HRD, Anxiety & Burnout

Thank you for listening to HRD Masterclass. It's a unique resource featuring over 130 HRD experts across 55 episodes. As a fan of the series you can help make season 6 happen. AHRD is crowdsourcing funding for the season and you can donate today at givebutter.com/HRD-Masterclass-HRD. With your help the season can bring you 11 new episodes focused on major HRD research articles. Their practical implications, the need for further research and how researchers and practitioners can help each other to advance research and practice on the topics. It would be amazing to continue the series and I hope you'll consider donating today at givebutter.com/HRD-Masterclass-HRD. Right, let's dive into the episode. It's really a HRD's role as giving a voice to those that are marginalized in organizations, giving voice to things that are difficult to talk about like anxiety, like burnout. Welcome to Human Resource Development Masterclass, the podcast series from the Academy of Human Resource Development, the organisation that leads HRD through research. I'm your host, Darren Short and here in our fourth season we're exploring the relationship between HRD and trends in society and organisations, with the help of leading authors, researchers and scholars. Today our focus is the relationship between HRD, anxiety and burnout. And my guest scholars are Dr Amanda Hay of Nottingham Business School Nottingham Trent University, Dr Ellen Ernst-Cosec of Purdue University, and Dr. Mira Allegoragia, who is now at Texas A&M University and was at the University of Louisville at the time of recording, all of whom join me for a conversation recorded in March of 2023. Our episode today is structured into two sections. In the first we look at anxiety and burnout and how they impact organisations and the workforce. Then in the second we explore implications for HRD practice, research and education. You can find out all about the questions explored in the episode, the three guest scholars, and also the episode sponsor by visiting allbyporkast.com/anxiety. Talking of sponsorship, Human Resource Development Masterclass is only made possible thanks to the wonderful support of our sponsors, who cover all of the costs associated with the series, and so enable us to release episodes free of charge to listeners like you. I encourage you to show your thanks by checking them out and letting them know just how much their sponsorship means to you. Today's episode is brought to you thanks to the wonderful sponsorship support of the Health Professions Education Special Interest Group, HPE SIG, at the Academy of Human Resource Development. The HPE SIG is a group bridging and applying HRD with Health Professions Education to develop the Health Care Workforce, including physicians, nurses, veterinarians, dentists, pharmacists, physician assistants, emergency medical technicians, and allied health professionals, such as hospital management, occupational therapy and clinical psychology. The HPE SIG vision is to create an interdisciplinary collaborative group that contributes to the practice and research in HRD and Health Professions Education. Before the information check out their website at ahrd.org/page/specialinterestgroups. Students, practitioners and scholars are welcome to join the AHRD HPE SIG. So welcome to our episode on anxiety, burnout, and HRD, and let's start by meeting today's three guest scholars. And first I'd like to welcome Dr Amanda Hay, senior lecturer in HRM, an organizational behaviour, at Nottingham Business School in the United Kingdom. Amanda has a PhD in Work Psychology and a central theme of her work focuses on efforts to humanise management learning processes by paying attention to rarely discussed lived experiences of managing such as doubt and anxiety. So welcome, Amanda. Hi, it's great to be here and I'm looking forward to some interesting conversations today. My second guest for the episode is Dr Ellen Ernst-Cosek, the basal esterner university distinguished professor at Purdue University's Cranet School of Management. Ellen is an award-winning social scientist who helped advance the US and international work family life research policy field. She studies how work-life boundaries, work-life family, and diversity employment practices impact women's workplace inclusion and career equality. So welcome Ellen. Thanks very much, Darin, looking forward to the conversation today. And my third guest for the episode is Dr Mira Algarajah, acting associate dean at the office of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships and associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Evaluation and Organizational Development at the University of Louisville. Mira's research interests include well-being, strategic HRD and workforce development, and her work has been recognised through both the Monica Emily Award for Outstanding Research and the Richard A. Swanson Award for Excellence in Research. Welcome, Mira. Hi everyone, happy to be here. So over the next hour or so we'll be talking about anxiety and burnout and then implications for individuals and organisations and implications for HRD. And before diving into those details, it feels like a good place to start our conversation is by exploring those two terms of anxiety and burnout, what they mean and then also how the three of you have explored those terms in your own work. Amanda, would you be willing to get the ball rolling for us? Sure, Darin. In my work, I think I've tended to draw on the work of the civilian philosopher and sociologist, Renata Salical. And she sees anxiety as being associated with a specific anticipated threat, which incites in us the feeling of being uncomfortable. But like most concepts in our field, then there are different ways that we might then view that understanding. So I think often times when we think about anxiety, we tend to view it through a medical paradigm. We see it as a clinical condition which has paralyzing effects and as such, it's something that should be avoided or certainly highly controlled. But there are also other ways that we might view anxiety. So an alternative way is all to see it as part of an inevitable part, really a human existence, which affects us to greater or lesser degrees. So here I'm thinking particularly of some insights from process philosophy, which might be useful. So a very basic level process philosophy is a way of seeing the world as always in a state of becoming, as always in the making. And this means that our world's then are far more precarious and fragile than we would often times like to admit. So our world's therefore are often times uncertain, unpredictable, unknowable. And these are the very conditions I think which evoke anxiety. So when anxiety overwhelms us and we're no longer able to cope, then it is I think anxiety can become damaging and this can lead plausibly to burnout. Something that was recognised by the World Health Organization in 2019 and it broadly describes a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, which can occur when we experience long-term stress in a job or when we have worked in a physically or emotionally draining role for a long time. So turning to my experience, I've tended to focus on