.png)
Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
Inspiring and thought-provoking conversations with eminent thinkers and sustainability leaders about business in society. Hosted by Senthil Nathan, Chief Executive of Fairtrade Australia New Zealand.
Business & Society with Senthil Nathan
#23 Overwork: Redefining Success and Sanity with Brigid Schulte
We're facing a crisis of overwork that's literally killing us. In this eye-opening conversation, award-winning journalist and author Brigid Schulte reveals how our toxic work culture has made overwork the norm, with devastating consequences for our health, happiness, and productivity.
Brigid traces the origins of our overwork epidemic to the 1980s when corporate priorities shifted toward shareholder value above all else. This transformation created what she calls "greedy work" - jobs that demand more and more of our time, attention, and energy. For knowledge workers, this manifests as a pressure to be constantly available and working excessive hours in one job. For the 44% of Americans in low-wage positions, overwork means juggling multiple jobs just to survive.
The most shocking revelation? Work itself has become the fifth leading cause of death in America. The psychosocial stressors of modern work - long hours, toxic management, and work-life conflict - contribute to both acute conditions like heart attacks and chronic illnesses like diabetes and cancer. Yet despite this health crisis, the myth persists that working longer hours makes us more productive.
Brigid demolishes this myth with compelling evidence showing that countries with shorter work weeks and better support systems match or exceed U.S. productivity. The problem isn't about working more; it's about focusing on what truly matters. She identifies three concentric circles of work: core value-creating work, work around the work (emails, meetings), and the performance of work (looking busy). In overwork cultures, we waste precious time in those outer rings.
The COVID pandemic proved flexible work is possible when leaders question assumptions. Organizations that successfully transform their work cultures share a common "success sequence": they pause to identify what truly matters, train managers to focus on outcomes rather than hours, and create systems that enable people to do their best work.
Isn't it time we stopped working ourselves to death? Listen now to discover how we can transform work to reclaim our lives, improve our health, and actually become more productive in the process.
Link to Brigid's books:
Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life
Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When No One Has The Time
Please visit our website, www.businessandsociety.net, for more inspiration.
Hello everyone, welcome to the Business and Society podcast, where we explore ideas at the intersection of business and society. I'm your host, Senthil. In today's episode, we will discuss the issue of overwork. More employees are experiencing burnout, stress and sadness at work. According to a recent Gallup report on the state of global workforce, only one out of five employees is engaged in their work.
Senthil:I'm joined by Brigid Schulte, whose work and writing have significantly contributed to our understanding of work and life. Brigid is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Washington Post and the Washington Post magazine, and she was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. She's also the author of Overwork: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life, and the New York Times best-selling book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play when no one has the time, which addresses time pressure, gender and modern life. Additionally, she serves as the director of the Better Life Lab at New America. Bridget lives with her husband and two children in Alexandria, Virginia. Warm. Welcome, Brigid. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Brigid :Thank you so much for having me. It's wonderful to be here.
Senthil:Excellent, Brigid. Let's clear some basics. What is Overwork and how did it all start?
Brigid :It's such a good question. So you know, particularly in the United States, that's sort of where I'm based and that's where I do a lot of my research, although the book does reach globally and also American culture is also so very dominant that a lot of the American, particularly business culture, does filter out and influence others. So there has always been a real valorization of work in the United States. We're very work focused here. A lot of people get their identity from work, focused here. It's also a very human trait who want to do meaningful work, to contribute to the world. Also, we need our daily bread, right, that's how we earn our living, that's how we're able to survive. So work plays a critical role, and it has obviously for generations in our lives. But really what's begun to happen is that work has begun; some economists and scholars say that work has become greedy and that it's taking up more and more of our time. And it's taking up not only time in our day. It's taking away time for family. It's taking away time for leisure. And it's not just that we're you know when we're at work or doing work, but when we're away from work, we're thinking about it, we're worrying about it, we're ruminating about it, and that's what's leading to so much burnout, feelings of being overwhelmed, and I think what I was starting to see in my first book I looked a lot at time use research and I started to see in the 1980s that the hours spent at work started to really climb. You know and sort of this was before everyone had a cell phone or an iPhone. This was before email had really taken off. So it wasn't that, it wasn't so much technology that was driving it, which is what a lot of people tended to think there was something else going on, that people were working these longer work hours. So that by the time I began to really look at this and I'll tell you why I wanted to look at it I was finding that for office workers, business workers, knowledge workers, desk workers, the expectation had become that you would overwork in one job that you would give your all.
