This episode features an interview with Steven T. Hunt Ph.D., Work Techno-Psychologist & Author of Talent Tectonics. Steve is an industry expert who has had a pivotal role in developing systems that have improved productivity and engagement of millions of employees around the globe. He is a well-known speaker, author, and thought leader on strategic human resources. In this episode, Shawn and Steve discuss how the nature of work is evolving, the cause of burnout, and how we should be using AI to make work better.
This episode features an interview with Steven T. Hunt Ph.D., Work Techno-Psychologist & Author of Talent Tectonics. Steve is an industry expert who has had a pivotal role in developing systems that have improved productivity and engagement of millions of employees around the globe. He is a well-known speaker, author, and thought leader on strategic human resources.
In this episode, Shawn and Steve discuss how the nature of work is evolving, the cause of burnout, and how we should be using AI to make work better.
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“You cannot provide excellent customer service, you cannot be creative, collaborative, all the things companies want people to do if you feel exploited, burned out, or exhausted. Yet, the pace of change people are facing is making them feel exhausted and burned out. This is why I wrote this book, Talent Tectonics. It talks about how do we need to manage work differently? Where we need to provide people an experience where they view change as, ‘Yeah, this growth opportunity.’ As opposed to just burned out and exhausted.” – Steven T. Hunt Ph.D.
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Episode Timestamps:
*(02:16): Rapid fire questions
*(08:31): Talent Tectonics and how the nature of work is changing
*(20:03): Steve’s take on burnout
*(28:32): How external factors play into burnout
*(42:40): How we should be using technology to make work better
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Links:
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn
Connect with Shawn on LinkedIn
Shawn Pfunder: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Cohesion Podcast. Today I'm joined by Dr. Steve Hunt. He's a recognized expert on strategic HR and has written over a hundred articles, published three books, and supported HR efforts with companies across five industries.
Shawn Pfunder: Continents, and generally just really understands human psychology and future of work, like how this works for employees. I'm super excited to chat with them. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steven Hunt: Thanks. Great to be here.
Shawn Pfunder: Awesome. So we start this off with some rapid fire questions to get to know. I mean, we're not getting really get to know you, but we'll get to know you a little bit personality wise.
Shawn Pfunder: And the first one is if you could know the answer. To one unsolved mystery, which mystery would you want to know the truth about?
Steven Hunt: I am so glad that you sent these questions ahead of time, because the rapid fire, because it's not like a rapid fire, and so I had to think about them for a long time. You know, the first one, of course, immediately I thought, well, life after death, and then I thought to myself, and got sort of philosophical, that I don't think I'd actually want to know if there's life after death, right?
Steven Hunt: Because it would mess you up in life if you actually knew, right? And so the one I came up with is life on other planets. It would be interesting to know if there actually is life on other planets.
Shawn Pfunder: Somewhere out there, it would, it, yeah, it would mess me up. Like what if life after death, you just like waking up, everything's fine.
Shawn Pfunder: Then I probably couldn't wait. That would be weird. Maybe.
Steven Hunt: Yeah. Or what if it was something boring or terrible, then you just live your life terrified, or what if you, what if it was really, really good? And then you'd be like, well, maybe I should just move on. This is it. Yeah. It's time to go. Let me pack my bags.
Shawn Pfunder: It's good we don't know. I don't want to know. What is the most impactful piece of media you've consumed this year?
Steven Hunt: Again, on this one, I thought, I consume so much media and not all of it healthy, much like food. Yeah, yeah. I think recently something I saw, and I kind of knew, but when I just saw recently just how far it's advanced, how quickly, is the ability of generative AI to mimic humans visually.
Steven Hunt: Not the text interview, but like literally to make movies of other people doing things people never did, right? And it's so much in our societies, you know, seeing is believing, and it's probably my biggest concern about AI is that falsification of reality that it enables, which on one hand is really cool, makes great movies, on the other hand could really screw us up.
Shawn Pfunder: Well, imagine that right now we'll, we'll believe fake news that's just text and crazy that comes out misinformation, disinformation, and then when you can see it, that's going to be interesting.
Steven Hunt: Yeah, so I'm really wondering how that's playing out eventually. It does go to something more larger just from psychologically.
Steven Hunt: Somebody's asking me, what can we do to make the world a better place than like, well, if people would just stop looking at their phones and look at the world around them, they'd probably feel a lot better because actually.
Steven Hunt: Yeah, we got issues in the world, but statistically, we're actually doing pretty well.
Steven Hunt: You know, if you compare it to life a hundred years ago, but when all you do is get it from some version of reality on your phone, it screws up our heads, going back to that life on death thing. Life after death thing.
Shawn Pfunder: No, that's true. Well, you know, if I could put myself on stage singing Bob Dylan songs, being key, just look like I'm at a concert, I might.
Shawn Pfunder: Try that, post that to social, I'm just kidding.
Steven Hunt: But if you're actually, truly imitating Bob Dylan, you wouldn't actually be on key.
