February 28, 2025 • 48 mins
Is AI about to replace your job—or is it your biggest opportunity? In this special episode, Daniel sits down with Jennifer Moss, a globally recognized expert on workplace culture, leadership, and mental health, to tackle one of the biggest concerns of our time: How will AI reshape our work, and what should we do about it?
Jennifer brings stories from all walks of life and insights from the largest studies that help whether you're worried about your own future in an AI-driven world or you're a leader wondering how to navigate change without losing your best employees.
🔑 What You’ll Learn in This Episode
📌 For Workers Wondering About Their Future:
- ✅ AI isn’t replacing all jobs—but it’s changing them. Learn how to future-proof your career by working with AI instead of competing against it.
- ✅ Work should fuel your life, not just be a grind. Redefine what success means for you and align your job with your personal goals.
- ✅ Take control—don’t wait for your company to figure it out. Find out how to audit your workload, initiate conversations with your boss, and use AI as a tool for career growth.
📌 For Company Leaders Wondering How to Adapt:
- ✅ The biggest risk isn’t AI—it’s losing your top talent.
- ✅ Discover why some CEOs are choosing flat growth years to prevent long-term damage to their workforce.
- ✅ Employees don’t just want higher salaries—they want flexibility, growth, and purpose in their work.
🔗 Resources & Links
🚀 Enjoyed this episode? Leave us a review and share it with a friend who needs to hear this!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
We're in the multiverse of work.
(00:01):
We're not in the future of work.
We're in a whole different timeline.
We would have never had this same trajectory
if we hadn't had the pandemic.
Making sure you're delivering on the promise of AI,
which is we were going to take away
the mundane and boring tasks,
and then fill your day up
with all of this creative, exciting work,
(00:21):
because that's what AI's supposed to do.
When you just take away someone's actual job
and then not replace it with creative opportunities,
it can be a very subconscious feeling,
but if you're uncertain about what your future looks like
and no one's telling you that you're safe
or that you're going to even be skilled up
to be part of the organization,
whether AI or not is going to take over
(00:44):
a certain aspect of your role,
all of these things make people tune out.
Welcome to Artificial Insights,
the podcast where you learn to build AI people need and use
by interviewing product leaders
who have launched AI products.
I'm your host, Daniel Manary,
and today we're joined by someone who has been
(01:04):
at the forefront of understanding workplace culture
and how it's evolving in this new era.
Jennifer Moss is an award-winning journalist,
Harvard Business Review columnist,
and a globally recognized expert
on workplace wellbeing and leadership.
She's here today because of her recent book,
Why Are We Here?
and has written previously The Burnout Epidemic
(01:25):
and Unlocking Happiness at Work.
Her research has shaped how leaders think about engagement,
mental health, and the future of work.
Her latest book, Why Are We Here?
comes at a critical moment as AI transforms the workplace,
raising big questions about leadership, purpose,
and what it really means to create a work culture
people want to be a part of.
(01:46):
Jennifer, could you tell us a little bit
about who you are and what you do?
Yeah, so, you know, I'm not specifically building AI,
which I think is important for everyone
that's listening to know that about me.
I've worked in tech in that I was a co-founder
of a tech company for many years,
and it was really interesting
because this was way back in the day
(02:07):
before wellbeing and wellness was something
that anyone wasn't laughing at,
because that's pretty much where we were.
When you talk about AI and how people thought about it,
again, in those early days,
it was this idea of a dystopian future, and here we are,
but I was working with my co-founder
and we were bringing, the hope was predictive analytics
(02:30):
around people that were stressed or well,
and how that ended up leading to business outcomes.
So obviously our hypothesis and the data and research agrees
that the more healthy and well you are,
the better you perform, right?
So we thought, okay, what if we could have insights
that came in for people so that they could then, you know,
(02:53):
know that they were feeling stressed,
and so we could help them develop, you know,
higher wellbeing, and then we could start to track that
for CEOs to show, okay, when you actually care
about your employees, here's the ROI.
So that was our big hairy goal,
and we moved from a startup to a stay up,
which was pretty cool, and the technology was great,
and then pandemic hit, and it was just too hard
(03:15):
to stay alive, and everything had changed.
I was doing a lot of public speaking,
and that obviously completely changed
because I was no longer in public,
but a lot of my background really is workplace culture
and strategy within organizations,
but also how do we make work feel more like fuel
(03:36):
instead of like a grind,
and that I think has been my mission statement,
and so from the AI standpoint, the reason why that I think
even maybe you and I are chatting today is that
we're seeing this massive increase in FOBO,
that fear of becoming obsolete, and AI anxiety,
especially in our younger cohorts at work
(03:57):
who are worried that AI is gonna take over their jobs,
which in many cases, we're seeing that shift,
but helping organizations and leaders do a better job
of adopting AI and then also making sure
that their team feels a sense of readiness
for the future with AI as a partner.
Very cool, recently you've written a book,
it's called Why Are We Here?
(04:19):
Could you just tell us briefly what the book is about?
Yeah, it's an existential question for an existential time,
and I think for me, I was writing
The Burnout Epidemic pre-pandemic,
and in the pandemic, it was obviously a news peg,
it just completely exploded, burnout became ubiquitous,
(04:39):
everyone knows what that is now,
and I was in this stage of launching the book,
I was traveling all the time,
and I kept hearing these conversations,
and often with Uber drivers,
I think I interviewed in the end over 100 Uber
or Lyft drivers through the course of the writing
of the book, along with other employees, executives,
(05:01):
and academics and experts, but what I kept hearing
were these people that had made these massive leaps
in their roles from Wall Street, now driving Uber,
to women leaving the workforce,
deciding to work in delivery or ride share
so that they could have more flexibility
(05:22):
because they were burned out,
we saw, there was a story that I include
right at the beginning of the book of Kara,
who was on track to be the first female black partner,
last three people in the pandemic
and decided to drive an Uber,
and I would ask people why they make
these huge career pivots, a lot of financial shift
and stress in many cases,
(05:42):
and everyone just said life is short,
and they were sitting doing what they were doing
like they do every day, and were asking themselves,
what is the point, why am I here?
And that led me on the path of discovery for this book.
And what is it that really excites you
(06:02):
about that topic personally?
