September 2024
Jennifer Moss knows a little bit about burnout.
The award-winning author, workplace culture strategist and globally recognized well-being expert has written two books that dive deep into the subject, including “Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants,” which is set to publish in winter 2024.
Moss wrote what would become one of the 10 Best New Management Books for 2022, The Burnout Epidemic, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.
Moss recounted the experience for a packed Independence Ballroom at the Grand Hyatt Washington yesterday afternoon, as she delivered the opening keynote at PSHRA Annual Conference 2024.
Sequestered at home with her husband, kids and Maple, the “pandemic puppy” the family adopted while in isolation, Moss “became the burned-out person I was writing about,” she (sort of) joked with PSHRA24 attendees.
“I was trying to write this book, we’re all stuck at home, the puppy keeps peeing in the girls’ bedrooms and chewing up my shoes. There was a lot going on,” Moss recalled.
Her experience was similar to countless others during the peak of the pandemic—working and living in the same space day after day, with no separation between the personal and professional, and no idea when some semblance of normalcy would return.
This unique period in time saw stress levels skyrocket, which undoubtedly contributed to many adults reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression as the pandemic dragged on.
Stress and burnout haven’t just disappeared in the time since, either. Many workers are feeling fried, and some recent surveys find burnout even more prevalent among public sector employees.
Preaching self-care is one key step toward addressing workforce mental health, Moss told the audience, but self-care alone will not solve the problems workers are facing.
“Listening to rain sounds for 30 seconds a day isn’t going to make you forget about your 55-hour workweek,” said Moss. “You know, we’re told to ‘just breathe,’ but that’s not going to do it.”
To more effectively combat burnout, she stressed the importance of addressing what she’s identified as its six root causes: unsustainable workloads, lack of control, lack of rewards and recognition, lack of community, lack of fairness, mismatched values and skills.
“There’s a reason why so many of us are running from work on Friday afternoons,” Moss continued. “We need to change that.”
Part of the solution requires rethinking workplace culture, she said, stressing the importance of creating a work environment that offers employees a sense of hope, purpose and community, for example.
Moss also emphasized the need to normalize workplace conversations focused on mental well-being.
“Make talking about mental health normal,” she said, offering a group of four nurses from a healthcare client of hers as an example of how even small gestures can vastly improve a work environment.
Using a white board, the nurses used four different colored magnets to indicate their current stress level. Red meant they were extremely stressed out, while yellow equaled relatively stress-free. If a nurse put a green magnet on the board, he or she was feeling good, and was open to talking with a co-worker in stress. Workers placing a blue magnet on the board were feeling sad.
“Throughout the course of a day, nurses could move from color to color, going from, say, yellow to blue if they lost a patient that day,” Moss said. “But the rallying around co-workers [was amazing]. They would hug, they would cry. I saw these nurses so open and really talking to each other about how they felt. And it was four little magnets on a whiteboard that started those conversations.”
