Human Truth Podcast | Ep. 03: Burnout Is a Business Problem - Learn the Signs

Welcome to The Human Truth Podcast where, each episode, we take a closer look at a popular workforce statistic ripped from the headlines and ask: Where’d it come from? Is it true? And why should we care?

• What are we talking about this episode? Everyone seems like they’re burned out lately. Do you know what burnout looks like in your co-workers, in your employees, or in yourself? Our stat under the microscope this week is this: According to ADP, Nearly seven in 10 (67%) workers say they experience stress at work at least once a week, and one in seven (15%) feel stressed every day.

• Who’s talking about it? Host Ian Cook, VP of People Analytics at Visier is joined by Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz, a naturopathic doctor and the co-founder of the digital mental resilience company Peace of Mind where she serves as the Chief Health Officer. There she works with businesses to help recognize and curb burnout.

Want to get in touch? Email us at podcast@visier.com

Learn more about employee burnout: 

• When Vacations Aren’t Enough: New Visier Survey Finds 70% of Burnt Out Employees Would Leave Current Job

• Managing Your Employees’ Pandemic Stress Level

• Ask Visier: Are Any Employees Fatigued?

• The Burnout Epidemic Report 2021

• Burnt Out Britain

More episodes of the Human Truth Podcast:

• Ep. 01: Is it really true that no one wants to work?

• Ep. 02: Could an employer’s values make you quit your job?

• Ep. 04: Managing Generational Differences at Work 

Transcript: 

Gabriel Kava, Producer:

More employees than ever are burned out. Up to 89% according to Visier’s report, The Burnout Epidemic. Learn which employees are feeling the most depleted, the root causes of burnout and how employers can better support their employees. Read more at visier.com.

It’s the Human Truth podcast where each episode we examine a workforce statistic rip from the headlines and ask, where did it come from? Is it accurate? And should we care? Why is everyone burned out at work? What are the business impacts today? On the Human Truth podcast we’re examining why nearly seven in 10 workers say they experience stress at work at least once a week, let’s get into it with host Ian cook and special guest, Dr. Antonella Aguilera Ruiz.

Ian Cook, Host:

So welcome folks. I’m Ian cook host of the human truth podcast. And today we’re talking about the question, why is everybody burned out at work? According to ADP, as we’ve said, nearly seven and 10 workers, 67% to be precise, say they experience stress at work at least once a week. And one in seven that’s about 15%. They feel stressed every day. So I’m joined today by a doctor Anella Aguire, AR Ruiz who’s in California. She’s a naturopathic doctor and the co-founder of the digital mental resilience company called peace of mind. And she serves as the chief health officer and she’s helping organizations to recognize and curb burnout. So thank you for joining us today, Dr. Antonella, it’s great to meet you. Can we get things kicked off by, by sharing a bit about, well, why you do the work? You do.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah. So this topic of burnout feels really personal on a lot of levels. Something that sort of launched me into my career was everything falling apart when I was 17 and had just started college, which that sounds so young, but I was like three weeks into my undergrad and I got this like chronic sinus infection. I had insomnia, I had headaches. I was gaining weight. Like literally everything fell apart from me healthwise and nobody could help. And so it caused me to see this fork in the road. And instead of going down like a conventional premed route, like finishing pre-med and studying integrative medicine, but it was such an origin story for me in this topic specifically, cuz now when I look back after having researched and cared about this topic for so long, I realize that that was probably my first experience with burnout.

I was coming off being like a typical type, a perfectionist student going to bed at midnight, like waking up at 5:30 AM, swimming, competitively, playing soccer, competitively, doing violin, getting straight A’s all the things. It was like this perfect pressure cooker for burnout. But at that time there wasn’t a name for it. Right? Like, and so now I think that’s why I care about it so deeply cuz I’ve experienced it. And then I also see it in my patients. I see it in the workforce that I think it’s such a prevalent issue and we now have a lot more accurate language to talk about it and describe what’s actually going on.

Ian Cook, Host:

That’s fantastic that like, I, I, your example resonates and I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners out there kinda go like, oh, you just described me. So I really appreciate you joining us really looking forward to, you know, drilling into this and, and sharing your insights about what you’ve learned. Cuz I, I, I think as you say, there’s a, the world has moved on and the recognition of, you know, what’s, what’s realistic and how do these stressors kind of generate that is, it’s just fundamental to good business these days. But what if in, in terms of the starting off, like how much of a problem do you think this is for business? I mean, we got a bunch of stats, but if, if I think about the businesses I joined back when I started working, you know, oh, burnout, you’re just not tough enough. Yeah. But I think we’ve moved beyond that. But then, you know, if you were to go to a CEO and say, you should pay attention to burnout, like how much of a business problem do we really think this is?

