 Next to Lee we've got Matt Darling, he is the vice president of Ideas42 and Ideas42, we're in partnership with Ideas42 and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we want to thank you very much. This whole project off the ground, so Matt's going to be talking about some of the research that they've been doing, really looking at work-life conflict and overwork and the impact on health. Really looking through the fascinating lens of behavioral science, really for using human psychology to try to understand what drives that overwork individually at the team and organizational level and also culturally. And then what can we do about it? So looking forward to that. And next to Matt we've got Barbara Wankoff, who is just an absolute expert in this field. I'm delighted that she's here, I'm delighted that you all are here. Barbara is the executive director of diversity and inclusion at KPMG and has been working on these issues for quite some time. And then finally we've got Serita Gupta, she is the executive director of Jobs with Justice and also the co-director of Caring Across Generations. So we're going to start, let me start with Lee. So the title of the show is Your Work May Be Killing You. And I actually have to say I sort of stole that from Jeff Feffer. He's a professor at Stanford and he's actually working on a book called Your Paycheck May Be Killing You. So I sort of changed it a little bit. But he and his research partners have done some really interesting looking at 228 different studies looking at work culture and health. And what they've found is that a combination of erratic schedules and uncertainty for low wage workers and long work hours and sort of telepressure and always feeling like you have to be on and vigilance for knowledge workers. Making us sick that the workplace itself is now the fifth leading cause of death in the United States responsible for 120,000 excess deaths a year with healthcare costs that rival diabetes. So what I want to know is why aren't we talking about this more? So Lee, give us an overview. You looked at the healthy workplace. It doesn't seem like it's that healthy. What's going on? Well, just a little context. A couple of years ago, around about the time that I met you, Bridget, I was going through a bit of a crisis. I work for an architecture firm and it was a really, really stressful time. And the first time in my life I've always been able to rally when times get tough. I hit a wall. So we're going on huge projects, 80 hours a week for weeks and weeks and weeks on end. And we all got there every once in a while. And in my case, my family was not so happy with me and my friends, all of that. And started this journey where I was really said, there's got to be a better way. Got to be a better way to work. And so I interviewed paleoanthropologist and I kind of went way, way back. I decided rather than look at work just the last 100 years, let's go way, way back and really understand how our health is so impacted. I mean, times are good. We have food. We have grocery stores. Like why is it so difficult? Why is our life so difficult? And so it was just looking maybe two million years back is that a lot of our time was spent hunting and gathering and as you might expect. But when I talked to these paleoanthropologists, they said that we actually were walking eight or nine miles a day. We were moving constantly. Of course, you're always being chased by a saber-toothed tiger and all these sorts of things. But we really were moving and our diet obviously evolved quite a bit. But fast forward to the farming, you know, when we all kind of cities were evolved like maybe 10,000 years ago. It happened all over the world around the same time due to global warming and lots of reasons. But we were still, even when we were farmers, we were moving around quite a bit. And if you look at subsistence farming, a lot of Amish farmers today and things like that, they're still moving eight, seven, eight miles a day and eating fairly nutritious meals. And then, you know, kind of the industrial revolution hits. We move inside. The physical workplace itself gets pretty horrible. As we all know, we're working crazy hours. Time shifted quite a bit and a very, very kind of stressful environment. There was this great story I heard in Manchester where people, it was so awful that there was this thing called gen carts. And people would be given gen or could buy gen on the street. They'd even buy it on the factory floor. So we spent most of our time intoxicated while working, which, you know, maybe that's good. I don't know, now we have, we're not intoxicated. Now we have coffee. It's so much better. And so there's that. And so this kind of slow gradual evolution. And I think now we're in a position where a lot of us are very addicted to our devices. We're working much more than those 40 hours that we all work so hard to reduce the work week down into, and we're giving away a lot of extra hours, are not paid, something like 30 extra plus hours a week, working desperately in grocery stores or in our pillows, you know, on our iPhones, whatever the case may be. And it's caused not only physical issues, most skill of skeletal issues with our working and the fact that we're not moving very much. We're not getting in our 150 minutes a week, which the American Medical Association requires. How many of you guys work out 150 minutes a week? That's like five times 30 minutes a week. Okay, so that was maybe like 30% of you. Okay, you represent the population. That's great. So what does this mean? Well, obviously there are all kinds of issues with obesity and being overweight. Two thirds of our country is overweight. It's a huge issue. And it's causing all these chronic issues and diseases. And it's also, we're really stressed out. There's this heart, mind, you know, health condition or connection. And so we're spending a lot of our time really stressed, and we have all kinds of issues physically with absenteeism, but also with presenteeism, which is going to work and kind of not really being into it, which is causing, you know, something like $500 million a year to lost profitability in organizations. And