We’ve all heard about pandemic burnout. But that’s not the whole story. This season on Strong Feelings, we’re focusing on pandemic clarity: how the past two years have changed people’s relationships to work…for good.
We’ve all heard about pandemic burnout. But that’s not the whole story. This season on Strong Feelings, we’re focusing on pandemic clarity: how the past two years have changed people’s relationships to work…for good.
In February, we gathered detailed survey responses from 236 people working in tech and design. Our central question: How has your relationship to work changed in the past two years? The results of our research were just released in a new report called “Work needs to stay in its place”—available for download now at activevoicehq.com/research.
We found that the pandemic didn’t just upend people’s daily routines. For many, it triggered a dramatic rethinking of their priorities and values at work. So that’s what we’re talking about this season. To kick things off, Sara sits down with researcher Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska, who worked on the report, to discuss some of their findings.
I think the pandemic set the stage for us being able to talk about stuff that we might have been feeling for a really long time but we didn't share with each other, or even share with ourselves. The idea of work being your passion and doing what you love is so prevalent throughout society that it's weird to say, "No. Work is just work." Especially in design and tech fields…where we are taught to have so much personal feelings around our work.
—Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska, research consultant
Over the next two months, we’ll be sharing intimate stories with people who’ve experienced major changes to their mindsets, motivations, and relationships to work. You don’t want to miss it.
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This episode features clips from
KTVU FOX 2 San Francisco, Fox Business, NPR, and NPR
Urszula Pruchniewksa 0:00 It's kind of like the phoenix rising out of the ashes. We just, like, burnt it all down and now there's new growth.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:18 Hey, y'all, this is Strong Feelings, the podcast taking a feminist look at work culture. I'm Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and I am so happy to be back for a new season because well, work has sure changed, and we need to talk about it.
News Montage 0:31 Last month a record 4.4 million people quit their jobs. And a lot of them don't seem to have gotten a replacement. Google's new hybrid work arrangement started today with some employees returning to the office for the first time in two years. Have we devalued work? Yeah, but I think it's worse. I think we've made it the enemy. Before the pandemic, 1 in 67 jobs being offered were remote jobs. Now, it's about 1 in 6 because that's what employees want.
SWB 0:59 Okay, okay. So yes, a lot of people are talking about work. But earlier this year, I started noticing that what I was hearing in the media was pretty different from what I was hearing in my coaching sessions and my workshops. Most of the conversations I was having weren't about back-to-office plans, or remote setups, or whether they're gonna have to put on hard pants again. They weren't even really about quitting—though some clients certainly did. Really, these conversations were about something deeper. People were telling me that the past two years had fundamentally changed them. Some had watched their companies make record profits, while freezing promotions because of "uncertainty." Some had experienced personal loss and were grieving while simultaneously trying to keep their careers afloat. Some were spending all of their energy trying to be present, compassionate managers for their stressed out teams, and then getting little to no support or acknowledgement from their managers.
1:53 People weren't just burning out because of pandemic stress. They were burning out because their needs and their motivations had shifted, and their workplaces hadn't. And so that got me thinking, this cannot just be my clients whose perspectives have changed. We have had two years of uncertainty, of old norms collapsing, of grief, of trauma. That changes people in ways that are way bigger than no longer wanting to get dressed up or way bigger than just quitting a job. And so I put together a survey in February that was all about these internal questions: How have you changed in the past two years? Also, what's been helpful in your workplace and what's been unhelpful? What does success mean to you now? What are your career goals? The results, y'all, they blew my mind.
2:38 I got 236 answers from people in roles like product design, UX, content, research, engineering. And these weren't just, like, quick little "pick one" answers. These were rich, detailed responses, like, paragraphs long. And what I found was that for a lot of people, they didn't just have pandemic burnout. They actually had what I've started calling pandemic clarity— because the past two years made them reevaluate life, and work, and what really matters to them. And they felt transformed. And it led me back to this podcast. Because this season, we're going to do something different. We're going to go deep into the stories of four people who've experienced this kind of internal shift in their mindset, their motivations, and whose relationship to work has changed dramatically as a result. We're going to meet people like Alison:
Alison Taylor 3:26 That was the turning point when I realized I do not need the things that I have been told that I need. I do not want to participate in the Thunderdome of American capitalism. I do not want to participate in being on the hamster wheel. And then I realized, "Yo, you can unsubscribe from all of this."
SWB 3:50 We're gonna meet people like Julie:
Julie Threlkeld 3:51 And there was this moment where she paused while we were talking. I guess there must have been something in my tone. And she said, "Julie, do you even want to lead?" And it was really hard for me to admit to her that, at least in you know, in terms of the sense that I think we mean "lead" in a corporation, the answer was no.
SWB 4:18 And Joann:
Joann Lee Wagner 4:19 As a daughter of immigrants, I saw both my grandparents and then my parents working 12-hour days. I've always really admired my family and my ancestors for that hard work. When I was reflecting on the four-day workweek and kind of the mindset shift that was necessary, I realized, wow, I am still in this mindset where—my husband calls it the "doing-the-most disease"—where, you know, I need to be doing the most, right? Like, my projects need to be stacked on top of each other for me to feel successful.