anxiety and not burnout per se. So my work has largely focused on management learning, how they learn in both formal and informal everyday settings. So when we study formal management learning such as in the context of say an MBA programme or a DBA programme, we see that experiences of anxiety are often an integral feature of the classroom. So it's when we think about it, learning happens when we work on the edge of not knowing and this is a condition which evokes anxiety. We also see that anxiety both encourages and hinders learning. So if anxiety can be worked with, it can lead to new insights and learning, yet if it is avoided, it can lead to what scholar or a spence is termed "will in ignorance" and in some cases, it might be considered overwhelming that it leads to dropping out. Perhaps this is the learning equivalent of burnout. I've also seen that anxiety is an important topic of discussion, an important part of what it means to learn to manage. So for example, my work in 2014, which interviewed a sample of mid and senior level managers, this highlighted that a common struggle for those managers related to coping with the anxiety of not meeting grandiose expectations of the managerial role, which demanded that they were always right, always in control and ultimately, I guess, always successful. And what kind of of struck me through those conversations with those managers was at the same time they were afraid to discuss their anxiety since ironically managers aren't supposed to be anxious and they tried to carry on typically by overworking. So for some in that study at least I saw a link between anxiety and burnout and importantly how in that situation how trying to avoid anxiety could actually lead to even more anxiety. Thank you so much Amanda. It's a great way of positioning those terms and it's great to hear about your own work in that space as well. So maybe to take it in the order that I introduce folks in Ellen I'm interested in how you have viewed anxiety and burnout and whether it's kind of different to what Amanda's talk through and then your own experiences of working on those issues. Yes so I've done more work on burnout and in particular done work from psychology on looking at aspects of it there's physical exhaustion, emotional exhaustion such as Maslow and Jackson's work and example if we were going to measure this is I feel emotionally drained from work, from emotional exhaustion and I've looked at work family conflict which is a different concept but I think it's related to this and that a lot of parents are anxious about managing work in family or people with elder care or people with their own health issues and how can we design work to support people's well-being on and off the job. So a lot of my work is focused on training leaders and cultural initiatives to support policy use and I think different jobs need different types of support and it's sort of like we could saw through in the pandemic that some workers, frontline workers had to go to work in a grocery store police and had to leave their families at home that would make people stressed and there I'm writing up a paper today about whether leader training helps employees and we found different effects of training leaders to support anxiety and burnout. In our case we called it family supportive behaviors and what we found is for workers that were frontline jobs having a trained manager reduce their emotional exhaustion and that was very important because they were you know having to leave home and during a very stressful time but for people that had control over their jobs like professors can work in a laptop, many managers can work in a laptop anywhere. If you had a trained manager it helped engagement in their family and engagement in their work being able to be absorbed in it and enjoying it and I think those are the opposite emotions of anxiety and burnout and I think we have to look at mixed effects and try and look at positive effects to prevent burnout and anxiety. So Mira how does all of that compare to how you view an anxiety and burnout and your own work on them? Thank you. I don't study anxiety or burnout what I do focus on is well-being and wellness and I see different approaches to well-being too especially if you look at it from an organizational level approach or you're talking about from a personal standpoint what are these different approaches and also within the context of work and within the context of life itself and so within the context of work when we talk about terms like anxiety burnout while being I think I am informed by Alia Crum's work on mindsets how they relate to stress and the downstream effects these can have on being well and feeling good and I think I'm also seeing outside of the context of organizations all kinds of ways in which people spend their time earning what I would say is maybe a living wage or something you know or maybe it's not so all of these impact all of these impact or sense of security and who we can be within the context of being well and feeling good and so then there's a cultural aspect of how we approach how we approach or manage or what notions we understand of who we can be and what those barriers are and how we work through those barriers but overlaying all of this is also societal notions of who we can be and I think then there's that then there's that I would say a daily dynamic and a struggle of like our identities that are informed by our families and communities versus maybe organizational expectations or societal expectations so I think this is where I feel that there's so much that we are still learning and figuring out and and learning from perspectives of others or employee groups that have traditionally not been the focus of in a management scholars or heecherdy scholars as well. It's interesting listening to the three introductions that you've each given that in there there are factors or implications related to like the individual or to groups of individuals or in some cases the workforce as a whole that there's clearly implications or issues that relate to organizations and organizational leaders and then as you just mentioned there mirror there's also like the societal or like national level and implications for those and so to kind of break the kind of past those a little and to dig in a bit I'm wondering if a good place to dig first is looking at what this means for individuals and so when we actually take a look at an individual employee and then consider like the therefore the workforce how do you see the individual employees being impacted by anxiety and burnout and this probably connects to what you were just saying mirror so you're willing to to pick that up first. Oh definitely I think so that the individual view and then I also think it's connecting that with job perspectives so whether we're talking about job crafting and the autonomy of the freedom or the extent to which employees can be involved in crafting their jobs with their managers and then we can also also talk about organizational impacts of anxiety and burnout but again I think from an individual view I see overwork a lack of agency and I think it's at multiple levels in the organization regardless of where our roles and responsibilities