Well, I found the research on mortality salience
super fascinating.
Jeffrey Greenberg started talking about what happens
when we face the finitude of our lives,
and he talks about it as an extreme stress event for people,
and what he saw in the last five years was so shocking,
(06:24):
and he was writing and doing so much more research about it.
He says that when we do face that anxiety of our lives
coming to a potential end or at risk of ending,
we become very self-confirming,
we attach to other people that confirm our biases,
it creates polarization, we actually are,
(06:44):
and this is not all of us, this is a group,
and that anxiety makes us feel like we need to
hold onto our core values more than ever,
so we'll stand up for those core fundamental beliefs,
and this is a big part of why he saw this increase
in kind of cultism and followership
and the stuff that was going on politically,
(07:05):
but then on the other hand, which you saw,
in even greater numbers is this increase in prosociality,
so if you're a prosocial kind of altruistic person
before you face your finitude of your life, that amplifies,
so all the people that were good people became better,
(07:25):
and more giving and caring,
and also wanted to have a bigger impact on the world,
they wanted to be purposeful and meaningful,
and what they were doing,
and this is why the great resignation
so interestingly happened,
is that a lot of people said, life is short,
I wanna do something really special,
(07:47):
and I don't wanna be in this job,
and this job feels like a toxic grind,
and this is not how I can spend the very few days,
because this is very subconscious,
the few days that I have left here,
it could go any time, I better be making the most of it,
and so I believe that a lot of the economic shift,
the workforce change has happened
(08:08):
with this sense of mortality salience,
and for me, I think that's super fascinating.
I'm very interested in spending our time well,
I feel like I came to my own mortality salience moment
when I was a young teenager,
and I've had to revisit that several times,
and each time I find deeper purpose in what I do,
(08:29):
and shift my career even, so yeah, I love that.
I love that because some people call post-traumatic growth,
and I think from a psychological sciences standpoint,
and behavioral sciences standpoint,
we are going through these growth moments for some,
and then there's a regression for others,
and I think that's why we're seeing such a split,
but what is also really compelling is that,
(08:53):
that pandemic wasn't just a crisis
that forced us to face the finitude of our lives,
we're in polycrisis, and climate anxiety,
and some of these other things are making that ever present,
so it's, again, this is why we as leaders,
and in organizations have to recognize
that this isn't just like a put it in the rear view
(09:14):
pandemic thing, this is a,
we're going to have people persistently querying,
why am I here, because they are going to feel a sense of,
life is short, until we solve for these big problems,
or increase sense of hopefulness,
then that's going to be the state of play,
(09:34):
I think for workers across the world.
Just to shift gears a little bit,
there's a question that I think is on everyone's mind
for a podcast like this, which is, Jennifer, are you an AI?
Am I an AI? Am I an AI?
That's a good question.
How should I answer like ChatGBT would?
(09:55):
Good question.
Processing the user query.
No, I am not AI.
I actually wanted to mention too, that reading your book,
I've come to, I think, a pretty keen sense
of when people write with AI,
and I'm fairly certain that you don't,
and I really appreciated that.
(10:15):
I don't.
I'm maybe old school about that stuff, however,
this is where I think AI is so cool,
because I partnered with AI,
because when I was in writing the Burnout Epidemic,
I'm really big on evidence-backed writing.
It's so important for me to spread information
that is factually accurate.
(10:37):
And so I like to go to big sample sizes.
I go to academic research that's been peer reviewed.
It isn't just like a survey of a thousand people.
It's really digging in.
And so for the Burnout Epidemic,
I'm reading thousands of papers and journal articles,
which are intense.
It was just so tiring and leading me to burnout,
(11:00):
which was ironic.
But with Why Are We Here, I could say,
ah, I'm investigating this thought or this idea that I have.
What kind of research papers are out there
that you could provide me with so I could have a read through?
And if there was a lot of jargon,
it was great to be able to say,
can you distill this in a way that feels like,
(11:23):
okay, it's worth me reading further?
Because if I spend all the time,
sometimes these papers are 50 pages
and I get to the end and find the conclusion
is just like not matching it all what I want to be pointing to.
This gives me that ability to shorten that process.
And so it was really hugely beneficial for me
(11:43):
to have those kinds of benefits.
Plus I had AI as a transcriber for this one too,
for all of my interviews.
I used Fribee and others in meetings.
And so that alone probably saved me 100 hours.
Very cool.
And I want to encourage everyone listening
(12:04):
to not let AI read the book for you either.
Because I think there's a tendency to summarize everything
down to almost uselessness,
but you'll get a lot more out of the book
if you read it with your own eyes.
I love that you said that because it really,
there's a lot of richness to the data.
And I talk about the return to office mandates
and I talked with Mark Mon as team
(12:25):
and I read through the research data
and I spend a lot of time.
And then when it's distilled, really,
you only get this very condensed viewpoint of it,
even in the book, because it has to be edited down
so that people want to read it
and they're not totally bored to tears
with my detail and technical analysis of research.
So then yes, sometimes when it gets distilled even further,
(12:48):
you do lose that kind of the meatiness of it.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to distill Romeo and Juliet.
So there's certainly writing
you shouldn't use your own mind for.
Okay, I really love you for saying that.
You just gave a comparison to Shakespeare
and I feel like that's maybe the coolest thing
I've ever heard.
(13:09):
So I don't own that, but I appreciate it.
Thank you, Jennifer.
I have a huge room of questions here,
so we won't go through all of them,
but there are a couple of things that really stood out to me
and one of the first ones was actually
a very human moment as well,
where you quote from Cloud Cuckoo Land
(13:31):
at the very beginning of the book.
And it was one of those things where I looked at it
and I said, I wonder why she quoted that.
And it would never have shown up in a summary, obviously.
And so I did a little reading
and that sense of shared narrative over time
is what I interpreted that as.
But yeah, what drove you to include that quote?
(13:54):
I think that's it, you nailed it.
It's really is, it's the stories that we tell
that give context to life
and to all of the other things that feel inexplicable
and also overwhelming.
And I think that's what Anthony Dewar
does such a good job of, I'm a huge fan of his
(14:15):
and that book, it's on my top, top five.