Brigid :ome about how we talk. You want to hire somebody who's going to give you 150% right. That's how we talk about people. We want them, you know, totally dedicated work, devoted, focused. But what I was also finding is that in recent decades, as work has become worse for people, you know, particularly in the United States, a lot of good middle class jobs have gone, you know, gone overseas, replaced by very precarious, poorly paid service work. And so what I was finding is that a lot of people in those jobs and what's surprising is that's 44% of the US workforce we have an awful lot of workers who are considered low wage workers and they're invisible. We don't tend to think about them.
Brigid :But what I was finding in spending time talking to workers, learning about their lives, they were overworking, not in one job, but in a series of jobs just to make ends meet, or jobs and side hustles, like almost everybody was driving Uber or DoorDash just to make ends meet, because the jobs themselves aren't big enough to support a human life anymore. And so part of what's driving overwork, there's a couple different factors. Some of it is cultural, that notion of kind of the ideal worker being work devoted, sort of taken to an extreme in sort of the knowledge setting. So that's much more of a cultural thing and expectation. And then, in sort of the lower wage sector, overwork is really out of a necessity that the jobs haven't become, you know they just don't support people. They don't support your life anymore. So there are different reasons that are driving the overwork, but what we do know there's all sorts of work, stress and health research that shows that it's not good for anybody.
Brigid :So I will give you sort of the cliff notes version of why did I want to look at overwork and a lot of it is. You know, I write because there are things that I want to understand and some of it comes out of my own experience. It's like Overwhelmed, my first book was like I, you know, I've got this great job I love, I'm a journalist, I'm working for the Washington Post, I've got these two little kids that I almost didn't have because I'd waited too long to have children. They were like my miracle babies and I wanted to be a good mother and a good worker. And how on earth I just didn't seem to have enough time in the day to do either one of them very well, and trying to understand that time pressure and gender.
Brigid :And then through that I saw how, when work has become so greedy, you know, and the requirement and the reward comes for overwork if you have care responsibilities, which tend to be women or mothers, you know or anyone caring for, like an aging parent or a disabled loved one you simply can't put in those hours, and so it cuts off opportunity.
Brigid :It's a very unfair system, because you're judging people by the hours that they put in, sort of as if you were in a factory, rather than in the work that you do. And so then I really wanted to look at well, does doing good work really require all those hours? Is the ideal worker norm? Is it a myth, or is that what we really need? And so CliffsN otes no, we do not need to work those hours to be a good worker or an ideal worker. And in fact, the more you overwork, not only do you damage your own health and your own quality of life, but you actually, for business leaders, you don't do good work, you're not creative, you can't think straight, you take longer to do things. So overwork isn't good for anything.
Senthil:That's very clear. You said work becomes so greedy. I'm trying to understand the root cause of this over phenomenon, which you said started from 1980s, it's just climbing up. What is the underlying cause? Is it the security we need as employees, so we need jobs, we need money? Or it's the societal pressure? Or we look at peers who work and say, well, you know, I just want to work like that. There's still, you know, a positive connotation attached to overwork, dedication and stuff. So I'm trying to understand what drives this.
Brigid :Yeah, no, it's such an important question, you know, and there are a couple of factors, no doubt. But if you look at sort of going back to sort of the 1980s, you know when those hours started really increasing. You know, when you look at the research, it kind of started in the financial services, it started in law and what a lot of companies started to do. This is when we began to change the way we... y You know sort of the purpose of a corporation, if you will, this was in the same era when it all became you know, a purpose of a corporation was to make a lot of money for your shareholders, and then somehow that was supposed to be good for everybody else. You know, we're still, you know shareholder primacy is still very much in play in most Western capitalist countries, and so it was really when the purpose of a corporation became less about taking care of your people, it became less about your stakeholders and it became much more about making money for your shareholders, like a handful of shareholders. That's when you see the overwork really taking off. Because then what ends up happening is, if you want your books to look good for Wall Street, for your earnings report, for your shareholders, every quarter, your labor is your biggest cost. And so a lot of companies started to regularly lay people off to cut those labor costs, to kind of goose the books, frankly, to make the books look better. And so to be able to do that, they created these systems that researchers called tournament systems, where you know, every quarter your bottom performing 20% was just gone. You know it didn't matter if you were sick, it didn't matter. You know, if maybe this wasn't the right fit for you, didn't matter. And so this tournament style hay structures was part of it.
