The reason your best employees are struggling (and the neuroscience-backed solutions)

Ethan Kross (00:00):

Mental fitness for your employees is not just a luxury item. It is essential for the health, vitality and ultimately the performance of your organization.

Jennifer Moss (00:14):

I think that we are afraid of what we might learn and instead it should be I’m excited to learn. If we can pull that into this next era of work, we’ll move from the great detachment to the great engagement.

Hannah Beaver (00:31):

You are listening to How To Make a Leader, a leadership development podcast from Big Think+, where we take the best ideas from the biggest minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hannah Beaver. According to the American Psychological Association’s latest workplace survey, a whopping eight in 10 workers feel stressed at work with most saying that it’s leaving them feeling completely drained. This may be you, and as you know, burnout feels like more than a buzzword. So whether you’re feeling the impact yourself or beginning to notice warning signs on your team, this episode is for you. I brought together two powerhouse experts for a deep dive into the burnout epidemic. I’m very excited to welcome Dr. Ethan Kross and Jennifer Moss onto the podcast today.

(01:24):

Ethan is a neuroscientist and psychologist at the University of Michigan where he runs the emotion and self-control laboratory. He’s also the author of the bestselling books Chatter and Shift. If you ever wondered what’s really happening in your brain when stress goes from motivating to debilitating, Ethan’s going to break down the science for us in a way that actually makes sense.

(01:48):

Joining him is Jennifer Moss, who is a workplace wellness expert and author of bestselling books, The Burnout Epidemic, Why Are We Here, and Unlocking Happiness at Work. Jennifer has advised companies all around the world, such as Google, Kraft Heinz, and TD Bank on creating those healthier workplace cultures.

(02:10):

In this episode, Ethan gives us the why behind burnout while Jennifer delivers the how and will give us some practical strategies and solutions that leaders can implement today and tomorrow to turn things around. We’ll learn why your team’s mental chatter matters, why traditional wellness approaches fall short, and which leadership practices actually transform workplace wellbeing. Ethan, from a scientific perspective, what exactly happens in our brains and our bodies when we experience prolonged workplace stress?

Ethan Kross (02:46):

Well, the negative effects of prolonged workplace stress can manifest themselves differently in different people, but they tend to hit three domains of life that I think most of us care a lot about. So first, your ability to think and perform. So one of the things that happens with stress in particular, when we become stressed out over specific issue like a boss or a job or other life circumstances, that tends to consume our attention and that can be really problematic because our attention is a limited commodity, so we only have so much of it that we can dole out at any given moment in time, and so chronic stress consumes that limited attention, leaving very little leftover to allow us to do the things that we want and need to do. It can also feel really depleting. So my guess, and you could tell me if I’m wrong, please tell me if I’m wrong, when you’ve experienced, when you’ve been really stressed out about a deadline or a boss, has it ever made it hard for you to focus on other facets of your job?

Hannah Beaver (03:51):

Definitely. Captain Brown.

Ethan Kross (03:53):

Right? That is the issue here. The issue is sometimes when I’m really stressed out about something, I want to read a book for fun, but I open up the book and I’m reading the words, but I don’t remember anything I’ve read because my mind, my attention in particular is zoomed in on the stress. Now, if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense why we have that default response because when things are important to us and we often experience stress over things that are meaningful to us, we focus on that because we want to deal with the source of that concern, but sometimes we just can’t come to a solution right away, and that can be tremendously depleting. So that’s one negative consequence of prolonged stress. Another thing is that this can infiltrate your relationships with other people, and that’s related to our attention, right? You go to sit down with someone else at the dinner table, you want to be there for them, you really want to be present and engaged, but you are anything but present because your mind is somewhere else. You could see how that can create friction.

(04:59):

It also leads us to become more irritable. And then finally, there’s our health and wellbeing. I don’t know about you, but I do not like feeling chronically stressed. It doesn’t feel good subjectively right? I’m tired, I’m fatigued. I don’t feel like myself. I don’t have the energy I often bring to life if I’m keyed up. Sometimes I can be anxious about things and then I can get sad because I’m so anxious. When will this end? So subjectively it feels really bad, but we know it also gets under the skin to impact people’s physical health. You’re devoting all of these resources to essentially being vigilant for a threat on the horizon. So you’re in this fight or flight like response, which if that happens for a short period of time, that’s okay, but if that fight or flight response is chronically activated, that’s exerting wear and tear in your body that has been linked to all sorts of negative physical health conditions. So thinking and performance, relationships, health and wellbeing, chronic stress impacts them all.

Hannah Beaver (06:03):

I’d love to hear you talk more about your research on emotional regulation and how have you seen chronic workplace stress manifest in people’s internal dialogue or what you call chatter?