But it is, it's about being able to also touch
different points in history through a narrative
and understanding what we've done in the past
so that we can make change that's relevant for the future
and this whole idea of repeated history,
we're just seeing it right now in such a big way
(14:38):
that it's upon us, it's on us to learn
and make a positive impact.
And so I think that's what it really is about
is how are we gonna share this story?
How are we gonna tell this point in time
and how is that gonna impact the future?
Because I feel like there's a precipice.
And I've been saying, we're in the multiverse of work,
(15:00):
we're not in the future of work,
we're in a whole different timeline.
We would have never had this same trajectory
if we hadn't had the pandemic.
We would just wouldn't have had so many people
working from home, we wouldn't have all collectively
faced our mortality at the exact same time
and had such loss and such shared grief.
And this timeline that we're on,
(15:23):
that makes it even more important to share stories
of the other timeline and prepare for what this is gonna
look like, which is a future no one really has
any framework for.
Yeah, I like to say that all linear predictions
of the future are wrong, including this one.
I feel like nobody knows what AI is going to do.
(15:43):
But in your interviews and the people research,
what have you heard that AI contributes
to this moment in time?
Gosh, it's having a major impact.
There is this data point that I thought was really
interesting and CEOs and their top disruptors,
technology was not even the top six
(16:06):
of their most biggest disruptors that they were worrying
about in 2019.
And that number went from in 2020,
it moved to maybe out of the six main disruptors,
it was on the list finally.
And within two years, it shot up to number one.
(16:26):
And now AI and technology and this rapid escalation
of adoption is really freaking out everyone,
because there's this pressure for senior leaders
and CEOs to adopt AI.
We gotta just, there's this mentality like,
we can't get behind, it's gonna make us not competitive,
(16:48):
it's going to impact our ability to be future ready
if we don't have AI.
But then there's also this other side where
I don't even know why I'm doing this.
Why am I doing this?
I don't really have a strategy, I don't really have a plan,
I don't really have a communication strategy
(17:09):
that I'm prepared to enact.
My employees are feeling like there's no plan,
they feel obsolete and the senior executives,
senior leaders are feeling this push and pull,
this battle of having to adopt something
that they don't even know why they're adopting.
And so I think that there needs to be a pause
and something happened in the pandemic
(17:31):
that created this toxic productivity,
this sense of false urgency.
And this false urgency has now made people,
and I think at the executive level,
feel like they have to be moving at such a fast pace
to be able to make sure that stakeholders
and shareholders are happy.
And yet what's come at the cost of that
(17:52):
is not having sustainability.
And I think that what AI is doing is amazing in a lot of ways,
but we're not really appreciating the promise of AI
because it's scattered in the way that we've assimilated
into the workforce.
It's ubiquitous in so many areas of our lives.
(18:12):
And a lot of people don't even understand
how much it is just assimilated in our lives.
When in the book I asked, there's this really great survey
that really asks people how much they use AI
and 50% of people say never.
And when you start to ask them, do you use this,
do you use this, do you use this?
And then all of a sudden it's actually 95% of AI
(18:33):
that they're using in their lives.
And so I think that component has been interesting,
but if leaders did a better job at work,
they wouldn't have so many people fearing
this kind of this doomsday scenario.
So I do think it's playing a big role in a lot of ways,
but I think we've missed the point on how to ensure
(18:56):
that AI is delivering on its promise.
There's a couple of topics in there
that are I think really big and important,
but you touched on earlier,
I don't know that I've ever heard anyone say it before.
So when you said it, I said, ah, that's what it is.
It's that, that's the name for it,
that fear of becoming obsolete.
And what does that mean?
And how does that happening in the workforce?
(19:20):
Gallup data and this Microsoft Trends report
that they partnered with LinkedIn
to really uncover how people are feeling.
And one and two workers globally
are expressing a sense of AI anxiety
and they had a very robust data set.
And what I think is most interesting that Gallup found
(19:40):
is that it is in our younger cohort
more than it has been before,
because obsolescence used to really be around automation
and being forced out through the new robots
that were coming into warehouses
and sectors weren't feeling as fear of obsolescence
as maybe others like manufacturing,
but now it's pervasive.
(20:01):
And that has a lot to do with AI.
And what happens when you feel a sense of obsolescence,
it reduces your hopefulness,
so you don't see yourself in the future of that organization.
It makes you less loyal
because you don't feel like you're necessarily
being cared for
and it can be very subconscious feeling,
but if you're uncertain about what your future looks like
(20:22):
and no one's telling you that you're safe
or that you're gonna even be skilled up
to be part of the organization,
whether AI or not is gonna take over
a certain aspect of your role,
all of these things make people tune out,
they disengage,
which is why we're seeing the highest level
of active disengagement that we've seen in 10 years.
And all of these new policies
(20:44):
that people are trying to bring back in
to impact engagement and improve productivity,
the thing is that we need to get to the root
behavioral barriers, which is I'm scared,
I don't know what is happening, I'm uncertain,
and you haven't done a good job of communicating to me.
(21:04):
And so I think that obsolescence can be rectified.
All of these big, huge business challenges
that I think everyone's freaking out about,
they're actually very solvable.
And the thing is it's going back to the familiar,
it's novel because it's a different approach potentially
and it's dealing with a new problem.
(21:25):
But at the same time, the way that we take care
of these issues inside of our organization
is through humanity,
asking people what they're stressed out about,
finding out people's skill level,
making sure you're delivering on the promise of AI,
which is we were going to take away
the mundane and boring tasks and then fill your day up
(21:48):
with all of this creative, exciting work,
because that's what AI is supposed to do.
When you just take away someone's actual job
and then not replace it with creative opportunities,
it should be that person that was data mining
is now providing data insights.
They're looking at it with a different lens
and be able to communicate the benefits
(22:08):
of what they've learned.
We have to skill people up to do that.
And that hasn't happened.
And so I think these are all very solvable things,
making sure that we don't have ageism at work
with this idea of reverse mentorship,
making sure it's about peer mentorship.
Google does that really well,
where people that are cool and smart at stuff,
they just host classes randomly
(22:30):
and people can go and learn from different people.
You can be 55, you can be 25, it doesn't matter.
It's all about just learning cool stuff from other people.
It's all about learning.
It's all about curiosity, exploration.
And the more that becomes part of the culture,
which is not hard to do,
it just amplifies our excitement and our enthusiasm for AI.
