Re-thinking the work-life balance with Connie Hadley

Transcript

Stuart Crainer:

Hello, I’m Stuart Crainer, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to our weekly LinkedIn live session, celebrating some of the brightest new stars in the world of management thinking. In January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar Community for 2024. These are the upcoming management thinkers we believe individuals and organizations should be listening to. The 2024 list was our most eclectically challenging, yet. This year’s Radar is brought to you in partnership with Deloitte and features business thinkers from the world of fashion, retail, branding and communications, as well as statisticians, neuroscientists, and platform practitioners from the Nordics to New Zealand and Asia to America.

Among the highlights for me are Ludmila Praslova, author of The Canary Code, teaching how to design healthier inclusive organizations. Ludmila will be joining us next week, so please join us for that session. Also featured in this year’s Radar are Jenny Fernandez, author of Zig-Zag to the Top, and Martin Gonzalez, principal of AI Talent Development at Google and co-author of The Bonfire Moment, a great title for a book, I still think. Closer to home for us, we include the excellent Neri Karra Sillaman, who is a sustainable fashion consultant and entrepreneur expert at Saïd Business School Oxford. And over the next few weeks, we’ll be meeting some of these fantastic thinkers in our weekly sessions. So we hope you can join us for some great conversations.

Last week we kicked things off with one of the stars of the 2023 Radar and the winner of the Thinkers50 Radar Award, Marcus Collins. That was a great discussion and is now available on YouTube if you missed it. As always, please let us know where you are joining us from and send in any comments, questions, or observations at any time during the 45-minute session. Our guest today is our first member of the Thinkers50 Radar for 2024, Connie Noonan Hadley. Connie is an organizational psychologist and research associate professor in the management and organizations department at the Boston University Questrom School of Business. Connie leads the Institute for Life at Work, a research lab and think tank. Its areas of investigation include hybrid remote work, team effectiveness, loneliness, psychological safety, burnout, and employee engagement. So there is an awful lot to talk about. Connie, welcome.

Connie Hadley:

Thank you so much, I’m so happy to be here. And thank you for putting me on the list.

Stuart Crainer:

Entirely our pleasure, Connie. So what’s the golden thread that when you explain your work to people, how do you explain it?

Connie Hadley:

Well, it took me a long time to figure out some words to explain what I do. I think organizational psychologist has been the key to tell people what I do. I’m a psychologist, but of organizations, as simple as that. But in terms of what things I focus on, the choice of the name of my research institute, Institute for Life at Work has two important words, they’re not the big ones, the prepositions. So my work is always for, for having life at work. And instead of thinking about life, people say work-life balance as if those two are two different spheres of your existence, and I really want to have life at work and I want to make it as enriching and successful as I can for people no matter what they do.

Stuart Crainer:

Which I suppose suggests that a lot of people don’t have much life at work?

Connie Hadley:

Well, it certainly seems that they have a different life at work, let’s put it that way, and maybe not a satisfying one.

Stuart Crainer:

What about the dividing lines between life and work, have they changed over recent years? I’m thinking of the pandemic and working from home.

Connie Hadley:

Well, I think people blended their so-called personal life and their work life much, much more during the pandemic. Remote work is part of that, and also part of that was just that personal life just seemed more important, more valuable during the heights of the pandemic when there was a lot of fear. I think now people are still trying to reconcile, what do we do next? How do we think about the balance between what we care about as a person and what we care about and do at work? And no surprise, I’m a big fan of finding ways where you can be yourself, you can live out your values at work, but also ones where you can not sacrifice too much on the personal side. So that will require rethinking work even more than we’ve already done over the past four years.

Stuart Crainer:

And I see a number of organizations are now insisting to a greater or lesser extent on people actually coming into the office. Where do you think that will go? Will that work, do you think?

Connie Hadley:

Well, I will say that I don’t think all companies have handled it well. I think it has felt too abrupt and non-consensual for many employees, this shunned return to five days in the office. But I understand why employers are doing it. I mean, a lot of it is with a good faith effort to increase collaboration and connection among people, which are two big topics I study. And also they’re tired, they’re tired of making decisions and changes and juggling hybrid work and I’m sympathetic to that reason as well. But I don’t think those mandates are going to work. I think that it is important to find, again, a new way of working. And hybrid offers us in some ways the best of both worlds. It does give people the flexibility and autonomy they want over where they work, and it does still bring people back into the office on a regular basis.