Ethan Kross (06:16):

So the two big sources of chatter, and I use the term chatter, refer to this process of getting stuck in a negative thought loop about something important to you. So if it’s a chatter about the past, we tend to call that rumination. You’re just turning and experience, oh, what should I do? What should I do? Why did I do this? Why didn’t I do this? And you’re not making any forward progress. If it’s chatter about the present or future, we often call that worry or we say someone’s perseverating, common ideas, you’re looping, you’re not making progress. Work is a huge source of chatter for a lot of people. It’s basically like work, relationships, health. Those are three big, big elicits of chatter. We spend more time at work than we do typically doing any other thing. Most of our time is spent at work, our identity is wrapped up in our work oftentimes.

(07:05):

Other people are telling us what to do. We have bosses. So work can be a huge chatter propellant. It’s why I think it’s so incredibly important for people to understand, number one, that chatter is a human universal we all experience at times, but then number two, there are things you could do to manage it. There are science-based tools that exist. Some of these are things you could do on your own. There are relationship tools that you can muster. There are environmental tools. There are so many different options for getting support, and what I really find to be a missed opportunity is that we don’t get these tools to people in a structured way.

Hannah Beaver (07:47):

I’d be curious if you could dig in a little bit more around what neurological changes occur when we are consistently overworked. So that feeling of burnout and chronic stress that we’re seeing. Can you talk to us a little bit about what happens to our brain function, our decision-making ability, our emotional processing?

Ethan Kross (08:07):

What’s happening in the brain can be pretty complex. We do tend to see heightened levels of activity in a network of brain regions involved in thinking about the self. We call it self-referential processing. So there’s this increased activation of that network that you can really think about as underlying this tendency to zoom in narrowly on the problem at hand. And when we zoom in narrowly, we stop seeing the bigger picture. Now that has obvious implications for judgment and decision-making, right? So sometimes we can think a lot more locally than globally. We’re living right now through turbulent times. There are lots of things happening in our world and not to in any way diminish the significance of what’s happening in our world right now, but I was just having a conversation the other day with someone who said, this is the worst it has ever been.

(09:01):

Well, is that actually true? Or if we zoom out, can we find other times where things were likewise challenging? And if we can, might we be able to learn from those periods in time to figure out how to navigate the present more skillfully? So from a decision-making point of view, we tend to zoom in narrowly, and that sometimes makes it challenging for us to learn from past experiences and other people. Another thing that often happens when we’re in this kind of self-focused stress mode is that we start processing information through a type of threat, tainted pair of sunglasses. And what I mean by that is when you’re in threat mode, which we often are when we are chronically stressed, all of a sudden we start seeing threats all around us and sometimes in ambiguous situations. So it’s almost like this experience we have is now tuning us more towards the negative side of life, which of course can then perpetuate our stress even further.

(10:03):

That’s oftentimes where having another point of view to kind of shake you and say, Hey, let’s look at this a little bit more objectively, can be so incredibly helpful. But the problem is we tend to lean into this response too hard. It’s like the pendulum is swinging in the direction of threat detection, but it swings too far and all of a sudden we’re in the middle of a war torn country, and that’s when you want to be able to bring it back. These emotional responses that we possess, all of them, the capacity to experience stress, anger, negative, anxiety, sadness, whatever you want, these are adaptive responses. Typically when they are triggered in the right proportions, the problem is they often aren’t triggered proportionally, we experience these emotions too intensely or for too long, and that is when we want to intervene. So when we’re talking about chronic stress or phenomena like burnout, which we often hear a lot about nowadays, we want to reign that in so we can get on with our lives.

Hannah Beaver (11:08):

I’m curious if in your lab, have you identified any environmental factors or specific workplace conditions that consistently undermine our brain’s ability to manage stress effectively?

Ethan Kross (11:22):

Oh yes. So let’s say you came to me and said, hey, Ethan, and you’re a super villain from a James Bond movie. I want you to create a situation of massive stress for my organization. What would I do? Well, I would make a situation, I would strip away all control from employees. They have no agencies, nothing they can do to modify the situation, and I would make it totally uncertain what would happen next.

(11:55):

Uncertainty and a lack of control. These are two building blocks, igniting agents, if you will, for chatter. We human beings, we crave certainty and control. Why? We like to know that the world is predictable and orderly. When a world is predictable and orderly, that is a safe world. That is a world that we can step out of our homes, go into the office, and we don’t have to devote much of our precious, limited attentional resources to making sure that I’m not going to cross a trip wire here that might blow me up. And that’s a comfortable kind of environment to be in. So you strip away that comfort by adding uncertainty and no control, and now all of a sudden you are turning, turning on people’s chatter machines and now they’re craving ordering control and oftentimes they do things that are self damaging to regain it.