or either constrained us or give us additional opportunities to exercise or bring forth our skills and expertise so I think that's the individual view and I think there's a lot of work for HRD professionals to figure that out also in support for all of the other things that are going on in organizations. The second perspective I think also looking at jobs and within jobs it's of issues related to lack of role clarity because I think there's been turnover, there's been fewer replacements of positions so then jobs have been added, responsibilities have been added, absorbed and then overall lack of clarity. I think also lack of communication so I agree relying more on technology but at the same time there's that sense of connoctal loss of connection burden of overwork that's also impacting our jobs and overall I don't know if you all agree with me but there seems to be an unreasonable time pressure. Overall just like less time we've got more tools less time to connect with one another and problem solve. What I think we're also sensing is this lack of community and so there's increasing silos, individual silos or within programs and themes but that cross collaboration is somehow being impacted, increasing concerns about lack of fairness of employees like especially in how you receive practices and policies and how you experience that and demands for customizing HR policies or HRD policies and then organizations that actually can support a particular employee and not just a group of employees so that customization is becoming a huge part of the diversity equity and inclusion conversations, social justice agendas within the context of higher ed and also outside and then overall this seems to be a mismatch of values and skills within organizations as well. So there's all of this going on at multiple levels and I think it's causing differential demands if you look at women, if you look at marginalized employees within organization context or marginalized communities as well. So I think creating a line of sight for organizational leaders of how we can help employees connect their individual personal aspects of well-being to their jobs and and how we can at least try to head in a similar direction is is a big challenge and also an opportunity for a greater alignment or moving towards some alignment of goals and expectations. I think that's a really interesting point about the alignment of expectations. Mirror and you were talking earlier about our identities and who we can be in the workplace and certainly the studies that I've come across there's a lot which talk about anxiety as being understood as a response to idealised images and expectations. So you know increasingly there is that pressure not just time pressure that's being put on us as individual employees but also you know these expectations to deliver more and more and more and that leads to you know individuals feeling anxious and insecure about their failure to be able to fulfil those various demands and expectations. You know I'm thinking particularly of some work by David Knight's and Caroline Clark in the UK context and they looked at for example vetting resurgence and academics and found high levels of anxiety related to the neoliberal context of deprofessionalisation and a loss of autonomy as well as increasing managerial controls of assessment or the in accountability. You know and it's about these conditions I guess where we can all probably relate to this where we are pressured to expect more and more yes yet we must do so in a world where increased levels of uncertainty mean that the achievement of those raised goals those raised expectations is somewhat fraught and then in terms of what this means for the individual you know that study was very much kind of helping us to understand that the anxiety and the insecurity that was provoked means that oftentimes people are increasingly living on the edge. Just related to that is the idea of as you mentioned identity and roles both of you and I think the blurring of boundaries between work and personal life is what's a big factor for many of us there is no separation for many people within between roles your family can text you at work and you can be contacted by your boss or colleagues at night and so I worked with the Center for Creative Leadership and a developed an assessment that's article published in the journal vocational behavior on how people manage work life boundaries to fit with their role identities so used to be that we thought that if people were workers they were generally career centric and that they valued their work role and demands more than their non-work roles a part of that was the structure of family somebody was taking care of their you know having meals ready when you got home or other domestic demands and then people were thought to be non-work centric you know they might work part time or want flexibility but they were and they were seen as more centred on family and personal life well many people today are dual centric they are high in their job identity out of necessity or professionals often love their work reacidemics have a lot of overlap between who we are and our jobs and their families as well and there's frustration because you can't work in an environment that allows us to excel at both and this lack of boundaries has increased cognitive complexity of managing back and forth between roles and there can be role confusion you could be home a steady stem faculty during the pandemic and they'd be trying to do their job and you know their kid you're locking them out of your home office or you're trying to watch an autistic child while you're working and I'm worried that we are haven't learned as much as we could from the pandemic maybe we've lightened up a little bit to let staff work it on more but I think it just increased demands and I know women administrators Mira had where the most overloaded in our study just one last say I wanted to mention too is I forgotten about the idea of related concepts of stress and psychological distress and I have studied that in an NIH funded study and Amanda when you were talking about everybody needs a little bit of anxiety the same was stress we only a little bit of stress the weak boring if we weren't stretched but I remember we did use a scale on psychological distress with nursing home nurses carried for patients and some of them had elder and child care off the job and psychological distress skills do include I feel anxious I feel you know uneasy and I think as you were both talking many people are just feeling as Amanda said on edge and that is a lot of depression right now with violence in the world we got a war going on UK I have a family member that lives in the UK Amanda you know can't bite tomatoes right now in the UK I mean these little things in life are on joking but there's a shortage you know it's you know can our kids go to school can we go to movie theater can we be an armed professor I try to miss you can stay it that was a shooting there it's an uncertain time it sounds from your answers that levels of anxiety and burnout have been increasing over potentially the last few years certainly over the last decade and I'm interested in your thoughts about the