Brigid :And then you're kind of like running scared of the. You know the layoffs are going to come for you, and so then you just start working harder and harder and harder, you know, longer and longer and longer, uh, to so that you'll avoid the next round of layoffs, and so so that's that's, that's part of what, what led to it. The other thing is, you have leaders, um, many of whom have no care responsibilities, because someone else is taking care of everything at home. Uh, you know, or they don't, or they're not very involved at home , or they're not very involved at home, and so they've been able to rise to power because they've been able to devote themselves body, mind and soul to work, and then they create those cultures that only people like them will also be able to succeed in. And so then what you end up doing is creating and recreating corporate monoculture over and over and over again, and I think that was probably one of the biggest revelations to me in the book is that we like to talk now in the United States there's a big push, the Trump administration is all against diversity, equity and inclusion, like that's somehow bad, and that we need to get quote unquote back to meritocracy, which is ridiculous, because getting back to you know, just sort of free form capitalism, that's not meritocracy. It did not. By focusing on the hours that people work and the butt in the chair and whether you're a presence in the office, if you're still organized and judging people on their input, you are automatically not focusing on merit. Merit would be something about you would be very connected to looking at output and impact and performance and not sort of the factory of the hours that you spend working. And so to me that's one of the biggest revelations in the book is how so many leaders are organizing their work cultures, their policies, really based on mythology, based on their own beliefs that are really not grounded in reality, nor are they grounded in good science or ethics.
Senthil:Interesting. Let's attack this important question, Does over work improve productivity? The answer, given the underlying theme, is yeah. People work more... leads to more productivity, more GDP. What does the research say? You traveled many parts of the world, spoke to many workers and what did you find?
Brigid :So that was one of the key questions that I really did want to understand, because that notion that the longer you work, somehow the better you work, that somehow the person who works who puts them in the most, most hours, is not only the most committed but the best worker, I really wanted to understand. Well, is that true? Do we really need to work this way to be productive, to have GDP growth? All of those things that we say are good and important, and so the shorthand is no, absolutely not. And when you look, I think to me one of the most convincing pieces of evidence when you look at hours worked by country and you line them all up and then you do a cross cut of GDP per hours worked, so what is your GDP divided by how many hours it took to get there? And what you see is that the longer people work, the lower the productivity. So places like Japan, South Korea you know they work some of the longest hours on earth where you've got people literally dying from overwork.. they have..
Brigid :Karoshi is the word in Japan, guaroshi is the word in Korean. Sorry if I'm mispronouncing that. I don't speak Korean as well. I don't speak Korean at all. I speak very little Japanese, although I've spent more time there. So in the United States, you know we are pretty. We are productive, no doubt about it, for a whole host of reasons, but when you look again at that measure of GDP per hour's work, we're about the same as France and Denmark and other countries where they have paid family medical leave, where they have long paid vacations four to six weeks where they have family supports, where they don't have expect people to work all the time.
Brigid :In my first book I spent time in Denmark and many of the companies there make work life balance one of the things that they grade your performance on, because they don't want you coming to work burned out. They don't want you to be sort of a you know exhausted and just sitting like a lump at your desk all day. They want you to come refreshed and they want you to come with new ideas and they want you to be healthy, because if you're not healthy, you're going to. You know, in the United States it's going to cost you more money. You know, because we still have which is really ridiculous. We still have employers supporting people with their health insurance, which is such a strange system that we have here, which I can talk about more later. But that's part of what drives the overwork as well is that when you rely on your job for your health insurance, you know you will jump through hoops, you'll work long hours, you'll do whatever you can not to lose that job because it could be so devastating for you.
Senthil:And it seems like a vicious cycle, isn't it? I'll just read a statistic I learned from your book. It seems people who put in more hours are two and a half times more likely to experience depression and 60% more likely to experience coronary heart disease. So you work more for medical insurance, then you create problems for yourself, then you've got to run that treadmill, isn't it?
Brigid :Yes, I have a whole chapter in the book that I can't believe people aren't running screaming in the streets about. There's a whole I had mentioned there's a whole literature a body of literature for decades on work, stress and health. And when you just look at that, there was this one study in particular that looked at 200 of these studies and they did a meta analysis, sort of looking for themes and patterns, and they were looking at 10, what they called psychosocial stressors of work. So it's not like the work hazards like going down into a coal mine or asbestos or pesticides or falling off of a ladder or anything like that. There were things like work-life conflict, long work hours, having a toxic boss, feeling like you weren't appreciated.
Brigid :So all of those stressors which I imagine most people will experience at some point or another, if not every single day. You know they're fairly common stressors and what they found is those 10 psychosocial stressors lead to both acute illness so they cause so much stress that you could have a heart attack or a stroke, something that happens immediately or they lead to long-term chronic illness. So think about it when you're working too long and you're under so much stress and you get home and it's late and you're too tired to make something healthy for dinner, so you order fast food and you're too tired to go to the gym, so you don't work out, so maybe you put on weight and maybe over time you're you're more likely to develop cardiovascular disease or diabetes or inflammation or cancer. And so what they found is that simply the way that we work and there the study was based in the United States Simply the way that we work in the United States has made work itself the fifth leading cause of death.
