Why Companies Are Afraid to Talk About Workplace Wellness: A #straightfromcait Episode

Welcome to Friday, the burnout podcast.

I'm your host, Kate Dunnevin, burnout expert, keynote speaker, and author focused on burnout

as a match issue at work.

Friday looks at burnout as information, not failure.

When people, roles, expectations, leadership behaviors, and systems fall out of alignment,

burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through ten of Friday focused primarily on individual burnout and recovery,

and those episodes are still available.

You can use the fried episode finder to find the conversations that best match what you're

dealing with right now.

Starting in season 11, the focus shifts to the workplace.

The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can improve match and get rid

of burnout in realistic, sustainable ways.

I also work directly with companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence

keynotes, workshops, and longer-term advisory work.

If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand what

it's pointing to, and how to find a better match.

Ain't gonna burn ourselves out no more, ain't gonna burn ourselves out no more.

Got each other on our side, plus all the folks at Friday, the burnout podcast.

Hey, fried fam, today I want to talk about something that I've seen happen in the space

that I'm working in since 2019, because my main topic is burnout, even though that's

now expanding, because my main topic has been burnout for all these years, when I get

on the phone with companies, often there's some sort of fear.

They're afraid to talk about burnout, they're afraid to use the word, they're afraid people

are going to blame them if we talk about it out loud, they're afraid more people will

claim they're burnt out if we talk about it out loud.

There's an underlying fear to it, and over time, with the companies that I've worked

with, I've kind of co-created this blameless approach to burnout, and that's one of the

ways that I de-risk this topic for them.

I watched another speaker recently, kind of voice of frustration about how what they

do is really important to them, and there are some stats that prove that it's really

useful in the workplace, but they can't seem to break through in a certain way.

And I was thinking about, in general, why the world of wellness is still such a risk,

or still feels like such a risk for everyone except for the bravest leaders out there.

Now, I'm going to do a little bit of reading today because I have some stats that I want

to pull forward in some quotes from LinkedIn that I want to use.

This whole conversation for me is about this idea that you might be nervous to hire

somebody to come into your company, and why that's justified, why that's okay.

So here we go, Gallup McKinsey and others have been sharing stats for years about engagement

and burnout and everything else, and most of those things are getting worse.

I mean, we know that it's not a secret, we haven't gotten much better, we're not seeing

a lot of improvement, and yet there's another set of stats that are really clear, and that's

that wellness initiatives are having a positive impact.

So there was an article that I found that said Johnson and Johnson saved $250 million

in health care costs over 10 years because of their wellness initiatives.

I mean, if you're a company, you could save 25 million a year because of a wellness initiative,

you'd do it, right?

A 2024 Deloitte study showed a 470% ROI on wellness initiatives.

470% was not a typo.

I double checked because I was like, really?

A 2024 well hub assessment showed a minimum of a $2 return for every $1 spent.

So we're looking at massive, massive percentage rate of returns on these initiatives, but somehow

these stats are not always convincing leaders and boards that wellness initiatives are not

only necessary, but helpful to both the bottom line of the health and wealth of the entire

company.

And if that's true, if people are still feeling like that's risky, then we should be wondering

why we as wellness providers in some in some way, shape, or form culture speakers, things

like that, people that sort of shift sometimes and say, well, I'm a culture speaker, I'm a

little leadership speaker, but they're still talking about emotions or communication

or all things that are actually related to wellness at the end of the day.

Now in my experience talking to leaders, it's not because leaders don't want their people

to be well.

It's not because they're callous, it's not because they don't care.

I work with leaders who are incredibly thoughtful and I believe truly want what is best for

their people.

So why is the investment in wellness that moves the needle actually talking about the things

that really matter actually giving true methods for moving through things on a systemic

scale?

Why is it still lagging so far behind?

Well, it's still feeling like a risky choice to most people.

Now, hear me out.

As a speaker, when you're building your business, one of the things that you need to understand

is that you are a risk for everyone that hires you, especially when you're new and you

don't have the social proof behind you to show that you're good on stage and in front

of an audience.

And speakers have a hard time understanding this.

They just don't always like they think they're good.

They think that their work is impactful, but I had someone hand me a copy of their keynote

once and said, could you go over my keynote with me?

Okay, I'm having a hard time selling it.

And the first paragraph of their keynote, their opener, was basically telling the leadership

that they weren't doing a good enough job and that's why burnout was present in their

workplace.

And I thought, well, this isn't sellable.

No one's going to pay you money to tell you that they're doing things wrong.

Like that's not helpful.