Shawn Pfunder: That's right. I just watched the We Are The World documentary, and why, like, he took a while to do his part for that song. But, I love the guy. I just, it was interesting to see.
Steven Hunt: What is your golden rule for work? Well, I mean, first of all, I would just go with the classic golden rule, which is treat others as you'd want to be treated, but I think even more so, but even though I think we have to modify that, because I think part of being, being emotionally intelligent in a sense is realizing other people don't necessarily want to be treated the way you like to be treated, you know, some people, I've definitely realized that in my own work.
Steven Hunt: Okay. I'm very comfortable with feedback because I grew up in a very feedback rich environment. Other people necessarily share that love of the gift of feedback. But I would say more specific when I was thinking of this one is be responsive, kind, and transparently realistic. And by that I mean, you know, if somebody asks you for something, even if, what really bothers me is people that just ignore people.
Steven Hunt: I get asked a lot. Requests all the time, you know, he's LinkedIn and I've got like over 10, 000 contacts on LinkedIn because I meet so many people. And if somebody asked me for something, it's a human asking for something. And I usually to get back and nothing else to say, Hey, I'm not interested or, and if I can't help them, try to help them.
Steven Hunt: Because that could have been you in this one place. I mean, at the same time, it does really bother me that we've got these chatbots pretending to be humans and those I ignore. But I try to, and also if I can't help people, be realistic about it, you know, if somebody says, yeah, because provide information either helps people directly or.
Steven Hunt: Even if you can't help them, helps them manage their own world, right? It's like if, like, if they ask you for something that's never going to happen, tell them it's never going to happen so they can move on.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Transparently realistic. I like that. I mean, transparent might mean I'm not interested, and that's okay to say.
Shawn Pfunder: Just be honest. And then what are you most proud of?
Steven Hunt: You know, you've gotta say your family. If you don't say your family, you shouldn't have a family. So they, I mean, I am, I, I've got an incredible family, both, you know, my children directly, my wife, my extended family, my nieces. I'm just fortunate to live bit a family that, yeah, I get to live vicariously through all these people doing really cool stuff.
Steven Hunt: So, yeah, you know, I look forward to getting together with 'em. So that's, I, I don't know if proud, I like to think I had something to do with it. I certainly contributed in some small way.
Steven Hunt: But I guess at a personal level through the work is. The feeling that I, hopeful feeling that I've positively influenced the lives of millions of people through my work, because my work involves helping companies use technology to create more effective work environments.
Steven Hunt: And as a psychologist, you know, kind of really like saying, how can we use technology to make people feel more recognized, respected, support their growth and their development? The three big things that impact happiness in our lives are our relationships, our experiences, and our health, and work is a huge part of all three of those things, and so I think when I look at this, that the work I've done If you just looked at the number of employees that have used the technology that I've helped design, influence, get deployed, it's millions and millions of people around the world.
Steven Hunt: So I like to think in a small way, I've positively influenced people's lives that way.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah. Well, speaking of that, your most recent book, Talent Tectonics, you write about the global workforce, or people, that there's a shift. happening, and we're sort of reimagining the employee experience, like, to be helpful for them.
Shawn Pfunder: How is the nature of work changing?
Steven Hunt: Yeah, that's why I wrote this book, Talent Tectonics, because my job, really, I'm a psychologist that works for a global technology company, interacting with thousands of organizations around the world, and I'm, and talking to them about how can we create more effective work environments, and Over the last several years, and it was really accelerated during the pandemic, I found that the same questions were coming up again and again and again across very different industries.
Steven Hunt: And so kind of looking at those trends and what I realized is what is one of the biggest things is the very nature of work itself is changing. The very purpose of work is changing from it used to be that we hired people primarily to be productive, but now we mainly hire them to be in a way adaptable and responsive and creative and collaborative.
Steven Hunt: And I'll put it in historical context, because I always look at works from a historical context. So if you want to know where we're going in the future, you got to look at where we came from in the past. Makes sense. And if you went back 200 years ago to the, you know, most people know that there's like, there's the agricultural age and there's the industrial age.
Steven Hunt: And now we're in the knowledge and service age. And you could argue for kind of entering a different version of knowledge and service. I still think we're just in the knowledge and service age. It's just getting more and more dominant. And You're like, that's an economic view of the industries and segments of the economy where people work.
Steven Hunt: But if you look at work from a psychology point of view, which you look at, why do people work? What is the purpose of work in our society? 200 years ago, the purpose of most people's work was to grow and distribute food so we didn't starve to death. The purpose of work was to keep us alive. Talk about meaningful work.
Steven Hunt: That's right. I mean, literally, I mean, literally, that's why people worked. It was to grow and distribute food so that we didn't die. Then, with the industrial revolution, we got far faster at growing and distributing food, so a lot of people's work shifted from keeping us alive to making things to make us comfortable.
Steven Hunt: Clothes, cars, things like that. Now, with digitalization and automation and technology sort of changing the nature of work, Most work now is what we call knowledge and service work. But what's the purpose of knowledge and service work? Is you're solving problems or providing services to make other people feel good about whatever it is that you're providing for them.
