 From New America and Slate, I'm Bridget Schulte, and this is Better Life Labs. When you get an email at nine o'clock at night, the question you ask is, do I answer it now? Do I wait till later? And what will that say about my dedication as an employee? David Waldman knows that unhealthy workplace dynamic pretty well. He's Vice President for Human Resources at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the nation's largest philanthropic organization dedicated solely to health. We really look to solve some of the most entrenched problems in this country around health and healthcare and creating a culture of health. A great deal of what determines our health takes place outside the healthcare system, in the workplace. Long work hours bring increased risks for hypertension, cardiovascular disease, and depression. One study found that men who don't take vacations are 30% more likely to have heart attacks. And for women, it's 50%. To counter those trends and to create a healthy work environment, the Foundation adopted many progressive policies for its staff. Flexible hours, generous benefits, you can even get a standing desk. Yet the problems of overwork culture were not going away. Enter Tara Oakman. Hi, I'm Tara Oakman. I'm a senior program officer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. I came here from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services in Washington, D.C. And I was there during an incredibly busy time where we were implementing the Affordable Care Act. Wow. And yeah, there was a lot going on. A lot. And we were all in. It was just constant work and pressure from all sides. And so it was really hard to turn it off. I had twins while I was there. And part of why I left is because I needed to really be thinking not just about my work life, but also about my family life. And when I came here, one thing that I was told were there are no emergencies in philanthropy. You don't have the White House breathing down your back. You don't have a Congress asking, what are you doing? And it was just amazing to me to see that here people were working really in the same kinds of ways. So the Foundation decided to study and redesign its own workplace culture. They draw on the latest research in behavioral science. If they could improve their own work-life balance and health, they'd make their own lives better, and they'd show other employers how to create a healthier, more productive workplace. On this episode of our podcast, which full disclosure is supported by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, I'm talking with David Waldman and Tara Oakman about the importance of improving not just workplace policies, but workplace culture itself. David sets the scene, describing efforts the Foundation has made over his 19 years there. Our building was actually refurbished with the idea of creating a healthier environment, one that caused people to walk around a lot with hallways that were big enough for folks to hang out and talk about their issues and keep movement as part of what they regularly do. We have an incredibly well-equipped fitness center and provide classes in the morning and at noon in the evening for our staff to stretch and move and get some of the anxiety and the stress of the day out. That said, our folks work at 100 miles an hour. They care so deeply about what we're doing for this country. The fact of the matter is with all we have done, there still is this driving force that moves our staff to work many more hours under the type of pressure that would make you think we were working in the emergency ward of a hospital and we're not. What I'd like to do as part of our conversation is share some of the stories from some people we've been talking with about trying to live a full life when work can be so overwhelming. I'd like to start with a woman named Keenit Howatt. She started her career working flat out at a law firm and for most of her 30s worked very long hours as an attorney for the EPA. There's almost a kind of weird sadistic or masochistic pride, I think, that some people take and being like, oh, well, I work way more than 40 hours. You know, that's the bare minimum, you know? And what is that? You know, why do we have that kind of culture? So Tara and David, what are your thoughts? You know, why do we have that kind of culture where, you know, the 40-hour work week is just for wimps anymore? The way I see it, we worked for many years in an industrial age country. Folks went in for a 35, 37 and a half 40-hour work week. They went in when the whistle blew. They finished when the whistle blew. And then as we started to transition to a more information technology type of environment, suddenly the boundaries of work were lifted. All of the artificial barriers came off. And I think as they started to come off, so started the race to see who was more productive. For some people, I would agree it's just a race and it's just a matter of showing that I can put in more time than you. I know in our sector and certainly in our organization, I think it's less that and it's more I need more time to figure out what we can do to have a greater impact on the topics that we care most about. And because that can be a never-ending sort of assignment, people devote themselves to that differently. The kind of knowledge work that we're talking about here and that lends itself more to this more than 40-hour week culture, it's just harder to know when you've met the expectations of doing a good job. If the finish line keeps moving, when you mow your lawn, you can step back when it's done and see what you've accomplished. But I think for the type of work that we do, there's