And of course, you pay people money to tell you that you're doing things wrong all the

time.

We hire consultants to say, hey, this is breaking down, that's breaking down.

So when it comes to wellness, we're a little bit more sensitive.

And in the speaking world, like when you're not yet a sure bet, when you don't have the

social proof, when you don't have the testimonials, when you don't have the client feedback, the

recommendations, the referral system, if you get hired and you bomb, that is a huge risk

for the company, for the event planner and for everyone involved in hiring you.

And so you need to understand that and you need to adjust your rates accordingly when

you're starting out.

You need to gather the social proof that's necessary in order to prove to people that you

can do this.

You need to continue to create content and show up and prove to people, show people on

a consistent basis that you can do this work.

One of the ways that I do this massive shout out, they are not paying me for this, but

I love them so much.

Massive shout out to my people at Talked Up, which is a system that speakers use to collect

feedback at the end or during their talks.

And now, thanks to Talked Up, I have over 3500 reviews, which is a huge safety net that

I can send to event planners to say, hey, listen, I've been in front of thousands and thousands

of people, 99% of them really enjoy my stuff.

So I think we're going to be okay.

And that helps to de-risk the hiring for people.

But it's normal that it's a little bit risky.

So why is it risky?

It's a question.

I got to this point in the podcast.

I was writing it out.

I was typing out my thoughts, trying to wrap my head around what I thought about this.

Why is it risky?

And then I put this out to the LinkedIn community.

And I said, why do you think I have a lot of wellness speakers in my orbit?

I said, why do you think this is a risky thing to do?

And it also had me thinking back on my acupuncture career, right?

Because as an acupuncturist, it's also we have this risky space because people only come

to us when they've tried everything else.

The first time you meet somebody and they say, oh, what do you do?

You say, oh, I'm an acupuncturist.

The first question they ask is, does that work?

And I think, no, like I'm a charlatan.

Like I just spend $100,000 on an education for the heck of it, you know?

And so I've been in this place of having a need to show the usefulness of the thing that

I offer for my entire career.

So this is really normal for me.

But when I asked the LinkedIn community, here's some things, some thoughts that I got

back.

Melissa Carson, who is a strategist, coach and fractional exec, wrote, I don't think HR and organizational

leaders have figured out how to talk about it consistently in business terms.

And while that might be true, I also believe that that's not HR and organizational leaders

jobs.

As the wellness speaker, as the person providing the service, it is our job to give it

to them in business terms.

However, a lot of wellness professionals don't have those business terms.

And here we have a huge gap and a huge disconnect.

The next thing that I thought was really interesting was Dex Randall, a fellow burnout

professional of mine and he's a coach in Australia.

He expanded on this by saying, we need to rebrand wellness as a performance upgrade.

Yeah, totally.

So as the person providing the service, you should present it in a way that makes it

sellable and viable without this huge sense of risk.

I liked it.

So we're on this sort of path right now that I see happening.

And then I got a comment from another healthcare keynote speaker, someone that I connect with

a lot on LinkedIn, Matt Paradise, who added this, hiring an external wellness speaker or

consultant can feel risky because the ROI is uncertain.

It's not necessarily, but it feels that way.

The market is noisy and regulated, super true.

And past programs often under deliver on promised outcomes.

And my heart sank when I read it because I was like, well, this is the truth.

And this touches on like a snake oil vibe.

And this to me is the biggest problem in this area is that right now we have a massive

gen, what Jen got leap is referring to as a trust recession.

We have a massive trust recession happening.

Nobody trusts what anybody's saying online anymore because we've all been trying to sell

each other stuff for over a decade using TikTok and Instagram and everything else.

And when you go into the world of wellness influencers, we've now put people that don't

have full medical degrees in some of the highest health care offices in this country because

they were popular on social media.

We have people that are telling us to be careful about products and food that we don't need

to be careful about.

We have all sorts of things happening in the wellness space.

We have all sorts of products being sold to us all the time that our faults don't have

peer reviewed studies are not supported.

And now listen, I don't think science is perfect.

Or do I think it is free from issues?

And yet it is the best system we've got so far.

So we have this space where some of the loudest voices in wellness don't have any medical

background at all.

Right?

So this is kind of super interesting.

And then I read something by Renee R who's a fellow keynote speaker and she hit me right

in the gut with her take.

She said, as a trauma-informed social scientist, I believe we need to call people in, not

call people out.

To often speakers hit like a hammer with data rather than landing like a salve to soothe

people in systems.

Our work can be surgical, even therapeutic, healing should remain at the center, right?