But we know hybrid’s really hard. Mark Mortensen and I wrote an article a couple of years ago in the Harvard Business Review called, Do We Still Need Teams? And really the point of that article was acknowledging that with all these benefits at the individual level of hybrid work, at a team level, it’s really a strain to do all the coordination work involved in keeping it a really oiled machine for teams. But that being said, I cannot imagine us going back to five days standard in the office if there is at all a possibility of doing a hybrid model. And some companies, of course will also continue to allow a hundred percent remote as well, and some employees will choose that. But I think that’s a minority of people, at least the people I talked to.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it strikes me, as you were speaking, there’s two issues that stand out for me is the first one that work got done during the pandemic when everybody was working at home, and after that, when a lot of people carried on working at home, work has got done, organizations haven’t crumbled, and the reason is that people have still been delivering on their work and doing the work they’re supposed to do. And the second element is the element of trust. It seems to me that’s still fundamentally lacking between managers and the people they manage.

Connie Hadley:

Well, there’s certainly the productivity paranoia that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has talked a lot about, and I was involved in some of the future of work research at Microsoft. And this really did come up over and over again was this sense that managers don’t believe workers are doing their best work when they’re not able to watch them, essentially. And yes, workers resent that.

I think one thing that will help maybe companies navigate this is there’s a model of culture that Edgar Schein from MIT had developed a long time ago that I still think is really valid. It talks about the layers of culture. There’s the surface layer, the artifacts, so the things like how your office is set up and what kinds of extra little things you have like a shared kitchen or you have ping pong tables, things like that. And then you get down to the sort of implicit norms that govern who gets promoted and who doesn’t. And then underneath it though is the underlying basic beliefs that this organization upholds.

And I think the productivity paranoia, if you were to really distill it down, is representative of a belief that people are lazy and that people don’t actually want to contribute good quality work to the world. And that’s just not a belief that I have from all the years I’ve spent studying people. I mean, I think people do well if they can. I think they’re trying really hard. I think we get a tremendous amount of self-esteem as adults from being a contributing member of society and doing good work. And so you really want to ask yourself, what is this policy about? Is it because I really think that unless I stand over and watch these people or unless I impose penalties and other sorts of punishments, people won’t step up? Again, that’s to me a belief that is deserving of some question.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, have we really moved on from Frederick Taylor and scientific management at the beginning of the 20th century? I mean, that was founded on the managers standing over the worker with a stopwatch, and there’s a strong sense that the stopwatches have just become a bit more sophisticated.

Connie Hadley:

Oh, I know with badging in and keystroke watching, there’s lots of surveillance devices that are available now. And I’m not also so naive to think that there aren’t cases of abuses of trust and that people aren’t taking advantage in some cases. But I really think that if you have the right environment, the right job design and the right people at work, there’s so much intrinsic motivation to get the job done, that that’s sufficient, that you don’t need all these other types of ways to keep people in line.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Thank you to everyone who’s joined us so far. We’ve got people from Greece, America, Luxembourg, Ireland, India, Canada, Austria, Italy, South Africa, Germany. Really nice to hear from everyone. Please send in your comments and questions along the way. Connie, can you tell us about your work with Microsoft during the pandemic? That sounds really interesting.

Connie Hadley:

Oh, it was such a joy. I mean, it was incredible. So I was asked to join as a consulting researcher, and for those who don’t know, Microsoft has a research lab, which is all people like me, PhDs, many former professors working on issues. And I was working on related projects to the future of work. And we’d have this lab meeting every Thursday and just the new stuff coming out is just really impressive.

But the one paper that I’ve written now with Microsoft is with Nancy Baym, and it was looking at peer social support during the pandemic, and we had a really clear gender angle that came out from that research. So what we were looking at was, first of all, to validate the expectation that strong connections to your co-workers leads to good things that employers care about, higher job satisfaction and lower burnout and lower intention to quit. So we validated that with this survey that was done. And by the way, these weren’t Microsoft employees, this was conducted by researchers with workers around the world, I’m sorry, it was US workers, this one.

And so then we said, “Okay, well then what are the organizations doing to encourage connectivity among co-workers? How are they encouraging provision of social support in various ways?” And what we found is that the people who felt their organizations really encouraged them to do that, definitely did more of it and got better value out of it. But it seemed that there was also a little bit of a twist, there were the women in our study reported that they did feel some organizational support, but not as much as men, but then they reported doing more social support activities. And so we’re looking at thinking about, how can we elevate social support in the workplace so that everyone feels rewarded for it equally, no matter who they are or what they’re doing. And we had 13 different kinds of social support that people were doing in the workplace, and then we broke those out by gender.