there's also this interesting rift I've been noticing in the last few years, which is there are people who are employed, luckily, and working, and their employer is not willing to maybe hire another person to fill that position, right? So we're continuing to hold on to the jobs we have. We're talking about this earlier. And then there's a whole swath of the population that is desperate to be working, period, to be working any sort of hours. And so there's a systemic issue, I think, that we're wrestling with. But at the end of the day, I think there are some lights of hope, and we can talk about those during our discussion today. But I think a lot of it starts with leaders who recognize it in themselves. You mentioned the Human Performance Institute. I spent some time with, how many of you guys have heard of HPI? So the Human Performance Institute trains athletes to improve their performance and better their game. They train Olympians and all kinds of elite athletes. And over 30 years, they've been training them to really manage their energy over time. Over the course of a day and between matches, it's all about managing energy. That is the difference between the A and the A plus players. So now they're training corporate America, and they're specifically training leaders in corporate America to help manage their energy and recognize there's a life outside of work that life and work overlap and feed each other. So it's a pretty exciting time, I think, as we build that realization, but it starts a lot with leadership. Well, thanks so much, Lee. What I'd like to do is, if I could turn to you, I mean, one of the things that really strikes me, you talk about presenteeism. And if you look at, say, Gallup, they do this general poll pretty much every year of employee engagement. And something like over 70% of American workers are disengaged at work. And yet we put in these really long hours, if you look internationally, we work longer hours than about any other advanced economy except for Japan and South Korea. And there's a word for dying at your desk in Japanese, you know? So speaking of, at this point, let me turn to you. I mean, you worked in Wall Street in that investment banking environment where those kind of long hours are sort of seen as this badge of honor or almost like boot camp that you have to get through. Can you talk about what that was like? And I think the most important question that I want to ask is, do you really have to work that way in order to do good work? No, you don't have to work that way to do good work. I think that's obvious. But there's certain industries we probably can't fix. And Wall Street's one of them. Because when you come in young, you opt in to that career, you get a lot of money, you're working on a deal that's someone's life changing event and they're paying you millions of dollars to work on it. I'm sorry, they're paying you millions of dollars to work on it and they want you to be available. If they want to talk on a Saturday night, you're going to be available to talk on a Saturday night. But what I found jarring is actually when I left that and I came to tech and the attitude is still the same and it's not billions of dollars. And it's not as critical and I mean even banking isn't critical. It's not medicine, it's not. You're not saving lives. So you don't have to work this way. But the flip side I'll bring up is it's not the hours that get to you, it's the unpredictability that gets to you. If you know you'd have to work 15 hours a day every day, you'll probably get used to it over time and you'll find your zone of happiness and you'll make your schedule around it. What I hated in banking was you'd sit down at dinner with my wife on Friday night and you'd get an email and you'd be at this fancy restaurant and you'd be like, okay, I gotta go. Or you'd get on a plane and you'd cancel your trip, you'd fly back the next day and you'd cancel your vacation. And I think when the big banks, they started two years ago, they started thinking about how do we deal with work-life balance. The first thing they did was they said, let's reduce the hours and they realized that morale didn't go up at all. But then they started giving you protected time off. So you still work long hours but they guaranteed you every second Saturday you could make plans. And morale went up. How about every Saturday? Every second Saturday. What happened to the weekend? But it's a trade-off. Even within Wall Street, it's a small group of people that opt into it. You do it for three or four years and hopefully it gets better. The problem is after three or four years, nobody tells you, you can stop doing this now and you've got to start drawing your own boundaries. Barbara, I'd like to bring you into this at this point. One of the points that you made earlier when we were talking was that sometimes, especially when it comes to knowledge work, people are really passionate about what they do and maybe they weren't passionate about the deal but it was sort of that kind of all-encompassing, exciting environment or we're really passionate. How do you set boundaries so that you don't go from passion to burnout? Well, some similar challenges in the professional services firm as in banking. But a few really key differences and we do have people who we say they have opted into this and they know that it's going to be hard work. It's client service delivery. So again, clients says jump, we say how high. But our engagement scores are through the roof actually and we two years ago set out on something that we call to talk about purpose and we really helped our employees from a very grassroots and leadership standpoint. So bottom up, top down is help people recognize why they're doing the work they're doing. And we told some stories of KPMG's history and the things that we've been involved in really world-changing events over time in our long history and then we challenged our employees to tell us why they were working so that they weren't just doing an audit of a healthcare company but they were finding extra money that the healthcare company could dedicate to cancer research. So they would tell us that they're helping to solve cure