(22:53):
Yeah, I speak to people all the time
who ask me questions like, do I need to get a PhD?
Or especially if they are younger,
they're wondering what happens to the entry level jobs.
And they seem to be disappearing a little bit
in some cases.
But is there anything in particular
that you would say to someone
who is fearing becoming obsolete
(23:15):
to help them deal with that?
It's really terrifying for a lot of young people
that are hearing 300 million jobs or whatever.
Everyone's, this is Elon,
everyone's gonna be replaced by AI.
I mean, that can feel terrifying.
What's the point?
And I have to put a caveat there.
AI is not gonna replace everyone's job
(23:36):
because that's an economic catastrophe.
What, are you gonna have everyone not working?
Then you can have no one buying anything.
That's just not how capitalism works.
So yeah, if everyone just had their jobs replaced,
we'd be in serious trouble.
Government would have to take care of billions of people
on their dime that aren't working.
So let's not worry about that.
(23:57):
If that comes to play,
I'm sure there'll be a lot of mandates
that will ensure that large organizations
are keeping humans hired.
So I think that it's just looking at the long goal
of what are the things that you really love to do?
And what do you care passionately about?
And understand that there's a role that you can play
(24:17):
in using AI to partner in that space.
I think what we've learned with this life is short mentality
is that if you are miserable, no matter what you do,
you're just not gonna be great at your job.
It just doesn't seem to be the thing that motivates us.
It becomes passionless.
And we're seeing our younger generation
just completely leave the standard route
(24:42):
of career pathing that Xers and Boomers have followed.
They're figuring out how to have four jobs maybe
that all bundle together to make a good enough life
that also includes work-life balance.
And work, life balance, and wellbeing
are not antithetical to work ethic.
It's about pulling those things together
to understand that this is about a life well lived
(25:03):
and work being fuel for that.
So I think it has to be A, that you feel connected
to what you're doing.
And then B, it's like, how do I make sure
that technology can be married with what I'm doing?
And then I know how to optimize technology
for that thing that I care about.
And it amplifies then what you're doing.
But I think worrying about obsolescence
(25:24):
is just holding us back from actually living a life
that work is fuel versus where work is a grind.
Yeah, I like that.
It's bringing it back to, I think you have a stat
in your book of something like 70% of people
find their meaning through work.
And that's intimidating, but I like,
(25:45):
you've framed it as a form of hope,
which is to find your meaning in a way
that doesn't necessarily rely
on that traditional definition of work.
It's really about life satisfaction.
And we get fairly, we got tunnel vision
because we spend 50% of our waking hours at work
it makes sense or 90.
Now I think it's around 110,000 hours
(26:06):
at work in a lifetime.
So you want it to be an enjoyable part of your life.
Like how can you have life satisfaction
and even longevity if you spend so many
of your hours stressed out and unwell.
So we need to start looking at the bigger picture
of work being in our lives in partnership with our lives.
(26:26):
And it just doesn't need to be this balance.
It doesn't need to be this balance so one is equally balanced
against the other.
There's lots of times where I say it's like triage
whatever's bleeding,
whatever's bleeding the most in the moment.
Sometimes I just have to take care of that thing.
The idea of work being in partnership means
that it's beyond work.
(26:47):
It's like having that all integrated into our lives
in a very meaningful way.
It doesn't also mean that your purpose can't be pay
or a paycheck.
Do you know how many Uber drivers I spoke to
who were working in this role so that they could put
their kids into a good school?
It was just, that was a lot of part of caring about them,
(27:10):
making sure that they could have a home and a life
that was in a good environment for their children.
And that's great.
That's purpose right there.
So it can be anything that is part of what motivates you
and pay can be that.
And you don't have to love every part of your job
or every day has to be magical.
It's just, what are you, how are you looking at the tasks
(27:33):
that you do every single day and associate that
with something that connects to who you are and your values
and what matters to you in your life.
And if you can make those connections,
that's how you find the value and the purpose.
It's not gonna be a mission statement.
It's gonna be how you can live that out every day.
And I think that advice holds true regardless
(27:55):
of whether you're starting your career or ending it.
Absolutely.
And I actually think that what this younger cohort is doing
is A, doing what every other generation does,
pushing back on the status quo.
That's their job.
That's what they're supposed to do.
Why are we so shocked?
And then B, they're telling us that the model
(28:16):
we've given them for work is terrible
and they don't want, like we're terrible models.
So why would they want to follow in our footsteps?
They wanna look at this as, okay, what can be different
in the way that I lead my life?
And they've come in to a moment
(28:39):
of huge cataclysmic disruption.
So no wonder they're gonna also have that amplified.
So I think this idea that it's like,
we've labeled this generation,
there's huge rise in youngism,
which I find so unfortunate.
And that rise in youngism is just,
they're coming into a workforce
(28:59):
where people are already thinking
that they're lazy and entitled.
And that's really unfair because this is the generation
that is going to develop the workforce of the future.
And we're sort of opting them out already.
I think one of the things I liked about your book
was that you spend a lot of time on, I would call it,
(29:19):
holding the executives accountable
to say work could be different, it should be different.
And one of the things I like to encourage,
I've had a lot of co-ops at work report to me before,
and I always like to encourage them
that you should hold your bosses accountable.
It's not just something that they get
to do whatever they want.
(29:39):
What do you feel like someone who is entering the workforce
for the first time should expect?
You know, I think that it's really important
to understand that work is still boring and tedious sometimes.
Like, and that's just, that is how it is.
I love my job and there's days where I think,
oh my gosh, especially writing a book can feel,
there can be points where you really do feel
(30:01):
like it's a grind, it can feel tiring and exhausting.
And so I think it's important to have a reality check
that it is hard and it is challenging.
And having that ability to set that reality is critical.
But a lot of it is, there's a lot of,
in those early days where you have to recognize
(30:23):
first year university, where you're taking all
of these courses that you don't need.
And by the time you get into fourth year, it's specialized.
That's like your career.
Your first few years are really just getting acclimated
and learning how to manage up
and learning about conflict resolution
and learning how to just deal with going into work every day
(30:47):
and that can be boring and tedious.
And then after that, you start to move into places
with more autonomy and then you get to craft your career
a little bit more.