And so we saw, for example, that women were doing more things like providing a listening ear to fellow employees who wanted to talk about something, they were more likely to be welcoming to new employees. And the male employees were more likely to do things like provide career advice and do online video games together after work. So we’re not trying to say that everybody needs to behave exactly the same in the workplace, but we do think that organizations that if they value connection and they want these other outcomes associated with it, they should put their money where their mouth is and make sure everybody’s rewarded.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s interesting, the sexes confirm the stereotypes.

Connie Hadley:

I didn’t want to see it, but it was there.

Stuart Crainer:

Yes. Yeah. I’m just disappointed in the men playing the video games, but there we go.

Connie Hadley:

Well, actually though, that could be a great thing, maybe more women should play video games. So I think listening is probably a really undervalued behavior in the workplace, and everybody could do a little better at that.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Yeah. Or perhaps the women should have more time on their hands to play the video games and men should dedicate themselves to listening, that would shake things up a little bit. There’s some interesting comments coming through. I’ll just read some of them. One from somebody on LinkedIn, “Leadership thrives when we treat work-life balance not as a policy, but as a practice of honoring the unique rhythms of our team’s lives, weaving flexibility and empathy into the fabric of our collective success.” Did you write that one yourself, Connie? 

Connie Hadley:

I did not but I’m going to steal it! Thanks for being anonymous LinkedIn users so I can take credit. No, but I mean, I totally agree with that. I don’t think people should foster empathy and relationships at work just to be a nice person, I think those are values that many of us hold dear as persons, but I think it really does translate into better work. The rhythm, that comment, teams that are in a good state, they’re firing on all cylinders and they’re really getting great work done and they’re enjoying themselves. Wouldn’t that be so nice to have really hard work getting done also with laughter and support and commiseration and friendship? That is really the ideal that I’m striving for.

Stuart Crainer:

Somebody else on LinkedIn says, “It’s also not about achieving a prescribed work-life balance as a business objective, it’s about establishing a rewarding journey toward inclusive, diverse and genuine work-life balance success for everyone involved. It’s about recognizing that the unique team’s well-being is linked to the organization’s success.” I suppose there, Connie, is work-life balance still a useful term?

Connie Hadley:

No, it isn’t, but we all use it so it’s hard to get out of that habit. And again, if you think about work-life as these two totally separate spheres, then I think you’re missing the chance to enjoy life while you’re working. And this is on a simple level, but thinking about the people who were so delighted during COVID to be able to take their dog for a walk at lunchtime, that’s part of their workday, but it’s a little bit of that life stuff. But again, I’m also thinking about, how do you get so much life out of your job that it doesn’t feel like you’re drained at the end of the day and you have nothing left to give to the people in your personal life. And so balance, people talk about balance, they talk about integration, they talk about spillover effects, I mean, there’s lots of ways we’ve been modeling it, but I don’t think we’ve quite figured out a way to say, how do you have the highest work-life possible and the highest personal life possible at the same time?

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. Yeah. There’s some good comments coming through. Chuck says, “We’ve seen improvements in productivity in hybrid, but it required new management concepts to realize.”

Connie Hadley:

Yes, I’m glad you’re mentioning the management side of it. All roads lead to the team leader and the middle manager in terms of enacting better work practices. And they have been so overburdened over the last few years because their value, I think, really rose in terms of people’s minds during COVID when people dispersed to different home locations, or wherever they were working from, and managers had to try to keep pulling that team together and managing the work. I don’t think that those strains are going to go away. Again, hybrid work is still more complicated to enact on a day-to-day basis. So one of the areas that I want to focus on in my research is how do we support those middle managers? How do we get them better trained, better educated, and relieve some of the burden on them? And that’s the point of one article I wrote with Kate Kellogg of MIT last year about using AI.