extent to which they've been increasing at a faster rate than our ability to help people with them as in is do you see an increasing gap between the levels of burnout and anxiety and our ability to support people I'm just saying organizations we have an ad hoc approach approach to solving anxiety burnout somebody as a problem we say oh goes go to the employee assistance program but we don't design occupationally healthy workplaces to try and prevent anxiety and burnout and the design of work and reduce stigma for asking for help the U.S. Surgeon General has come out with five aspects of a healthy workplace I was interviewed for that work life harmony is one of them I'm a work life scholar I bring that but the people can have time to be whole people and feel that both many parts of their life are not sacrificing one for the other that's a challenge and you know people can easily buy houses now you know there you know a lot lots of things for the good life young people coming out is there a job security we don't work for a company long-term people are delaying getting married fertility rates are dropping I think when people have children and feel they have a place or you know growing there's hope our people losing hope in the in our institutions functioning an interesting point for me perhaps is you know that stress and anxiety are distinct phenomena as well and perhaps we've had lots of conversations about stress in the organizational context we haven't really necessarily talked about anxiety it still seems to me from my kind of research very much to do words that we are well behind in terms of being able to to help people are suffering from living on the edge and dealing with those those pressures of anxiety I think it's also important when we talk about anxiety burnout stress well-being also to like these descriptors for you know exhuman experiences that we're having how does that get contextualized outside of like traditional datasets that management and HLS call us typically focus on right so for example one of the things that we found very fascinating with my with a research team that I work with we say okay so let's look at well-being datasets that if you know we've collected data we have talked about this about these concepts and constructs in multiple fields whether it's in psychology sociology sometimes in the intersection of spirituality religiosity and all of these different components of well-being what does that mean for someone from a low resource community a member who falls below the poverty threshold and what are their experiences of well-being and when we're shining a spotlight on these kinds of words and descriptors what does that mean for somebody's experience outside of that socio-economic status or the kinds of datasets that we go after or who we survey who we talk to who we interview and was fascinating for us to because we started talking more we started unpacking the kinds of opportunity structures that are available for somebody who might be lower middle class upper middle class or you know or maybe somebody who works within higher education who has a job who has employment so anxiety and burnout and well-being feeling good all have different notions of what that that could be like under what we continue to discuss not just in research literature but also in popular media literature right and so what we wanted to focus was how do we shine a spotlight on folks whose stories we don't hear enough from what are their stories of feeling well and so within limited opportunity structures what we're finding is similarities in some of the some of the themes around well-being and feeling good so which is great so there's a commonality of that human experience but also very specific differences in how folks are focusing on being well or sometimes saying we don't use those terms to describe these kinds of feelings that we have or these experiences that we have and so then I think it goes I think the work is interesting because now what one of the projects that I'm working on currently currently is now we're looking at community settings or like how as individual members we embedded in these particular communities these particular geographic locations or zip codes if you want to say that way, like where we are, what resources are available to us, create these different structures, and within those structures, what is our sense of being well, and what are those stories? And I think, so I think, I think there's a lot of perspective taking that folks who have, I think I would say, bottom line, have a full-time job, able to make more than a living wage, I think we are losing sight and sense of perspective of what other people's experiences are. So going back to some of the comments, Ellen and Darren, we made earlier on, I think there is a societal siloing of experiences and experience sharing and a greater loss of community knowledge, community experience as well as generational or passing of expertise or things of ways of being, that I think there's much bigger loss than we are able to grasp and the pandemic has served like really like being a big, like hopefully, like it's stalled as I think for a little bit of time, but I somehow feel that now we are on a faster, crazier path and sometimes I think just perspective taking alone, like when I go to the field, when I go to the community and I collect data, I talk to that one person in the community, I come back, I know I show up differently at my workplace. And so sometimes just hearing, like getting perspectives of others itself in itself is a great, I have it from personal point of view, it's a great coping mechanism for the things that I feel like, oh, I can grapple, this colleague or whatever is going on in my workplace. I think that really, in Politement, we are hesitant to have situated understandings of particular individuals in their situations and we can't just assume what anxiety means what burnout means in that particular context. And I think particularly as well, it's that kind of relational aspect, the ability to share and to see and to, and that kind of really helps, doesn't it? I think once we know it's not just me and I think that's so mundane, but certainly in the work that I've done that's very, very powerful as a way of helping the individuals to cope because there's so much stigma it seems, still attached to these kind of uncomfortable emotions when it's necessarily part of life and might be getting much worse if we've been saying across society as well, so we need to be having conversations about this so that we can connect to it in healthier ways. Mary, you were talking about zip code being a variation of communities, resources. And years ago before the US passed, welfare reform, requiring people to work and also get benefits when Clinton was in power. I did a study in Michigan and with the Department of Social Services and it had mothers and children and we looked at four work sites predicting who would get off welfare. And so there was the public policy law that you had to work or go to school to be able to get your benefits that we ask people psychological capital, the affiliate will be able to have self efficacy and we looked at zip code and what predicted over time who was