Brigid :So we really need to be paying attention to this, like health and well-being. Healthy, happy workers do better work and live better lives. There's no reason not to change the way we work so that we can do better work. You know so the CEOs of the businesses can get over their mythologizing and valorizing these long-term values, but then we need to have the time back to live our best lives. You know we're only here on Earth for a short while. You know we're meant to do more than simply work.
Senthil:That's profound. I want to highlight Peter Schnall's argument. You know you cited his work that businesses generally have an economic motive to deny that work is causing illness. But isn't it also clear to businesses that worker burnout, attrition, lack of engagement are significant risks, Isn't it? that leads to economic loss as well? Studies show that. I'm wondering what is missing here. There is a problem on both sides, and business leaders are smart, maybe right or wrong in some way, but they're very clever people. Even if you put in the economic lens and look at it in the money-making angle, it's a losing proposition. So why do they miss out this?
Brigid :It's a great question, and if you look in the work redesign chapter, I think again I go back to the idea of what leaders believe becomes how they shape their companies and what they end up doing. And sometimes those beliefs are not really based on reality. They're based on their own experiences, or they talk to one another, and so they're in sort of an echo chamber and they have very limited life experience. They tend to all have the same life experience. Most leaders of companies, of organizations, are still majority men, so they don't have a lot of the work-life conflict that so many others do. I think it's important to note it's not just women that I'm talking about. There was a Harvard Business School survey and they found that 75% of most employees have some form of care responsibility and, especially as societies age, more and more men are responsible for caring for their elderly parents. So we all have some care responsibilities, you know a majority of workers do. And then, let's not forget, we need to take care of ourselves. You know we're not robots. We do get sick and we need to care for ourselves. So in that way, you know, we're families of one, we're all caregivers, even if all we're doing is caring for ourselves. So to your point like why are businesses or why are leaders not doing more? You know, I think that there's a lot of talk about well-being and worker well-being and there's a lot of for a long time there was a lot of talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, and I think that there are good intentions sometimes there's good will. sometimes and I do feel like people don't really know what to do. You know, and a lot of it I mean the secret sauce, if you will is training your managers. You know, it's not, it's not like it's a big secret, and the reason I say that is I was looking at COVID experiments that were both really successful and were terrible failures.
Brigid :I was looking at work redesigns, again that were failures or wildly successful, and I looked at short work hours, movements, places that really did work at changing the structures and cultures of work, and all of them, you know they all did sort of something similar and that was leaders had to suspend their way of doing things and accept that there might be a different way of doing something. There might be. They could experiment, they could take a chance, they could be open and the other thing that they did is they talked to not other CEOs, but they began to listen to everyone in the company and they went down vertically rather than staying horizontally, and so they got a much better sense of what people were experiencing, what their pain points were, and they also listened to people like well, what are your ideas? What should we do? Let's try, let's experiment, do, let's try, let's experiment. And so I think there are.
Brigid :And then to make some of those ideas or changes really stick, it took having really good middle managers who are well-trained and are well-supported. And I tell you, every single work redesign, short work hours movement it lives or dies by your middle manager. And a lot of people they don't know how to train middle managers and a lot of what they offer is sort of what people call edutainment. You know, go to a talk and there's an inspiring speaker, but it doesn't really tell you how to have a difficult conversation. It doesn't really tell you... Well, how do I know somebody's doing a good job, you know, so we tend to think well, how do I know somebody's doing a good job? So we tend to think well, if I walk around, I see them, they must be working, sort of the walking around by the management by walking around stuff. But we all know that that's not true. So managers need the skills to not surveil people. When everybody went and so many of the desk workers went virtual during the pandemic, you had so many panic managers buying surveillance technology so they could count keystrokes or mouses or you know jiggling and then workers would sort of find workarounds. You really need to be at the root to create cultures of trust. So be very clear on what the work is. What is it that you're doing?
Brigid :And you know like I came to think about work in three ways. There's sort of the core work that creates value for your organization and really gives you the most sense of meaning and purpose. That's where we want to be spending most of our time. And then there's what I call the work around the work, sort of the next concentric circle, and that's like emails and meetings and Slack and you know all of that stuff that should lead to, you know, spending more time doing that concentrated work. But oftentimes it's like a merry-go-round. We get stuck on that and then we answer all of our emails and then we think we've had a good day, but then we get to the end of the day and we realize, well, I never made time to do that really important thing. And then there's the final circle that I call the performance of work.
Brigid :And when you are in sort of cultures that prioritize long work hours and busyness, and appearing busy and appearing like you're doing a lot of work, you know to sort of meet these sort of mythological ideal worker standards. You're going to create work. You're going to create kind of what I call stupid work. You're going to go to meetings you don't need to go to, you're going to send too many emails, you're going to like weigh in on all sorts of stuff, so you will look busy and you are further and further away from that core of what really matters. And so that's what managers need to do.