So the whole premise of our article is that if AI can remove some of the scut work involved in coaching and mentoring employees by collecting the data unobtrusively, by aggregating and analyzing it for the manager, then the manager can spend instead of those hours collecting that data, they can spend that hour talking to the employee and using it to help guide them to how to perform better, how to execute their work better, maybe new skills that they should be developing. And so I think we need to keep using all the tools at our disposal, including AI, to alleviate the workload burden of middle managers right now because it is unsustainable how much they were doing, but we need them to integrate the work and to support their employees.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s interesting, I’m old enough to remember that Tom Peters wrote in 1992 or 1990 around then, and there’s a line I always remembered, “Middle managers are cooked geese.” And he said that obviously middle managers are a thing of the past, but obviously we’re still talking about them. The other thing from what you were just talking about Connie, is that the role of AI, we were told that AI would get rid of a lot of low level jobs, but now what we’re seeing is AI impacting our management and AI being an alternative to a lot of management tasks.

Connie Hadley:

Well, I think it is an alternative to a lot of the management tasks that managers, frankly… I like the model of highest and best use, when you think about assigning personnel to tasks. I think AI can really relieve middle managers of a lot of the tasks they were doing that really weren’t their highest and best use of time. And for example, this idea of codifying performance data, that could be offloaded, but I don’t think AI is going to replace the really nuanced understanding of both people and the world of work that humans can accomplish. That may require not only retraining managers on how to use AI and integrate that successfully, but also on how to have better people and management skills.

I teach in the business school at Boston University, and we often find these middle managers come into our evening MBA program and they say the reason they came back to get a degree is they may be a PhD, or the MD, or a JD, they’ve got all these extra degrees, but they don’t know how to manage people. And the more they advance, the more they realize that that’s a real shortfall. So I think that, equivalently, just as whatever other on-the-job training people were getting didn’t really train them for people skills, taking away some of the tasks with AI or another tool is not going to relieve people of the obligation to hone up their people skills.

Stuart Crainer:

Somebody’s asked, “Where does this leave blue collar workers?” Because we’re talking about managers, white collar workers in the conventional terms.

Connie Hadley:

Blue collar workers in terms of AI?

Stuart Crainer:

No, in work-life balance.

Connie Hadley:

Oh, okay. Well, again, I think the more you… We have some resource theories to explain how people can make their careers more customized to their needs, and one of them is this sense of social capital. So social capital is something that anybody can accumulate no matter what type of job they have or what level in the organization they have, and that matters a lot. So I would say for blue collar employees, one of the first things they need to figure out is where can they get more power and influence to be able to request and receive better accommodations for their work so that they can feel that better balance? Again, it’s within limits, so these people may not be able to work remotely, for example.

But, on the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of creative solutions. Even people you think could never work remotely, they’re in manufacturing and somehow they can now control something from a console in their home, or a doctor who is able to do tile health on a Friday and not go into the hospital. So I do think we want to keep pushing on what occupations really cannot be made more flexible, but I think in order to get it actually accomplished, you’d need some kind of power, you need some kind of influence over management because otherwise they’ll just continue with the status quo.

Stuart Crainer:

Lots of comments coming in. Jeff Frick says, “A ping pong table in the middle of an empty room didn’t do the trick?” You’re right, Jeff. It was never going to work.

Connie Hadley:

No. Again, I appreciate the effort. I mean, it’s better than nothing, but it’s not useful. And what I worry about with those experiments with trying to create a sort of a casual bonding atmosphere for people is that if they fall short, people give up. And that doesn’t mean you should stop. Maybe the ping pong table didn’t work, but maybe you need to reconfigure it into a cafe format or some other thing that can actually create that kind of combination that you’re looking for with people. It’s too easy to just buy a piece of furniture or a toy and then think, “Okay, it’s going to be all fixed now.” It doesn’t work that way. People are really complicated. I mean, we are challenging organisms, and so no, there’s no way that just a paddle and a white ball is going to solve it all.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, it’s a difficult game to master as well. Frank Carlberg says, “Will people become more or less purpose oriented in the work they do?”

Connie Hadley:

I think they’re very much seeking more purpose. That’s what I hear over and over again from my students and from the people in the millennial and Gen Z generation that I survey. And I think that’s a really positive trend. It doesn’t mean, again, people like to sort of paint these trends as black and white, so, “Oh, okay. They don’t care about money anymore.” No, they still care about money. And financial stress is a major contributor to low wellbeing at work. So let’s just say people still want money. And they still want career advancement, they want growth opportunities. But in addition, I think more and more the expectations have risen to feel a sense of purpose, to feel that this job that I’m doing makes a positive impact on the world and that is a great thing. That’s a great aspiration in my mind. It’s not always perfectly achievable.