cancer. It framed their work in a completely different way. Now we set out a challenge to our employees and said if we could get 10,000 stories in a three month period of time and at that point in time we had about 24,000 employees. So we were asking for one story per person from less than half of our population. But we set out a challenge that if we could get 10,000 stories in three months we would give extra days off over the Christmas holiday period. Well, in less than a month we had 10,000 stories and we announced that congratulations, you'll get extra time off and we proceeded to get an additional 35,000 stories from our employees. This resonated so much and it gave people that purpose to do the work they're doing. So all in all now you want to do the work, you believe in it and you tend to put in a lot of extra effort and a lot of extra hours. How do you find that balance of doing important work that you believe in and you want to excel at to not being sidelined and not doing meaningful work? And where's that sweet spot? And I do think it is a lot about self-regulation and I also think that it is about leadership and being sure that our leaders understand the importance of that time to recharge which is why that we shut down over the holiday break so that there's no work happening. You don't come back to thousands or hundreds of emails and you have to work so much the week before you go out and the week after you come back. You get 10 or 12 days where there's no email traffic, there's no expectation to be online and you do get that. I would love to say we could do that every weekend but we're not quite there yet but I think that there's recognition and discussion of the benefit that we see in our employees to giving them at least some time to really recharge. Small steps. And the challenges that we make but is there something when you're looking at the workplace and the work context, is it only self-regulation? Is it also looking at systems and structures and what can behavioral science help us understand in terms of both the problem and the solutions here? Speaking of getting depleted, it's interesting. I work at Ideas for Two, which is a behavioral design firm. We're a non-profit. I think it's a great place to work. I think it's a place where we have a lot of flexibility, a lot of ability to set our own hours. I'll break my colleagues here in the New York office because I'm in the Boston office where there's only six of us and no one even knows if I come in so maybe I don't. What's funny about this is you think about this from that perspective. The systems are in place, the leadership that's bought in and everyone thinks that work-life balance is important, especially on the work-life balance team. What's fascinating is I still think my work-life balance is pretty bad. I think all the structures and leadership and a lot of these impediments that we're really worried about are really bad and my work-life balance is great and part of it is because I value my work. I think it's important. I like doing it. But also, and I think this is where the behavioral science comes in, is because there's a lot of ways that I make mistakes in how I prioritize or how I self-regulate. You think about how do I set the work that I want to do? I like the part of my work that I'm doing, the fun creative side of it, but that doesn't mean that I don't have to go and spend afternoon every once in a while figuring out where my invoices are going and where they're supposed to go and what the actual charges are. What's always interesting is I kind of put that off. I start out and say, hey, here's the creative work and then I say, okay, now I need to do the invoices. But really I should go and answer this other email and maybe I should reorganize my whole email system because I just don't really want to do those invoices and I procrastinate, procrastinate, procrastinate on that and I'm like, oh wait, I really should get paid for some of my work sometimes. So one thing that we've been thinking about a lot is these sorts of ways that are how we procrastinate, how we forget, all these sort of funny little quirks of how people make decisions, how people take action and how that really interacts with workplace design and how we work things out. And I'm thinking about almost like the Robert... mending wall poem of good fences make good neighbors and then the neighbor comes and says, okay, but that's only when there are cows, right? If cows aren't going to go and eat your grass, it's fine. And a lot of the ways we workplace is structured sometimes is saying, aha, you know, keep an eye on your workers, they're going to go and try and slack off and they're going to try and get as much as they can. And a lot of times it's not the case. A lot of times we're the ones who are driving ourselves, we're the ones that are motivating ourselves and when you put in these structures, it removes that motivation, going back to your point about people being disengaged or people being uncomfortable. So I think thinking about how these sorts of weird things about how people act changes, and I think one thing that's really clear to me is that even just not... it's not about knowing it. I've realized these things about myself, I've realized these mistakes that I make, but how can we change the structure of how we're organized in order to make it better? And I would love to say I have a good answer to that. We're working on that right now. We've got some ideas. I think everyone has the wonderful part toolkit that's registered in my colleague, Stanley Wihon, I've put together. And I think these are good ideas, but I think the question is, do they work? And that's the thing that we're going to hope to find out. You know, it's interesting. Sarita, let me bring you in, because one of the things Matt was talking about was that sense of self-will or whatever. But what if you're a low-wage worker and you are completely at the mercy of your bosses, the organization, and just like Matt was saying, a lot of the structures are set up because there isn't a sense of trust, or we're going to watch you, or we think you're going to try to get away with something so almost very