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So it’s a huge business problem. And I think we’ve got some statistics there’s Gallup polls around, right. People are 63% more likely to take a sick day, we’re going to lose productivity. And that loss of productivity can often be equated to about 34% of a person’s salary. So there’s numbers that I think we can look at to see that there’s a high cost to burnout. Although I will say, I think some of those numbers aren’t compelling as they should be. Right. Like I think they’re a little bit easy to just be like, okay, that’s not great. But maybe if we keep pushing, right, like we just need to like buck up and keep pushing that. If I was standing in front of the CEO, I would say like, think about when you are stressed. Like when you feel like your cup is just full and someone just like maybe uses the wrong tone and you’re ready to jump at them.

That is not a time when you’re creative. It’s not a time when you’re probably gonna make your best decisions. It’s not a time when you feel like you can really problem solve and delve deep into innovation. And so to me, that’s the cost of burnout, right? There’s numbers, but it’s that cost of it takes well-functioning resource brains to be creative, to be innovative, to drive change, to do all the things we want in business. And if we’re in a state of burnout, it’s virtually impossible to get there or we’re not, we’re getting like the tiniest capacity of that.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah, no, I, I, and I love the way you position that Antonella, there’s, there’s the stats and then there’s the making it personal and, and to truly drive change in our organization, you, you often need both, as you can probably guess, you know, at vier we’re oriented towards evidence and data intelligence, but we also study the people side of business. So it has to be personal, personal, just, you know, dropping in some more stats. Visitor did some research, 89% of workers experienced burnout in 2020. Like, and I think that’s where this got elevated to business awareness. It wasn’t just ones and twos individuals who’d pushed themselves to the max, like almost as a collective society, we’ve been pushed to the max and there’s, and again, in that business impact piece, there’s a connection to, to people quitting. Right? The great resignation’s been a thing. And I’ve definitely seen a, a series of commentaries, like, you know, some people left to go to do other things, but I’ve also seen those LinkedIn posts said, you know, I quit just to take a breath. Yeah. And again, lots of respect to those people cuz that’s awareness of their state that’s awareness of how to get out of it. That is a, a very positive approach to that. So yeah, we probably go into a little bit of the neuroscience, but say a bit more about that burnout and lack of lack of innovation, lack of, of creativity. Cause that sounds like there’s a, again, there’s a strong connection there in terms of what happens to an organization when so many people are in burnout that you lose creativity.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I think this is probably where like the systemic societal piece meets the individual piece. And so where we feel the cost is at the cost of like individual resilience. But that is to say, right, those numbers are so big because institutionally we’re seeing that our systems are unfortunately promoting burnout. Right. They’re they’re definitely not preventing it. They’re not even keeping us at a status quo. Right? Like we, our, our workload and our ability to meet that workload is so mismatched that you get these huge amount of proportion of burnout. Yes. So there’s like a systems how we structure work, how we run our office piece to it. But I think what your question is pointing to is that individual lack of creativity, like when we experience burnout in our own physiology, in our bodies, what we’re experiencing is a maladaptive stress response. And so that isn’t to say that anything is wrong with any of us.

It’s more that there gets to a certain point where if that stress is chronic, it’s repeated or it’s deeply traumatic, there can be this state where our body is like no longer able to adapt to it in a like balanced homeostatic way. It, it becomes maladaptive. So then we’re essentially turned on all the time. Yeah. And that is going to evoke our fight or flight response. So there’s the cortisol stress response that’s gonna be in the background, but that immediate adrenaline fight or flight yeah. Is going to get recruited repeatedly. Yeah. And so that fight or flight is great when we’re escaping. Right. When we think that there’s a burglar when we’ve been attacked by a bear or a lion, but it’s not when we are at work and someone asks something of us in our internal dialogue is like, holy crap, I can’t take that annoying question. Like, no, I can’t take out the trash. No, I can’t do this. Yeah. Right. Those like really short, reactive, or like who are they to ask me? Right. Yeah. That’s that fight or flight part of our brain. That’s more in just quick reaction survival. It’s not like, let me smell the flowers. Sort of let your brain be off leash and do its thing where it’s like, oh, maybe this is a way we could do that. Or this is the way that we could do that. That fight or flight takes over.