And as you move inside of an organization
or even as you move around in your career,
that it is, that there is this ability to have growth.
(31:08):
So there's stuff in our control and then there are things
that are not in our control, you know, bad policies,
a bad boss and a lot of things that we can't control
even inside of an organization, like a pandemic
and political disruption and big, huge things
that are happening.
So I think what is really critical to say,
(31:31):
okay, what is in my control?
What isn't in my control?
How am I going to make it work for me
inside of the kind of confines of the boundaries
that I'm in?
And also, when is it right for me to have conversations
with my boss about things that I know
that they are playing a role in,
whether it's positively or negatively?
And one of the things that I found
(31:52):
that our younger cohorts are great at
that we need to develop some of these essential skills
for them is that they don't really know how to manage up.
They often will go to their boss and say,
I have this problem or we see this with a burnout.
I'm burned out.
Instead of going, okay, how am I burned out?
What are the things that I'm dealing with
(32:13):
that is stressing me out?
And doing an audit of your workload.
What's happening over the course of this two weeks?
Spend two weeks journaling.
Okay, I've got this area that maybe I've had to take on
because someone's left.
I'm not really skilled at this,
but I'm doing it anyways, because we're under resourced.
Maybe I've taken on a project
(32:34):
that I thought I could have extra time for.
And I said yes to, and maybe I don't really
have actually have the time for it
because all my other work is getting pushed down.
Maybe I need some more technical development
in certain areas that I thought I was really well versed in.
And I've pretended to everyone
that I've got this really strong technical skill,
(32:55):
but I actually need a little bit more training in it.
These are all inefficiencies in our own work,
in our workload that adds to our working in our pajamas
at 11 o'clock at night.
Spending two weeks and really analyzing
what is stressing me out?
What's burning me out?
What are some of the processes I could fix?
And going to your manager and saying,
(33:16):
so I audited my workload.
These are the areas where I think I could use more help
or I could use more training and have that conversation
where you're presenting an idea to your boss
so that they can help co-create solutions instead of it,
I need you as my boss to solve it for me.
And I think that certain generations just learn that
(33:40):
because they would maybe be met with you're fired
or get out of my office if you came to them like that.
So you had to figure it out and come up with these ideas
to help yourself.
But now there is an expectation for bosses and employees
to work together.
(34:00):
And so you have a choice of how you're gonna manage up.
And I do see that skill as something that we really need
our younger generation to practice.
We need leaders to develop that.
We need to be able to make it so that there's more
solutions driven conversation instead of solve my problem
for me.
And that's just skill building
that I think is missing right now.
(34:22):
And speaking of AI, I feel like that's somewhere
that journaling with ChatGPT can really help you reflect.
It does solve so many problems like that.
This is what's going with my workload.
Spend a bunch of time feeding ChatGPT
with what's going on your workload and ask for solutions.
It's incredible how it can help you think
(34:43):
through these kinds of issues.
And of course the nuances that there's not gonna be
any more resources potentially for.
Potentially for another hire.
It's understanding that like the scene within your team
and within the organization,
but it can really help you create a strategy.
(35:03):
And it also makes you feel more in control.
When you're feeling like everyone else is in control
of your happiness and healthiness at work,
you just feel very discouraged and hopeless.
But if you can come up with some solutions
and sometimes you don't even need to go to your boss.
Sometimes you can figure out,
okay, actually if I do this differently,
(35:25):
that might save me an hour a week.
And incrementally those minutes and hours add up
to get you back into a better manageable workload.
And so I think this is just one example
of what we could be doing better
to have more control over our potential risk
(35:45):
of stress and burnout.
But I think that our younger cohorts need to develop
those skills a little bit more.
And again, they're just starting in their career.
So this is where you're supposed to get that development.
You don't just show up and have that.
And I think this is a good opportunity
for leaders and managers to just reinforce
that kind of learning.
One of the things you mentioned in the book
is shiny object syndrome.
(36:07):
So coming at it from the perspective of the managers,
you call that rushing into AI
without fixing deeper workplace problems.
And could you share an example where AI was overhyped
versus when it actually improved work culture?
Oh my gosh, you saw that a lot in journalism right away.
And this whole idea of just coming in
and just replacing copy editors and journalists with AI
(36:31):
and some of the stuff that was coming out,
especially, I mean, we're in a better iteration of AI now
than we were even a couple of years ago,
but just wholesale adopting AI
and just focusing on that as being the core
part of your business and then having such backlash.
I cite an example of Gizmodo,
(36:52):
which has basically hired all these
or let go of their entire translation team,
started using AI and stuff was coming out like gobbledygook
and every one of their readers was just so angry about it.
And it really turned people off.
And so I think what that did was not good
(37:13):
for AI's reputation either.
It was like, see, AI just is ruining things
instead of AI could be really helpful
if we use it the right way.
Going in and making sure that you have a resource
or a academic journal that's going to support your argument,
(37:36):
like those types of things.
And understanding too that this technology
is still right, rife with errors.
It provides date, what it sometimes it's called
placeholder data and it will just come up
with the statistic like, oh, 70% of women feel like
they don't wanna go to work tomorrow.
(37:56):
And you'll say, oh, can you fact check that?
Well, actually that was placeholder data.
And a lot of people are still using it like it is the law,
it has been fact checked.
And so we have a long way to come before it really is
that strong enough that you could use it to write something
because it's just, there's so many errors still with it.
(38:20):
And I think that this idea of shiny object syndrome
is that we just are putting way too much trust in something
to take over like the core products
that we are offering people.
And instead it's about us slowing down,
which again is so terrifying for people,
this idea of slowing down.
(38:42):
And I said something so provocative
in this massive state of burnout that we're in.
How about we don't grow this year?
How about we just have a year where we're not growing?
And that's impossible, but I've had some conversations now
with CEOs that said, we've decided to look at this
as a flat year so we can take a breath.
(39:03):
And I've been really excited to see CEOs say that
because they know that it's not sustainable
because they've been in this mode for five years.
And they've said, we've decided to just look at this
as a flat year.
And they have to explain that to shareholders
and stakeholders and that can be scary,
(39:23):
but it seems like more people are starting
to understand that we need to just take some time
to really do this so that people feel like that AI is there
to support them, that it makes sense,
that the senior leadership have understood the why,
(39:43):
they know the assignment,
and then we can all together cohesively move
into the future kind of as a team with a shared vision.