SWB 4:47 And Kate:
Kate Rotondo 4:48 There's no amount of studying, and practice, and more education that you can get to make men who don't want to see it see it. So, what if you stop? What if you just stop trying to prove yourself as a technical person? What else could you do? What possibilities open up? And that was when I decided to try to consciously spend more time with women.
SWB 5:10 These are women at different ages, from different backgrounds, who are working in different fields. Some left jobs, some left industries. One left the country. But what they all have in common is this: their mindsets about work, and the space that holds in their lives, have shifted. And each of them is going to share their story in an upcoming episode. But today, to start out this whole series, I want to talk more about this research project and the report that came out of it, all the stuff that I learned. So the report is called "Work needs to stay in its place," which is a quote from one of the respondents. And it was so powerful. You can get a copy of it right now at activevoicehq.com/research.
5:51 So to talk about that research, I called my friend, Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska. She's a UX researcher working in civic tech, who earned her PhD researching gender in social media. And she's the first person I texted when I looked at all those survey responses, and I thought, "Holy shit. There's a lot in here to deal with." So she joined me to analyze the data and make sure that I wasn't missing anything or misconstruing anything. And she had a lot to say both about the research and her personal reaction to it.
SWB 6:23 Hey, Urszula.
Urszula Pruchniewksa 6:25 Hi, Sara.
SWB 6:26 I'm so happy that you made time to talk with me about this research.
UP 6:29 Yeah, of course, excited to be here.
SWB 6:32 The first thing I wanted to ask about is that when I created the survey and sent it out, I was kind of keeping my eye on the responses as they came in, just to kind of make sure, like, was I getting what I expected to be getting? And, like, what were people saying? Just, you know, loosely looking at stuff. So what that meant is that I kind of had an idea of what was in there before we really started the analysis, or at least I had some idea of some of what was in there. But you didn't get involved until later, so it was when everything had come in and I closed the survey that I got you involved. And so I'm curious, when you kind of popped open those survey results, what was your first impression?
UP 7:07 There was just so much data, and it was really interesting to see, like, conversations that I've been having for a long time with colleagues, with friends with family really reflected in the survey answers. So, like, that personal experience stuff that I've been hearing over and over, like, anecdotally was really being validated through this research, even before I got to, you know, super jump into it.
SWB 7:29 Something you mentioned there that I was thinking a lot about, and maybe the first thing I noticed was just how meaty it was. Like, I thought, "Oh, people are gonna give me some interesting answers," and then it was like, "Oh, wow, people wrote paragraphs." People wrote long, intense answers. Not everybody, right? There are definitely those people who did the short, little, you know, five or six words. But there were a lot of people who wrote multiple paragraph responses, and I was just thinking, like, "Wow, I feel like people are really hungry for questions like this." Like, they had been just waiting for somebody to actually care about how they were doing, and what they were thinking, and what was different for them. I thought that was really interesting.
UP 8:07 Yeah, it was super interesting from a research perspective. I do a lot of surveys, and it's, like, really hard to get people to actually care about open-ended responses and write a lot of comments. People just tend to, like, skip the open-ended responses. And I was just like, "Wow." It really does point to the hunger of people to actually share these stories because in research it's just so difficult to get this kind of data.
SWB 8:32 And there's something you were saying a while back about how, like, people were bringing up stuff that was maybe taboo or, like, wasn't something that they were typically allowed to talk about. And I thought that that might be an important piece of it as well. It's like, "Oh, finally, a place I can talk about this thing."
UP 8:47 Yeah, totally. I think the pandemic kind of set the stage for us being able to talk about stuff that we might have been feeling for a really long time but we didn't, like, share with each other, or even share with ourselves. The idea of, like, work, being your passion and doing what you love is so prevalent throughout society that it's weird to say, "No. Work is just work." Especially in, like, design and tech fields, I think, where we are taught to have so much personal feelings around our work. It was interesting looking in the answers and just see the sort of awakening. People being empowered and being like, "Yeah, normal work stuff sucks. It's toxic, and unfair, and unequal, and just like, working, working, working and not getting a lot back." And, like, people were really starting to critically think about their relationships to work in a way that I don't know if they felt that before or if they just didn't express it before.
SWB 9:42 Yeah, for me, it felt a little bit like that sense of taking their power back, which we're gonna get into as we talk through some of these results. But for me, it felt like not just complaining about work, which, like, obviously people have done since the beginning of time, but also a strong sense of, "This is a system that I used to just believe had to be like this. And I don't believe that anymore." And I thought that was maybe the part that was the most powerful. Because a lot of this was not necessarily the most positive, rosy stories, right? It was, like, tough stuff.
UP 10:14 Yeah.
SWB 10:14 But that, to me, felt really reenergizing in a certain way to see people say, like, "I have choices here, and I'm gonna make different ones."
UP 10:22 Yeah, thinking back to it, people complain about work all the time. And we're all like, "Well, what can we do? We just have to work to survive." And people now are like, "Wait, do we? Do we have to work like this? Are there better ways of working? Are there different ways of working? Do we have to work our entire lives?" Yeah, just, like, definitely questioning of the norms.