Ian Cook, Host:

That makes a lot of sense. So, and what I hear in that Anella is, is there’s, there’s a significant business impact in there because you get, you know, one or two people at a time and they’re stress zone. Okay. But you start to get tens and twenties and thirties and you know, again, we’re, we’re looking at research that says 60% of people are at some level of burnout constantly. You start to see the performance impact. Yeah. You, you resonated a personal story for me. I, early years I did a lot of education like management education. And there was a phase where we did five weeks in a row. We were on six days a week and we were on our feet for about 14 hours a day. Wow. The fifth week of that halfway through a presentation, I’d done 20 times. I literally physically stopped. I could not remember where I was, why I was there or what I was supposed to say next. And it took me about five minutes to recoup the resources. And that was my kind of visceral experience of burn. I was like, whoa, I have limits. And I just find them in a really public way. And it’s kind of embarrassing.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yes. But that’s such, I think such a beautiful point that like that recognition that we have limits because the, what we spoke about earlier, right? Like I think for a long time, this was framed in. If you have limits, it’s almost like a you problem, right? Like you’re not strong enough. You don’t have enough grit. But what we’re realizing is that burnout is an energy capacity issue. That the balance between your, the analogy I use is the deposits and withdrawals that if you’re over withdrawn, right, five weeks, 14 hours on your feet, at some point you’re gonna be over withdrawn. And your body’s like, Hey, we’re like in a way, negative balance here. I don’t remember what’s going on. That’s burnout. That’s that like mismatch in energy capacity, you have over exceeded your body’s ability to meet those demands. And so it’s not like a personal failure or failing. It’s like there are limits. We need to respect them.

Ian Cook, Host:

Totally. And, and you’re starting to drill into think. What I think is, would be again really interesting to unpack further. How do people start to recognize, you know, I think you’ve done a wonderful job of, of describing burnout. It it’s that point where you are so stressed that you don’t have the resources to handle regular interaction. How do people start to recognize the physical and mental signs of that? Like how, what would you look for in yourself? What would somebody look for in the people that they, they are working around?

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I think it’s probably helpful to have our like base definition of what burnout is, cuz has three qualities to it. So one is fatigue, which is usually described as like an energy exhaustion. So that’s usually experienced physically. So we’ll come back to all of these in a little bit more detail, but to give us our three. So the first one is exhaustion or an energetic fatigue. The second is this emotional disconnection or cynicism, that’s when you start to feel like everything is a little bit of a burden, there’s that internal, inner dialogue, there might be interpersonal conflict. And that’s like an emotional exhaustion. You see it in that sphere. And then the third characteristic is a dissociation of personal efficacy, a lack of personal efficacy. So you feel like my job, isn’t a job well done. It’s not even worth doing what’s the point. And so that can also be described as like a spiritual exhaustion, right? Like our purpose of why we’re doing something gets lost and disconnected. Yeah. And

Ian Cook, Host:

So sense of worthlessness can be so debilitating in those

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

So debilitating or an intense amount of self doubt. Right. We’ll see that in physicians and surgeons, especially women physicians that they get to that point, then you’re doubting every prescription you’re doubting your like clinical decision making. Right. That’s such a hard place to live in. So I would say, right, there’s an, a physical, an emotional and like a spiritual aspect to burnout and it can come in a range. So those physical exhaustion can just be feeling tired. I often describe it in practice or in conversations. Like it can feel like an iron curtain, like an iron cloak. It’s like different than the fatigue where you’re like, I need to take a nap. It’s just like hangover, tired, like really, really heavy.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah. And typically you might even feel tired when you wake up. Like, if I, if I go back into my own experience of this is like I would sleep and I would’ve slept, but I’d wake up and I’d still just not feel any sense of energy. So totally.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. Just like exhausted, like really depleted. And to that point too, like you can start to see your sleep suffer. You might be oversleeping or feel like your sleep isn’t enough or have insomnia or trouble sleeping. You might have gastrointestinal symptoms. Like your digestion might feel sensitive, right. You might have more IBS symptoms or anxiety or depression or feel like you’re crying spontaneously or feeling irritable. And so I think everyone, those physical symptoms are really important or those emotional symptoms and sort of learning what the line in the sand is. Right. Like I know mine is irritation and resentment. Like when I start resenting every slack message, like we need to check this out for like for a minute, we need to take a pause here.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah. Oh no. I, I like that one a lot. Cause I think that’s, especially if I’m thinking about teams I’ve been part of or people I’ve managed, especially if you’re, if you’re around for a while. I think one of the early indicators is that there’s science irritation kick in sooner than you would expect. Like everything’s kind of got a baseline and, and you start to understand what what’s going on. When people operate at a baseline, everybody’s, baseline’s different. But getting that sense of like, oh, you seem more irritable today than usual.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. Yeah,