able to get off welfare was not whether you were assigned to a policy or how you personally felt necessarily as much as where you lived. And it was a lot easier to get off welfare in Kalamazoo, Michigan than Detroit. There's a less resources in community, less people functioning, going to work. And so I think we've gone, particularly the US society's very individual focused if you don't succeed or you have anxiety or lack of well being well, are you not exercising or that? You know, it's like, Hey, I just want to make a paycheck to pay my rent. Do I have time to even, you know, go buy healthy food and, you know, go to the gym? It's at a different level. So I love those comments. I just also want to, I was thinking about social support. I've done a lot of work on and that you're trying my customizing what different people need, what different things. And I do think the power of social support has been shown time and time again, specifically when it's what the party wants, not everybody wants the same thing. So part of the perspectives, taking and situational viewing that Amanda also mentioned, I think is important that we just need to understand that the people need different things and, you know, figure out where they are at and meet them there if you can. So type support I've studied is emotional support, the empathy, instrumental, one of the classic items for social support, you can you borrow your car from somebody or $10, $20, um, role modeling, people showing others being kind. And the last one is harder to measure, but creative, we look at creative work like management, thinking of win-win, how to help people in and also helps the community be better. And those were not in that creative space as much as we should be. To pick up on that, you know, obviously, eventually in the conversation, we're going to get to talking about what this means for HRD, but it feels like there's a step there because we're talking about community, we're talking about social support. And maybe the step towards HRD is to explore the question of what does this mean for the organisation. So if we take a look at the prevalence of anxiety and burnout within the organisation or setting, what are the implications for organisations and in particular for the leaders of those organisations. And Ellen, at the back of the beginning, you talked about the significance of having a trained manager on what that can do. And so Ellen, I'm interested in your thoughts really about what all of this means at an organisational, an organisational leader level. Well, I think leaders need help in learning how to be good leaders. And just like now, everybody knows how to be a parent. I think a lot of leaders don't always know how to be a good supervisor and need some help. And supporting wellbeing and mental health and working family is not something that many leaders thought we're part of their poor leadership roles. I just published a paper in a cabing management, animals on misconceptions between the leadership and the work life field. And work life people always focus on just support for flexibility, but they don't look at how abusive supervision also makes people's lives horrible off work and leadership people don't look enough at the non-work. So I would like organisations when somebody becomes a manager that they learn about core skills and one would be helping people have flexibility or whatever they need to be able to have their non-work life fit with their work life in ways that create positive synergies between both. And so those four behaviours that I mentioned, leaders having emotional support and what matters is what employees think. So we find there's a 50% perceptual gap that 100% of leaders will rate themselves as being supportive emotionally and other forms of support. And about half the employees don't experience it that way. So we need to go back to training leaders and how to help other people feel that they are being supported. And so I would like training seems like not a strong intervention, but your crowd certainly is interested in training. We start there, builds awareness. It helps people have common language. It helps build a baseline of expectations. And then what you have to follow up with is having leaders at different parts of the organization mirror these behaviours because if people are just trained as first-line supervisors go do this, but the top managers and middle managers who are sending lots of pressures down make profits at all costs, but in layoff people whenever you need to, but in that helps them. We are in a very mixed message society. Look at these Silicon Valley companies that offered lots of flexibility during the pandemic and vitro fertilization, and they are currently for dads and now we are having major layoffs. So it needs to really be cascaded down the organization. It will only happen when leaders are at the top that have these lived experiences from increasingly diverse backgrounds, whether it is women, people of color, people immigrant, we have a lot of people immigrating to the US. They have families in other countries and they can also mirror ways to be flexible and supportive of many backgrounds. I think that is a really interesting perspective in terms of cascading down from the top and it is a cultural change isn't it in terms of the ways that leaders and managers are working with employees. If we think about anxiety as I mentioned earlier, it is something that is commonly felt in organizations yet it is not very well discussed. There is barriers there. We can't openly discuss about our anxiety. I guess there is very much training of leaders and managers. They themselves will experience anxiety and well-being issues and it is working with that to enable the safe environment for other people to come forward so that they have the support that they need. There was an earlier study in human resources to open quarterly that looked at where individuals were coming from. conducted with CEOs who participated in the reality show undercover boss. And so my colleague and I, we took that opportunity actually to really talk about, what do those vertical and direct linkages look like when CEOs are in direct contact with frontline workers or frontline employees? And what is that quality of communication and exchange or conversations? What are the impacts on HRD practices? We also was interesting that we found that it affected like positively impacted morale of the CEOs and the senior executives. As much as it had an impact on frontline employees, I think they could see that how does that vision for whatever they want their company to be? How does it actually get operationalized in data interactions in the frontline of the company? And so that was very fascinating to say. And so how do organizational leaders create those-- get out of those silos and create those opportunities for conversations to get like a firsthand view, sort of speak of that experience of being in the frontline? Because again, it's about perspective taking and in some like organizational leaders staying with other people more of their kind. What does it take to go past your structural silos with an organizational spaces and connecting and finding ways to impact that employee experience, especially