Steven Hunt: Whether that is the product itself or the services around it. Really, the purpose of work is to exceed other people's expectations for what they expect from you or the company you work for. And cause that's, you know, that's what we want from a company. We want you to meet or exceed our expectations for whatever it is you're providing to us.
Steven Hunt: But because of technology also, people's expectations are shifting really, really rapidly. How quickly we expect our packages to show up, what we expect our computers to do, how we want our cars to run. All of these things are shifting. The service experiences we expect when we go to restaurants, all of these things are constantly shifting.
Steven Hunt: So what we're employing people to do. is to keep track of how these expectations are changing, both in terms of what people want and how we deliver it. And the purpose of work is really to, requires people to be much more adaptable to these constant changes. And this really shifts the importance of employee experience because people can do repetitive mindless work like shoveling dirt all day long and feel like crap.
Steven Hunt: A matter of fact, if they do it, they probably will feel like crap, but they can also feel like crap and do it. They kind of go together, right? You cannot provide excellent customer service. You cannot be creative, collaborative, all the things companies want people to do. If you feel exploited, burned out, or exhausted, Yet the pace of change people are facing is making them feel exhausted and burned out.
Steven Hunt: And this is why I wrote this book, Talent Tectonics, is it talks about how do we need to manage work differently, where we need to provide people an experience where they view change as, yeah, this growth opportunity as opposed to just, you know, Burned out and exhausted. There's a phrase in psychology called emotional labor, which refers to the physical and mental toll that happens when people try to, or act to act differently externally from how they actually feel internally.
Steven Hunt: We all know it. It's like, it's hard to smile when you feel like, when you feel crappy.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah. Yeah. You know, you, you bring up this. I don't know how much of a difference there is between these two things, but when you talk about industrial revolution and some of the things we saw that like making a yard of cloth, it was like a week to make a yard of cloth before industrial revolution to like weave that, put it together, everything.
Shawn Pfunder: I mean, you had women staying at home And most of the job was like feeding a family and repairing their clothes over and over and over again, or making the clothes and putting it together. And then that happened, we had sort of exploitive labor, lots of things that came with that. And it's all sort of like a challenge with, I don't know, burnout's the right thing to say, but like, yeah, it's like shoveling dirt.
Shawn Pfunder: I could certainly get to that point, so you're miserable doing it. Is there a difference that we're experiencing between sort of that exhaustion that would happen? You know, during the Industrial Revolution, and then you talk about this emotional burnout or this knowledge working burnout. How are those two things different?
Shawn Pfunder: Is one worse than the other? Is one new?
Steven Hunt: One is physically worse and one is psychologically worse. One of the things I talk about is, you know, anyone who tells you work was better 50 years ago did not work 50 years ago. Work physically wore people down. I mean, it shortened people's lifespans. Work now is, you know, is Physically much easier than it used to be, but it's psychologically much more difficult because you've got to be engaged.
Steven Hunt: I mean, I'll use that example of like shoveling dirt. I used to, I used to say when I would do presentations on this, I'd say you can shovel coal and feel miserable, but you can't provide excellent customer service and feel miserable. And I said that once in an audience member. Raise their hand. I'm like, yes.
Steven Hunt: And she goes, I work for a mining company. That's hidden kind of close to home But then she said you're wrong the way that we mine now uses highly sophisticated Machinery the last thing in the world that we want is to somebody come in who's just mentally not prepared Fully present because it can lead to accidents, it can lead to breaking machinery.
Steven Hunt: We need people to be fully engaged even when they're digging coal, which historically we didn't think of a fully present kind of job, right? So this shift is looking at how do we need to manage work differently in this psychologically more difficult world. Increasingly, we used to hire people largely to act like machines.
Steven Hunt: Show up, do exactly what you're told, and do it over and over and over again. Now we're using machines to act like machines, and what we're learning with things like generative AI is any technology, what it does is it automates repetitive tasks. Even like a self driving car is automating a repetitive task.
Steven Hunt: And so, We're just being able to automate more and more and more things and say, well, what does that leave for people to do it? Leaves for people to do the one thing technology can ever do, which is be human. Matter of fact, it's creepy when it tries, right? And it even crosses over into something that goes beyond just the behavior.
Steven Hunt: There was a, I saw this article by a clinical psychologist who talked about The use of generative AI for clinical psychology, and I'm not a clinical psychologist, industrial organizational psychologist, but I'm familiar with the field. And she said, tactically, it can do a lot of the same things. It can say the same things over people.
Steven Hunt: She said a big part of clinical psychology, just as a good part of customer service, is knowing there's another human who actually cares about you. And caring is defined as a human giving their life in the form of time and attention for another human. Technology can never do that. Right. But. We also know that, you know, humans can be really good at caring, they can be really crappy at it, too.
