The Future of Well-Being is Now

Women’s Work

Most catastrophic events tend to impact the local economy. When it is a world event, the economic ripples are vast. For example, the World Wars had a significant event on the U.S. economy. The highest rate of U.S. unemployment was 24.9% (37% for all nonfarm workers) in 1933, during the Great Depression. By 1944, the United States would see its lowest unemployment rate of 1.2%. ¹

It would take a global pandemic to see rates reach their highest in nearly 80 years. By April 2020, unemployment was at 14.7% in the United States while OECD countries were similarly high. ² As a result, women’s participation in the labor force declined significantly.

A joint report by McKinsey and LeanIn.org showed that unpaid labor skyrocketed for women during the pandemic. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, women worked an average of 4 h 22 min of unpaid labor weekly while men averaged 2 h 15 min. During the pandemic, women increased their unpaid labor to 15–20 h more per week while men remained nearly the same. ³ By September 2020, 865,000 women had dropped out of the United States labor force alone, compared to 200,000 men. ⁴

Women also happen to make up the majority of workers on the front lines of the pandemic, providing essential health and care services. For this, they faced a host of additional risks and stresses.

To address some of these discrepancies, countries are developing policies related to pay equity and support for family leave—a critical antidote to burnout. In November 2020, the New Zealand Equal Pay Act came into effect. Although existing law guaranteed women and men would be paid equally for the same work. The new law makes sure that women and men are paid equally for work that is different but has equal value, including in chronically underpaid female-dominated industries.

In the United States, there is a renewed push for federally mandated Paid Family Leave. Since the United States is the only OECD country without a national paid family leave policy, it will be a necessary move to increase wellness across their nation.

As the pandemic highlighted the extraordinary pressures on women, some organizations and policymakers reacted. The growing trends to address this issue include the following:

Companies providing onsite care.

Alan May, executive vice president and chief people officer, for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), is attempting to lead the charge here. He implemented a fully paid, six-month leave for all men and women to either have children or adopt children. To expand the policy, HPE added 3 years to return on a part-time basis (for both men and women) with full job security. For May, it was critical to target the opportunity to both males and females. He said, “The well-known medical and psychological evidence around the nurturing of young people in the first year or two of their lives makes this policy essential for all groups.”

Before the pandemic, the effort to support gender equality at work was in progress but moving slowly. The crisis has accelerated that need. The question remains—will the learning from the pandemic be enough to affect real change? Time will tell.

Work From Home for Now or Forever?

Factories and its early approach to packing people into spaces because it was the most cost-efficient, led to the modern office design. More people, more product. Although offices look less like a warehouse today, the same attitude to warehousing people in confined spaces to optimize efficiencies prevailed.

Yet, as technology optimized systems, the need for humans in these roles shrank. Where there used to be typing pools (floors of receptionists) emails can be typed anywhere. Filing cabinets live in the cloud. And water cooler conversations happen on Slack.

This did not mean that companies suddenly adopted a more flexible attitude toward when, where, and how people worked. It would not be until another major disruption, the 2020 pandemic, that workplaces would finally “see the light.”

Before 2020, only 3.6% of the United States workforce worked from home. ⁶ Global Workplace Analytics estimates that 56% of the United States workforce holds a job that is compatible (at least partially) with remote work. They predict that “the longer people are required to work at home, the greater the adoption we will see when the dust settles.” As the dust is settling, the trend toward work from home has been realized.

By the end of 2021, the number of people predicted to be working from home multiple days per week will have increased to 25–30% of the workforce. ⁷

According to the research paper, Why Working From Home Will Stick, authored by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, “Nearly two-thirds of respondents and nearly 80 percent of those able to work from home want to do so at least one day per week. About 30 percent want to work from home all week and 40 percent would like to split the workweek in half.”

For those respondents who prefer to work from home two to three days per week, more than half see it as worth a pay raise of five percent or more, and nearly one in five see it as worth a pay raise of 15 percent or more. “In sum, the vast majority of respondents would like to work from home at least 1 day per week, and more than half express a willingness to accept a sizable pay cut for the option to work from home part of the week. ⁸

Flexibility is particularly important for Millennials, the fastest growing and largest workforce in history. It will be a key competitive advantage for employers who respond effectively and conversely, will lead to attrition for those who ignore the needs and wants of this demographic.