for those that have limited support and attention within the organization? And there is a recent-- I love those comments, we're about connections between the leaders and employees. And with the growing virtuality of work, people are not connected as much. And even for frontline workers with facing jobs, we have different schedules, compressed work weeks. So there was recently a New York Times article labeled "Late Off in Your Living Room." And so you're laid off and people may not have ever met their boss face to face. So I think that is part of-- as Amanda mentioned about the need for relational support. And relationships are not as high quality or in quantity as they were in the past when we were all coming in and maybe having lunch together at the office or factory. Here you were talking there about an article in HRD core to the-- you were talking about the potential role for training. What do you see as the role for HRD practitioners within organizations? I think the research is very clear that resilient employees, they're able to navigate or they are less likely to experience burnout. And they're also probably not searching for jobs, less likely to search for jobs outside. But we know that job search is also related to other factors within the organization. So how does your immediate team work? What's the supervisor relationship with employees and subordinates? So there are other factors. And yet we know that resilient employees somehow are able to navigate typical challenges of working in organizations. And I think also when we have resilient employees, we know that they're able to meet their goals. They're also able to help their teammates and also the overall organization. So knowing these-- I think these evidences that we have from the research literature, I think helping employees generally being able to weather change or manage change, whether it's incremental or long-term or drastic disruptive change in organizations, as we know what just happened with Google and all that's happening within the technology industry. I think we can-- if you can help employees, how do they find ways to bounce forward and thrive, despite all of the challenges, all of the pressures that are going on? And then I think if you're able to do that from a HR standpoint or a HRD standpoint, then there's going to be sustainability for-- it's going to be more about human sustainability. And that's going to be very crucial moving forward. Specifically in terms of HRD practices, I think the challenge for us going forward will be how do we customize our policies so that they can-- they're really responsive to that unique needs of an individual. And with more generational change in the workplace, we are seeing that's going to be one of the key challenges for HRD practitioners. The other challenge is absenteeism, right? So it's about how employees are showing up for work, whether they're physically showing up for work or they're working virtually. Because the nature of the job and nature of jobs across industries, it's more remote working. And organizations and employees have had a harder time reintegrating back into the workplace. And collectively, we're seeing that it's negatively impacting employees, their mental health, but also impacting, negatively impacting organizations too. And so then there have been articles in Wall Street Journal and some research that's coming out saying that we actually need employees to be physically, at least for a few days. We don't know exactly how many four days of work we really don't know about that. But we know that those are important conversations that we're having. So then the importance of well-being strategies within the context of a much more complicated hybrid work situation is something that HRD professionals we need to grapple with that as well. I have to say this, that wellness products that are currently in the marketplace, I think they're all over the place and it's really, really hard for employers and also for individuals to figure out what kinds of strategies do I need to use or for an organizational standpoint as from a manager or a supervisor standpoint. What are these different products that are available? And how can I actually bring it to the workplace and help employees navigate these different services? I think that's again another challenge because we have more choices. And however employees want better communication, they need better ways of understanding what those well-being experiences work for them and how companies or managers can help them find the products and the services that are most suitable for them. So navigating benefits, navigating coverage, what kinds of programs work better for them and what would be able to get them the tools that they need in real time. In the moment of the greatest need is another way of another challenge, I think, for HRD practitioners. - I think kind of building on that, Mary, it's really a HRD's role is perhaps a giving of voice to those that are marginalized in organizations, giving voice to things that are difficult to talk about, like anxiety, like burnout, going beyond kind of things like employee engagement type surveys to get deeper understandings of the specific situated issues. And that's perhaps where we might come in as academics and perhaps conversations and collecting also more qualitative and deeper levels of understanding perhaps. I think going back to my 2014 paper that was looking at the anxieties actually of managers, then perhaps one of my inspirations for that piece was to actually voice those anxieties because they seem to be something that people were suffering in silence with. - Yeah, and Amanda, as you're talking about your work, I'm finding me on the quality of work, I just did a report for the National Academy of Science and Commission Paper with Tammy Allen and Tracy Dumas I invited them on work-life boundaries and division of labor, unequal division of labor for gender and gender is not a binary term, but we were focusing on women in particular because childcare centers and things were closed during the pandemic, domestic labor increased. And what we found is this idea of quiet quitting, we found that, first off, a lot of the popular narrative are that in this true, thousands of women left the workforce because it was just too hard to try and figure out how to manage non-work demands and hold things together. So maybe they made less money, something often and it had to stay home. But we studied the women who stayed in despite the lack of organizational support. They loved their jobs. Met work is very good for people. It brings, besides resources, links you feel valued. And we found that in organizations where they felt they were not supported at all bad climate, there was higher rocket science, higher occupational turnover intentions. But so interesting, this is STEM, which is more masculine women are underrepresented, say the college campus and aerospace engineering, maybe women are, I know if it's like 7% or 8% of faculty, but they're not allowed. And so these vast and environmentally- You feel like you don't fit. You already, and then you have a stressful situation. And so when they women leave, they don't leave STEM. They just, they still go