Because CEOs also know if you don't have people connected
to a shared vision, then you're gonna have a really hard time
meeting those goals.
That reminds me actually, as I was reading,
(40:07):
I think it was chapter four on compassion,
I wondered what's the motivation for a CEO
to adopt a compassionate mindset
to help people feel like it's not my job that's at risk,
that AI actually, I think you put it in a wonderful way,
it's AI and human that have to work together.
But other than being an altruistic person,
(40:27):
what would motivate someone to say,
yes, this will be a flat year?
Yeah, I think this is progressive,
and I do think that it feels like that doesn't make sense
from a business outcome strategy.
But I keep saying, this isn't a benevolent strategy,
it's a business strategy.
(40:47):
It's not just because I'm nice that I'm doing this.
These executives, and when I get them in the room
and talk about it with them,
because I've been pushing them for a long time
to talk about maybe having a year
that is not in growth mode,
and they wouldn't hear it inside of 2023, I would say,
and even early 2024.
(41:08):
And what's interesting is in 2023,
we had the highest CEO resignations and turnover of CEOs
that we've seen in two decades.
There was just massive shift,
and CEOs were burned out themselves.
And so when you, as a CEO, at that level, burn out,
you also recognize and have empathy
(41:31):
for what that feels like to be running at that level
and knowing that it isn't sustainable.
And so what I've found is a lot of CEOs
that have hit that wall have realized
that this isn't going to be good for business
if I'm losing talent, because it's the high performers
and the talent that leave,
(41:52):
and you lose them to your competitors.
It's not the people that are quiet quitting
and rage applying.
They're the ones just sitting there
until they get a new job and not productive, not engaged.
They're not leaving.
They're going to leave when they find a new job,
or if it makes sense,
but it's your high performers
and that top talent that you're losing.
And it is also when you want to have an organization
(42:16):
that is hitting targets, they can't be exhausted.
They just, you cannot work if you're exhausted like that.
And this is what we're seeing is a lot
of this burnout conversation is hitting the bottom line
in a big way.
And when it becomes a bottom line issue,
that's when you start to see CEOs making pivots
(42:36):
around what their former strategy has been.
When it stops working, then you realize,
okay, this is a factor that I need to bring
into my strategy and it could be that we need
to rest our workers a little bit.
I like that.
It becomes a productivity and a bottom line problem.
(42:56):
And you quote Bill Gates in part of the book
and I love his advice,
which is who is solving this problem well
and what can we learn from them?
So who is solving this problem well
and what can we learn from them?
So I love that too, because it's a belonging strategy too.
And it's an inclusive kind of question
(43:17):
because when you're just celebrating people
for coming up with really great ideas to solve problems,
we're not looking at demographic data,
we're just looking at the ideas
that people are coming up with.
And so from celebrating people coming up with ways
to make business better and to do things easier
and more efficiently is a big part of what I think
(43:41):
from an inclusion conversation is what we should be doing
more, but from who's solving this problem.
I believe it's companies like Atlassian
and organizations that are not burning people out
to the point that they are throwing all of these policies
(44:01):
at them to try to fix it,
but it's actually increasing the stress
and it's making people within the organization
less likely to stay, it's creating all of this turmoil.
And so what I love about Atlassian
is they're a fully distributed workforce.
They have a lot of trust in the people that they hire.
They really believe in still having connectivity.
(44:25):
So Annie Dean, I interviewed her and she's in the book
and she's the lead of Team Anywhere at Atlassian.
And what I love about her is she just really said,
work is broken, we need to rethink it.
And that means, yeah, we have to see each other
and still be friends and hang out,
but let's create these satellite offices
where people can go around to and we'll pay for them
(44:45):
to come into and travel.
50% of the New York office is always filled with people
not from New York.
So people were really encouraged to travel
to different places and they have 91% occupancy
in these buildings at any one time,
but they're fully distributed.
So there's just a sense of that feeling
(45:05):
that you have when culture's great,
it's in the walls, it's in the spaces.
And they've been able to capture that
and they've measured when they have,
what they do is bring their executives around
to these different satellite offices.
So you also could be like very junior product developer
and be meeting with the CEO or senior executives.
(45:26):
So it's making it so that there's accessibility
to these people that honestly, in most cases,
it's like a monolith and they live in the big tower
in New York City and you never get to ever meet them here.
It's they're coming to you.
And they found that these team anywhere
when they have these kind of three or four day
connection events, that they find that employees
(45:50):
actually increase by three times their number
of ad hoc lunches that they have afterwards.
So it like creates this sort of multiplex relationships,
which is not just transactional,
it's like these building of bridges.
And you also aren't siloed then to your team
because if you're going to these different satellite offices,
you're meeting all these different people
(46:10):
across the organization.
So it's not, so you feel a shared vision.
And then they have these great hackathons every quarter
where people get together and they just solve big problems
using their skills.
And a lot of the products have come out of these hackathons
and anyone can participate.
And it's just, it was really true to their culture.
They have this tagline, it's all about getting done.
(46:32):
And so they say that's what it is.
It's still, we're working on things.
We're still moving the needle,
but we're doing it in a way that feels
much more community driven.
And they've had, in the last three or four years,
they've had the best years of growth and sustainable growth.
They've incredibly, they're incredibly profitable.
They've hired lots of great new people.
(46:53):
They've expanded their product offerings
and their human resources.
So it just, I think they're an example
of how we could be doing things really smartly and scalable.
They really, they continue to scale.
This is a very scalable thing.
And I think that they're a good example of doing it right,
(47:13):
but also getting shit done.
Yeah, I like how you referenced that earlier too,
that a work ethic is not the opposite
of finding purpose at work.
So I would love to ask you more questions
when we're at time, unfortunately.
There's so much more to be said.
So I'll just say, please, everybody listening,
read your book, it's good stuff.
(47:35):
So thank you very much, Jennifer.
Thank you so much, Daniel.
This was such a great conversation.
I started this podcast because I wanted to stand at the gate
of businesses using AI and see what separated hype
from lasting impact.
Back when cities had walls,
you had to go into the city to do business at the market.