In fact, one study I have right now going on with a group in Dubai, Cosmic Centaurs, is looking at little things like team rituals and how they can increase someone’s sense of purpose at work. So it’s kind of the team route, a backdoor entry into getting more purpose. And Cosmic Centaurs has a variety of different kinds of rituals that they implement with their clients, including conversation starter cards. And we’ve seen in our survey and in a field study that they actually translate into people feeling more satisfied with their job and a greater sense of purpose and meaning. And it’s not that the job changed, not that the company changed, but it’s the people they worked with and the relationships that changed and it really invigorated their sense of purpose.

Stuart Crainer:

Did you say Cosmic Centaurs?

Connie Hadley:

Centaurs, yes.

Stuart Crainer:

Yes. Okay. Jeanette Bronee says, “I focus on work-life quality instead of work-life balance.” Fair comment, I think. Pramod Slanki says, “Listening is an undervalued behavior at the workplace.” Simon Ellis Hughes draws attention to Microsoft WorkLab and their reports, and he’s got a link there. Thanks for that, Simon. Nancy Fredericks uses the term harmonize in her work. That’s quite a nice word, isn’t it?

Connie Hadley:

I do, I do like that a lot because it allows both voices and both lives, both existences to be together overlapping. That’s great.

Stuart Crainer:

And Jeanette says, “Collective well-being is crucial for a healthy culture built on healthy human relationships.”

Connie Hadley:

Mm-hmm, I endorse that. Yep.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, fair enough. Pramod says, “Work-life is part of life and we should be able to be who we really are, the whole self. That’s when we fully express ourselves and be at our best.” And that goes back to authenticity, doesn’t it? Being our authentic selves in the workplace. And I think there’s lots of research saying historically you weren’t promoted for being your authentic self in the workplace at all.

Connie Hadley:

Right. Although I will say sometimes authenticity gets taken too far. A friend of mine, Alexmey at HBS says it’s not unfiltered self-expression either. So we do want to make sure that people… What you don’t want is this really difficult-to-handle burden of faking your way through every hour of the day. There’s longstanding research by Arlie Hochschild on emotional labor and sort of this surface-level acting that people have done in their jobs. So originally they were looking at it, for example, in customer service teams, it just corrodes you inside. It’s just this sense of I am just not really being who I am here. So I do generally endorse helping people be more authentic – with some boundaries and some limits in terms of what topics are discussed and how much detail to give.

Stuart Crainer:

And some element of leadership has always been performative, hasn’t it? Which in itself isn’t authentic because it’s acting a role.

Connie Hadley:

Right, right. But again, there are certain things that we’ve seen in research that leaders can sometimes destabilize organizations, for example, during a pandemic or a crisis, if they seem completely out of control and racked with anxiety, that’s not healthy for the rest of the organization who needs to rally around it. And I’ve done some research on crisis leadership, and we saw that too. You have to have a certain level of confidence and emotional regulation as a leader as well. So again, not unfettered self-expression.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah. And your research has also looked at loneliness, and there seems to be kind of an epidemic of loneliness, especially amongst senior executives. That might be over egging it slightly, but tell me about your work on loneliness, Connie.

Connie Hadley:

No, I mean the word epidemic has been used many times. Our current surgeon, US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, wrote a paper in 2017 in the Harvard Business Review calling it The Loneliness Epidemic at Work. And the Surgeon General just produced a wonderful set of guidelines and recommendations for how to mitigate the sense of social isolation and loneliness that at least we face in the US. So it is an epidemic, and I think that’s important to know because it doesn’t mean it was just driven by the pandemic, and therefore it’s not going to go away with the pandemic.

And the emphasis I would give to organizations is that solving this is going to help so much of your work life improve. It will help with retention and recruiting, and it will help with productivity. And so what you need to figure out first is are people lonely in your organization? And what I’d say is use a pre-validated scale from science on that. I have a new one actually with my colleague Sarah Wright, right from the University of Canterbury that’s coming out where we ask certain questions like, do you feel like people at work understand you? Do you feel lonely while you’re working? So the first thing I’d say is companies should assume there are lonely people in their organizations because we’ve seen it in every study, and then they should try to drill down and understand more about who those people are and what’s going on with them. And Sarah and our new research is that we just did a big study looking at what interventions will help reduce loneliness, and so that data will be coming out soon.