Hannah Beaver (13:06):

Jennifer, welcome to the How to Make a Leader podcast. We are very excited to have you today.

Jennifer Moss (13:11):

I’m so thrilled to be here. I think this is going to be a great conversation.

Hannah Beaver (13:15):

Well, I’m really looking forward to it, and I think this topic is certainly one that everyone is interested in can relate to. So I’d love to talk about The Burnout Epidemic. Your book, which you published in 2021, which obviously was a very pivotal time post-COVID world workplaces drastically shifted. I’m curious to know, what have you seen has shifted the most since you published that book? If you had to write that book again, what were some of the key themes that you had bring up and call out today?

Jennifer Moss (13:46):

Well, I think there’s been so much that has changed as far as the adoption of the word. It’s become ubiquitous, and I started writing about burnout. I’ve been writing for the Harvard Business Review for a long time now, and my first book was Unlocking Happiness at Work. It was really about psychological fitness, but it was also about the habits we have to build in cultures to increase happiness. And then put this article out that was Burnout is About Your Workplace, Not Your People, which became the third most read article on HBR for maybe all time. People were already feeling so validated by that because they’ve been told that to solve for burnout is just with self-care. So all the books have been about breathing and taking baths, and I’m rewriting this book. And so then what happened is in the pandemic it…like any crisis does, it just explodes existing problems. And then everyone’s talking about burnout and burnout now is being measured and discussed, and we’re seeing wellbeing programming, targeting burnout, and thinking about burnout. On one hand, we’re talking about it and we’re investing and trying to fix it, but on the other hand, we haven’t really moved the needle on burnout. Actually this year, Mercer Trends reports said that it’s the highest they’ve seen. 81% are at risk of burnout this year, which is higher than peak pandemic. So we obviously have a long way to go in actually addressing the root causes of burnout.

Hannah Beaver (15:19):

Today, 2025. Why are people so dissatisfied at work?

Jennifer Moss (15:24):

We have a few things that’s happened when isn’t that we just had the future of work going in the trajectory that it normally would. I say we’ve actually jumped a timeline. We’re in a new universe of work because this massive cataclysmic thing, the pandemic shifted that it disrupted that, but then other things came after that we’re in poly crisis, so it’s a cluster of crises that make each crisis worse. So the pandemic started it, but then we have climate anxiety, really big shifts around that in the last few years. We have AI acceleration, which has put a big stress on people. We have a new frame of reference. We went from 4% of the global workforce to 37% working remotely. I mean, so you can’t unwind that memory. And I think the big one word answer is that leaders right now, especially the C-suite, are from a different generation around leading and the frameworks that they used to rely on, that’s what they’re still using because that’s very comfortable and it’s fair.

(16:23):

That’s how they were professionally raised. So to have to pivot on the way that you’ve worked and led for 30 some or more years, that’s difficult. But we need new frameworks so people are feeling a disengaged because they’re different and things still feel very much the same, but even worse, it feels like that had my freedom, I had autonomy. You invested in DEI, now you’re clawing that back, you invested in wellbeing, now you’re clawing that back. You let me have agency to be able to work from wherever and now you’re clawing that back. And so there’s a real distrust in leaders who are also not meeting the moment. You have people just in a state of ennui and disengagement, and they just really feel like a lot of people are just saying, what’s the point? Or why titled the book, Why Are We Here? That is that existential question is just, it’s across the global workforce right now.

Hannah Beaver (17:28):

If you are a leader thinking about a greater sense of certainty and stability within the workplace, keeping in mind those very turbulent external factors that are occurring in the world right now, what are some of the steps that you would take to create a workspace that can manage and create that feeling of certainty and giving back some initiative and some control to employees? Any small steps?

Ethan Kross (17:53):

There are many steps we can take to help other people, and if you’re in a leadership position, I think a lot of resources should be devoted to affecting the culture of your organization because culture is one of the most powerful tools for enhancing your organization’s mental fitness. How does this work? Well, I think of culture. It’s like the air we breathe. It is all around us, and we know that the air we breathe, what we inhale, has direct implications for how our bodies and minds function. So when you go to organizational culture, what does that even mean? First, it means what are the values and beliefs of this organization? Many organizations that I’ve interacted with are still characterized by more old school beliefs that like, Hey, emotions, they don’t actually matter. This just noise focus on your job. We know definitively that this is not true.