Ian Cook, Host:

Absolutely. That’s a good observation.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. And, and I think other things that we might take for granted or think are common, right? Like tension in the neck and shoulders feeling tense. Right? Like a lot of times it’s also that anxiety that doesn’t fit like a true generalized anxiety disorder, but you just feel like you’re revved up for the day. Like you’re running on adrenaline. To me, that can be a real like embodied live signal too. That burnout is happening.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah. Yeah. So we dug deep into what burnout is. I think we’ve got some great indicators, some, some sense of how people can identify either in their teams or in theirselves. So we’re gonna take a quick break. And when we come back, we’re gonna discuss how employers can support their employees.

Gabriel Kava, Producer:

How does burnout impact employee’s ability to work and their job satisfaction read Vi’s report the burnout epidemic to learn more about the state of burnout epidemic, why employees aren’t uncomfortable talking to their manager about it and how to use people analytics to understand burnout better, more@viser.com

Ian Cook, Host:

And we’re back. So I’m Ian cook the host of the human truth podcast. Today. I’m joined by Dr. Anella ag Ruiz, and we’re talking about burnout. So we were talking about the signs before we went to break Antonella let’s look at how does an employee, you know, recognize the signs and start to bring ways of managing their own experience of burnout. Burnout is very personal. Everybody’s bar is different, but there have to be some common ways we can recognize it in ourselves and things we can do to look after ourselves.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I think the most useful analogy here is that when that we mentioned around like a bank account in energy withdrawals in deposit. So I think of an employee is able to start to notice like, right, am I feeling extra tired, irritable? Am I having stomach aches or feeling anxiety and then assess your withdrawal in your deposits? And I think giving this language and normalizing it actually allows us to look at it objectively like, oh, this might be a common experience because I’ve been working 10 hour days getting six or five hours of sleep, right. I’m over withdrawn. And then you can adjust. So I think a lot of this conversation comes around boundaries, which I know employees in different setups are gonna have different comfort levels in really implementing those. If that’s taking a break to make sure that you’re getting a walk, making sure that you’ve got protein at every meal, really prioritizing sleep time and turning your blue light off an hour before bed so that you can get adequate sleep and make those deposits. And so for us at peace of mind, we really think and teach people about this deposit withdrawal analogy, cuz it allows us to make an assessment and see where those boundaries need to take place to start to prevent burnout or catch it early, or is gonna be really important in an intense recovery period. If someone’s super crispy, as I describe them, once they’re really burned out,

Ian Cook, Host:

I, I like that description. It’s brilliant. You’re, you’re what you’re suggesting also resonates with some of the things that we found in our survey around flexible work hours. You know, I think sometimes that position is like, oh, that’s so that people can go to the laundromat if they need to or whatever. But I often think flexible work hours actually gives certain types of worker permission to take that 30 minute walk, make the investment back into the energy bank. So when they come back to work, they work with more energy. I, I certainly know when I I’ve worked for myself for many phases, so that that’s kind of being part of my process. Interesting. Kind of link there. So then that takes us to the, the company, man, every interaction between a company and employee, it’s always a two-way street in my mind. So great advice for employees. How do you, what do you think companies could, should, will do to help that management of burnout? Both for the individual and then, you know, more collectively across the population?