SWB 10:43 Yeah, I mean, that's something that I think both you and I are kind of historically interested in, right? It's like—
UP 10:48 Yeah.
SWB 10:49 What are the norms that maybe we've taken for granted? What are the norms that we've been socialized into? And what happens when people are like, "Wait a second?"
UP 10:58 Yeah. And when it happens to many, many people all at once, you know, when it's not, like, an individual awakening, I think thinking critically about stuff often happens with that personal experience, which is very disjointed for people. But this was a lot of people started feeling the same feelings all at once and expressed them all at once. It's like a mass revolution.
SWB 11:18 Yeah, I think that that's something that really stuck out to me as well. You know, we know that when people go through some kind of major trauma or some serious grief, you know, they lose a loved one, or they have a big accident, those kinds of events can really change people's lives. For example, they go through cancer treatment, and come out the other end and make a huge change in their lives. They're like, "I realized, I want things to look different, and I don't want that life anymore." And it's like, we're used to those stories at a more individual level, but I don't think we're used to those stories happening at this kind of broad societal level to see so many people say, "This changed me, and I want something different now." And that is so fascinating to me. And also to me, like, just very exciting.
UP 12:01 Yeah, I mean, I think it's also just really nice, I think—you know, the pandemic has affected all of us. We're tired, and cranky, and feel hopeless, and just not positive feelings—and to kind of see that something positive did come out…like, this would not have been possible without the pandemic. The questioning of work norms would have never happened spontaneously, without a massive negative event that affected a lot of people all at once. So it's kind of like the phoenix rising out of the ashes. We just, like, burnt it all down, and now there's new growth.
SWB 12:33 Yeah, I think that there were threads of people before the pandemic who were questioning work, right? Like, there was definitely a renewed interest in unionization happening. There were people who were starting to write differently about labor and, like, more conversations about workers and labor. But I guess it felt like that was still sort of sitting at the fringes. And it hadn't really become a central part of the conversation in the way that I'm seeing it happen now. And I think in this research, that was very, very direct, is that people were like, "Work needs to be a different place in my life than I used to have it. I don't have to love it. It's asking a lot of me, I can ask some stuff of it." And I think that that is such a big shift. And I think that, you're right, that it's like those conversations happened in pockets. And now those conversations are happening everywhere. And they're sort of the central story and not a side story.
UP 13:24 Yeah, it's moved from the fringes to the mainstream, I think, this idea of questioning work.
SWB 13:29 Okay. So for you, what was the most surprising thing that you found in the research?
UP 13:34 So, I think I was really surprised at how many people were still interested in professional development, even though the general sentiment was a desire to consciously uncouple from work. But as we kind of dug deeper into the results, it became obvious that it's really more about people doing things their own way, in time set aside during work and not letting professional development encroach on personal life. So people still want growth, they want to learn stuff, but not at the expense of stress and sanity, and definitely not outside of work hours. So really kind of related to this idea of boundary setting, not necessarily rejecting all things work-related.
SWB 14:18 Yeah, I think that that was an important one. You know, boundaries came up a lot. There were 43 people that mentioned boundaries, I counted them out of our 236 responses, right? It's a lot. And they were mentioning boundaries as something that had been of increased importance to them, something they were working on, something that they maybe didn't used to have and now have. I thought that that kind of coupling of boundaries and growth opportunities, like, "I want both, I want growth opportunities, but I want them on my own terms." I thought that was really important. And the other thing I was thinking about boundaries is it is really hard at an individual level to set boundaries because so much about workplaces is optimized to erode those boundaries, to get you responding to email late at night, to just squeeze one more meeting in, to just a little more, just a little more, just a little more.
15:06 And so I think that in a lot of knowledge workplaces like tech jobs, it's very draining to feel like you have to protect your personal boundaries all the time. I mean, I've talked to people in the past who would say things like, "Yeah, I want to have better work boundaries, but..." and there would be some sort of reason that that was not possible. Like, "I can't do that." And now what I'm hearing is sort of, "Respect my boundary, or else." People are saying, "Respect my boundary, or I'll just leave." And I think that there's this stronger sense that people just don't want to put up with and don't feel like they have to put up with some of that overstepping behavior on the part of their companies. And they're just like, "I will simply quit if this place doesn't respect me." What I hope, though, is that what that does is that, like, actually puts pressure on companies to deal with the overflow of work in more systemic ways so that it's not so much of your personal energy that needs to go into setting and protecting those boundaries.
UP 16:00 Yeah, totally. That was a really big theme in the research altogether was this kind of shift from just thinking about stuff to actual action: "I just will not tolerate this anymore. It's not that I just don't like it, I will not tolerate it." And yeah, like, you know, thinking personally from experience, like, at my current job, we use Slack to communicate. And actually all the notifications are silenced after 6pm and before 8am. I just think that's a really nice company-wide way of setting time boundaries, where it's expected that you're not going to be looking at stuff outside of work hours, you know. And that's just, like, one small way that companies can start setting those boundaries a little bit.