(18:48):

Nowadays, we know for certain that chronic stress chatter has direct implications for thinking and performance, employee satisfaction, and a list of other outcomes that are directly relevant to organizational success. So what are the values and beliefs of this organization when it comes to mental fitness? Do we care about your ability to skillfully manage emotions? Do we want to privilege those capacities? If so, we need to back that up. And so another thing that culture does is culture gives us tools to support its values and beliefs. It gives us practices, right? So leaders are in a position to disseminate what we know about. How do you manage an emotion effectively? What are the things you could do on your own? What are the best practices for managing emotions in teams? Can you catch an emotion? Does it matter how you show up, not just for you but for other people?

(19:44):

What the hell does it need to experience? Emotional contagion, scientific phenomenon, we catch emotions from other people within milliseconds. So as a leader, you’re in a position to start disseminating this knowledge, these tools to your direct reports and their direct reports and your employees to help raise the collective emotional agility, if you will, of your organization as a leader. You’re also in a prime position to model those capacities for those who are looking up to you, which is everyone in that organization, so you can create new norms. My best advice for organizations and leaders is to not wait for their employees to succumb to chatter and stress and then in a reactive manner start trying to do damage control to get them tools. What you want to do is build that muscle, that mental fitness muscle ahead of time so when things begin to go sideways, your team knows exactly what to do. I love the analogy here to physical fitness. I think it is completely uncontroversial to say that we all agree that being physically fit is really important for health and wellbeing. We don’t just go to the gym and learn how to become physically fit, learn how to use all the machines, which if you’ve never stepped into a gym, take some time to figure out what machines to use and how to use them to meet your goals. Best practice is not to wait until you have a heart attack and then start exercising.

(21:16):

Best practice? Start exercising earlier. Learn how to use the tools, figure out what works well for you, figure out how you do it with other people so that you are buffered against those negative outcomes. Same principles apply to mental fitness for guarding against experiences like burnout and the trillion dollar hit that we experience in the global economy as a result of anxiety and depression due to lost productivity at work.

Hannah Beaver (21:44):

What might that look like in practice?

Ethan Kross (21:47):

Well, what it looks like in practice is being open about the fact that sometimes a leader themself experiences some chatter. You yourself are not immune to this. That tiny bit of vulnerability that does two things. A, it humanizes you as a leader, makes you more likable. B, it basically makes it clear that this is just how human beings work. This is something we sometimes have to deal with. It doesn’t mean we don’t have to show up to do our job. What it means though is, alright, if this is something that we’re all going to have to deal with at times, let’s get our employees the best possible resources that we know of to help them do that well. And so it means talking about what are the things that you do to manage your chatter to stay mentally fit, share those practices with other people, really don’t shy away from talking about these issues.

Hannah Beaver (22:43):

I really like that. Could you talk to me about the concept of mental time travel and how that can help manage current workplace stress?

Ethan Kross (22:54):

Yeah, mental time travel is one of my favorite tools for managing chatter. It’s really effective for all sorts of chatter, including workplace stress. There are two ways you can do it. One thing you can do is when you’re dealing with something that feels really challenging, ask yourself, how are you going to feel about this experience next week, next month, five years from now, 10 years from now? Scientifically we call this temporal distancing. Mental time travel’s a little bit easier to stomach, but here’s what happens when you do that. You transport yourself into the future and instantly a set of thoughts become accessible in your mind, which is, oh, this may suck, but it will eventually pass. That gives you hope. It shows that what you’re dealing with is temporary, it’s not permanent, and that tends to turn the volume on our chatter down. You can also time travel into the past, so this works a little bit differently.

(23:54):

So when things feel really challenging for me, I get in my time travel machine, I go back to 19 41, 42 Eastern Europe. I spend time with my grandparents who had just had their family slaughtered by the Nazis and were fleeing the ones who were after them and when they were homeless for several years, went to ghettos and lived in the woods, and I don’t have to spend a whole lot of time with them before. My perspective is dramatically shifted because now I’m thinking to myself, wow, yeah, what you’re dealing with now, Ethan May not be fun, but it’s a heck of a lot better than just losing your entire family and being homeless and not knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow for years. That’s a huge perspective shifter. You do not need to have grandparents who survive the holocaust to do that. We all have experiences of our own that we’ve gotten through adversity or we know people who have or we can clinging to stories from our cultures that provide us with those kinds of experiences to compare our current circumstances against. That’s mental time travel into the past. Those are two super simple tools that people can use. They’re backed up by lots of science. What I love about them is they’re easy to use if you know how to use them.

Hannah Beaver (25:23):

That’s great. I want to touch on one more tool that you talk about a lot, and that is the WOOP framework. So how can we apply the WOOP framework in the workplace when we’re feeling negative emotions?