Brigid :A good manager needs to be really clear on what is that important work for each person on their team, for themselves. How can they create the systems as a team for their individuals that really ladder up so that you could spend your time doing that valuable work? How can you listen and iterate? You know it's like, okay, we've tried this, that didn't work, let's try that. You know, be open to experimentation, and managers need the training to be able to do that and to be able to set good standards, to set deadlines, to communicate clearly, to have difficult conversations, you know, because you definitely want cultures of trust, but that also requires accountability and a lot of our managers aren't trained to do that. So the answers are there and the examples are there, and they're not that difficult.
Senthil:Leaders make a difference, particularly mid-level managers. I have quite a few follow-up questions there. So you talked about leaders reaching out vertically and speaking to people at various levels. I'm trying to understand is overwork a problem for a specific segment of employees, such as low-wage service workers... you've covered ample stories in your book or is it a problem across the hierarchy middle managers, c-suite executives? What did you find there?
Brigid :Yes, overwork is a problem in every sector, at every socioeconomic level, in every industry. As I mentioned before, what I found was that overwork was valued in the knowledge worker setting, the desk worker setting. If you overworked in one job, you were there early, you stayed late or you were answering emails late at night to kind of show your value. So that's sort of the value, sort of the overwork culture in a desk setting, a desk worker setting. But because in the low wage setting, I mean think about it, why do we even call it low? Why do we have low wage work? You know we make it very difficult for people to survive even when they're working full time on a low wage salary. You know, in the United States there's a lot of discussion now about cutting our social safety net. The Trump administration and the Republican Congress, they want to cut Medicaid, which helps with health insurance for people who don't earn a lot of money, or food and nutrition support.
Brigid :Well, there's studies that have been done by the... you know very like General accounting office. You know very official studies that show that 70% of the people who are poor enough to qualify for those public benefits actually are working full time. So what does that tell you? It does not tell you that people are lazy, which is what a lot of the sort of the mythology or the narrative is. It tells you that the jobs aren't big enough to support a person or a family. And so what I found the overwork there is really a matter of survival people working in several different jobs and you know, a full-time job plus a side hustle, a full-time job plus a part-time job. So overwork shows up all across the socioeconomic sector and it's stressing everyone out.
Senthil:You also talked about purpose and sense of connection. I learned from your book that half of Americans don't feel connected to their company's mission or get a sense of meaning or significance from their work. So what's happening there?
Brigid :Well, you know you mentioned the Gallup survey on work engagement. You know early on in our conversation here. You know Gallup has done that survey for years and years and the level of disengagement is high and persistent. People not engaged or even actively disengaged, and I think a lot of that is. I think you can track it back to that same 1980s era that we started talking about, when work hours started to creep up, about what work is and sort of what the purpose of a corporation or an organization is, began to shift and became much more focused on Wall Street and profits, when CEO salaries started to really just rise exponentially and workers became less valuable, less important, became more like widgets that you could cut on a whim. And so there's been sort of a broken social contract, sort of a broken trust, if you will, and it's not too late to reweave it. We absolutely need that.
Senthil:Well, let's come to an important topic, a theme that's visible across your book, which is women and gender. I don't know if that's your intention, but you come across as someone who wants to champion women's equality. After reading your work, I realized overwork problem is predominantly a women's problem. You used a term called Caregiving discrimination. We all know women provide a lot of care. Talk us through these issues.
Brigid :Yeah, so you're absolutely right that one of the key drivers for me is this question of how can we all live a good life, how can we all have an opportunity to combine meaningful work, time for love and family and friends and connection and time for joy and leisure and play. How can we make that available to equitably to all people and not just maybe a few billionaires at the top, you know? And so from that sense I'm very interested in making making sure that women have opportunities that you know, for so long women's roles have been very narrowly defined and women didn't have an awful lot of opportunity outside of caregiving in the hall. But at the same time, I think it's really important that people know that the Better Life Lab we also have done major work looking at men and men's desire and experiences with care and caregiving and how many men you know. Sort of our cultural norms have sort of frozen us or trying to freeze us into these notions that men are better workers and they're breadwinners and providers and women are somehow better at caregiving and nurturing and so they should be at home more. So we tolerate women working as long as they're still primarily responsible for care, and those are very powerful conscious and subconscious narratives that then end up shaping our policies, that shape our workplace culture. And so part of what I'm trying to do is like really shine a light on them and then really ask the questions. You know, is it really like this or does it have to be like this, or why is it this way? And so I think that's a big driver of mine is.