SWB 16:43 And I think that there's a lot that needs to be figured out. Like, I talked to people who are trying to deal with things like working on a team that is distributed across a lot of different time zones and handling issues where it's like, "Okay, my working hours and your working hours might be really different." And so what do you do with somebody on the West Coast who is sending out 10,000 things at the end of their day. It's coming in to people on the East Coast, for example, in the evening. Suddenly, at 9pm, they're checking in on stuff, and they're like, "Oh, now I have to catch up on what happened for the last three hours of the West Coast workday. And it's like, those kinds of challenges, I think, are hard. And there's a lot of nuance to them, because people have so many different arrangements for when and how they're working.
17:25 But I think fundamentally, it's like, organizations need to look at that as their responsibility to get creative. Like, "Okay, yeah, that's a challenge. What can we do that might create some more space for people? What are some different ways of handling it?" And then also, like, how do we actually enforce that? What is accountability to that? For example, if you're a manager, and you are posting stuff, or sending stuff late in the evening a lot, or if you are setting those expectations with people, like, who's talking to you and saying, like, "Hey, that's not cool"? You know, who up the chain is saying, like, "Wait a second. This isn't something that actually works." And actually, that ties to something that came out in the research was just so many people who are like, "I want my manager to walk the walk."
UP 18:08 Yeah.
SWB 18:09 They're like, "My manager keeps saying 'Rest,' and 'It's okay to take a break,' and then my manager doesn't take any frickin’ breaks, and my manager doesn't take their time off. And my manager is sending out stuff late at night." And I think that there's this strong feeling, oftentimes amongst people in leadership roles, that they're doing that to protect their people. "If I do this, that's gonna make it easier on my people, so my people can rest." And I think that what we're seeing in this research is actually it makes it harder for those people because it feels like it sets expectations that they then have to live up to. It sort of says, like, "This is what it looks like to be a leader." It perpetuates this idea that the sort of pace of work is fine, because, like, your manager is sort of keeping all the wheels on and keeping it together. And it's like, some of this, I think, is about people in more powerful roles saying no and letting some stuff fall apart, letting some stuff fall off the list and say, "And we're gonna just have to deal with that fallout. And I'm not going to personally, like, use myself as a band-aid to that. I am going to let that happen."
UP 19:08 Yeah, I think definitely, being part of this research affected my personal relationship as a manager. I mean, it's not like I was hoarding my PTO or anything before, but I really make sure that I take time off regularly. I log off at 5. I talk about errands that I need to run during the day, because guess what, we're all human. Especially working remotely, we do stuff during the day. As long as your work gets done, that's fine to not pretend that work is, like, your entire life and that you're sitting at your computer from 9 to 5 because we all know we're not actually doing that. And to make that be okay.
SWB 19:44 My gosh, yes, the kind of "work cosplay." I think about that a lot where it's like, what somebody's actually doing is, like, they're flopped out on their couch about to lose it, and they're on their phone, but they're like carefully typing into Slack with good grammar so it doesn't look like they're being sloppy: "No problem. Get right on that."
UP 20:03 Yeah.
SWB 20:03 And I feel like there's this piece of just honesty and humanity that is coming out where it's like, you know, can we just accept that humans are humans and that means things. That means that they need breaks, that means that they have errands, that means that work is not the only thing on their mind. And let's stop pretending that it is. I feel like that pretending is a huge energy drain, like, just pretending that you're a little business robot takes it out of you. And it actually makes it harder to do good work. I mean, like, you're not more productive that way; you're just wasting energy trying to pretend to be productive, as opposed to actually getting things done that matter.
UP 20:40 Yeah, thinking about how different types of work take up different kinds of energy, you know? Like, I'm in a lot of meetings, and I'm always like, "Well, I have eight hours a day. So I could technically have seven meetings with an hour for lunch." But just remembering that meetings, workshops, brainstorming, like, actually takes up mental energy, and that it should be part of the work day to have time to breathe between those things.
SWB 21:05 Yes, I kind of think that, like, everybody needs, like, 15 minutes in a quiet, dark room after a big meeting. You know?
UP 21:14 Yes.
SWB 21:14 You have to, like, come back to yourself a little bit. But we don't often give one another that. You know, I know a lot of organizations that have tried moving to schedules where default meeting lengths are shorter now, you know? "We do a 25-minute meeting and a 45-minute meeting. And those are your options," to try to avoid that kind of back-to-back-to-back-to-back. Works in some places and doesn't work as well in other places. But I do think it is really valuable to say that the moments between the big things, it's okay to take a breather, right? The idea that you have to fill every second of that—
UP 21:48 Yes.
SWB 21:49 Right? I have 12 minutes between this and my next thing, and it's like, "Let me get three emails out." And I understand the pressure. I mean, like, I do that sometimes. And I understand the pressure people feel to do that and how it feels like you'll never stay on top of email otherwise, for example. But I think, thinking about time differently from an organizational perspective and thinking about "What is a day of work and what does good look like?" I think is really important. And I think that not enough organizations have really been thinking about that, and particularly those organizations that had been tied to, like, a kind of "butts in seats" model where, like, your presence was sort of what was counted. I think some of them are really scrambling to figure out how do we make sense of what an appropriate workload is now?