Ethan Kross (25:37):

There’s been a lot of research that’s been devoted to helping figure out why we generally falter when we try to achieve our goals in life, and WOOP is a summary of how to help people address this issue. So WOOP is an acronym, and what it does is it breaks down goal pursuit into a few different stages. Let me just walk you through it and if by the way, you ever forget what this is, just think of the song, right? Like whoop, there it is. It’s actually WOOP, but think, whoop, right? So the W is wish. What’s your goal? I want to be more emotionally present and calm when my kids start fighting with each other. Okay, that’s my goal. Very clear. It’s the W is the wish. Now we get to the first O. That’s the outcome. What’s the outcome that will follow? Well, I’ll feel better about myself as a dad and I’ll have a more cohesive, tighter, stronger family.

(26:39):

Now, the purpose of this second step focusing on the outcome, it’s really to energize the person around pursuing their goal. You want to get the motivation going like, okay, this really matters to me. Okay, then we get to the second O, which is the obstacle. What are the personal obstacles that might get in the way of you achieving this goal and the good outcomes that might follow? Well, sometimes when I see my kids fighting, I get this automatic response. I feel like hot under the collar, blood rushes to my head and I want to engage and just yell and do things to correct their behavior. And I know long-term it’s not good, but it’s just hard to control myself in those situations. So now we have identified the potential problem, the obstacle. Then we get to the final layer of the WOOP, which is the P, which is a plan, but it’s not on any kind of plan.

(27:32):

It’s a specific kind of plan called an if-then plan. So what you do is you think about if the obstacle occurs. If I start getting really emotional and I start to want to yell because I see my kids finding it then and you plug in the tool you’re going to use, then I’m going to use distance self-talk to give my advice and mental time travel to put this in perspective, and then you rehearse that plan a few times. If this happens, then I do this. If this happens, then I do this. What you’re trying to do with that final layer of WOOP is create an automatic response. You’re pairing a specific situation to a specific action. So it’s kind of like when I wake up in the morning when my wife’s alarm clock goes off, I automatically get up and I go to the bathroom and I brush my teeth. I don’t have to think about what I can do, what I should do. There are lots of options that exist. I know if this happens, then I do that. So we’re trying to create an automatic link between a context. If my kids fight, then I do this. What that does is the promise there. The hope is that we make motion regulation automatic and easy and lots of research shows that can be helpful for doing precisely that.

Hannah Beaver (28:51):

That’s great. I appreciate that breakdown. So if you’re a leader and someone on your team or that you work with is clearly going through feelings of chronic stress, what can you do to help them?

Ethan Kross (29:03):

There are basically two things you want to do. Step one is you want to learn about the issue. Give the person an opportunity to express what they’re going through. You’re in listening mode here, and the purpose of this is you want to allow the person to get it out, which is important as a first step. You want to validate what they’re going through. There’s nothing wrong with you. Anyone would be in this situation would feel this way. That’s validating, it’s normalizing, it’s establishing empathic connections between two people that make it a lot easier to have tough conversations. It’s a safe context if visual. So step one is to just listen, and then step two is once you have a good read on the situation, now you have the opportunity to start working with the person to broaden their perspective. Ultimately, we need to do that because we need to get the person to a solution so they can reach closure and move on.

(30:03):

But there’s a pathway for getting to that point, this process of being a good emotional or chatter advisor, if you will, to someone else. It often breaks down in two ways. Some people think that the best way to support someone else is just to let them vent their emotions, just get it out. We know that that can be really useful for strengthening the connections between people, the bonds, but typically people then leave those conversations feeling really good about the person that they just spoke to. It feels good about their relationship, but they’re just as upset because all they’ve done is just rehashed all of their angst. So just listening is often not the best route. The flip side is other people think, and this is very common in workplace context, you come to me with a problem, let’s keep it not emotional, just jump into advice giving mode. This can have the unfortunate effect of really alienating the person who’s suffering. You come off as cold and insensitive. And so step one, relate. Let them talk, validate, normalize. Step two, let’s look at this bigger picture and try to find a solution. That is the two-step process to being a great advisor to someone else.

Jennifer Moss (31:16):

A lot of leaders are feeling frustrated by the resistance or that it’s led to further disengagement. I write about it in this chapter that I think is one of my favorite to write. It was about freedom and I talk about the neuroscience of freedom and just how deeply wired our sense of protecting our freedom is. And so we’ll fight at great personal risk to hold onto it even if we don’t necessarily know what we’re fighting for, but we know it’s freedom. And so that’s where we’re seeing a lot of resistance. Employers need to have a better discussion about why they’re bringing people back. And here’s the main, I think crux is that all the data points to hybrid from a pure capitalist standpoint is the most effective hybrid where you go into work and you’re repeating the same behaviors as you would at home where you’re just going in and it feels arbitrary.