Do we have permission to excise and address baked in tendencies or not?

Who and which processes will our interventions impact and how?

If we target change on individual, intergenerational and systemic levels, sustainable outcomes

can be realized, but only with permission after we unpack the risks.

If done haphazardly, we're throwing spaghetti against the wall to meet ROI's, but can do

real harm.

Hence, truth seekers face real tangible risks to people, processes and productivity and

choosing to invite us in.

That was like a whole sermon, Renee.

Thank you so much for writing that.

And this is one of the biggest risks in the well-being space that I don't see people

talking about.

Renee is the first person that I've ever seen say this out loud.

It doesn't mean that nobody, if you've read it somewhere, you can tell me, but I haven't

seen this thought process, hold outside of a one-to-one medical interaction.

So when we're talking about one-on-one medical care, we talk about this all the time, like

Physician Duno harm.

This is your first rule.

Let's find a way to meet people where they're at and be gentle when we can and give them

a little push when we need to, et cetera, right?

But we talk about this in a one-on-one space and Renee has just expanded it to this full

company, full system solution saying, we still have to be aware that we have to make people

feel safe in order for them to move forward, which is so interesting to me because so many

of us are talking about psychological safety as part of our work, but then not always

providing that psychological safety as we do our work.

And this is, I thought, gosh, on a deeper level, underneath all of the, well, the stats

say this, I'm unsure about that, all of the like wishy-washingness sitting at the surface,

underneath there is a really true and deep fear of harm.

So this is something that I think comes out a lot because most people working in wellness

in a larger space don't actually have any sort of practitioner ship as their background.

So the people that are often doing organizational psychology and things like this in the workplace

are people that have done degrees in organizational psychology and have worked in corporate spaces.

So they have the knowledge and they're connected to the corporate lingo and all of that, but

they often go into the wellness space, the workplace wellness space after having a bad experience

in the workplace.

And then they use that as their catalyst to help change the thing that was wrong for them.

And I totally get that.

That's absolutely normal.

Most of us will try to do that in some way, shape or form.

But there's a, there's a fear in that too because if somebody had a bad experience somewhere,

they might be assuming or assessing that somebody else is having that same bad experience

at your company when you're trying to hire them.

So there's another level of risk there.

So all of that sort of admitting out loud that like this is actually really risky for people

and we should be aware of that and we should be cognizant of that.

When we talk to people and get people on the phone and have sales calls and all of that,

we should really be aiming for relief, safety and understanding before we get to any sort of

selling and offering and explaining.

And so I was thinking about how that works in my business and how do I reduce risk for my clients?

And I've got to be doing this on some level because I'm doing fairly well as a keynote speaker.

I get invited back to the same companies and events year after years.

And my referrals are my number one source.

So I've got to be doing something right.

So I sat down and thought about what that might be.

So one of the ways that I reduce risk I mentioned in the beginning is I take a blameless approach

to burnout. I know that people love to blame leaders and systems, but that's not really useful.

And also my personal story doesn't support that.

So the interesting thing about my own burnout and the thing that I'm doing in the workplace

is that I don't blame anybody for my own burnout, not myself, not the system, not anything.

I was both the leader and the employee.

I always worked for myself and I burnt out in that scenario.

So I didn't have a leader to blame.

I didn't have a system or an organization to blame.

I had myself to deal with my history to work through and my systems and processes that I created.

Right. So why did I create them the way that I created them?

What are these normal human things that so many of us are doing that have nothing to do with our

workplace originally, but that we're bringing into our workplace that can be adjusted

with a little bit of understanding.

So number one, I take a blameless approach to burnout.

And I believe it really deeply that that's true.

The other way that I reduce risk is that the framework that I'm building now relies on

you remembering one question. It's not a, you know, four part thing made up of an

and not an anagram. What are those things called with the letters and the words I don't remember

right now? It's not an anagram, but you know what I mean.

Right. It's like I'm not trying to make you remember an 87 step process.

I'm giving you one question to bring with you throughout everything that can help

pretty much everyone. And so that I think do risks it for people.

It's like I don't have to, you know, become a walking encyclopedia or I don't have to be a trauma

informed specialist in order to make this work. You just need a little bit of curiosity and a

simple question. The next way that I reduce risk, which might sound counterintuitive, but is

the thing that I'm hired for most frequently, which is super interesting, is I speak about the

emotions that hold us back from changing and shifting. So when people are stuck in a system

and they're unable to move forward, they're stuck before a change. There's some reorg happening.