punitive. Can you talk more about what a low-wage worker or an hourly worker might feel, what the situation is for them, and how does that impact health? Have you looked at what that experience is like? Yeah, thank you. Well, work is stressful, as we know, and this conversation is absolutely credentialing that it's a public health crisis, really. And the truth is that the intensity of stress that's faced by workers who work in the low-age sectors of our economy is incredibly intense, and it's not talked about, but it's so stressful, and the health implications, both physical and mental health implications, are enormous. So the best way... I would love to just share a story of a woman named Janelle. She's a home care worker, and she's a warehouse worker, and I'm actually going to quote her. This is pretty much how my day goes. I get up, and I get my daughter to school by 8 a.m. I'm at my first job by 9 a.m. I get off at 1 p.m. I take a nap before I pick up my daughter at 5.30 p.m. We do dinner and homework. I try to take another nap. Then I go to work at my second job at 10 p.m. in a warehouse because I'm not getting the hours with home care, and if I do get the hours, it's still not enough money. I make it home by 7 a.m. and start over. Some days, I'm going off of three or four hours of sleep. On Saturday, sometimes I get to sleep late, and sometimes I'll get up and try to go do a movie with my daughter, but if I do that, a bill doesn't get paid. That is the reality that growing numbers of working women and men in our economy are facing right now, and I say that because a man is functioning on three or four hours of sleep every day over time what that does to your physical and mental health. So it's really pretty profound, and what we've found in our work is that it doesn't have to be this way. So we've looked a lot at the retail and restaurant sector, for example, which are two growing sectors of our economy, and what we've found is for restaurant or retail workers, the chaotic schedules and unpredictable schedules coupled with the lack of enough hours of work, coupled with the low wages is tremendously stressful. So today in the retail sector, a lot of employers are going towards what we call having workers on call, right? And in demanding that people have open availability, which means essentially you call, in some cases you call in the morning and hope you have a job that day and you have some hours of work or you're just on call until the employer calls you and you're expected to be on call and open and available full-time even though the work you'll be asked to come in for is just part-time, which then if you think that through for a second, how does somebody hold a second job or a third job, because they're not actually being given the flexibility or told here are some hours within which you're going to work. So so many working women and men that we've talked to have said this is impossible to budget their lives, to plan their lives to take care of themselves to go to doctor's appointments, let alone if you have children or you have aging adults in your family that you care for, how you actually plan for their needs. How much email are people sending over their Christmas break? Again, like you said, we're lucky enough to have an organization that says hey, you get the 25th to the first off and email went down, it went down by about a third. You think about that, that's probably every one of us was spending maybe an hour, two, three hours a day sending out emails. No one had a deadline at that point in time. No one had pressing work. We all were off and it still was happening and it was interesting because we could actually monitor that. We're trying to think, what should we do? Should we just turn the server off and say no one gets the email for the next week? If you want to contact your team, message them on the phone, call them or something like that. On the topic of email, we have to struggle but you send out an email and somebody responds to it and you feel the need to respond and the next thing you know, on an average day you're reading and writing war and peace over and over again but the equivalent of it. In my group we came up with a simple rule, a small descent group of ours that said outside of client emails we're going to cap it at 15. Once I'm done writing 15 emails for the day, I'm done. You send out less emails, you start getting a whole lot less emails and your work product just gets better and more thoughtful. We push it the next day. I imagine there's going to be other forms of corporate disobedience that you'd have to come up with to put a stop to it. If you imagine corporate disobedience, you can imagine actually having a policy that says that, right? Or having technology that says this is how many emails you can send out, this is how many meetings you can schedule between those hard limits. I think they should just charge for email. That would stop a lot. I love that, charging for email, because I'm one of those inbox zero people and it's driving me crazy. It's driving me crazy when it's full. It drives me crazy trying to get to the zero. I wanted to ask you, so you lived in this intense work environment on Wall Street and you walked away. Did you learn lessons? I kind of want to turn the last part of our conversation towards solutions and sort of what are next steps and what's hopeful now that we've gotten ourselves all depressed about email and being buried in information technology. I had an opportunity to create a company then on your own. What were some of the lessons that you learned or what were some of the things that you really wanted to try to avoid or really create intentionally to sort of do better work and maybe have time for some life? So I think there are three lessons that I learned. The first was old habits die hard because my first company, I started with a fellow banker and we both brought all our bad habits to the startup world and it was as intense and as awful and then we had to put a circuit breaker on that and I'm very fortunate that I have a co-founder from a very different background and you know it brings perspective. The second lesson was one of remote work and I