Steven Hunt: And that has a lot to do with how they're managing the experiences they have. And so, I think, when you look at this, how is the nature of work changing, we're, in the Industrial Revolution, the big shift in working was literally about people's lives. You know, the really, when I talk about this concept of talent tectonics, it's a reference to like the tectonic plates.
Steven Hunt: We have these plates, you know, that we can't see that are moving all the time, but we experienced the results of their movement in mountain ranges or earthquakes. The same thing you can look when we apply to work as there's the underlying sort of talent tectonic shifts. And the one we're talking about right now that we're going through is this massive thing of digitalization, changing the nature of work by technology permeating every aspect of work in society.
Steven Hunt: Which requires us to rethink work and employee experience. Well, to your point though, how is that different from like when they were making yards of cloth? The big talent tectonic shift of the 20th century, well there were two, but one of them was the worker's rights movement. In the, you know, 1900, there was no occupational health and safety.
Steven Hunt: Companies would actually factor in how many people are going to die on the job when they're doing their recruiting plans. I'm not making that up. And so there was a huge move about employers obligations to protect the health, well being, and physical safety of employees. And this was not a, this was not a gentle transformation, you know, entire governments fell, union organizations, all sorts of things like that.
Steven Hunt: A lot of the things that we take for granted about work around physical safety did not always exist. Now that we're running into this thing, but it's psychological safety. We're going through now an exchange. The next phase of work is what can companies do to create a sense of psychological safety, not just so that they can attract and retain employees because the other big shift is that there's fewer employees relative to the labor market because we're having fewer kids.
Steven Hunt: So it's part of tracking and attachment. We have to provide a psychologically safe, supportive environment because people can't do what we want them to do if they feel exhausted and burned out. I think that's the really big shift in talking about the nature of work. Now, the one constant, I'm talking about things that are changing, the one constant though we have that we have to focus on is the one thing that isn't changing is the fundamental psychology of people.
Steven Hunt: So you're like, well, is it that people want different things now than they used to want? No. Your grandparents wanted psychological safety, but it wasn't as important as physical safety. They were just, thank God I could get a place that I'm not going to get killed. The idea of having a place that I'd enjoy my work, that would just like, that just didn't exist a hundred years ago, right?
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah, Maslow's hierarchy, right?
Steven Hunt: Yeah, we've moved up and now the hierarchy now is, you know, employees just like, You know, they want a job where they feel engaged and it's so easy to change jobs. Now, whenever I hear, like, people say, these kids these days, they don't want to work. And I'm just like, no, they don't want to work for you.
Steven Hunt: And why should they? Your job sucks.
Shawn Pfunder: If you're the one saying, these kids these days don't want to work, then absolutely, no, I don't want to work for you. They don't want to work, and they don't have to. And they're two clicks on Google from another job, right? You know, it's like
Shawn Pfunder: This idea of burnout, we hear people talk about this a lot.
Shawn Pfunder: I talk about it a lot. I work in tech with a lot of people. is, I guess, one Like we mentioned, we have so many things that are helping us do our jobs, and that's only going to, I think, increase the repetitive tasks, things like that. So is burnout, is it a real thing? Is it an exaggeration? Is it people just trying to come up with an excuse to go trail running in the afternoon?
Steven Hunt: Burnout is a real thing, and it's better than apathy. Burnout is when you care about your work, but you cannot sustain the way that you're doing the work. Whereas apathy is you just don't care about the work at all. That's disengagement, right? And it does get into that idea that the fundamental psychology of people doesn't change.
Steven Hunt: One of the things, when I talk a lot about this in Talent Tectonics, is one of the myths about people is that people fear change. That's not true. People fear poorly managed change. They fear change that's going to hurt them. And we're wired to be skeptical about change, right? We're going back to, we're scared little mammals in the trees.
Steven Hunt: Change! Ah! But actually, the competitive niche of humans as a species is our ability to adapt to changing environments. We're really good at it. Other animals aren't. It's why sadly there's lots more of us and fewer other animals, right? It's called learning. It's innate. People have asked me, how do you teach people to be adaptable?
Steven Hunt: And I'm like, that's the wrong question. It's like, we're born adaptable. When kids are born, they only know how to do three things innately. They know how to eat, poop, and learn. And I always say, if you've ever had kids, they're really good at all three. They're great at it. Yeah. But as a parent, you don't teach your kids how to learn.
Steven Hunt: That's one of the joys of being a parent is just seeing this amazing ability to learn that comes up in kids. And You know, and what your job as a parent is to create that environment, that supportive environment, where it just taps into their natural learning ability. But it's not like you're like, oh, Billy's six months old, time to enroll him in crawling class.
Steven Hunt: No, they just figure it out, right? Because you create this environment. The problem is that historically, we have focused on people focusing on learning to learn about age 25. And then it's like, okay, you've learned, now be productive. And we're most productive when we're doing stuff we already know how to do.
Steven Hunt: So the work experience that maximizes productivity is very different from the work experience that maximizes adaptability. And I guess what you're getting into is the burnout, and it's a long answer to answer your question about burnout. But burnout is a result of when different psychological needs aren't lined up.