not that clear-cut end. So how much of that is the individual being driven by that and how much of that is organizational or is it a combination of both? I think it's a combination of both. I think organizations set the tone and we can all do more, which is really a large reason why we've engaged in this project to try to figure out organizationally what can be done differently and behavioral economics is a hopeful answer to that question. But I think the other piece of it is the drive in our staff members to try to find the answer. So one thing we've learned is that people kind of exaggerate in their heads how much other people are doing. And so if one person is doing more, working later and sends emails at 9 o'clock at night than other people that are getting them thinking, well, everyone's working and so I should be working and then it's like, okay, well, then I need to be checking my email and therefore I'm sending email and it's sort of a vicious cycle. And so as we are thinking about solutions, one thing we're thinking about is, okay, well, we don't want to necessarily stop that person from working if that's what they really need to do, but how do we kind of cut that cycle? So maybe their email gets sent at 9 a.m. the next morning instead, just kind of putting structures in place to protect everybody else. Yes, and I think that's an important point. How do we make sure exactly to Tara's point that we respect the desire of someone to work but don't let that drive the organizational culture and what's the right way for an organization to intervene in that situation? And that is difficult and delicate. Right, right. Yeah, you don't want to, you want to nudge, not shove, right? Exactly. So let me play you a bit more from the conversation I had with Kenneth Howard. After working as a senior attorney at the EPA, she landed her dream job. She became director of a leading environmental nonprofit. She loved the work, but she worked so hard she began to feel real impact on her health. Eventually she found herself facing a really difficult decision. Let's listen. I was working at that public interest organization, you know, much in the same way I did when I was at the farm and at EPA. I was pouring myself into, and I think more so actually because this was my dream come true. This was my job. I wanted my whole life, you know, and it was so fantastic. I really cannot say enough good things about that experience, but the clock is ticking and I also really wanted to have a child and I finally made the tough decision to leave that job. And very shortly after that I was able to have a child. I had problems with losing pregnancies. I don't know that any medical person would say there's definitely a connection, but I can tell you that from my body I think it was critical that I take the stress level down a notch in order to have a child. My body knew I just needed to have more space and be better to myself physically in order to carry a pregnancy to completion. So Tara, what do you think? What does that say about the way we're all working and what we value? I think kudos to her for deciding that. It must have been an incredibly difficult decision. It's sad. It seems like you should be able to have your dream job but be supported in that in trying to minimize the stress. I don't have the silver lining for that. Unfortunately, I think it is more common than we all necessarily admit and that's why talking about these issues coming up with solutions for all of us is really important. David, one thing that strikes me in all the different conversations that we're having, there seems to be this almost religious belief that the only way that you can do your dream job, the only way to do really excellent work is almost to sacrifice everything else. In your years of watching people work, I mean, is that really true? Is that really the only way to do excellent work? Absolutely not. Some of the most successful people that I've worked with have found a way to manage the balance and it is usually not in the earlier part of their career because that tends to be the time when you're doing everything you can to impress the people around you for the potential of future opportunities. But as people gain more wisdom in the workplace and in their career, I think they get to the point where they're able to ask themselves, what do I really want in my life? In the case that you just conveyed to us, the person made that decision and had to go to a greater extreme than I wish were the case. My initial reaction was, you lose some really great talent. Here was someone who was very devoted to the organization. It was her dream job. So one can only guess how important she was to the organization and what that loss to the organization meant. And to me, that's just a shame. So organizations have to find a better way to help people balance. And I would add, I've been doing HR for over 30 years and I think of workshops I did 30 years ago with staff focused on the exact same topic. So it really hasn't changed despite the fact that many organizations do try to find ways to create that balance, but there just haven't been enough good examples of where this is actually working. Well, one of the places that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is looking for help with workplace culture is the field of behavioral economics. Unlike older traditional economic models that try to predict what a so-called rational actor would do, behavioral science recognizes that human decision-making is much more complicated. For instance, when we're mentally overtaxed, it turns out we actually get stupid by up to 13 IQ points according to one study I read. So