A 2021 survey of 1000 business leaders and 2000 knowledge workers asked leaders to share what they believed employees were expecting from their organizations. Employees were asked about their actual expectations. There was a considerable delta between leadership perception and reality.

The survey found that 87% of majority millennial respondents want to focus on career stability, security, and a healthy work–life balance. Leaders shared that their younger workforce desires were by and large, “workplace technology and training opportunities.” ⁹

Additionally, the survey found the following:

Over half (51 percent) of the workers want to remain working from home most or all of the time.

Obviously, the awareness gap is wide in this example. It could prove disastrous for competing firms if this widening gap is ignored. Additionally, it must be stated, work-from-home initiatives saved the United States employers over $30 billion dollars a day during the COVID-19 crisis. ¹⁰ These data points reinforce why remote work may become increasingly attractive for global firms.

Meeting Fatigue Became Zoom Burnout

Meeting fatigue has been a pervasive problem within organizations long before the pandemic hit. But in a year of increased workload—one of the biggest predictors for burnout—virtual meetings just exacerbated an existing problem. Data reinforce that meeting fatigue must be addressed.

The United States workforce alone engages in between 36 and 56 million meetings every day. ¹¹

A joint survey by Leiter, Maslach, Moss, and Whiteside analyzed the state of burnout and well-being of 1500 respondents from 46 different countries during COVID-19. The team combined several evidence-based scales including The Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a psychological assessment of occupational burnout, and The Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS) used to assess employees' perceptions of work setting qualities.

Out of 3300 qualitative responses, themes of overwork from meetings appeared consistently throughout the data. One respondent shared,

“I’m working more hours, a lot of the time straight through lunch. There seem to be a lot more meetings, than before we started working remote. those five minute conversations we would have by stopping by someone’s desk, or seeing them in the kitchen, can’t happen anymore, so they have been replaced with 25/30 minute meetings or 50/60 minute meetings.”

Efforts to battle this issue included an effort to shorten meetings, limit number of attendees, decrease number of meetings, and ensuring that individuals walked away with clear action items. Perhaps the most important learning, still yet to be fully realized, is that video conferencing as a communication tool can risk an individual’s well-being and mental health.

In the first peer-reviewed article yet to analyze the mental health impacts of video conferencing, Professor Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of the Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), found four distinct negative consequences of too much time on Zoom.

Excessive amounts of close-up eye contact. Bailenson suggests that when someone’s face is that close in real life, the brain interprets it as an intense situation that is either going to lead to mating or to conflict. This keeps individuals in a hyper-aroused state for extensive periods of time. To solve for this, Bailenson recommends taking Zoom out of full-screen and minimizing face size according to Vignesh Ramachandran, who interviewed Bailenson for Stanford News.

Spending all day looking in a mirror is exhausting. Numerous studies show there are negative emotional consequences to persistently looking at your reflection. According to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, the pandemic has led to a 10% increase in cosmetic surgery and 20% in France, an estimate by the French Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. ¹⁶

Video conferencing is leading to a sedentary lifestyle. One study found that people are spending an additional four hours each day sitting while at home, with 18 percent adding more than seven hours of sitting time to their days in 2020. ¹⁷ And yet, moving is critical to improved cognitive health. Dr Scott McGinnis, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, shared that moderate walking, just 20–30 min per day, is associated with a reduced risk of depression and anxiety and is shown to slow cognitive decline and may reduce the risk of dementia.

To solve for this, trends toward taking meeting on the go have increased with more support for using other forms of communication. Some companies encourage taking meetings while on exercise bikes and treadmills. Stand-up desks and accessories to turn desks into stand-up desks are on the rise. According to Google Trends, the search phrase “standing desk” increased by nearly 700% in August 2020 as many employers and their employers realized that remote work was here to stay.

Trends toward turning camera’s off have increased as well. Since studies show that it’s harder to pick-up non-verbal cues, individuals are exhausted by trying to assess facial expressions or gestures. Companies like Cisco, Deloitte, HPE, KPMG, RSM, and many others are creating policies where there are off camera times and “camera by choice” for those who just need to switch off.

A wave of new technology looking to decrease meeting fatigue has emerged in since 2020. The trend toward asynchronous meetings has grown significantly. Since these meetings do not expect participants to meet at a singular place at a singular time, it makes them appealing. The flexibility to engage in a meeting when it works within an employee’s schedule is a desirable innovation.