somewhere else to work. So there is something about making the culture one for people who feel marginalized from the poorest employee that's working the cafeteria to even people that are in the supposed elite positions. We are not going to have the diversity we need where people will rise to the top or stay there very long. If we don't make a different layers of the organization places where everybody can fit in. And so we found besides occupational turnovers, some women. Just mentally disconnected and they sort of like phoning it in. So is either they phone in their job or they phone in for their children. Oh, I know they're online all day, but I got to get this report out. You know, and so the quality again, we have to help people. Be able to give their attention and energy to be the best they are at different times, you know, whenever the times needed and part of this workload. And maybe this because we're online a lot in social media. And there is, but I do think. I've also looked at the idea of low value work. And you know, you think of the university double reporting or, you know, you get to do more, more, more, more is always better, right? You know, now more grants more outreach more engagement. And so maybe some of the work I've studied and reduced work is where for your, this is privilege for for high talent people you customize. Rather than have them leave if somebody's really great at research, maybe they do have a different load. Somebody's great at teaching, maybe you don't stigmatize them, but they enjoy teaching, but have less research. We're not very flexible, even in how we design jobs. And then at the lower levels, I think it should be allowing people to have, you know, transportation, child care, flexible hours, money towards going to school, money towards daycare vouchers. So safety nets are sort of declining in it's unfortunate. The role of the employer is being able to lift people up is, you know, is not doing very well. And so we need I work to an HR for many number major companies were pretty siloed, even with an HR. So that, you know, the benefits and the training people and the leadership people all need to get together. Society oftentimes comes from poor performance management systems as well where we've got these kind of unrealistic metrics that are in place, you know, like you say we're expected to be fantastic at everything instead of recognizing that people have strengths in certain areas and allowing us to have strengths in certain areas. I think that is kind of that is really critical to have realistic performance metrics, realistic and responsible performance metrics, I guess. And in that requires managing performance as a team, right, it rather than one off, you know, then where you're not as strong, then I, you know, I could cover something else. And what we implement flexibility right now, for example, it's pretty odd and high deal making. You can work at home, but then somebody else is angry because you're not in the office or senior people who are on high talent can negotiate a fourth, you know, you're studying your four 10 work week at the UK. But you know, is that going to work for everyone is that can work for childcare long to 10 hours shift. So let's look at a group. Let's look at the, you know, anything that work across the work group and having to find roles and backup systems. That requires coordination and that's weakening in many of our work groups, particularly for virtual work. People are working asynchronously, just like our emails. So, I'm under something you said there makes me think about what this means for us in terms of how we prepare HRD professionals to work on this because it's clear from this conversation that, first of all, it's a, it's a complex complicated picture. It also feels from like the last 10, 15 minutes of our conversation that there is amazing potential for HRD within organizations to do some good here. But I'm wondering how we actually help prepare HRD practitioners to have that role. And this presumably a role here for education, as in how do we through our through graduate diplomas through degrees. Prepare HRD professionals to work on issues of anxiety and burnout. Do you have any thoughts as to the role of education? Yeah, well, I guess, you know, given my focus on anxiety, there's a real need from my perspective to four ground discussions actually of anxiety in HRD education, both as part, perhaps, of the learning process itself. And as a topic for reflection for learning about how organizations are emotional places, you know, because if we look at HRD education anxiety is rarely discussed in that in that context as we find it being rarely discussed in the organizational context. And as Ruspense has commented in 2016, you know, it's it's actually somewhat depressing, perhaps, that emotional aspects of learning within and about management and organization are not already so obvious that they're integral to what we do in business schools at the moment. You know, so improving how we engage with anxiety as a process and as a topic in the HRD context might be a really important first step towards helping people better to connect to it in the organizational context, whether that be the HRD professional themselves, whether that be we think about forms of management education and thinking about, you know, we've talked a lot about training leaders training managers. And what we do and what we emphasize in management education becomes important as well. So, you know, I think partly it is about recognizing and accepting anxiety as part of the process of learning itself, you know, as my work has highlighted that anxiety itself is a major emotional output of attempts to learn and develop. So it is kind of, I guess, recognizing when we are learning in education that learning itself necessarily involves uncomfortable emotion and then thinking about the ways in which that uncomfortable emotion both promotes and at the same time hinders learning. So I guess then it's also thinking about, can we, can we have open and discussions in HRD education about the concept of anxiety about the topic of anxiety to think about and to reflect on its significance as a subject matter. So how significant actually is anxiety in everyday practice as we've discussed earlier, it's an integral part of the lived experience of organizational life, but it seems to be rarely discussed in the education and development context. I think, you know, there's perhaps a need for HRD education to go further and to kind of use that unsettling of anxiety in the classroom as a starting point for asking some deeper questions about the extent of anxiety and organizational life and whether it's realistic for expecting people to cope with those levels of anxiety. So I'm thinking about the links to employee wellbeing, so I'm thinking here then of kind of challenging taken for granted ways of doing and this would then chime, I guess, with the aims of more critical forms of HRD which challenge the status quo. And then I also kind of think as part of this reflection and an important role for HRD education is that it helps learners to recognize that the problems and the struggles and the issues that we oftentimes associate with a shortcoming