think we have an opportunity today just to use technology to enable us the same way technology enslaves us and remote work does that. I have a team that is largely remote and what it means is that I can't police their time and they are free to work when they are available to work and it creates this I'd argue, assemblance of balance that is hard to do in a corporate environment and the third thing is actually relating to the work we do ourselves and what Tapwich does is we write, we build tools to help companies write better job descriptions that are more inclusive and we have made the decision that they want to be more friendly from a work-life balance perspective they still articulate all of their culture and their jobs and how they relate to each other in vocabulary that reflects the stress of constant work so they will write we want aggressively available people we want people to be self-reliant we want people to the way they describe their job is less about engagement we want to talk about earlier and more about what you will do the way they describe works is more about we have food all the time we have beer on the tap we have boozeball instead of talking about we have parental lead benefits and we have health benefits we are family friendly and those are some of the things that I've learned I want to say that and not to be a downer again but those have to be personal and not over promised so I think that one of the things that lessons learned over time is to set the right expectations and when we fail to do that and people's expectations are not met is when we have the most discontent so you say you are going to have all of these benefits and all of this time off and then reality doesn't it goes to that predictability control I know what I'm getting into I'm buying into that little bit so Barbara to go back to you've been responsible for really changing culture of a pretty culture that was pretty set and set in its ways how do you go about doing that and where are you trying to push forward right now well I think that you do have to think about this as a change exercise really and look at all the best change management so that it's not anyone's solution we're very fortunate that we have some great leaders who recognize this and recognize it as a business imperative whether it's the ability to attract and retain the talent we need to serve our clients we find that the most innovative solutions come out of those business needs so you have a partner who has a client and they need to serve that client and they want to retain those people they won't do anything and everything bend over backwards for those employees flexibility, remote work reduced work schedules because they believe in those people and they want to retain them so you find those examples you can make it work and we promote those all over the place we hold those up as best practices and then I think that there is a real need to get some grassroots energy around this and dispel the fears dispel the fear of penalty of asking for what you need and so that it should come from the bottom up as well I do think that you find those pockets where it can work and you hope it spreads over time starting pilots almost experiments and then taking it from there and we have some leaders who are going to be bold and so we go to them and say try this let's do an experiment and then do you find that people then say hey what are they doing or can I try that have you found in your experience that that actually does spread sort of like a contagion we do we have a pretty competitive environment so somebody sees something and then somebody else says wait I want to do it and I want to do it even better so that's the plus side of that in our audit practice several years ago we started a program called what we call team of choice and teams that work together over a long period of time get together and right up front they do a lot of planning what's important to you what's coming up over the next three months you know you want to run a marathon you need to have time for your training you your sister's getting married you want time off for that you want to have dinner with your child a couple times a week you know okay and so you get it all on the table and you do some planning and that's been very successful in our audit practice which is a little bit more stable in terms of the engagements when we looked at our advisory or consulting practice where teams are forming for short periods of time and then moving on it was harder and just recently our advisory practice said alright that's it we're going to figure this out we're going to do team of choice our way that's going to work so they're in an experiment right now to figure out how teams that come together for a couple of days or a week at a time can create the environment where people get what they need so you know Matt one of the things that struck me in reading the report and hopefully you guys will all have a link to the ideas 42 report which is great great reading you know one of the things that really struck me when I was talking with Dan and Weehan was one of the designs that you're looking at is really being planful if you will and planning slack for things that you can't predict and planning for your own planning fallacy recognizing that you may not you may be overestimating what you can do and underestimating how long it can take and just can you talk about how important planning is you know both individually and organizationally as sort of thinking about kind of redesigning work and moving into the next step I think one of the interesting things about life is that unexpected stuff happens all the time and it's kind of funny because we should expect it right like every so you know I work on a lot of our work is grant supported and so every once in a while be like oh here's this wonderful grant that I need to apply for because it's so perfect for us and I need to sort of schedule 10 hours for me to work on it and it's funny because I never have that 10 hours ready but this still happens to me like once a month right this still happens to me that I and there's this level where I should always know that it's coming down