UP 22:30 Right.
SWB 22:31 You know, there's a lot of studies that the percentage of time people spend in meetings has really gone up in knowledge work through the pandemic. And I think some of that is also like, "Well, then we know you're working. You're in the meeting."
UP 22:40 Right.
SWB 22:41 And is that actually how we want to be spending our time? And I think what people are saying here is like, no, that is not. You know? Like, they're tired.
UP 22:48 Yeah, and I think that connects to the remote work that's come out of the pandemic, but, like, just a trust in your employees that, you know, if they're not in a meeting, they're probably working, or they're getting stuff done, or they're thinking. You know, just, like, trusting that stuff is happening when you're not right there in the room. And then another thing I wanted to mention was this idea, a couple of people mentioned it in their responses, that they really appreciate it when a company does, like, a company-wide shutdown for a week or even a couple of days. So that that whole like, "I'm going to come back to a full Outlook, and it's going to suck getting through 200 emails the day I come back from PTO," the companies control that a little bit that everyone is off, and everyone is actually off. And so you don't feel like you have to catch up. I think we've all done that, where I'm like, "I can't go away for longer than a week because when I come back, it's going to be a nightmare to work through all the stuff that's happened while I've been gone."
SWB 23:41 Oh, yeah, gosh, I was thinking about this conversation that my uncle and my mother had. And you know, they're both German, but my mom has lived in the US for a long time. And my uncle is, you know, he's in management at Volkswagen. And he goes on those long European summer vacations that people take. You know, he was just like, "No, they just turn my email off." Like, it just doesn't exist. And, you know, my mother had worked in the United States for a long time and was a professor, and as a professor running a research lab, it's kind of like running your own small business. If you are not there pushing the research forward, things don't happen. And you have to write the grants. It's not just teaching, right? It's like you're doing all this other stuff all the time. And for her, that was such a foreign concept, because—
UP 24:23 Right.
SWB 24:24 It was so baked into how so many of us work, particularly in the US that's like, "I am essential. I can't miss these things," right? And it's like, well, what happens if you just don't read those? What happens if you don't read the back scroll in Slack, for example? And I think for a lot of us, that's terrifying. I also think that those are some norms that we might need to really look at. What happens if you don't have to stay caught up on everything? What happens if we accept for, not just ourselves, but also for one another, that people truly let go? And then it's like, they're not responsible for knowing all of those details, or like, we just have more fallbacks. More than one person knows something about this system, so that if that one person is out, they can still get something done. And I think that we're not used to thinking about teams that way, especially in tech, where so much has been like "agile" and "lean," which has benefits to it. But it's also fragile a lot of the time because there's nobody else who can handle it. And nothing does happen if you're out for a week. And I think that that's probably something that needs to be kind of thought about a little bit more intensely,
UP 25:26 Just as you're saying that, I had such a, like, whoosh of relief in my chest. Just like, "What would happen if you went away, and you didn't have to catch up on everything?" And I was like, "Ah, that sounds like a dream."
SWB 25:37 Well, yeah. And I think that going back to some of what we heard in the research, it's like, so much of what people told us is just that they found work so overwhelming. And I think for a lot of people, they were taking this, like, purposeful, willing step back just to get outside of the overwhelm. And I mean, for a lot of people, right, they mentioned things like, "I don't want to climb the ladder anymore. I'm not interested in a promotion anymore." Because that those were the ways that they could come up with that would allow work to be less all-consuming.
26:09 There was this one person, a product manager, who had this quote that I've just thought about a lot since reading it. Here's what they said. They said, "I've realized that the positions that give me the greatest room for growth and learning also cause me tremendous stress. If I focus on where my career should go for its own sake, I'm a stressed out mess and a shitty husband. I'd rather have a less-exciting career and be a better partner." Whoo.
UP 26:31 Yeah. Yeah, that one really stood out to me as well. The stopping the striving, the constant striving, and achievement, and hustling just to, like, be okay with less, because that gives more of you to the rest of your life.
SWB 26:47 One of the things it really got me thinking about was, I think it would be easy to write that off as burnout, and to say, "Well, they're just burned out. And when they recover from burnout, they're gonna get their ambition back." And what I think we actually heard was much more like, "Yes, people are exhausted by the past two years. Yes, they're burned out. But also, they're different now. Like, this person is telling us that they have a different set of values than they used to. And they're reevaluating what they want out of their life. In my mind, that's more of what we talked about before, where it's like, oh, after a major traumatic event, people tend to reevaluate things. And that's more of a lasting shift. That's not a bounce back. That's not just like, "Oh, they're just burned out, and then they'll recover that later."
27:35 And so I think this goes back to what we were saying around, like, can you leave the office and not, like, come back to a mountain of email? I think a really big question that I want organizations to be asking themselves is: if people are not willing to be stressed out messes in order to grow in their careers, if they're not willing to push that hard because it's going to destroy them, how do we reorient what work looks like and what career paths look like so that people can still have growth, and they can still move up, and they can still learn new things, they can still deepen their skill sets? But that that doesn't, like, destroy them. Because I think that what people are feeling right now is this sense of them having to choose right?