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I think there’s probably different levels to this question. I think one, it starts with talking about it, right? Like I think creating avenues where you have normal check-ins and normalized the conversation, a lot of this has been behind a stigma and there’s been this gap in what employees want and what they think their employer is providing. And part of that I think is just having an open conversation. So that might be managers, just checking in and saying like, I’m curious how your energy feels, right? Like it doesn’t necessarily have to be like a really formal mental health question, which I think can feel intimidating to managers and leadership, cuz that feels sensitive and like beyond their capacity. Totally. But it might be like, how do you feel about your energy capacity? Do you feel like you’ve got the resources you need to meet, what’s being asked of you and really listening. So I think that conversation and frequent check-ins so much of our employee employer conversations on this level, I think can be like quarterly or every six months or a year. If someone is experiencing chronic stress and you catch them 12 weeks later, that’s probably too late to make a big difference. Right. We need more frequent check-ins it needs to be a constant conversation. Not like in every hour, like how are you doing? How are you doing right. But it needs to be consistent and not a lot of time lapse in between.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah. That, that makes a lot of sense, man. We we’re seeing that whole element developed within the practice of people analytics, which is more frequent listening and I’m, I’m smiling on the inside cuz it’s like burnout is not a question you ask once a year in an engagement survey that’s right. Kind of the opposite of what you actually need to do. So some really practical advice. I also like the, the other notion I’ve often, you know, I grew up when email was meant to be an asynchronous communication. Like the whole point of doing it in email was that somebody could respond when they wanted to. So I’ve often found with my teams, like if I send you an email, it might be at 10:00 PM. That’s cuz that’s when it’s useful to me, I don’t expect a response at 10:00 PM. I expect you to de respond when it works for you because I’m treating email as a synchronous. And so setting those things as expectations of what does this mean? Cause I think a lot of people treat every communication channel as a demand for an instant response. And I think setting those expectations is, is really important.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Absolutely. And we talk about that internally, right? That like how can we be explicit about expectations? Cuz I think so much gets lost in the like, oh my God, he sent me an email at 10:00 PM. Am I supposed to respond? Now I have to be alert at 10:00 PM. Right? All of those things get in the way of burnout. And so being really explicit around systems and operations and I think companies are gonna have to take a hard look at workload, flexible work schedules, fairness, right? Psychological safety within the workplaces. Those are the bigger buckets that start to implement sort of systemic changes that prevent burnout. Yeah.

Ian Cook, Host:

That makes a lot of sense. Cuz again, if you’re starting to look at, okay, managers are checking in, managers are have enough skill to ask the appropriate questions, recognize the right pieces. Then if you start to like, so as you’re starting to highlight you aggregate that across a business, we say, you know, actually it seems like our level of burnout is going up. We have more people consistently towards that, you know, orange zone, maybe not in the red, but heading towards the orange zone. How, how have you helped clients or how do you recommend organizations roll that into something that’s programmatic as opposed to relying on manager discretion, which has often been how this has run in the past.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I think right now at peace of mind, we’re really concentrated on empowering the individual right in the manager. Right. Sort of the people on the ground in a lot of ways with those resources and pillars that help them make those constant deposits. But that is always in conversation with those organizational things. And I really do think that comes from the C-suite and that leadership in saying, how do we organize ourselves our strategic goals, how we communicate our wellness and wellbeing policies, our healthcare, our paid parental leave, right? These are big institutional questions that the decision makers need to really be informed by burnout. Right? This comes at workload, right? Does our strategic goal cause the workload to be too much for our human capital, then that means we need to change the goal in how we get there respecting the human capacity that we have. Yeah. And so this burnout conversation, even though we, as a company are empowering individuals, our hope is that it calls upon that like other leadership to start to change the systems of how we think, how we do business.

Ian Cook, Host:

Absolutely. You’re again, you’re leading me back into a lot of the, the experiences I had that, that lead me to the passion I have for, for people analytics, cuz I know often people analytics is positioned as like, oh that’s HR tracking HR work. And for me it’s, it’s not, it’s actually tracking the people side of the business. So we, we have a, a large number of organizations who track ours worked and then they wanna associate that with, you know, different managers, different manager, turnover, the depth of, of kind of competence or experience within that population looking at is workload evenly distributed. We have a number of clients who use our recruitment application. One of the constant questions for them is, is the manager giving their best recruiter, all the hardest requisitions to fill. So you, you load up the star performer and, and then you actually erode their capacity to do the great work they want to do. So we, we see a lot of the, see a lot of the, the, again, the, the appreciation around the connection of burnout as an emotional response, but it has many, many impacts down through the, the data within the organization, the workload, the opportunity to deliver it. Well

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Like, yeah, I think there’s like, there’s the practical steps, right? Like if we think about this idea of the four hour work week, right? Yes. Like it will sort of get thrown into the world and people talk about it. But how many companies have implemented the, like the learnings that we have from the four hour work week, right? That’s based on this concept that people are productive for four to six hours that an eight hour Workday then is maybe not the expectation that we should be productive. All of those eight hours. Isn’t true. But we still continue to think hours worked equals productivity. Yeah. And the more hours you work, the better you’re doing, right. We still have yet to dissolve that connection. And I think that’s, what’s gonna ultimately prevent burnout in the long term at a systemic level.