(32:13):

You’re doing the exact same work as you could be doing at home. You’re side by side on Zoom meetings. All you’re doing is in video conferencing meeting all day. It feels like you’re just going there to save the office and you’re not going for any real reason. That’s leading to cohesion. We really should be focusing on thinking about how we can look at flexibility as not just where but how we work when we work with whom we work. So changing the concept of flexibility, giving autonomy to people to make those choices, and also when we’re in the office not replicating the experience of home, it has to be that we’re using this for moments that matter. Microsoft does a good job where it’s onboarding or it’s a big project that they want to cross the line with. They’re working together, they’re collaborating, their meetings are in person together, and then they can have that time to be at home and do the things that you want to do heads down, and it’s 50% time, so it’s not dealing with commute don’t have to be there from eight to six or nine to five. It’s in core hours, and I think that we have to start thinking about the office in a very different way, and again, leaders need to rethink their frameworks of what the office looks like.

Hannah Beaver (33:24):

You’ve worked with leadership teams at large enterprises to measure wellbeing, so what metrics do you find to be the most valuable for accurately assessing organizational culture and workplace wellbeing?

Jennifer Moss (33:38):

It’s critical to be asking people about their workload management and workload is the number one cause of burnout across the board. There’s a lot of things that are multilayered, so it’s not just workload you’re dealing with usually when it comes to these issues, it’s the culture is also adding all of these other aspects of the lack of hygiene just because of this mentality around workload. We’re even hearing Sergey Brin from Google is just talking about this AI team, how they should be working 60 hours or more per week. The whole point of AI is that it’s supposed to be saving time and it’s supposed to be giving us our time back. There’s such an irony there that this team that’s supposed to be building efficient products are actually working in inefficiently, and so I think that we have to do a better job of just really measuring for how are people’s workload, how do they perceive their workload is going to improve over the next three months.

(34:42):

When you look at these sort of predictive analytics, you can see where people are in their risk of attrition or burnout. If people feel like in three months it’s never going to get any better, then you know that they feel a sense of cynicism and hopelessness about this culture changing. But in some places, you ask a teacher in June, if it’s going to be better in three months, they’ll say yes because they know it’s compressed workload. You see this with tax time for accountants, you know that they see, okay, this is just working on a project. As soon as we get this project out, I’ll have rest time and my employer cares about that. It’s when people feel like they’re always working, they’re always on. There’s a level of toxic productivity that they’re celebrated for burning out, then that’s how we can measure where we’re at. We have to be looking just at people’s sense of psychological safety. Do they feel like they’re safe to be able to speak up? Do they feel like that there’s turn-taking in meetings so everyone gets a chance to speak? Do they feel like there’s microaggressions or there’s bias that’s making them feel othered? Talking to the root causes, you’re measuring the root causes, and if you align the data to that, then you can map out a plan based on what you learn.

Hannah Beaver (35:55):

And from a practical standpoint, what does that look like? So if the example of measuring the level of psychological safety that people feel at work, is that in an employee engagement survey? Is that on a team-based level? If there’s managers listening to this conversation, is this something that they can measure themselves? What would that look like in practice?

Jennifer Moss (36:17):

So I’m not a huge fan of looking back surveys. I think that getting a one-time understanding of your employees is going to give you false data. You never know if someone shows up and they just had an argument with their spouse or they had a bad commute or very little reasons that make people frustrated these days. So they’re helpful in getting big aggregate data, but I think you’re better to be looking at pulse surveys, but you should always be getting qualitative feedback. So you should be asking open-ended questions as well, because those themes, that qualitative data is actually the most compelling. And I’ve have case studies where that qualitative data has been the golden nugget of learning, but managers should be given permission to have the ability to be asking and intervening and asking and intervening. For example, you are feeling like your staff are stressed.

(37:13):

It’s likely inefficiencies, probably meeting fatigue right now or something like that. Just maybe it’s AI anxiety, whatever that is you want to ask. And then you want to be able to be empowered to try an intervention. Maybe it’s reducing our meetings by 10% for the next month and then we’ll go to 15% reduction the following month. And then you’re measuring pre how do people feel from their level of job satisfaction or whatever you care about. Is it retention? Is it just burnout? And then ask again in two months how people are feeling, making sure that people feel like they can answer anonymously. And then while that’s happening, you’re building a non-work related, which means you’re asking what let you up this week? You’re learning about signs of motivation, language of motivation, what stressed you out? So it might take six months before someone’s really vulnerable and says, actually, this is stressing me out, but it’s consistency and frequency and never losing the integrity of that, meaning that builds trust. So you’re building trust and then you’re asking, what can we do to make next week easier? What can we do for each other to make next week easier? That’s you gathering the gray area data. That’s you having small wins, that’s making people feel hopeful, that’s building trust. And over time you will see a real shift in morale. You’ll see a shift in trust. It’s not hard, but it is about proving that you’re there and you’re going to ask that question every week and that you care. It’s not hard, it’s just…it’s intentional.

