Erica Keswin

Bye-Bye Burnout with Jen Fisher, Chief Well-being Officer at Deloitte and Keren Ehrenfeld, Managing Director at Morgan Stanley

The pandemic accelerated several workplace trends, but none more rapidly than the conversation around holistic well-being. How do we think about wellness at work? How do we integrate work and life instead of trying to force an impossible balance? How has the pandemic changed our view of well-being in a way that’s holistic and gives mental health equal weight? At the end of the day, “We bring work to life by bringing life to work.”

This week on the podcast, Erica chats with two women leading the transformation of workplace well-being: Jen Fisher, author, podcast host, Thrive Global Editor-at-Large, and Chief Well-being Officer at Deloitte, and Keren Ehrenfeld, Managing Director in Global Capital Markets at Morgan Stanley and Head of Healthcare and Transportation Debt Capital Markets practice. Jen, Keren, and Erica discuss how to recognize burnout, how each individual’s view of wellness is different, how managers are one of the biggest impacts on wellness at work, and how wellness can be achieved from organizational, team, and individual levels. This is an absolute must-listen for leaders looking to move into the future of work with well-being as a top priority.

Quotes

Keren 10:02 – “When your demands exceed your capacity is when you hit the burnout level. And that’s the thing we’re trying to avoid, and that looks different for everyone.”

Keren 10:56 – “We all know at the end of the day, the best relationships and employee happiness really depends on who your manager is.”

Keren 11:23 – “Number one is to understand what burnout looks like is really, really important. Being able to look at someone or your people or even have a conversation and notice when they’re exhausted or losing steam or a little bit irritable or sometimes we start hearing people be a little bit cynical about their job, right? Or people who are superstars start to lose their mojo a little bit and their work product is not as good as it was. Noticing those things and instead of getting annoyed or angry at it, it’s then understanding how to have the conversation and building in some strategies that can help the employee or help your friend or whoever the person might be.

Keren 12:07 – “So once you spot [burnout], how do you source it? How do you source the burnout? What is the real problem here?…Of course unsustainable workload is one of them…but there’s also lack of control about how and when you work your best…just having that conversation around having more control can alleviate a lot of the burn out.”

Jen 26:27 – “How do you continue to maintain the authenticity and vulnerability? I don’t think our workforce is going to let us go back, right? So much has changed and there’s such a demand societally for people to be able to show up and be who they are.”

Jen 27:54 – “At the team level it’s really about behaviors and norms. How do we get together as a team? Because we know all the research shows that the people who have the biggest impact on your day-to-day wellbeing are the people that you spend most of your time with. And for those of us that work, the majority of our waking hours during the week are spent at work, right? So those people that we’re engaging with on a regular basis are the people that have the biggest impact on our wellbeing, so for most of us, that’s our team. So how do we as teams get together and talk about what do we want our wellbeing behaviors and norms to be? What do we want standard working hours to look like? How do we get in touch with each other outside the standard working hours? What does common or accepted response time to emails look like? What are the expectations around learning and development? Do we all want to step away from our laptops for lunch everyday? Just having those conversations and creating norms on a team so that everybody understands what’s expected of them and when it’s expected. It also creates a platform and an environment where I can speak up.”

Jen 29:29 – “Every individual must have agency and feel empowered to take care of their own wellbeing. We can do as much as we can possibly do at an organizational and team level; I cannot force you to take care of yourself.”