Steven Hunt: There's three things that That make us good at dealing with change. We're really good at dealing with change when, first of all, we understand why we're doing it. How is this affecting me? How is this helping me achieve what I want to achieve out of work or life? And that can be higher order of career development.
Steven Hunt: It can be save the planet. It can also be I just want to pay for my kids college or spend kids time, you know, have dinner at home with my family. What's the purpose of the work that you're doing?
Steven Hunt: The second thing is humans are social animals. Particularly under stress, it's really important that we feel a sense of belonging, that we're part of a group.
Steven Hunt: And it was an interesting thing in the, during the pandemic, actually, studies on employee experience, it used to be the biggest driver of engagement was, I'm recognized for doing rewarding and meaningful work. That's purpose. During the pandemic, it switched to, I feel like I'm part of a group that cares for me.
Steven Hunt: I feel a sense of belonging. So that's the second thing. So if we feel like meaningful work, Part of a group that cares about us. And then the third thing is we have to be confident that we can actually achieve what it is we're being asked to do. A sense of sort of self efficacy. I call this task experience that I can do the tasks that you're asking me to do in the time I have to do them.
Steven Hunt: When we have those three things, we know what we're doing. We've got, we're working with a team that can support us and we never have everything we want, but we've got the tools and knowledge to make it happen. Change can be really exciting, really, really exhilarating. But if these things fall out of whack.
Steven Hunt: We switch from exhilarating to more sort of like survival mode. And the biggest source of burnout in particular is when the purpose is there. I know why I'm here. I know this work. I want to be successful. But either the people I'm working with and leadership doesn't care about me. Or, I don't have the tools and resources to do it in an effective, efficient fashion.
Steven Hunt: When those two things are gone, that's when burnout starts to come in.
Shawn Pfunder: How big a deal is burnout? Do we know? Are there studies on burnout? Do we know what it looks like broadly? Is it only in particular sectors?
Steven Hunt: Yeah, it's, it's gone up in general. I'd say it's gone up in general as sort of mental fatigue and mental exhaustion.
Steven Hunt: And it's not just work, it's our society. We live in a psychologically noisy world and not only is it that the world's changing quickly because of technology. We also have technology that any change, like if I was talking to somebody who worked in the news and this is the way the news works is we look for what's the closest disaster and we just go farther and farther out until we can find a disaster and then we bring that to you and so we spend a lot of time focusing on disasters on other parts of the world to create the same emotional reaction as if they were like Closer to us.
Steven Hunt: And there's, we just live in a world that a lot of people have said this, but, you know, social media and all that is peddling emotion. It's not trying to teach you anything. It's trying to make you feel something so that you click on more things. Right. It's, and so we live in a very much an emotional, exhausting world.
Steven Hunt: We're seeing like the American psychological association. Every year it comes out with like a top 10 things psychologists would be thinking about. It was interesting to point about, or we've seen this, one of the big psychological challenges right now is. Well, there's mental health in general, but they said work instability, that people in the United States in particular are very concerned, you know, about the stability of their jobs.
Steven Hunt: That's creating this sense of burnout, this sense of exhaustion. And I think it creates an interesting challenge for companies, which is given how much things are changing that the company can't control, as I put it, companies can't control how much change employees are going to experience, but they can influence how employees experience change by really trying to manage them in a way that makes sure they give them the sense of purpose, belonging, and confidence.
Steven Hunt: I will say too, one last little thing that's interesting on this point of like you said, is it happening everywhere? This is from, I work with a lot of talent management experts in very big companies. And from several companies that I've worked with that have very large professional workforces, but they also have very large, it's called sort of frontline deskless hourly workers, whatever production workers, they said, it's interesting that actually may switch that some of the highest engagement levels are actually the people with the most structured jobs.
Steven Hunt: They're like, I know what I'm supposed to hear to do. I come in, I do it, I leave. Done the people that are burning out of the people that, you know, you would think, Oh, have a lot of autonomy and they get to work whenever they want. And they're just exhausted because they're never done. There's always more to do.
Steven Hunt: There's no, you know, so it's funny. There's kind of been a switch that like people that clock in and clock off. Often I'm like, yeah, got that structure. I can control my work. The people that don't clock in and clock off. Often are people who are feeling the most burnout because of the ambiguity in their roles.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, yeah, like you need, I mean, creativity, what is it? Creativity goes up based on constraints or something to push against. Like knowing clearly what it is that you need to accomplish or do.
Steven Hunt: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Shawn Pfunder: Necessity is the mother of invention. Yeah, all
Steven Hunt: I could think of was Frank Zappa.
Shawn Pfunder: You know, it's funny, my first Frank Zappa album I got last year for my eldest son, which is great. You brought up, and I think this is really interesting, speaking of Frank Zappa, sort of external mass, external forces on creativity, the news, the cycle, the psychological stuff that's outside of work. You know, I saw, this is years ago, I saw Anderson Cooper.