UP 28:18 Yeah.
SWB 28:19 The interesting "important" work that will destroy me or this more boring path where maybe I'm not learning, but I can, like be a good partner. It's like, "Well, what if we thought about ways that people could stretch, and grow, and learn, and be able to have interesting careers that are also gonna let them be a better partner?" People would want those. Like, these are interesting, motivated people. These are people who like to learn stuff. And it's not that they're trading their career path to stay at home because they don't care about learning and growth. I mean, earlier, we talked about professional development. It's that they feel like that's the only way to get their life back. Like, what happens when you think about other ways they can get their life back?
UP 29:02 Yeah. And I think this points to one of the big themes that came out, as well is this idea of the four-day workweek, which we've heard about in conversations in the media for a while now. The imbalance of how much time we spend at work versus how much time we spend on our personal lives. And it's not that we want to, like, stop working or just be lazy and sit on the couch and do nothing.
SWB 29:27 I mean well? Well?
UP 29:28 Sometimes. We still want, like, engagement and interesting stuff, but we need to shorten the time that is spent at work.
SWB 29:40 And I think that feeling that it's almost like a runaway train, right? Like, if I'm not constantly trying to keep up with everything, constantly pushing forward, right? Any pause, it feels like it just gets away from you? And I think that feeling is what people are just like, "I can't do that. So how Do I get learning and growth? And how do I get opportunities to try new things that don't require me to kind of keep chasing after this runaway train of work?" I mean, that's really what I think people are hungry for. They're hungry for opportunities to do that that also feel safe, and where they feel like they're respected, and where they feel like they can heal from this past couple of years.
30:22 And for a lot of people that is working less. I love the four-day workweek conversation. It's something we've been working on here. For Active Voice, but I mean, like, tiny company. It's me and one employee. Hi, Emily. Emily produces the podcast, amongst other things. She'll listen to this. And Emily's got a four-day week. I have a four-day week ambition, if I'm being honest in that—
UP 30:45 Yeah.
SWB 30:46 I don't book meetings on Fridays. I have a lot of boundaries on Fridays, and I have some stuff I do on Fridays. Like, 10am, I have a personal training appointment. So it kind of, like, makes me not have a normal work day. But I do find that a lot of my work ends up spilling over to Fridays, particularly, not like client things, but things like working on this research, things like working on this podcast because those are things that feel like maybe non-essential to running the business but really important to me creatively or important to me conceptually. And so I'm trying to really look at what are the ways that I want those things to integrate more into the rest of the work and not feel like so much extra on top of. And also for me to do that, like, we talked about before walking the walk, right? So like if Emily has a four-day week, but then I'm working on stuff at midnight. Is that really appropriate? And I don't think it is. It's on my mind, too.
UP 31:44 Yeah, it's hard. It's hard to, like, give in to that or step away from that kind of mindset.
SWB 31:50 So one of the things I wanted to ask you specifically about is that I know that you also were going through various career changes during the pandemic, and then looking at this research was triggering lots of thoughts and feelings about that. And I'm wondering, yeah, can we talk about more of your story? What were some of the things that came up for you personally?
UP 32:10 Sure. So I changed career paths during that pandemic. I went from being a professor and doing academic research. I moved into UX because I really wanted to see my research findings have more of a tangible impact. So, like, on a very basic kind of value level, the discussions in the survey results around, like, wanting work that is meaningful, wanting work that does good, really resonated with me. I'm in a nonprofit environment now, so it feels like my research findings are going to, like, the greater good. But I've also in recent years, just become super obsessed with the idea of early retirement. I really like my current job. But ultimately, I just want to be free to not work and to have free time.
32:54 I was discussing this idea a lot with my husband during the pandemic and thinking back to like those norms and things that we don't even consider possible, he was like, "Wow, I'd never actually even thought that you could retire before 65. It's just like a given that you're going to keep working." And I was like, "No, you know, let's aim for like 50, 55." And I feel like most people don't consider that or at least don't talk about this idea of early retirement. And then reading through the survey results was really personally validating for me. I felt like I had kind of found all these kindred spirits, that other people were feeling this way too and actually working towards making it a reality. There was this one quote that was like, "If I chase more money, I want it to be in service of retiring early." And just like the actual words "early retirement" came up over and over again.
SWB 33:41 Over and over. Yeah.
UP 33:42 Yeah.
SWB 33:43 I was a little surprised how many people mentioned specifically "early retirement" or saying something like, "I want to sort of retire," like, "I want to retire from full-time work. And I'm not opposed to doing some work for money. But I don't want it to be like this." There are a lot of people who, again, it's all of this like reevaluation and renegotiation of what they want work to be in their lives. And I think a lot of people in the survey were probably loosely in the millennial age range. And some of the, like, younger side of Gen X. Both of us are in that range as well. And I think for a lot of people who kind of were working during the Great Recession, and 2008, and who really got inundated with the hustle culture messaging, I think that there's been a sense that, like, we all have to just work all the time till we die. Like, I think that that has kind of become ingrained from both a fear perspective and from this idea that, like, work should be your passion.