next I want to share a bit of a conversation I had with one of the leaders in the field, Dr. Jeff Pfeffer. He's a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford in the Graduate Business School. He's done a lot of research on work culture and impact on our health, and he's found some pretty startling things. We need something to kind of as a baseline measure, and so we brainstormed for a while and we figured out one possible baseline measure would be second-hand smoke, which is a known carcinogen and heavily regulated. And it turns out almost all of the workplace practices we looked at, economic insecurity, absence of health insurance, long work hours, shift work, absence of social support at work, absence of job control, had health effects as large as second-hand smoke. We estimated about 120,000 excess deaths in the United States annually from exposure to harmful workplace conditions. And so yes, the workplace has hazardous to our health. So how is it that we've known about this and how is it that we haven't done much about it then? I think we haven't done much about it in large measure because the costs have not always been well-quantified, but also unlike the case of perhaps polar bears or penguins or other forms of endangered species, the assumption is that human beings can take care of themselves. There is a very market-based ethos in the world which says, you know, employers offer work, people accept the terms and conditions of that work, and if they don't like it or if they feel sick, they should go find themselves another job. The absence of job control, the long work hours, the economic insecurity that comes from layoffs are not only harmful to individuals, but they are not very beneficial to the economic well-being of the companies for whom these people are working. So that we really have put ourselves in a lose-lose situation. My bottom line is that we ought to be as concerned about human beings as we are about polar bears, that we ought to be concerned about human sustainability. So, David and Tara, it's pretty astounding. His meta-analysis, they found there were 120,000 excess deaths just from the way we work. I'm not surprised to hear those statistics. I think another challenge is that many employers don't necessarily take the long view in thinking about their employees and investing in people and their development and supporting them and wanting to think about their holistic health. And hopefully, as we try to build a culture of health in this country, we really are encouraging this idea of taking the long view, thinking about innovative ways to kind of change these attitudes because it's really the only way we're going to get there. You know, David, you said that you've been in HR and 30 years ago you were running these kinds of programs on work-life integration, work-life fit. One of the things that I've noticed over the years as I've reported about it is that it was sort of seen as a soft, kind of nice-to-have thing. People didn't really take it all that seriously. But I guess what I'm wondering is with statistics like these, it certainly seems that looking at work culture really deserves to be front and center. Oh, you couldn't be more correct with that. Some organizations think about their workforces disposable. And when you think about the fact that the majority of a person's waking hours are spent on the job working, you can understand where stress in the workplace would take a major toll on their ability to function and on their life. This is not something you need a whole lot of research to be able to understand. That's true. Yeah, it is. And, you know, just good common sense tells you that high-performing individuals, whatever their motivation, need some help from the organization to make sure that that high performance is balanced with the type of relaxation that will enhance their creativity. Yeah, Tara, you were talking about where things are better or where people are being innovative. We had a wonderful conversation with a woman named Michelle Hickox who made it up the partner track, made it to the top in her dream job, and she also managed to take summers off for 10 years. I've had a great career in the position that I'm in right now. I love, I love being the CFO of this bank, and I feel like I would look back and say I've been very successful. So I don't think that my, the fact that I did it differently has held me back in any way. If you ask my girls who are both in college now, my oldest daughter just turned 22, and this summer, you know, she was talking to me about how that was important to her, and she liked that I was around. You know, when she needed me to be around, either during the summer or school events or whatever it was, she never felt like that I missed out on anything. So there are stories like that out there of people doing excellent work and making time for their lives and families, but on the other side, I wanted to play for you a story from a guy named Dan Carter who is also very mission-driven. He works in campus safety. He's done amazing work over the years, himself a happy workaholic. He says he lives to work and that he couldn't imagine not working, that that would be a fate worse than death. Here's Dan. I had the chance to meet Leonard Nimoy once in my life, and it's still one of the pinned pictures on my Facebook profile. I'll have to go take a look. But the thing that sort of haunted me the most were the words of his son, Adam, when he was talking about those key years filming Star Trek, because the make-up, he had to be one of the first in the studio, the last out, and because he was financially smart, he was taking paid gigs on the