Deloitte's Jen Fisher on Workplace Burnout, Mental Health, and Loneliness

��If you employ human beings, you have to care for their well-being. It's not a nice to have, it��s not a good to have, it's nonnegotiable. It is a baseline requirement for today's workforce.��

On this episode of the Better podcast, Jen Fisher, chief well-being officer at Deloitte, shares her burnout experience, signs she ignored, and the impact workplace friendships and in-person connection have on our mental health, productivity, and retention.

She talks about the No. 1 thing you should do before starting any well-being program, and how to combat loneliness some remote workers might experience.

On her experience with burnout:

I processed many of the symptoms of employee burnout as failure. I had the mindset of, ��I'm just going to push through. I'll rest on the weekend. I'll take a vacation when the project's over. Then things will get better ��when.����

I had not been engaging in work or life and in any meaningful way. I didn't have any motivation. I was exhausted all the time. My emotions were all over the place, either really high or really low.

My personal relationships suffered. I didn't make time for them. I didn't value or prioritize them the way that I should.

So my body and brain said, ��Okay, you're not going to do something about it, so we're going to make it so bad for you that you have no choice.�� And that's really what happened. I was forced to take a step back and take time off from work, and address burnout and the struggles that I was having with my mental health.

That personal journey and personal discovery led me down the path of saying, ��I want to help others not get to where I got.��

On where to start when creating wellness programs:

The No. 1 and lowest cost thing that you can do �� because there's no cost to it other than engaging with people and getting a little bit of their time �� is asking your workforce, ��Hey, what do you want? What do you need? What would be meaningful? What are the barriers in the way of you doing these things for yourself, or taking advantage of the things that the organization is providing you?��

As leaders, understanding what those barriers are, you can then decide if that��s a barrier you can remove. And if you can't, are there ways around it? Are there things you can do to overcome it?

It's really powerful to engage your workforce in this type of conversation, because even if you don't do exactly what they ask you to do, the simple fact that you asked them what they thought and what they needed goes a long way.

On the challenges of remote work on our mental health:

I personally believe that there is, and will always be, a need for human beings to come together in the workplace, in person, in real life. We need to engage in conversation and work and fun �� and all of those things in the workplace�� with other human beings in real life. Then when we're remote, we then have a stronger connection with those people.

People go to the office to have their human needs met, and the biggest of those human needs is human connection. Can it be done in a digital environment? It can, but it can be accelerated and done better when there is also in-person time.

I'm not going to prescribe what that looks like for every organization, but with remote work, there are positives and negatives. We know that fully remote work has exacerbated the loneliness crisis. Digital connection is connection, but it's not human connection.

On the importance of friendships at work:

Unfortunately, the research shows that many people don't have a friend at work, but for those who do, they're more likely to stay with an organization. They're more engaged, their work product is better, because we are meant to connect with other human beings.

It's a sense of belonging. If I connect with another human being, I feel like I belong at the organization, and that's what we all want. We all want to know that we belong somewhere. We want to know that we're accepted. We want to know that we're seen.

And that's why you need to have at least a couple of friends at work. You don't have to like everyone, but you need a few friends.

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