Brigid :And I use productivity and effectiveness because I know that that's what leaders, business leaders, are going, that's what they care about, that's what is going to drive them to make their decisions.
Brigid :So I try to use that language Because if you do the right thing for gender equality, for racial and social, economic equality, you actually end up doing better things for work and work effectiveness and sustainability. And we all know you had asked earlier like why don't businesses change A lot of these costs like low morale or high turnover? They're sort of not necessarily on the books, they're sort of lost future sales or lost, so they're hard to quantify. But we all know, we all know how expensive it is if somebody leaves, especially if it's a you know, if it's a valued employee, it's a valued worker, and so that's part of what I'm trying to do is help us all see a fuller, bigger picture, and that, when we all do well, guess what we all do well, that's really what I'm trying to do with these books
Senthil:and how did the COVID-19 pandemic on the impact impacted on the way we work, does it made our lives better? The mix of arguments I read one is you know, saved on commuting space. You spend that time for better quality things at home, spending time for breakfast with your family. It seems it also hurt certain segment of people who provide care.
Senthil:What is your observation there?
Brigid :Yeah, no, those are really really good questions, and I know you'd asked about care and care discrimination, so let me answer both of those now. So when you have workplaces that are kind of ideal worker cultures and they they value long hours or they value presence or they value your, you know your devotion to work. You know having a care responsibility is seen as an inconvenience. You know to have somebody who might be sick is an inconvenience, you know they. So we tend to reward people who don't get sick or don't take sick days or don't need to leave to go do the childcare pickup or don't have an aging parent that you need to take to the doctor. You know there is research that shows that when you ask, like the C-suite, you know who's the best worker, who are the ideal workers, the majority will say someone with no care responsibilities, and so what I'm trying to show is that that typically has been women, but increasingly it's also men. It's pretty much everyone. Care is very much of a human imperative. It's also part of what makes life worth living. It's not just a duty and a responsibility and it is work. It's important work, but it's also joyful and incredibly important and meaningful to people to spend that time, to take your, you know, to take your mother to the doctor and be there when she might be afraid to be there with your child at a parent-teacher conference, and you know all of that is what makes life worth living. And so when you have work cultures that see that as a problem, you know, when they see, you know, giving somebody control over their schedule or giving people flexibility or ensuring people have paid family leave or access to childcare, they see that as a nuisance or a bother. You've just created so much stress for families that leads to so much more work-life conflict. So what we saw through COVID, we saw two things. You know several things, but two things very strongly.
Brigid :For those who could work from home, you know, and work virtually, you know it's interesting. For years, you know, working flexibly or working from home was sort of seen as a, as a gift for women or for mothers, and so it kind of immediately put you on the mommy track. Immediately you were thought of as a lesser worker. You know that somehow you got some, you know some great gift and that you were, somehow your brain had fallen out of your head and I say that from experience, because it happened to me. I began working a shorter work week and you would have thought that all of a sudden I was no longer the rising star, and I wasn't. I definitely was mommy track, and it was so unfair and so infuriating. I hadn't become any less dedicated or any less talented, but because I was working one day less a week in an industry that just valued these kind of Iron man culture, I was sidelined and a lot of women were at that time and a lot of companies would say, oh, we simply can't. We can't have virtual work, we can't do it. Well, covid showed that overnight. Yes, you could, you absolutely could.
Brigid :And a lot of organizations that had resisted for years all of a sudden did it. They were sometimes more productive, they were able to concentrate more. Remember when I was talking about those concentric circles of work. Because they weren't disrupted all the time, because it didn't have all of these kind of like interruptions, they really were able to focus on meaningful work. You know, we also had a pandemic raging and people were dying and people began to think more about wow, I really do have a short life span here on Earth. What is important to me and they were sort of like a kind of a much more of a reflective period about what was important. So, yes, work was able to change. People began really thinking about what is important in my life.
Brigid :But I think it's also important to remember that on the other end of the scale, when we had, you know, in the low wage workforce, we had what we called essential workers, zero workers. You know so many people who are going in to stock the grocery shelves or delivering food so that we could, so many people could stay in their homes and we they had been invisible for so long and then, all of a sudden, we were applauding them and now they're invisible again. And at the same time, we need to recognize that work isn't where you go, it's what you do, you know, and it's time to move into the 21st century. And when we do, you create much more opportunity, not just for women, not just for people with care responsibilities, but for people, workers of color. Many of them felt much more able to focus on their work when their identity wasn't front and center.