Hannah Beaver (38:47):

Do you have an example of a case study of a company that’s really thriving in creating a positive workplace culture or better yet, has maybe transformed their culture from a struggling culture into a very positive place for employees?

Jennifer Moss (39:02):

The Deloitte Wellbeing Wizards, and there’s 5,000 of them, and a lot of what they do is just time saved for people. People will say, I know how to fix that, and it’s so strong because it isn’t just programming or an ERG that sort of sits on its own and separate. It’s really there to solve business problems that create burnout. Anytime you can have someone like Google does a really good job of peer training. So someone is really smart in a certain area and they hire some of the most brilliant people in the world, and so they give them the opportunity to say, oh, you’re having these issues. I can give you a practical way of talking about it, and it’s very much like peer support, peer mentorship, but you can go to these ad hoc classes that they have there where someone that’s a genius is just telling you, here are some practical ways of thinking about this tool or this technology. And it’s really well received. People like learning from their peers and they’re much more likely to adopt or be enthusiastic about something if they’re learning it from a coworker versus it being some sort of training that feels like it doesn’t connect to their culture or the language that they use.

Hannah Beaver (40:18):

What is today’s answer to workplace wellbeing?

Ethan Kross (40:22):

I think there’s more recognition of the importance of workplace wellbeing than certainly any other point in my adult life, and that’s a huge giant step of progress. The problem is people don’t really know how best to solve this puzzle of workplace wellbeing. So you have a lot of companies who are devoting resources to do it by getting app subscriptions for their employees or giving them flexible accounts to just develop personally in different ways. I think the answer is a lot simpler and direct. We know what the tools are. We have identified lots of different tools, are dozens of them for helping people manage their emotions while according to science. You’ve got to give people those tools in a structured way, expose them to those tools, and then you want to guide them through the process of self experimenting to figure out what tools work best for them given the unique context that they operate in. So we need to guide people as they find those optimal combinations for yourself. I think that is the key to workplace wellbeing.

Jennifer Moss (41:29):

Really cool research by Herzberg. He talks about the two-factor theory of hygiene motivation and what I think the basis of a lot of how I think about work and how I think about how we can improve wellbeing in a real, authentic, sustainable way. And it’s looking at the fact that these two things work in different continuums and hygiene or the table stake stuff. We need to feel like when you look at those six root causes of burnout, these are systems design flaw issues. It’s unmanageable workload, it’s lack of community, so loneliness, lack of autonomy, freedom being taken away, it’s lack of fairness. So injustice or arbitrary decisions that are made going against data and just making those decisions. It’s lack of fair pay. So equitable pay, people are taking on roles of leadership and they’re sandwiched and they don’t know what they’re doing, but they’re forced because of lack of resources and mismatched values.

(42:32):

You see that with doctors and nurses and teachers. Why we’re seeing these jobs that should be lifelong jobs, having the highest level of attrition at five years now because you thought you were going to be doing something meaningful and purposeful, you’re going to save lives or educate children and that value has been missing. So those are the upstream issues that we need to tackle before we can optimize with wellness. We got to deal with the hygiene. We need to make sure that those six root causes are being addressed and then we can optimize. But the huge amount of investment is going to those downstream programming and everyone’s kind of scratching their head like, why isn’t this working? I put millions of dollars into these wellbeing programs and I don’t know why they’re working. Well, because it’s tone deaf and you’re trying to invest in a resiliency exercise for people. There’s resiliency trainings, but then people have to take their work home and work in their pajamas at 11 o’clock at night because you force them to take an hour to be more resilient. And I think that that’s where we’re seeing the huge disconnect between what wellness downstream is looking like and really improving wellbeing, which is the hygiene.

Hannah Beaver (43:47):

What single cultural shift do you think would make the biggest positive impact on employee happiness and engagement right now?