Ian Cook, Host:

Totally. And, and again, being a bit of a stats freak, I’ve seen two different pieces of it, research on this, which substantiate what you’re saying. They both identified 48 hours of productive output over, over a week. One looked at coding and they found that the bug rate after people had been writing code for more than 48 hours in a week, the bug rate increased to the point where it was diminish. They, they weren’t making progress. They were actually going backwards.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. Yeah.

Ian Cook, Host:

They found the same in forestry. They, the injury rate past 48 hours of, of kind of contact time. Again, meant the business went backwards, the cost, the time lost all these things. So, you know, it’s not, everybody’s always 48 hours, but it seemed, I’ve seen evidence sort of building towards this. There is a general window around which, you know, you’re starting to do diminishing returns on actually putting in the time and time is just a really bad measure. Yeah. So now what do you say to things like wellness programs or gym memberships time off policy? Like how should organizations think about those as part of their approach to burnout?

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. So I would say they need to think of those things in the function of a bigger burnout conversation, right? To just say that you’ve given your employees a gym membership and that you’re preventing or recovering from burnout is not accurate because that gym membership one is only gonna prevent burnout. If people are actually using it, that they feel they have the flexibility to use it. And that on the other end, they’re not so overworked that it’s a benefit to go and exercise, right? Like if you have a gym membership, but you’re still working 16 hours a day, that is not going to prevent burnout or curb burnout. Yeah. So I think those wellness apps need to be almost like the secondary thing, right? Like they’re the cherry on top to real foundational systems of how people work, how strategy is communicated, how expectations are communicated, flexibility, fair fairness in pay, parental leave, like the things that give people really autonomous quality of life in the workplace. And then you add those things on, as these are other things that you can do in order to continue to deposit into your own energy capacity, but they don’t replace a burnout strategy.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yeah. I, I love the holistic view cuz I, I can almost hear the employee say, yeah, I got a gym membership. I’d love to use it. If only I had enough people on the team that meant I didn’t have to do overtime all the time. That’s the it’s thinking about the, do we have enough people serving the right areas in order to, to move these things forward? Yeah.

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

Yeah. Great. And a lot of what we’ve seen in surveys too, like during the pandemic is that employees wanna see this modeled. I think it’s worth mentioning that it feels really uncomfortable to exert your own boundaries and go to the gym in the middle of the day. If nobody else on your team, in your leadership, isn’t doing that right. There can be that internal voice of like you’re real high maintenance, right? Nobody else is doing this. Are you gonna be lazy? Are you productive enough? But if you see your manager do that, if you see his manager do that, right. Take the break and get the walkin in the middle of the day. Then it normalizes the behavior and you’ve changed culture. And that’s what we wanna do is we wanna change the culture of work.

Ian Cook, Host:

Yes. Yeah. Cuz the, the fixes to normalize the behavior you expect so that people have the chance to look after themselves. That makes absolute sense. So we’ve covered a lot. We’ve got a lot of good ideas. I think it’s a great place to wrap up. There’s there’s no doubt we could talk forever on yeah. Side since your, again, your expertise and your passion is, is very, very, what’s it called transfers to others really well missing my words today. So we’ll wrap it up. So thanks for listening to today’s podcast. We’ve been talking about burnout. Anella do you have any last words for us?

Dr. Antonella Aguilera-Ruiz:

I think just that burnout is real and I hope people really take this analogy of deposits and withdrawals into their own life and speak up when they see it and that managers feel comfortable broaching the subject and opening up the conversation. And thank you for having me.

Ian Cook, Host:

No fantastic advice. So thank you doctor Antonella Aguilera Ruiz. Who’s a co-founder of peace of mind and I’m sure you’re gonna want to check out her work. You can find that at peaceofmind.us. So I’m your host Ian Cook. We’ll be back next time. Discussing another workforce statistic.

Gabriel Kava, Producer:

Thanks for joining this episode of the human truth podcast presented by Viser more links and information presented on today’s. So are at viser.com/podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts, the human truth podcast is brought to you by Viser, whose mission is to reveal the human truth that helps businesses and employees win together. Today’s episode was produced by Sarah Gonzales with technical production by Gabriel Kava. Grace Shepphard is our assistant producer and all podcast related image on our website and social work created by Taylor Kunkel. See you next time.