Shawn Pfunder: And it was like a Baptist church in downtown Phoenix. I went down there and he was speaking and everything. And somebody asked him at the end. He says, are there any questions? Somebody raised their hand. They said, yeah, how do you not like kill yourself or quit your job? Because it's just miserable. Like because of all the news, the cycle, everything that's going on.
Shawn Pfunder: He goes, you know what? People ask me that question a lot, and I can tell you, and this was a few years ago, it's probably changed a little bit, but he said, I can tell you that every major indices related to humans, human happiness, so it could be infant mortality, it could be violent crime, it could be, like these things that we sort of associate with bad things, he goes, they get better.
Shawn Pfunder: Like year over year, they've been getting better. I think that's something that I, like, I certainly lose sight of and get caught up in the sort of those external forces that then affect me at work. And so are you saying on those external forces, even if it's our own stories that we're telling ourselves or seeing or watching the news or social media, that contributes to burnout along with Kind of what goes on at work.
Steven Hunt: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's a book called Factfulness that talks exactly what Anderson Cooper is talking about. It was, you know, if you look at all the metrics in general, there's been some changes from one year to the next, like with COVID, but you know, we're living longer infant mortality rates have gone way down.
Steven Hunt: People don't realize how many women used to die in childbirth. I mean, there are so many things that our society is getting better over overall. I mean, there's a lot more we could do, for sure, but, you know, it is trending positive. So physically, it's going back to that point. Physically, the world is a better place than it used to be, but psychologically, it's an incredibly noisy place.
Steven Hunt: And you're seeing these increases in things like mental health and depression, and, you know, I think it's tied to a lot of things. I think certainly the social media. The way I put it is, You know, we, in the 1950s, there was an explosion in sort of processed food and science of food, and what we learned, took a while, is that our bodies are organic and are not wired to live off of highly processed food, right?
Steven Hunt: Sort of synthesized food. Well, I think what we're learning now is that our brains aren't designed to live off of highly processed, synthesized social communication. There's a lot of things in it. I'm not saying it's bad. It's just like process. We need, you know, we couldn't, we couldn't feed the planet without modern food manufacturing techniques, but you can have too much processed food.
Steven Hunt: You can have too much processed social communication and there's unhealthy, you know, that's kind of like your question about impactful pieces of media, you know, there's useful media on your phone and there's Junk food media.
Shawn Pfunder: Oh, that's, that's interesting from the perspective of, I think for a period of time, is calories are calories.
Shawn Pfunder: But now we're at the point that, that not only is if it's processed or it's junk food, it's worse. And I wonder if that's the same when we know that community belonging, like these types of things, like help you live longer, you have a happier life, things like that. If it's false community or, or plastic or like saccharin to sugar type of thing, is it.
Shawn Pfunder: Is that even worse?
Steven Hunt: Yeah, it's kind of my say that I think there's an appropriate way to use corn syrup. There's an appropriate way to use social media. We, these things are good overall if you use them the right way. Right? You know, and it's like the challenge I think companies are facing when it comes to this issue of burnout and going back to the point too.
Steven Hunt: If you want your employees to be caring, collaborative, creative, they need to feel supported, they need to feel energized, they need to feel fully present, and we can't feel those things if we feel exhausted, burned out, stressed out, and anxious. And a lot of the things that create stress and anxiety in employees are not necessarily things at work, it's economic pictures.
Steven Hunt: I mean, there's. Every week layoffs, you hear about all these layoffs here, or you hear about generative AI when I hear some people say, Oh, well, we're going to work alongside the technology or like, okay, yeah, we are, but a lot of people are going to lose their jobs.
Shawn Pfunder: That's right.
Steven Hunt: And telling them that they're going to work alongside the technology is not really going to help them in this period of like, I'm unemployed right now.
Steven Hunt: I think with our, with companies, the challenges. As a company, you have to change, right? You've got to change, but how can we kind of deal with change and engage our communities that tries to create more of this psychologically safe environment? And part of psychological safety is feeling physically and financially safe as well.
Steven Hunt: Right? So I think if companies, and I'm seeing this, I see examples. I don't want to be like positive on this. So like seeing more and more companies that are. Investing in providing employees a lot more freedom to structure their lives. So for example, hybrid work is a really good example. And I see really big differences.
Steven Hunt: So the companies that are handling hybrid work well are realizing human interaction, faith, going back to our social media thing, there is value meeting in person. If you meet a person, and there's research before the pandemic, that if you meet somebody once in person, it forever changes how you interpret your electronic communication with them.
Steven Hunt: The way I talk about it, it's like your family. I think there's people in your family that you probably don't see very often, maybe once a year, maybe once every three years. But it's important that you see them in person periodically, because it just reinvigorates the relationship, it strengthens the relationship.
Steven Hunt: That's true at work too. Absolute value in getting together. But getting together doesn't mean forcing people into an office three days a week, just to force them into an office three days a week. That's not work. That's incarceration, right? It's like, and so the companies that are doing this really well are taking what I call a mindful approach to the use of office space.