So if you wanted to talk to someone,
(47:57):
you waited by the gate until they came in or came out.
Do that enough times and you could talk to everyone.
That's what I want to do.
Stand at the gate of people doing business with AI
and talk to them, see what they do and why they do it.
If you know someone that's making an impact
in the world of AI, would you connect them with me?
(48:17):
You can find me on LinkedIn
or shoot me an email at daniel@manary.haus.
That's daniel@manary.haus.
A-R-Y dot H-A-U-S.
Thanks for listening.
We're in the multiverse of work.
(00:01):
We're not in the future of work.
We're in a whole different timeline.
We would have never had this same trajectory
if we hadn't had the pandemic.
Making sure you're delivering on the promise of AI,
which is we were going to take away
the mundane and boring tasks,
and then fill your day up
with all of this creative, exciting work,
(00:21):
because that's what AI's supposed to do.
When you just take away someone's actual job
and then not replace it with creative opportunities,
it can be a very subconscious feeling,
but if you're uncertain about what your future looks like
and no one's telling you that you're safe
or that you're going to even be skilled up
to be part of the organization,
whether AI or not is going to take over
(00:44):
a certain aspect of your role,
all of these things make people tune out.
Welcome to Artificial Insights,
the podcast where you learn to build AI people need and use
by interviewing product leaders
who have launched AI products.
I'm your host, Daniel Manary,
and today we're joined by someone who has been
(01:04):
at the forefront of understanding workplace culture
and how it's evolving in this new era.
Jennifer Moss is an award-winning journalist,
Harvard Business Review columnist,
and a globally recognized expert
on workplace wellbeing and leadership.
She's here today because of her recent book,
Why Are We Here?
and has written previously The Burnout Epidemic
(01:25):
and Unlocking Happiness at Work.
Her research has shaped how leaders think about engagement,
mental health, and the future of work.
Her latest book, Why Are We Here?
comes at a critical moment as AI transforms the workplace,
raising big questions about leadership, purpose,
and what it really means to create a work culture
people want to be a part of.
(01:46):
Jennifer, could you tell us a little bit
about who you are and what you do?
Yeah, so, you know, I'm not specifically building AI,
which I think is important for everyone
that's listening to know that about me.
I've worked in tech in that I was a co-founder
of a tech company for many years,
and it was really interesting
because this was way back in the day
(02:07):
before wellbeing and wellness was something
that anyone wasn't laughing at,
because that's pretty much where we were.
When you talk about AI and how people thought about it,
again, in those early days,
it was this idea of a dystopian future, and here we are,
but I was working with my co-founder
and we were bringing, the hope was predictive analytics
(02:30):
around people that were stressed or well,
and how that ended up leading to business outcomes.
So obviously our hypothesis and the data and research agrees
that the more healthy and well you are,
the better you perform, right?
So we thought, okay, what if we could have insights
that came in for people so that they could then, you know,
(02:53):
know that they were feeling stressed,
and so we could help them develop, you know,
higher wellbeing, and then we could start to track that
for CEOs to show, okay, when you actually care
about your employees, here's the ROI.
So that was our big hairy goal,
and we moved from a startup to a stay up,
which was pretty cool, and the technology was great,
and then pandemic hit, and it was just too hard
(03:15):
to stay alive, and everything had changed.
I was doing a lot of public speaking,
and that obviously completely changed
because I was no longer in public,
but a lot of my background really is workplace culture
and strategy within organizations,
but also how do we make work feel more like fuel
(03:36):
instead of like a grind,
and that I think has been my mission statement,
and so from the AI standpoint, the reason why that I think
even maybe you and I are chatting today is that
we're seeing this massive increase in FOBO,
that fear of becoming obsolete, and AI anxiety,
especially in our younger cohorts at work
(03:57):
who are worried that AI is gonna take over their jobs,
which in many cases, we're seeing that shift,
but helping organizations and leaders do a better job
of adopting AI and then also making sure
that their team feels a sense of readiness
for the future with AI as a partner.
Very cool, recently you've written a book,
it's called Why Are We Here?
(04:19):
Could you just tell us briefly what the book is about?
Yeah, it's an existential question for an existential time,
and I think for me, I was writing
The Burnout Epidemic pre-pandemic,
and in the pandemic, it was obviously a news peg,
it just completely exploded, burnout became ubiquitous,
(04:39):
everyone knows what that is now,
and I was in this stage of launching the book,
I was traveling all the time,
and I kept hearing these conversations,
and often with Uber drivers,
I think I interviewed in the end over 100 Uber
or Lyft drivers through the course of the writing
of the book, along with other employees, executives,
(05:01):
and academics and experts, but what I kept hearing
were these people that had made these massive leaps
in their roles from Wall Street, now driving Uber,
to women leaving the workforce,
deciding to work in delivery or ride share
so that they could have more flexibility
(05:22):
because they were burned out,
we saw, there was a story that I include
right at the beginning of the book of Kara,
who was on track to be the first female black partner,
last three people in the pandemic
and decided to drive an Uber,
and I would ask people why they make
these huge career pivots, a lot of financial shift
and stress in many cases,
(05:42):
and everyone just said life is short,
and they were sitting doing what they were doing
like they do every day, and were asking themselves,
what is the point, why am I here?
And that led me on the path of discovery for this book.
And what is it that really excites you
(06:02):
about that topic personally?
Well, I found the research on mortality salience
super fascinating.
Jeffrey Greenberg started talking about what happens
when we face the finitude of our lives,
and he talks about it as an extreme stress event for people,
and what he saw in the last five years was so shocking,
(06:24):
and he was writing and doing so much more research about it.