34:35 And those things kind of interlock. So it's like, "I'm terrified to not be working because I don't know how I will ever get by without that. And I also feel like there's something, I don't know, moral or righteous about always working because I should have my passion there." And I think those two things feel really powerful, but I will say for me, you know, I've been really rethinking a lot of that. I definitely spent a lot of yours very career-oriented. And some of that is about money. And I think I've historically had a good bit of fear around the future. I don't have family wealth. And I do have family that will probably require substantial amounts of care, which is money.
35:18 I grew up pretty poor. And I know how to live off of very little money. But I also know how stressful that is. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, "How do I protect myself? How do I ward that off? How can I build a career that gives me some sense of safety or security?" And like, I don't think it's a bad thing to want that security. I think people deserve that security. And people deserve it even if they're not fancy tech workers, which is a whole other conversation. But one of the things I've had to think about for myself is like, "Okay, I'm going to do what I can to build some future security for myself." I mean, as much as anybody knows what's going to happen in the future.
UP 36:01 Yeah.
SWB 36:01 But also, I need to look at what cost to current me? And do I want to fry myself to do that?
UP 36:07 Exactly.
SWB 36:08 What does it look like to try to have a richer and fuller life now? And are there compromises I might need to make? But also, what happens if I believe it's possible to have a rich and full life now and to, you know, think about my future at the same time? Does that make me get creative and come up with new ideas or new ways that I might work? And I think, just kind of expanding my mind and trying to think creatively about work is one of my goals. And I think looking at all of these survey responses, it really helped me with that. Because it really reminded me, it's like, "Oh, there's a lot of different perspectives here." There's not, like, one right way to be when it comes to work. It kind of just got me thinking, like, I'm allowed to do this on my own terms. And believing that, I think, is maybe the first step toward anything actually changing.
UP 36:54 That's so true. I mean, I think just thinking about how there were so many different options, or different ways of doing work differently in the survey results. Like, you know, talking about early retirement, like, that was an idea that I've had for quite a while. But combining that with the four-day workweek stuff that kept coming up, I was like, "Hang on. Do I really want to work, like, 40 hours a week for the next 15 years? Or do I want to start working less now, and then I don't have to, like, make as much money to retire later? And I've got the time now." You know, ultimately, early retirement is about getting time back. But, like, what if I could get the time back now, so maybe it won't be necessary to retire early if I'm only working three or four days a week? It really made me think about the value of money versus time and how to balance that. And, yeah, like you said, everyone will have different ways of getting to that balance.
SWB 37:49 But I think that, you know, this idea that what we need to do is work as hard as we possibly can now and then maybe, eventually, hopefully, we can do something else, I think that model just feels increasingly outdated and unrealistic to people, right? Because they're fried. And so they're like, "I can't even do that. And I don't want to do that. And I want to explore other things." I don't know, I think that's one of the things that I'm most excited by is just people getting that sense of like, "I can't be in control of what my company does. I am not the one who's making all the corporate decisions, but I'm going to be in control of me. And so I'm going to set a boundary, I'm going to leave, I'm going to make choices. I'm going to make trade-offs. I'm not just going to let this be something that happens to me."
UP 38:33 Yeah, for sure. Sara, I'm curious, what has the response been like to the report?
SWB 38:38 It's been really interesting. I think, what I keep hearing from people is that it was really validating to read. That people felt like, "These are experiences that I've had. These are experiences I haven't felt like I could talk about. It's such a relief to know other people are feeling that way. One of the things that's been really interesting is that I also have been hearing that from a lot of people in, like, relatively senior roles. And I think that that's the thing that is often kind of not talked about. It's like, people in leadership roles are feeling this stuff, too, unless they're really at the top of an organization where maybe they're more protected against some of these issues. They have a lot of support, they have an executive assistant, they etc., etc.
39:16 But for a lot of people, even in relatively senior roles, where they have a lot of people reporting into them, they're feeling it, too. And they have, I think, oftentimes felt a lot of pressure to keep quiet about it because they're a leader, they're supposed to, like, toe the company line. And so one of the things that I really hope, actually, is that people in those roles and at those levels talk more about their experiences, are more open about their experiences because otherwise, I think it sets the stage for, you know, people in individual contributor roles to feel like leaders just don't get it and that the leaders are kind of pushing the status quo. And I'm like, these people mostly don't want the status quo, either. I don't think. And like, have the courage to talk about it. I think that's what I would really like to see a lot of leaders do is, like, have the courage to talk about it.
40:05 And also, you know, as people read this report, something I'm hearing from people, and that I hope that I hear from more people is just, like, "I just need to soak this in," right? Like, "I just need to soak in that this is what people are thinking and feeling." And to think about those people as if they're people on your team because they probably are. Like, there are people on your team who are having these thoughts and feelings, who are not telling you about it. If you just imagine that that's what exists out there, how does that change the way that you do your work? How does that change the way you lead? How does that change the questions you're asking people? Like, how does it change all of the ways that you might manage? And I think that's something that I'm really hoping for kind of triggering a lot of reflection into people's individual work lives, but also, like, what are my own management practices here? And is this the way I want to be doing this job?