Steven Hunt: They're like, yeah, we need to get people together. They also realize that these water and cooler conversations, people talk about almost never happened, research from before the pandemic. So these things, so the companies are doing really well are saying, well, what is it that employees want? They want a sense of connection and strong authentic relationships, which means we need you to get together periodically.
Steven Hunt: So they're creating spaces and environments and events to bring people together. And when they bring them together, they bring them to be together, not just to sit together in cubicles. But, you know, so you can ignore somebody face to face as well as you can ignore somebody over the phone. Yeah. Yeah. But they're, they bring them together to events and things like that.
Steven Hunt: It's like purpose. Purpose. Right. Purposeful use of space.
Steven Hunt: They're recognizing that not all employees want to work from home. It has a lot to do with the home environment, whether you have a home office, the length of your commute, the nature of work you do, your personality. But what all employees want is they want two things.
Steven Hunt: They want flexibility to decide what makes sense for them. It's called freedom. People like it. And a lot of that flexibility is really important. If you're dealing with changes outside of your world, like, you know, kids stuff and all this, right? So that's, they'll give them as much flexibility as you possibly can, but also give them transparency.
Steven Hunt: So they understand the impact. It's like, if this meeting is really important, then I'm going to be judged on it. Tell me I'm going to be judged on it. I will show up, show me and be as transparent as possible on how you make decisions about me that affect my career. There was really good research in the pandemic that showed that when people are forced to go remote, employees that had really good managers that set clear goals, did regular check ins, regular feedback, people's engagement went up.
Steven Hunt: Employees that had lousy managers that didn't really set clear goals, weren't good at managing, weren't good at feedback, their engagement went way down. And so, I think, When we look at this, what can companies do to help people deal with all this change? It's make sure you've got really good managers and communication of transparency and goals and feedback.
Steven Hunt: Really stress on giving people as much flexibility as you possibly can. You know, and then listen to them and ask them, how's it going?
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, that brings me back or brings us back even to the, the golden rule. I mean, have the emotional intelligence and as much as you possibly can, treat others as they want to be treated.
Shawn Pfunder: Not necessarily as you want to be treated. That's super powerful. And I'm glad that that's where we can, like, listen, we talk about burnout and the consequences of burnout and where we're going to end up as people, but burnout makes me nervous. But this is. I think, well, it makes sense that companies are going to have to figure out a way to do exactly that you're talking about, or they'll lose employees, get burned out employees that then convert to apathetic employees.
Steven Hunt: I think there's a larger issue too that I think as a society we have to focus on because a lot of this, I'll use the example of like layoffs. There is a empathetic way to do layoffs, and I've seen companies do it this way, where they're like, one, they're very transparent about it, they're like, hey, world's changed, and Like I remember one company that were like, they had to go to a factory and they had to tell the employees, they said, look, the world's changed.
Steven Hunt: Yeah. You guys are doing a great job, but the reality is that people are consuming this product less and less and less and less, and there's no way we can be running this. We're going to have to revamp the factory. We're not going to have the same jobs, but they were very long term transparent, focused about that.
Steven Hunt: They didn't hide it. The past companies were like, we have to hide it from employees so they don't quit. It's more like, no, be upfront, and if they feel they should quit, give them the power to make the decisions, you know, going by authentic transparency, right?
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah,
Steven Hunt: Be honest. And what they found is, you know, employees, when they understood that, it's like, okay, thank you, I was about to buy a house, but now I won't buy a house, you know?
Steven Hunt: These things have big effects on their lives, right? So transparent and then of course in the actual like layoffs companies that provide like a year of health care because they're like, Hey, we know that you can't control health care costs. And there's a lot of things companies can do with layoffs that make, that give people more of that sense of psychological safety and physical safety.
Steven Hunt: And restructuring, but still companies are going to have to do this because the economy is changing all this. The larger question is, how do we need to change our society to a world where people are getting laid off all the time? And are having to re skill and are having to change and we don't, we still live in a society where the idea is still like we're going to get educated until we're 25 and then we're going to work in the same basic industry for 40 years, then we're going to retire, then we're going to die.
Steven Hunt: Now we're not in a society like that anymore, but we're not wired for people making whole scale career changes when they're in their forties and have kids and all this other stuff, and they can't afford to go to school full time. And there's not no healthcare and all these, I mean, we're the only society, the United States here is the only developed society where people make decisions based off of their kids get dental care.
Steven Hunt: I mean, I know, I know, I know. And on this, I don't want to get political per se. But it's funny because somebody asked me, well, companies shouldn't be in politics. I'm like, Hey, companies have been lobbying for lower taxes as long as I've been around. That's pretty darn political.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, they're in politics.
Steven Hunt: I think companies really, because when you look sustainable economies require sustainable workforces and we're running into these issues where we're going to have our workforce as a whole is going to be burned out and exhausted.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah.