East Coast, so on the weekends he was flying and coming back. And his son said his father wasn't around much and it was very clearly a painful memory and that was just sort of chilling to me because that's exactly the kind of thing I never want to do. And I don't know that I would be able to stop myself, the man at a calling. And I mean, and he literally touched the lives of millions of people. Growing up, the character of Spock, I would come home every day after school and watch the Star Trek reruns. And it gave me so much hope that you could be different. You could be sort of the logical, isolated person, yet still be part of a very collegial group and make a significant contribution. That, for me, was such a powerful lesson of Star Trek. Well, that's kind of what I wanted to ask. I consider a lot of what I do a calling. I think if you go into a profession that doesn't pay you particularly well, it's because there's something else going on. There's something that drives you a question that you have or a passion that you've got. But I guess that's my question to work that way. Is that the only way to sort of deliver on that calling that you have to give up everything else for it? Absolutely not. And I don't think our world would be a very good place if everyone who had a calling gave up everything like that. I just think it was the right thing for me. I think I was never particularly good at relationships. Maybe that was just because of the way my mind worked constantly thinking about other things. And it's not like I don't enjoy people's company. You know, maybe someone will come along and he'll be the right fit for that. But in basically 30s and mud years of looking, I haven't found someone like that. That's Dan Carter. So as you guys know, most of the health research out there and the research on happiness, it shows that having strong relationships that support network is not only integral for your health, but that's really the basis of human happiness. So what are your thoughts on people who are so wrapped up in work that they miss out on that part of life? This is what makes this question of work-life balance all the things we've been talking about so difficult. Because every person is different. I think to the extent that we can help people be more self-aware. That is one of the things with behavioral economics being conscious in the choices that you're making. Maybe we can help them think about those choices in their personal lives as well. You're not going to turn somebody into a different kind of person. But just helping them think through their choices can I think help improve their overall health. And from an organizational point of view, I think it's just fine that the person that you spoke to has made a personal decision to devote themselves totally to their work. You hear stories about some people deciding to have pizza every night for dinner for their life. And they stick with that. And that's their choice, and that's fine. I think the key, however, is around organizations not letting those individual behaviors drive organizational norms. You can't allow that person to set a standard or an expectation for work behavior amongst their colleagues. When you get an email at 9 o'clock at night, the question you ask is, do I answer it now? Do I wait till later? And whatever decision I make, what will that say about my dedication as an employee? Organizations have to help with that. It's so interesting. I was just talking with a researcher from the University of Georgia. She studies workaholism. And in her research, what she's found is that there's all sorts of negative effects individually for somebody who works long hours and sort of has that workaholic behavior. But they found no correlation whatsoever to performance or productivity. So that you have... We're sort of fostering this culture where there is all that, like you say, frenetic going 100 miles an hour sometimes. But that doesn't necessarily connect with the actual quality or quantity of work that we do. That's the story that has to get out. Putting more time in doesn't necessarily result in better product. We would argue that it dulls your creativity, especially when you're working and trying to find answers for intractable problems. Not being at your best, not being creative, not being refreshed is detrimental to the type of product you're going to get. Organizations just don't seem to understand that as well as they need to. And if employers don't look at that seriously and understand that they're getting less than what they should, they're making huge mistakes. All right. Well, Tara and David, thank you both so much for talking with us today. It's just been fantastic talking to you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Tara Oakman and David Waldman from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Tara is a senior program officer there. David has worked at the foundation for close to 20 years. He's vice president of human resources and administration. For more resources on working healthier, visit us online at newamerica.org. Click on the link for Better Life Lab. Better Life Lab is produced by New America in partnership with Slate. Thanks so much for joining me for our podcast about the art and science of living a full and healthy life. It's a collaboration with Ideas 42 supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Our producer is David Shulman. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd be grateful if you take a moment to review Better Life Lab on Apple Podcasts. It really makes a difference in getting the word out about these issues. From New America's Better Life Lab, I'm Brigitte Schulte.