Ethan Kross (43:56):

Well, I think it goes back to what we talked about before. It really involves defining cultures that recognize the importance of these concepts and that communicate the belief that mental fitness, wellbeing, I’m using those terms somewhat interchangeably here actually matters. And then it’s a culture that starts giving people those tools. Let me draw another reference to physical fitness. It’s all relevant right now. You’d be hard pressed to find any student in an elementary school, even before kindergarten that doesn’t have some kind of physical fitness class. It wasn’t always like that in the states. This happened in the early 18 hundreds. But we have recognized culturally that managing our physical health matters so much so that it is just, it’s in the water. This is what you teach kids how to be physically fit, and that is hopefully a habit that stays with them throughout the course of their lives. And the data linking physical fitness to health and wellbeing is incontrovertible. That is the kind of cultural shift I think we need when it comes to mental fitness, valuing the importance of understanding how to manage our emotions and giving people exposure to tools and training, so the time kids are little kids all the way through the lifespan at colleges, in organizations and beyond.

Jennifer Moss (45:17):

The first thing that leaders need to consider is that we spent 550 years with the office leading up to 2020. We’ve had five years in this social global experiment and we don’t know what we’re doing yet. And the idea that we’ve built some sort of framework or we really know what’s going on. I get that we want to have that certainty, but the more we’re able to be agile and nimble and open to learning and really taking this as a learning opportunity, then I think that’s which companies will be transformational. Being open to developing a whole new rethink of work instead of trying to get back to some new normal, we don’t need a new normal. It wasn’t really working in the first place, so let’s use this as an opportunity. I think really smart, amazing leaders, which I’ve run into many times in this journey. There’s a lot of them out there that are thinking, okay, this is a huge opportunity for me as a leader to do something really incredible. And I think that’s what’s going to create optimism and hopefulness and excitement if you are in partnership with your employees instead of in this polarization, us and them. And I think if you start there with humility, you’ll go really far.

Hannah Beaver (46:40):

If leaders could take away just one actionable insight from our conversation today, what would you want that to be?

Ethan Kross (46:47):

Mental fitness for your employees is not just a luxury item. It is essential for the health, vitality, and ultimately the performance of your organization. So whatever metric you care about, whether it is simply the bottom line productivity or having a workforce that is engaged and happy to show up every day, you really need to pay attention to mental fitness in order to achieve those kinds of outcomes.

Jennifer Moss (47:18):

Just ask. I think that we are afraid of what we might learn, and instead it should be, I’m excited to learn and I can’t wait to learn. Changing the narrative of asking and creating lots of different inputs and opportunities for people to have feedback. Lots of single upward downward feedback. Creating spaces where there’s meetings that you check in, making sure that we’re also doing big data gathering, we’re asking qualitative feedback, but it’s just about focusing on a culture of learning and curiosity. And I think if we can do that, if we can pull that into this next era of work, I think we’ll move from the great detachment to the great engagement.

Hannah Beaver (48:06):

Thanks for listening. For more from both our guests, check out the show notes where we’ve linked their websites, books, and LinkedIn pages. For more from How to Make a Leader, please hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back next month and every month with more insights from another L&D expert. We’ll catch you next time as we learn How to Make a Leader.

Nearly 8 out of 10 workers feel stressed at work, and most say it’s leaving them completely drained. If you’re seeing warning signs on your team or feeling the impact yourself, this deep dive into the burnout epidemic will give you the science-backed strategies you need.

Dr. Ethan Kross, neuroscientist at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter and Shift, breaks down what’s actually happening in your brain when stress feels debilitating. Jennifer Moss, workplace wellness expert and author of Why Are We Here? and The Burnout Epidemic, shares the organizational strategies that companies like Google and TD Bank use to transform their workplace cultures.

Together, they deliver both the “why” behind burnout and the “how” to fix it, giving you actionable frameworks to implement immediately. 

You’ll learn:
– The science behind burnout and brain function
– Case studies from Deloitte, Google and TD Bank on how they’re improving workplace culture
– Introduction to the WOOP framework to help employees build resilience
– The leadership practices that genuinely transform team mental fitness and engagement

Things to listen for:
(00:00) Introducing Dr. Ethan Kross and Jennifer Moss
(01:24) The science behind stress and burnout in the workplace
(03:51) How chronic stress affects focus and performance
(06:03) Emotional regulation and the impact on internal dialogue
(08:07) How stress alters brain function and decision-making
(09:01) The threat mode response and its influence on behavior
(15:19) The role of uncertainty and lack of control in workplace dissatisfaction
(17:53) Why culture plays a major role in mental fitness
(21:44) Building mental fitness muscles for long-term success
(25:23) Using the WOOP framework to handle negative emotions
(30:03) How leaders can help teams regain a sense of control

To learn more about Ethan, check out his website, most recent TED talk, and his books, Shift and Chatter.

And to learn more about Jennifer, check out her website and her books, The Burnout Epidemic, Why Are We Here, and Unlocking Happiness at Work.