Steven Hunt: Companies really engaging more with the communities they're in to say, How can we make. Education and healthcare, far more accessible and affordable to people when they're not working for us, because we want them to work for us, but we're not going to be able to get them, you know, like childcare is a good example, somebody was like, companies should provide childcare, and it's like, that's not going to help the single mother who can't look for a job because she doesn't have childcare.
Steven Hunt: You know, instead we really focusing on getting out and engaging the community. And I'm reminded of something that a CHRO said when they, we have the social justice, you know, riots and things a few years ago, and people were talking about, well, why are we getting involved in this? And she said, this is the community.
Steven Hunt: Our employees live in our community. Our future talent lives in the community. The community is us. And really trying to break down that dichotomy. Cause I think when I look at these issues, there's so many things companies can and are doing that, you know, help manage these burnout employee experiences internally and shared some of them in this book, talent, tectonics gets into great detail, lots of examples and things like that, but the larger thing is.
Steven Hunt: Companies ability to be successful depends on the larger community that they're a part of and a large community, particularly the talent in that community. And I would hope sort of in closing that companies really lean more in and saying, we're not doing this just out of altruism that, Oh, you know, education should be affordable and all that we're doing this because.
Steven Hunt: We want to operate in a labor market where we're surrounded by healthy, well educated people. Because those are the people we're going to need when we grow. And if we don't have them, we're not going to be able to grow as a company.
Shawn Pfunder: No, I mean, you may not be able to survive as a company in that sort of a situation.
Shawn Pfunder: No, I appreciate that a lot. The one that, being honest, like you treat people as adults. Not as children. You don't need to hide anything. Just be upfront and be honest about it. And really what you've mentioned about this, let machines be machines and do that kind of work and let humans. Be human, because everything you're talking about, the, like, we know community is important, we know that honesty is important, we know that this interaction beyond, well, beyond, hey, be a machine, even if you're a knowledge worker, there's some managers, some companies are like, be a machine, productivity, take care of this, but as soon as it sort of morphs into something that's more meaningful and creates that kind of meaning, then They'll stick around.
Steven Hunt: Well, and yeah, and I sort of like would sort of end on one other myth, you know, the myths I talk about in the book, one is that we fear change, another one is that we don't want to work. One of the big myths about people is that people don't want to work. We are wired to work. We are wired to want to accomplish achievements that make us a sense of, I achieved something.
Steven Hunt: You know, we want our lives to have meaning and meaning comes from doing things that other people rely on us for, whether that's, it's usually living things, whether it's plants and we plant it or people or pets.
Steven Hunt: You know, my wife is a family medicine doctor and she talks about when people retire, it's actually viewed as a health risk because she said it's important to have a reason to get up in the morning.
Steven Hunt: And work, when it's good, is that reason. It's not, I have to work, it's I get to go to work to do something to provide to people. And I think this is a real fundamental shift in our society that people are like, Oh, we want to automate these tasks so that people can just stop working. And it's like, people don't want to stop working.
Steven Hunt: It's unhealthy not to work. It's, I mean, Working doesn't necessarily mean being paid, I think it has to be economically, but it's like we are wired to want to accomplish meaningful tasks, that's why the word meaningless is a synonym for depression, and that I would say as you look at this technology, We should be using technology to automate away all of the stuff that's repetitive, where people come in and say, I just gotta do this, but we should be focusing on saying, okay, how can we shift their time to give them something that gives people a sense of meaning because it's tapping into their unique values as individuals.
Steven Hunt: This is the utopian world that we could move to. But if we don't shift our thinking as a society from sort of like a 19th century view of why people work and the purpose of education and all that, where we could run into a real dystopian world, and I say, we don't want to go through another workers revolution like we did in the 20th century that didn't end well for a lot of people.
Shawn Pfunder: For a lot of people, that's right.
Steven Hunt: But we don't have to if we acknowledge and lean into these issues and they're not. You know, it's a little doom and gloom, but we can create a fantastic world. I'm an optimist. But if we don't get ahead of it, we could create a really crappy one too.
Shawn Pfunder: Yeah, well, you've converted me the same way.
Shawn Pfunder: Like, I'm optimistic that there won't be pitchforks, and fires, and lobbing, what is it, Molotov cocktails around? Yeah, yeah, don't.
Steven Hunt: International Workers of the World Unite.
Shawn Pfunder: That's right, huh? Well, Steve, thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, it's been a pleasure. Everything I expected and just learning about these things, learning about people and, and I know that our listeners will feel the same way.
Shawn Pfunder: Is there any, any place that we can sort of learn more about you? We could follow your antics?
Steven Hunt: Best place? Well, LinkedIn. Definitely follow me on LinkedIn. Steven T. Hunt. Pretty easy to find. I also, the book Talent Tectonics, there's a website, talenttectonics.com, it's available on Amazon and all those sites.
Steven Hunt: And I have a website out there, steventhunt.com, that I try to keep up. But yeah, I think probably LinkedIn, and I'm always posting stuff on this, on LinkedIn. That's my main area. I share kind of my insights.
Shawn Pfunder: Super rad. Hey, thanks again.
Steven Hunt: Thank you.