There's a merger happening and there's a lot of emotion around it. I come in and I talk about

the actual emotions that people are feeling. We talk about resentment. We talk about fear. We talk

about grief. We talk about anger out loud on stage. And I give people a way to move through those

things that is healthy and can help everybody move forward. So one of the best ways to reduce risk

is to admit on the larger scale, like we see you. We know what you're feeling. We believe you

when we think that we can help you with it. Instead of saying, oh, let's slap some joy on it.

Let's slap some gratitude on it and pretend like we're all super enthusiastic when half the

company is angry and scared. So I've had so many wonderful conversations with companies,

especially this past year, saying, we know our people are nervous. We've got a lot going on.

And we'd really like to find a way to give them some relief. So we have to talk about what

they're feeling. And I'm like, I'm your girl. Let's do this. It's my favorite thing to do.

So that's been really fun for me. But it is counterintuitive in the beginning. One of my best

selling keynotes in the first couple of years of work was called resentment is your superpower.

And I sold it like hot cakes because people wanted to talk about it. We were just in the middle and

sort of just after a pandemic, people were mad. Things were changing a lot was happening.

And if you meet people where they are, they automatically feel safer. Now, if your whole company

is sad or angry and you bring in a joy keynotes speaker, they're going to be like, what?

Why are what we can't get to joy right now? It feels like a slap in the face and it feels super

patronizing. So one of the ways I de-risk wellness in the workplace is talking about being

able to meet people where they are in a way that's positive, intentional, intentional,

and future focused. The next way that I reduce risk, and this is something that I've actually

only started doing this year, is offering a longer session that's only a 45 minute keynote

and then a 45 minute open Q&A. Because this instead of having people be talked at,

this gives your people the opportunity to say, hey, but what about this? We can solve some of

the problems in real time. Instead of saying, now go leave and implement this on your own. No,

let's implement it right now. Let's figure out some of the solutions that are specific to you

and your team right now. This has been a huge success this year and it's super, super fun. And at the

end, here's what the people say is that they feel relief. That's the most common word that I hear

after these sessions. People feel relief and people feel hurt and understood. That's building

psychological safety without even trying just by showing up and letting people be who they are,

where they are with what they've got in their bodies and their minds and in their hearts right now.

So, those are the ways that I de-risk wellness for you and for your companies.

And de-risking, like I said, comes natural to me because it's been a normal part of my career

since I started. As an acupuncturist, I constantly had to do this. And as my talks evolve,

I'm moving kind of into the culture space. I'm moving it intentionally. First of all,

because the ideas that I've grown around burnout have evolved and now hit more in the culture space.

They're more about culture than they are about wellness. And it's been an interesting evolution

for me to sort of have burnout as this center of everything that I do for so long. And having that

sort of shift, everything I do is burnout informed, is chronic stress biology informed,

which is another thing that makes me a little bit different. I focus a lot on the physiology and

the biology of the body. Why things are happening, not just to the psychology of it, what's happening

physically for you that maybe keeps things stuck? I'm a healthcare practitioner at heart,

always. But if that ever prevents me from helping you make a positive change at your organization,

it does take a back seat. Your comfort and your safety are necessary for that change to take place.

So when you want a partner for moving your culture forward, when you want a partner,

when your people are scared and lonely and worried and upset,

that's when you can come get me. I want to work with you on this in a way that helps people move

through change and move through shift with more ease and more support and more understanding

so that you can still go ahead and reach all your KPIs and get the ROI that you're looking

for. All right, Fred fam. I can't wait to hear actually what you think about this. If you're a

fellow speaker, do you think that wellness is a risky road? If you are someone who hires speakers,

what is your thought process on this? You agree or disagree? I hope that this turns into a really

kind of a much bigger conversation so that we can move this entire part of the profession forward.

Thanks. See you next time.

Welcome to Fried, the burnout podcast. I'm your host Kate Dunnevin, burnout expert,

keynote speaker and author focused on burnout as a match issue at work.

Fried looks at burnout as information, not failure. When people, roles, expectations,

leadership behaviors and systems fall out of alignment, burnout is often the signal.

Seasons one through 10 of fried focus primarily on individual burnout and recovery

and those episodes are still available. You can use the fried episode finder to find the

conversations that best match what you're dealing with right now. Starting in season 11,

the focus shifts to the workplace. The conversation center on how leaders and organizations can

improve match and get rid of burnout in realistic, sustainable ways. I also work directly with

companies and events through burnout and emotional intelligence keynotes, workshops and longer-term

advisory work. If burnout has been getting your attention, this podcast will help you understand

what it's pointing to and how to find a better match.