Stuart Crainer:

And what interventions… Can you give us an example of interventions that help?

Connie Hadley:

Well, we did some piloting and interviewing of people to generate ideas. And I would say the ideas are coming up, there are things that are probably done in the organizations of people that are watching here right now, simple things like devoting five minutes at the beginning of a meeting to having chit-chat and checking in on a personal level. They’re having free lunches in the office where there’s no agenda but to get to know each other. Also, all the way up to having a well-being program where people join as a group and they do something together to reduce stress, for example, or learn a new skill. So we’re looking at all these different types of interventions that companies can make.

And the thing that I’m excited about in this study is that we actually went out and solicited both lonely people and not lonely people, so we could really kind of compare the difference between the two. And again, these are really preliminary findings, but what we’re finding is some of the simplest things like the five-minute chit-chat in the meeting are the things that the lonely people are most likely to engage in and to get benefit from. So there might be some good news coming for organizations who are worried that I’m going to recommend a million dollar intervention program, but it’s really not that hard. It’s not that hard, but it takes intention, effort, and consistency to make those relationships.

Stuart Crainer:

Amongst the senior executives and CEOs I’ve spoken to, they’ve often talked about the issues at the top for them are loneliness and ambiguity. So loneliness, there’s no one they can really talk to, honestly. And ambiguity in that actually how they spend their days, and is often vague. And what about loneliness at the very top of organization? Is that a thing? Or should we feel sorry for them?

Connie Hadley:

Well, I tend to feel sorry for anybody who tugs at my heartstrings. So yes, if someone is lonely, no matter what their role, I would have some sympathy and empathy for them. I do think there are research reports, including Sarah, my collaborator has done one recently validating that it’s lonely at the top. And it might be about a different kind of loneliness. So for example, when we look at people who are lower in the hierarchy, a lot of times their loneliness is described as a sense of being invisible, people don’t know me, they overlook me. Whereas the CEO, obviously people are looking at you and you’re not overlooked. So it’s not exactly the same type of loneliness or the same drivers. But no matter what level we’ve looked at in the hierarchy, one of the big reasons people give for why they feel either strongly connected or disconnected and lonely is about their job, about the job and the role and how it’s designed.

And so that I think is the key factor for the CEOs and the people at the top, the way their job is designed at the top of that pyramid, they literally don’t have anybody else who’s at that level and they have a board, but that’s not exactly a reassuring social group in most cases, and so they have to find other ways to create that sense of connection to people in a work sense. And that may be some friends and peers in other companies or joining one of those leadership small forums to relieve some of that stress of being the sole decision maker. It’s a lot of pressure, a lot of eyes on you, and you know that if you make a mistake, it could really hurt a lot of people in the company. And that is in fact something that can cause people to feel deeply lonely. I’ve had CEOs tell me that with a tear in their eye.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, I mean, loneliness, anxiety, burnout, are organizations generally healthy places to be? Because all these things seem to be on the rise.

Connie Hadley:

They are on the rise. And also zooming out from the organizational life, I think they’re on a rise in society as well. I mean, every statistic I see about mental health shows that we’re going in the wrong direction as a society, and we’re talking about people who are too young to be in the workforce or people who are retired and out of the workforce. So part of this is just the milieu that we’re in right now. People are struggling more than they perhaps used to be, or at least reported being in the past.

So I do think these are big problems. I do think though, that the solutions aren’t as daunting as they seem to many people. Again, it goes back to this intentionality, effort and consistency. But they all can be, I think, channeled through the small group, the team. So burnout, for example, a remedy for burnout is building relationships. A remedy for loneliness is building relationships. A remedy for people not feeling psychologically safe is building relationships. So if we can just kind of use some of these levers and use the small group to create that kind of nest of comfort for people and really mutual understanding, then I think we will see a lot of these issues go down.

Stuart Crainer:

Which organizations get this? It must be best practice of organizations you’ve come across; they really understand it and are doing small, important, practical things to make them better places.

Connie Hadley:

Well, I don’t like to name names, but I can tell you sort of in general companies without their names that I’ve seen. So there’s one group that I’ve been working with, in a technology company and I’ve seen a real transformation of this one unit due to what the leader has done. So over time, he’s really focused on creating this psychologically safe environment that involves people being able to speak up without fear of punishment. And it’s taken years. There’s been pre and post surveys, there’s town hall meetings, there’s lots of conversations, large and small. But over time it’s clear that people are improving on that over time. And when you have that psychologically safe environment, then you can talk about things like burnout and workload and how to redo the work.