UP 40:51 So as a manager, if you had to give me, like, one piece of advice from this report, what would be the kind of biggest takeaway for managers?
SWB 41:00 Oh, Urszula, I think you're baiting me because I think we both know, like, the biggest thing people mentioned, right? The biggest thing people mentioned, we asked them, "What was the most helpful thing that their managers had done over the past few years to support them?" We also asked them, like, what do you wish that they would do? For people who had managers that they rated highly, the number one thing that they got was managers who listened to them. They just want to be listened to, and acknowledged, and not fixed. A lot of this is stuff that it's not somebody else's job necessarily to fix. But people just want to be heard. And they want conversations that aren't just about deadlines, and projects, and what's on the roadmap. They want to be seen and heard as people.
41:47 And I know that sounds really basic, but I think this is actually really hard. It's hard to listen at that level because many managers don't get a lot of training at all. And the training they do get tends to be more like managing upward in the organization. But this idea of being supportive, and being deep listeners, and being humane and empathetic to the people on their teams, I think that that gets really short shrift. And so I think for managers, any manager, I think one of the big things is to say, "What can I do to listen and acknowledge the experiences of the people on my team and not judge them? I don't have to decide whether you deserve to be stressed or not; I just need to be able to accept that you feel stressed." And I think to do that, it is really learning deeper listening skills and learning to sit on your hands a little bit and just listen before jumping into that fix mode, which is where I think a lot of managers are more comfortable.
UP 42:46 You know, related to that is, like, assumptions. Like, don't make assumptions about what your employees want. Let them tell you what they need. They know best.
SWB 42:54 Yes. And get better at asking questions that help them open up, you know? Ask open questions, not yes, no questions. Ask questions like, "What's been challenging for you lately? What do you need more of?" Those kinds of open questions, and then be honestly curious about the answers.
UP 43:13 Yes.
SWB 43:13 I think a lot of times you hear people ask questions, but they're not really curious about the answer, or they're asking a question, again, to like, judge, the answer as right or wrong. And this is not about judging somebody as right or wrong. I think what people really need is to have their experiences seen. And doing that, what that will do for you as a manager is that will increase people's trust in you. That will make people feel safer around you. And when they feel safer, because you're actually curious, and because you're not jumping to conclusions, when they feel safer, they will share more with you. And when they share more with you, you will have a better idea of how to support them, how to empower them, how to motivate them, all of these other things that I see a lot of managers very confused about. And, like, "I don't know how to keep my employees happy." And you know, "I don't know how to keep them from leaving," or whatever. And it's like, you gotta go listen on their terms and not your terms.
UP 44:10 Absolutely. So what are you planning on doing with this report next? Like, where is this work and these findings going?
SWB 44:19 I think, for me, the biggest thing that I'm focused on is just sort of deepening my own work around how managers particularly can create those kinds of spaces for their teams. And then also how managers can get support for themselves because I also know a lot of managers get fried in this process. They're like trying to be supportive. They're trying to do all the right things, and they don't have a lot of support. So what does it look like to build more of those systems? And that's something that I did a lot of last year, but I think this report really cemented for me that that's, like, a central theme in the kind of work that I want to do going forward. So I'm definitely thinking a lot about that. It was just so helpful for me to get your perspective on this research and get your perspective on this. If there was one thing that you're going to hang on to from it, like, what's that for you?
UP 45:07 Actually taking this back to my workplace as someone who has a team, you know, and just thinking more about their personal experiences and kind of just acknowledging that they're probably feeling a lot of the findings in this report and talking about them. I really want to bring this up in my workspace, and talk about it candidly, and see if we can, together, work to create workspaces that are more healthy for everybody in them.
SWB 45:36 Yes. All I want is healthier workplaces for everybody. Urszula, I want to talk to you about this research for three more hours, but instead, we should wrap this up.
UP 45:47 Thank you for having me. Yeah, it was really good, just, like, hashing this out some more and talking about all the things that were just so interesting. And thank you for getting me involved.
SWB 46:00 I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Urszula as much as I did, she is one of my faves. If you want to get more on that research, definitely head over to activevoicehq.com/research and download that whole report. I bet it'll affirm a lot of things you've been feeling and maybe even open your eyes a bit, too. And stay tuned for the next episode of Strong Feelings, where we'll dive deep into one person's story of pandemic clarity. And this one, it's a treat:
AT 46:26 I realized that I was in a toxic and abusive relationship with America, and you can't heal when the call is coming from inside the house. You can't heal when you are still facing systems of oppression and abuse every single day.
SWB 46:42 That's Alison Taylor, and you'll meet her next time on Strong Feelings. Till then, I am your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at activevoicehq.com and get all the past episodes, show notes, and full transcripts at strongfeelings.co. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our guest today was Dr. Urszula Pruchniewska, and our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Blowdryer. Check them out a https://blowdryer.bandcamp.com/. Thank you for listening.