Brigid :Many reported not feeling much less stressed that they were not facing microaggressions every day. There's also people with disabilities. They didn't have to deal with news. They were able to focus on good, good quality work, the work that really mattered to them. You had neurodivergent people feeling much less stressed by having more control over where they work and how they could how they could control their interactions with people. And so the data is clear. There's research. Nick Bloom is an economist out of Stanford who's been tracking digital work and network work long before COVID, and it's very clear the benefits Hybrid work is... I'm a huge fan of hybrid work when you can do it. I'm a huge fan of getting the basics right for all workers. But I think what's important is that, even with all of these return to office headlines to remember that hybrid work, digital work, is still pretty holding steady, and I think part of the reason why is that people did get a taste of working differently and they're not willing to go back to the way it was.
Senthil:So what do you think is the intent of businesses that are calling employees back to offices? You know, some of the reasoning they state publicly is if we bring people back, you know we'd have built a better product. Similarly, big banks like JP Morgan, I think so said that you know bringing people back to office, having those face-to-face interactions helps.
Brigid :Yeah, well, I can't get inside the heads of CEOs, so you'll have to ask them why they're doing it. What I will say is you're right, you hear all sorts of different reasons for why. Oh, we're better together, it's better for culture, we're more productive, we'll be more innovative when we're all together, you know. So you hear all of those different arguments. But the research is a much more mixed bag and a lot of times people are going back into the office and it's not done very well. You know, there's just sort of an expectation that, like, mentoring will happen by osmosis, that innovation will happen by osmosis, and it really doesn't. You've got to be much more intentional about it. Now... This is why I'm a big fan of hybrid. I mean human beings. We are social creatures and there is no doubt that it is wonderful to see people in person and build relationships, and there's something wonderful about you know, kind of running into somebody and you're talking and then you might get an idea and maybe that will lead somewhere. But that's not to say it only happens in person. It doesn't. It also happens in a digital setting. It happens in a lot of different ways. You can create culture in a variety of different ways, as long as you're intentional about it. So just the idea that you're going to return to office and you're going to get innovation and mentoring and culture is really wrong and wrongheaded. I mean, there's a reason why people are feeling lonely and isolated even when they're back in the office five days a week, and so to me it goes back to sort of the secret sauce training your middle managers, creating intentions about when you come together and why, and making it really clear, making it easy, but then also creating space and protecting space for people to actually do their own work. You know, because that's part of what leads.
Brigid :We did a big research study a couple of years ago. I was a storytelling partner with Ideas 42, a behavioral science design firm, and we wanted to understand what drives overwork. And boy, over and over and over and over again, we found people saying I was so busy all through the day I was running to meetings, I was answering emails and I got to the end of the day and that one big thing I really needed to do I hadn't even started yet. And so that's where we need to like stop prioritizing the person who looks busy, stop rewarding that and really focus on that core, concentrated work, and that's what you can do in your own life. You know, in your own sort of sense of personal transformation. You have that ability and then the important thing is then to communicate it. Especially in a busyness culture, you need to prove your value because that's not going to be obvious. But managers can do that. You know managers can help their workers do that, and this is absolutely what leaders should be doing.
Senthil:Let's talk about solutions, Brigid... you talked about artificial intelligence and you featured some companies that does a better job of scheduling service workers. Do you see AI help solve this problem Anyway? How do you see these emerging technologies fits in?
Brigid :You know, honestly, I think they could absolutely help. They could also make it worse, because what drives overwork isn't really the concentrated work, it isn't really the value, it isn't really, you know, kind of like that core work. What drives overwork is the perception. That's what's important. It's the belief that that's what's important. So in that sense, it doesn't really matter whether AI is going to make it better or worse. If you still believe that the best workers work the longest hours, that's what they're going to do. So in a sense, belief trumps actual technology. So I would love to see AI make life better for people, and it could.
Brigid :But whether it does or not is going to be entirely up to what leaders delete and the cultures they create Interesting,
Senthil:Interesting. And you also discussed a few solutions like short work hours movement, four-day work week, flexible scheduling. Did you find any promising solutions that say look, these are some of the things which businesses can start doing immediately to solve this overwork problem?
Brigid :Oh yeah, I found a lot of very helpful stories and I think what's important is that every single chapter ends with what I call a bright spot of somebody really making a difference. And you know, honestly, it goes back to what I'd already said. I'm going to sound like a tape recorder here, like, but it's really true. It's sort of I call it like the success sequence. You know, whether it was a work redesign or shorter work, shorter work hours or whatever it was that I was exploring, they all had done this sort of success sequence where they sort of just took a breath, took a pause and you know, and so many times people say, well, we do it this way, because we've always done it this way, you know, and there's no kind of questioning of what the value is, what the mission is, none of that.