So again, I hate to name names publicly without their permission, but I’ve seen, this is in a big tech company with a lot of high pressure people, and I’ve also seen other smaller companies that have just created again that kind of culture where people take care of each other and they feel that everyone has their back. I mean, if you ask yourself right now, does anybody at work have my back? That’s a good indicator of the nature overall of the climate you’re working in. Is it for you or against you? Or even perhaps just neutral. But if it’s not for you, you’re not going to see some of these better outcomes. And so I have seen some companies that have taken advantage of their small size and the ability to really get their arms around a culture that have created those kinds of places, where people just love working, they don’t want to leave.

Stuart Crainer:

It’s much easier in smaller organizations though, to manage these issues in many ways.

Connie Hadley:

It can be, but again, some things can get worse as well, because there isn’t the comparison effect. If you have a really, really dominant leader at the top, then people may feel like there’s no escape, there’s nowhere to go. They have to leave the company. Whereas at big companies, you can have great pockets and lots of great pockets, and you can still shift around.

Stuart Crainer:

Okay, just a few comments. Elizabeth says, “It’s my experience as a psychologist that we’re also going in the direction of individualism regarding mental health. A person with burnout, anxiety, depression, et cetera, is sent to a psychologist on the company health insurance, but nothing actually changes in the company, which is the root cause. We’re treating symptoms, not problems.” Elizabeth’s from Sweden.

Connie Hadley:

I completely agree, Elizabeth. I just did a workshop with a bunch of HR leaders on Friday, and there was just one sentence on one of my slides. It says, “Burnout is a workplace problem, not a worker problem.” And so stop telling people to go self-care their way out of burnout. Burnout is driven by the factors at work. It’s how the job is designed and how the reward system works and other factors like that. Paula Davis wrote my favorite article title of all time, which was, You Cannot Yoga Your Way Out Of Burnout. And so I think, we think it’s really important that this is great; I’m so glad that more companies are adding on mental health supports outside of the office with providing more therapy access and access to things like apps like Calm and Headspace. That’s great. I don’t think they should stop that, but it’s all just going to be a surface solution until you can actually address what’s going on in the actual workplace.

Stuart Crainer:

I’m not sure you can yoga your way out of anything.

Connie Hadley:

Not me.

Stuart Crainer:

Me neither. Christina von Mayer says, “Do you believe that fulfilling a higher purpose necessitates a form of spiritual intelligence requiring distinct skills, grounded in values and a connection with something greater than oneself?

Connie Hadley:

Oh, deep question from Christina.

Stuart Crainer:

Big question there, Christina.

Connie Hadley:

Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:

Let’s put you on the spot, Connie.

Connie Hadley:

Well, we talk about well-being as different facets of well-being. So I already mentioned financial well-being is a big thing that can affect people’s mental health. There’s social well-being as well. And another one is spiritual well-being. This is not an area I study in depth, so I’m not an expert on that. But I have read research that does talk about the value of having a sense of almost existential connection to something beyond yourself and that’s typically what religion and other spiritual practices can offer to people.

It does provide the grounding and comfort and perspective that can help people get through difficult times. I’m not sure where organizations, what role they play in creating a spiritual connection, though. I mean, I need some more time to think about that as well. But certainly if it means that, there was a coworker at Questrom, at the Questrom School of Business at BU who would use one of my neighbor’s offices because he faced the right direction to do his prayers during the day. So he’s Muslim. So if you think about what are the ways organizations though can not stand in the way and inhibit people from pursuing whatever those spiritual practices and connections are.

Stuart Crainer:

So we’re going to need to rethink the role of organizations if we’re talking about issues like spirituality or even loneliness and mental health. They weren’t traditionally seen as having… The organizations weren’t traditionally seen as having a role to play in those areas.

Connie Hadley:

No. And there are reasons why organizations are being layered on with all these extra things on their to-do list and concerns to manage. And a lot of it, again goes back to what’s happening in the broader society. So some of you may know Robert Putnam wrote a famous book called Bowling Alone, and I just saw him speak at a conference this fall, and he was showing all these graphs about things like community engagement, about practice in some kind of house of worship on a regular basis. All those have really declined over time as a world society and especially in the US, but those needs haven’t gone away, the needs for people to feel connected and to feel that, as Christina was saying, this sort of higher spiritual intelligence. And so people are looking at the organizations to fill some of those gaps, right or wrong, but that is happening. And so organizations either can respond or they can ignore it and hope it goes away.