However, the tools have not yet adequately solved the problem yet. Startups like Claap claim that by bundling the video and the collaboration together in one single platform is the key to a successful asynchronous meeting. Time will tell. And yet it’s obvious there is a market for decreasing meeting fatigue.

Can Tech Burnout be Solved With More Tech?

One of the fastest growing trends to come out of the pandemic was increased adoption of existing technology and more openness to novel technology, like Artificial Intelligence (AI).

For example, the massive adoption of telehealth and teletherapy. In the article, “Telehealth as a Bright Spot of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Recommendations From the Virtual Frontlines,” academics found that in just a few short few weeks after the pandemic hit, telehealth went from under 5% of patient visits to almost 93%. ¹⁸ A survey from the American Medical Association and the American Telemedicine Association found that notably, over 83 percent reported good overall visit quality, and 78 percent said they felt their health concern could be addressed via telehealth. Over 70 percent expect to access virtual care post-pandemic. ¹⁹

In an interview with Emma Williams, Corporate Vice President, Modern Workplace Transformations at Microsoft, she suggests that employers can help their employees reduce burnout from technology (ironically) by leveraging technology. Williams indicates that AI will inevitably come to help individuals “feel more engaged and accomplished rather than burned out and stressed.”

Bryon Robinson, ²⁰ PhD and Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, in his article, “How Artificial Intelligence Is Preventing Cognitive Overload, Compassion Fatigue and Job Burnout,” claims that AI will help prevent decision-fatigued brains.

He shared how some of the big firms like MetLife and Humana are employing innovative new technology to offset burnout through AI. One example is an application that “nudges” call-center agents via the display of in-the-moment cues. For example, a heart when a customer’s emotional state changes, indicating a need for empathy. It guides agents during conversations to be more emotionally intelligent, which takes some of the cognitive burden off of them and helps better control conversations.

A study by Oracle and Workplace Intelligence analyzed 12,300 respondents and found that 82% of respondents believe robots can support their mental health better than humans and they would rather speak to a robot than their manager about stress and anxiety at work. Most workers are open to having a robot therapist or counselor to support their mental health.

68 percent of people would prefer to talk to a robot over their manager about stress and anxiety at work.

“Now more than ever, it’s a conversation that needs to be had and employees are looking to employers to step up and provide solutions,” says Emily He, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud HCM. “There is a lot that can be done to support the mental health of the global workforce...But first, organizations need to add mental health to their agenda. If we can get these conversations started – both at an HR and an executive-level – we can begin to make some change. And the time is now.”

Lack of Well-Being and The Great Resignation

The global pandemic would forever change work and life permanently. After several years of dealing with daily uncertainty, grief and loss while workloads reached unsustainable levels, chronic stress and burnout would be the result.

Exhaustion, lack of individual self-efficacy, mental distance from one's work, and cynicism would take hold, leading to one of the biggest mass attrition events the workforce has ever seen. The Great Resignation would be defined as the moment the biggest global firms would finally declare that mental health and well-being would finally be taken seriously. Now a bottom-line issue, organizations had to stop the mass exodus happening in firms around the world.

In his article, Who Is Driving the Great Resignation? for Harvard Business Review, Ian Cook shares data from his in-depth analysis of more than nine million employee records from more than 4,000 companies, Two interesting trends emerged. Middle level managers are resigning at higher levels than groups. He suggests, “Many of these workers may have simply reached a breaking point after months and months of high workloads, hiring freezes, and other pressures, causing them to rethink their work and life goals.” ²¹

The other trend was that certain industries are more at risk of attrition than others. “In general, we found that resignation rates were higher among employees who worked in fields that had experienced extreme increases in demand due to the pandemic, likely leading to increased workloads and burnout.”

Overall, the data simply reinforces that the workforce has hit a wall. Although some groups and industries are at more risk than others, no employee is immune.

As organizations look to be transformational, remain competitive, and more importantly, still exist in the next five years, prioritizing mental health and well-being while preventing chronic stress and burnout must be table stakes.

2021 will be remembered as the first time pay would come second place to well-being, in the battle for attracting and retaining talent across the global workforce. Perhaps one of the strongest cases yet for a future of human centered leadership.