as an individual might actually well be a representation of the broader power relations of the social context within which we within which we work. And then finally just I guess also to say that you know there are real challenges for HRD educators as well. If we start to foreground discussions of anxiety in the classroom as a way of bringing these out in the organizational context, you know, it's very challenging to do that. And once we start discussing uncomfortable emotion in the classroom that in itself might actually generate further anxiety in the classroom. So we have to be alert to that and look at ways in which we can work with unpredictable outcomes, particularly perhaps in environments where there is pressure to show relevance immediate relevance to show value for money for favorable teaching scores and the like. So as a final question for the episode I'm thinking here about the role of research and I'm conscious that a fair number of the people who listen to this podcast are either users of research or they're generating research. So we've talked a fair amount about the complexity of anxiety and burn. out the potential for HRD and probably some of the limitations about what we currently know. And so I'm interested in your thoughts of what guidance you would give to research as out there about potential research agendas or research questions and what research is needed into HRD and its relationship to anxiety and to burn out. And Ellen, I was wondering if you'd be willing to dive into that first for us. Sure. I think that research and practice is sometimes siloed itself and there's a lot of work on the idea of evidence-based HR practices being actually implemented early work was done. I think it was Sarah Rines, right, different on that from out of university to Iowa. And cyber and research to practice conferences on diversity and gender. And I think for this eighth question, I would like to see teams of people that are interested in policy but implementation of policy well, allowing say HR people with OV people or wellness people or interdisciplinary research to be primed for an NSF grant they like interdisciplinary research. I think right now we're kind of, we have people measuring emotions very micro and that there's nothing wrong with that. We need to measure it well. But I don't see sometimes the measurement of how people are feeling, linked to what are interventions that organizations can do whether it's for leaders, for employees there's research on mindfulness training. I'm certainly supportive of that. But individuals are in a social context. So you can be very mindful, but if everybody else is texting you at night or say you have crazy non-functional interactions, you're going to be depressed. You're in a system. So I'd like to also see multi-level research. So this idea of, and you know, people look at this as disciplinary. So Mary said we needed disciplinary interdisciplinary work. Sociologists look at the big picture. Psychologists measure how people feel. HRD people measure, you know, what are the training and policies and development we can do. I don't always see these cross-cutting research. So one is what is something you could do as an employer of choice since that's their, you know, the mantra we say to proactively make a work culture that helps people feel have well-being when they come to work. And then for those people at the margins at the low end or you know, how can we help people at the bottom? I mean, I've studied a little bit on flexibility policies. And I think in some ways, policies need to provide a floor of protection for people to prevent serious episodes happening. We have to at least start with, you know, helping people walk before they run the marathon. And then once people have protection that they're not being abused at work that they have, the resources they need that they're able to do their jobs that they're not worried about their families while they're at work, we can then motivate them through good managers, through performance managers, through team work, through career opportunities. But right now we can't even get to those higher level needs as Basil would have talked about if we aren't addressing the basic things people need to function every day and that's coming to work feeling good. I think that's really important in terms of understanding through the participant's own terms. And that would call for that kind of more in depth research to generate those deeper understandings to be able to describe it in their own terms. And I also kind of wonder when we're talking about burnout, you know, that's something that doesn't happen overnight to have some sort of longitude and all research to see how things unfold over time and at what point does the anxiety become too much to handle and what leads to kind of that burnout. And then also I guess you know you're talking about the research's role in the projects that you've been working on. And it's also then looking I guess about how the work that we're doing, how is it received, what difference does it make, what impact does it make, and then research to actually follow those things. Oh, after we've done the intervention. Well that feels like a tremendous call to action to researchers that wraps up the episode very nicely indeed because unfortunately we've run out of time for today's conversation. But I want to say a big thank you to Amanda Elan and Mirafor, such an interesting discussion of giving us all so much to think about and then hopefully to then act upon. So thank you all so much for being a part of the episode. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great to meet you all. Yeah, you too. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode. It was wonderful spending time with Amanda Hey, Ellen, Ernst, Cosec and Mira, Alla, Gerrager. If you enjoyed this episode check out all of our others. There were 33 episodes in the first three seasons and we're releasing a further 11 here in the fourth. Between them they provide access to conversations with over 100 leading scholars from around the world. New episodes release weekly. To learn more about this area check out hrdmasterclass.com and to learn about the Academy of Human Resource Development check out ahrd.org. Also don't forget to look into our sponsors, the Health Professions Education Special Interest Group, HPE SIG, at the Academy of Human Resource Development. To find out more information and also to join the SIG, visit ahrd.org/page/specialintressgroups. I'm looking forward to being with you in our next episode when we're exploring the relationship between hrd, inflation and unemployment. With the help of Dr. Mandel and Moll of Rockford University, Dr. Fotiars-Mitsakis of Nottingham Trent University and Dr. Perissa Mabubi of the CD How Institute. Until then this is Darren Short signing off from the hrdmasterclass. Human Resource Development Masterclass podcast is brought to you by the Academy of Human Resource Development and is a production of allbypodcast.com. Thank you for listening to hrdmasterclass. AHRD is crowdsourcing funding for the season and you can donate today at givebutter.com/hrd-hythinmasterclass-hythin-six. 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