Brigid :So all of these places that really successfully changed and really did cut down on overwork, they just put a pause on that and they said, all right, maybe we've always done it this way, but let's ask why. Let's really figure out what's the important work that we really want to be doing. Where do we create the most value, you know, for the company, for the leaders, for people? And let's spend our time figuring out how to create the systems that enable us to do more of that. How do we dispense with stupid work? How do we stop the busyness culture, because that's not getting us anywhere?
Brigid :And when they were able to really focus on what was most important, when they trained the managers so that they could really focus on that, when they recognize that people are not widgets and, you know, had care, responsibilities. You know, when they figured out how to judge, reward fairly the work product, communicate it clearly, so that you were no longer just, you know, given great points for just being there or working long hours. When they did that hard work of figuring out what the work was, how to measure it and when it was done and good enough, that's when they made a huge difference. And those are companies that are still experimenting. Again, they're getting out of their CEO bubbles. There's much more communication up and down the ranks. There's much more asking people closer to the problem. Well, what do you think we should do? There's sort of co-designing, if you will, and then testing, iterating, gathering data, figuring out what works, adapting. Those are the companies that are really going to be resilient and sustainable.
Brigid :Excellent.
Senthil:Brigid. Let's move to the final segment. How I did it, where we ask all our guests three personal questions to draw lessons from their experiences, life and career. How do you handle differences of opinion and setback?
Brigid :Well, so I'm a journalist, so my whole life has been about talking to all sorts of different people with different perspectives, sometimes of the very same thing. So I guess I see that as a strength. I think that's part of being human. You know that we do have different viewpoints and I'm always interested in learning about them. So I guess I'm curious. I deal with that with curiosity. I deal with that with curiosity. I deal with it with respect and curiosity.
Senthil:Interesting, and have you ever faced setbacks? Reading your story, I'm sure you have quite a few.
Brigid :I have had a lot of setbacks.
Brigid :Yeah, I mean, I don't think you get to this age I'm going to be 63 next month you don't get to 63 without having your fair share of setbacks, and some of them have been very difficult to weather and I guess, as I go, just recognizing that it's all part of life.
Brigid :Life is wonderful, life is awful, life is ordinary. And again, taking that same spirit of inquiry and curiosity and humility and sort of looking at it as an opportunity to like, okay, what can I learn? To compassion for myself and for other people, because it can be really easy to spiral downward and blame yourself, feel bad, you know, and sometimes you know it's not all about you. You know, we're always, always the stars of our own movies and sometimes it's been very instructive to just take a broader perspective and recognize that maybe what I consider to set back or I didn't get a response, that I was, that I was thinking I would or hope for, and then, when I learned more about the situation or what the other person was facing, realizing it had nothing to do with me, you know. And so I think broadening your perspective is an important thing to do, as well as bringing that spirit of curiosity and learning.
Senthil:Love it. In your experience. What are one or two essential skills required for business leaders?
Brigid :You know, honestly, I wrote this in a piece for Charter courage. Courage, to not stick with the crowd, you know, to not stick with your CEO buddies, to take the time to listen to the people and really understand their experience, people who work for you and with you.
Brigid :Yeah, open-mindedness, a willingness to experiment and the courage to act on it.
Senthil:Finally, can you recommend a book or two to our listeners?
Brigid :Well, there's so many books that I absolutely love, but if you're interested in work, one of the books that I found incredibly powerful and you can see I write about it a lot in my book I found it shaped my thinking quite a bit.
Brigid :It's a book called the Story of Work by Jan Lucasen.
Brigid :He's a Dutch historian and he goes all the way back to the prehistoric era to track the human beings and our relationship with work throughout millennia, and it's fascinating, and what I love about it is that he doesn't just focus on what we do for paid work, but he also looks at the unpaid work of care and home as also work, and I actually took from him his definition of work is everything that is not leisure is work, and so that is what really it drove sort of the three points that I make in the book, which is you need to think much bigger about work, that it's not just what we do for pay, but it's also the unpaid work of care and home.
Brigid :It's not just what we do for pay, but it's also the unpaid work of care and home. And that number two all of that work should be good work and characterized by meaning, fairness and cooperation. And the third point is that it's entirely possible, and that's one thing that you can see, then, through the arc of history. There's no one right way to organize work there never has been and so there's a myriad ways that we can do it, and so let's be open to the sermon.
Senthil:Excellent, Brigid, such a pleasure talking to you today and thank you so much for taking the time out sharing this wonderful perspective and all your important work on this important issue.
Brigid :Well, thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful talking with you today.
Senthil:Excellent. Thank you so much for tuning and listening to our podcast today. When you get a chance, please do not forget to leave a rating and review of this podcast and feel free to write to me if you have any thoughts or comments or what kind of episodes you'd love to hear in the future. Thank you so much.