Stuart Crainer:

Yeah, yeah. Jeanette says, “We also need to rethink self-care so it’s not something we do have to work, but rather having the tools to work with our emotions and mental health in relationship with others.” Elizabeth Sandler says, “Companies aren’t convinced that humanizing culture will deliver the same profitability. This is the biggest challenge for those of us committed to change.” I think there’s quite a lot of truth in that, that companies aren’t convinced that humanizing culture will deliver the same levels of profitability.

Connie Hadley:

Well, what I say to that is the companies who do believe and can enact it will just have to show them, because every piece of evidence we have is that when people are in the right context with the right group of people around them, they will perform better and so… But I understand that you can get a lot of compliance in the short run with other methods. So when you think about the really tough environments where people are not cut any slack and they’re working 80 to 100-hour work weeks, they will perform well in the short run, absolutely. And if they have a high enough supply of talent willing to step in and play that role until they burn out, then they can continue for even longer. But if they could find a different way, I think that they would find a better situation for the company. It would be less dependent on that churn of talent, and they could have higher success in the long run. But again, every company has a choice to make and it is theirs.

Stuart Crainer:

And are you optimistic?

Connie Hadley:

I am cautiously optimistic, is what I would say about the future. I am really, really happy that more conversations are being had about these issues. And I have to, again, thank you and Des and Thinkers50 for putting me on the Radar because I take that as of course, like a wonderful honor for myself, but I take it as validation that the things I’m talking about matter. And you’re saying with this award that these are things companies should be thinking about and paying attention to and working on, then that’s great, that gives me a tremendous amount of optimism. And I have found, even in the last four years, the network that I’ve developed of people around the world, it’s like we’re finding each other and there is strength in numbers from that as well. And I’m thrilled to have collaborators all around the world now working on these issues. And so yes, I think we are going to make a difference. I think there are some headwinds, but I also think we’re picking up on some tailwinds.

Stuart Crainer:

And where next for your research, what do you have coming out? What are you focusing your energies on at the moment?

Connie Hadley:

Well, I have new projects going on all the topics we’ve already discussed, but the one that I haven’t really addressed right now is specifically on mental health in the workplace. And this is a project with Haria Jisrari and Hillary Anger Elfenbein. And we are really trying to get at what organizations can do, especially as a cultural, as remote work policies, what manager’s behaviors can do, what teams can do to support people who have diagnosed mental health conditions in the workplace. And we’re starting with bipolar disorder, which is a tough one. I have people in my life with bipolar disorder. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with psychiatrists about that through my work at McLean Hospital as a board member there. So I know that this is hard, but we are really determined to find some tools and practices that can support people who have that diagnosis. And through that hopefully will help people with other diagnoses, certainly depression, anxiety, and other ones as well.

Because again, just like loneliness, it’s already there. It’s already in your workplace. The numbers are too high to think that any 100 person or greater organization doesn’t have people who already have some kind of diagnosed mental health condition. So rather than ignore it, let’s get down to the bottom of it and figure it out together. So that’s an exciting project that I have. And then I have other research going on, like I mentioned about loneliness, really looking at interventions there. We also have a new broad-based study that connects loneliness to other aspects of the employee value proposition, that’s with Mark Mortensen and Amy Edmondson. And another project going on in AI trying to figure out what are the human factors that are going to make AI successful in adoption, and specifically how to make middle managers’ lives better. So lots of stuff going on. It’s going to be a really big year for data collection and writing for me.

Stuart Crainer:

That sounds fantastic. Some great comments finally from Rosanna Hook and Esther Crew and a LinkedIn user says, “It’s time to move from traditional management to a new leadership approach that benefits the demands of today’s world.” I couldn’t put it better myself. We’re out of time. Thank you very much, Connie Noonan Hadley for her time and brilliant insights. Find out more about the Institute for Life at Work at their website, and the website is institutelifework.org. Lots of inspiration, some great research there. Next week, Des will be leading the conversation and will be joined by Ludmila Praslova, author of The Canary Code. Thank you everyone who joined us today and look forward to seeing you next week. And thank you very much, Connie.

Connie Hadley:

Thank you for having me.