we're going to talk about today at our tables are around practicing more mindfulness, gratitude, investing experiences and relationships. If we can do a little bit of these things just a little bit consistently every day, we can really see the benefits of it. And the research shows that there's tons of benefits by practicing these happy habits. This is all evidence, research based stuff. And that's why I love positive psychology as just one tool in your leadership toolkit. It's not a panacea. It won't cure everything. But I love the fact that I can do something and there's more guarantee than not that I'll receive benefits. So the research is awesome. Love the research. That gives me a lot of confidence, but nothing beats just having my own personal experience with it. So before we switch tables and get to our first discussion, I just want to tell you a little bit about my own personal journey with positive psychology and how I actually fell into it and how I started applying it in my life. So this was probably about five or six years ago at my corporate job. I was leading an area of the company and had to lead a pretty significant organizational redesign that resulted in role eliminations. So if you've ever had to be in that situation of telling people that they're losing their jobs, it's. It's yucky, it's horrible. Sometimes you have to do it. So on one day, I had to tell multiple people that they were losing their jobs. And I was bracing myself for unpleasant conversations because why would they be anything other than that? And all the conversations were unpleasant. So people reacted very negatively. They were mad at me personally. They were very upset with the company and upset with themselves. It wasn't pleasant, but I expected it. However, there was one conversation that completely took me aback and one person that I had to share this news with. The person's reaction was something like this, okay, this was not what I was expecting, nor what I want. But when I look back, I have really enjoyed my time at this company. I've learned so much. I assume that this is a catalyst for me to go on and do something else. I don't know what it is, but I'm looking forward to learning what that is. And Beth, how are you? I couldn't believe it. I honestly couldn't believe it. Because honestly, if the tables were turned, I would not have had that poise and that grace. It impacted me so much, I literally went home and I googled how can some people be positive in negative situations? And that's when all this stuff about positive psychology popped up. So I just started reading these articles and I thought it was fascinating. Like, oh, we have a negativity bias. It's not just me. My brain's actually working the way it's supposed to when I go negative. But we have the ability to override it to some extent. And that was fascinating. So I read the articles, then I started taking classes. I took so many classes, I ended up getting certified in it, not thinking I was going to do anything with it. It was just more out of interest. And so because I was doing all this learning, I started just applying some of those happy habits to my daily life. Not with any serious, like strategy, but, you know, you learn something that kind of sinks in. And I started to see that that latent sort of foundational level of stress that I had always lived with started to dissipate somewhat and I started coming at work, showing up at work with a different kind of attitude. I was less wrapped up into my problems and I was more able to be emotionally available to other people at work, which made me a better leader. So I started noticing it's working to some extent. So I was then more intentional about bringing mindfulness into my leadership team and started having different conversations with my leadership team around how do we support one another and how do we be more present as leaders for our employees? And little by little, we started to build more of a workplace family type culture. Engagement scores went up and eventually our team was achieving some of the highest engagement scores in the company. So HR noticed and they had come to me and they said, beth, we have a problem. There is a large segment of our workforce where we noticed a huge uptick in short term disability claims, specifically due to stress and anxiety. We know you've been tampering around with this positive psychology. Like what would you recommend that we could do that? Maybe it could help the situation. And I had no idea. I mean, adopting these happy habits for myself is one thing, extending it to my team is another. How do you now systemize it and make it enterprise wide? So we partnered together and we came up with solutions. And so that was my experience, applying positive psychology in my personal life, at the team level and also at the enterprise level. And quite frankly, that experience then was the spark for starting this business with organizations on how to boost more positivity at work. A lot of times that means how to fix dysfunction at work, how to increase engagement, get more out of people at work. Because I saw firsthand, stress, anxiety, burnout is a thing. It is costing the company money. And there are some simple solutions. And again, positive psychology is not the only solution. It's just one tool in your leadership toolkit. So the fact that there is research that backs it up, but I have personal experience that backs it up, makes me a believer that it's a simple solution that we should sometimes turn to.