He says that when we do face that anxiety of our lives
coming to a potential end or at risk of ending,
we become very self-confirming,
we attach to other people that confirm our biases,
it creates polarization, we actually are,
(06:44):
and this is not all of us, this is a group,
and that anxiety makes us feel like we need to
hold onto our core values more than ever,
so we'll stand up for those core fundamental beliefs,
and this is a big part of why he saw this increase
in kind of cultism and followership
and the stuff that was going on politically,
(07:05):
but then on the other hand, which you saw,
in even greater numbers is this increase in prosociality,
so if you're a prosocial kind of altruistic person
before you face your finitude of your life, that amplifies,
so all the people that were good people became better,
(07:25):
and more giving and caring,
and also wanted to have a bigger impact on the world,
they wanted to be purposeful and meaningful,
and what they were doing,
and this is why the great resignation
so interestingly happened,
is that a lot of people said, life is short,
I wanna do something really special,
(07:47):
and I don't wanna be in this job,
and this job feels like a toxic grind,
and this is not how I can spend the very few days,
because this is very subconscious,
the few days that I have left here,
it could go any time, I better be making the most of it,
and so I believe that a lot of the economic shift,
the workforce change has happened
(08:08):
with this sense of mortality salience,
and for me, I think that's super fascinating.
I'm very interested in spending our time well,
I feel like I came to my own mortality salience moment
when I was a young teenager,
and I've had to revisit that several times,
and each time I find deeper purpose in what I do,
(08:29):
and shift my career even, so yeah, I love that.
I love that because some people call post-traumatic growth,
and I think from a psychological sciences standpoint,
and behavioral sciences standpoint,
we are going through these growth moments for some,
and then there's a regression for others,
and I think that's why we're seeing such a split,
but what is also really compelling is that,
(08:53):
that pandemic wasn't just a crisis
that forced us to face the finitude of our lives,
we're in polycrisis, and climate anxiety,
and some of these other things are making that ever present,
so it's, again, this is why we as leaders,
and in organizations have to recognize
that this isn't just like a put it in the rear view
(09:14):
pandemic thing, this is a,
we're going to have people persistently querying,
why am I here, because they are going to feel a sense of,
life is short, until we solve for these big problems,
or increase sense of hopefulness,
then that's going to be the state of play,
(09:34):
I think for workers across the world.
Just to shift gears a little bit,
there's a question that I think is on everyone's mind
for a podcast like this, which is, Jennifer, are you an AI?
Am I an AI? Am I an AI?
That's a good question.
How should I answer like ChatGBT would?
(09:55):
Good question.
Processing the user query.
No, I am not AI.
I actually wanted to mention too, that reading your book,
I've come to, I think, a pretty keen sense
of when people write with AI,
and I'm fairly certain that you don't,
and I really appreciated that.
(10:15):
I don't.
I'm maybe old school about that stuff, however,
this is where I think AI is so cool,
because I partnered with AI,
because when I was in writing the Burnout Epidemic,
I'm really big on evidence-backed writing.
It's so important for me to spread information
that is factually accurate.
(10:37):
And so I like to go to big sample sizes.
I go to academic research that's been peer reviewed.
It isn't just like a survey of a thousand people.
It's really digging in.
And so for the Burnout Epidemic,
I'm reading thousands of papers and journal articles,
which are intense.
It was just so tiring and leading me to burnout,
(11:00):
which was ironic.
But with Why Are We Here, I could say,
ah, I'm investigating this thought or this idea that I have.
What kind of research papers are out there
that you could provide me with so I could have a read through?
And if there was a lot of jargon,
it was great to be able to say,
can you distill this in a way that feels like,
(11:23):
okay, it's worth me reading further?
Because if I spend all the time,
sometimes these papers are 50 pages
and I get to the end and find the conclusion
is just like not matching it all what I want to be pointing to.
This gives me that ability to shorten that process.
And so it was really hugely beneficial for me
(11:43):
to have those kinds of benefits.
Plus I had AI as a transcriber for this one too,
for all of my interviews.
I used Fribee and others in meetings.
And so that alone probably saved me 100 hours.
Very cool.
And I want to encourage everyone listening
(12:04):
to not let AI read the book for you either.
Because I think there's a tendency to summarize everything
down to almost uselessness,
but you'll get a lot more out of the book
if you read it with your own eyes.
I love that you said that because it really,
there's a lot of richness to the data.
And I talk about the return to office mandates
and I talked with Mark Mon as team
(12:25):
and I read through the research data
and I spend a lot of time.
And then when it's distilled, really,
you only get this very condensed viewpoint of it,
even in the book, because it has to be edited down
so that people want to read it
and they're not totally bored to tears
with my detail and technical analysis of research.
So then yes, sometimes when it gets distilled even further,
(12:48):
you do lose that kind of the meatiness of it.
Yeah, you wouldn't want to distill Romeo and Juliet.
So there's certainly writing
you shouldn't use your own mind for.
Okay, I really love you for saying that.
You just gave a comparison to Shakespeare
and I feel like that's maybe the coolest thing
I've ever heard.
(13:09):
So I don't own that, but I appreciate it.
Thank you, Jennifer.
I have a huge room of questions here,
so we won't go through all of them,
but there are a couple of things that really stood out to me
and one of the first ones was actually
a very human moment as well,
where you quote from Cloud Cuckoo Land
(13:31):
at the very beginning of the book.
And it was one of those things where I looked at it
and I said, I wonder why she quoted that.
And it would never have shown up in a summary, obviously.
And so I did a little reading
and that sense of shared narrative over time
is what I interpreted that as.
But yeah, what drove you to include that quote?
(13:54):
I think that's it, you nailed it.
It's really is, it's the stories that we tell
that give context to life
and to all of the other things that feel inexplicable
and also overwhelming.
And I think that's what Anthony Dewar
does such a good job of, I'm a huge fan of his
(14:15):
and that book, it's on my top, top five.
But it is, it's about being able to also touch
different points in history through a narrative
and understanding what we've done in the past
so that we can make change that's relevant for the future
and this whole idea of repeated history,
we're just seeing it right now in such a big way
(14:38):
that it's upon us, it's on us to learn
and make a positive impact.
And so I think that's what it really is about
is how are we gonna share this story?
How are we gonna tell this point in time
and how is that gonna impact the future?
Because I feel like there's a precipice.
And I've been saying, we're in the multiverse of work,
(15:00):
we're not in the future of work,
we're in a whole different timeline.
We would have never had this same trajectory
if we hadn't had the pandemic.
We would just wouldn't have had so many people
working from home, we wouldn't have all collectively
faced our mortality at the exact same time
and had such loss and such shared grief.
And this timeline that we're on,
(15:23):
that makes it even more important to share stories
of the other timeline and prepare for what this is gonna
look like, which is a future no one really has
any framework for.
Yeah, I like to say that all linear predictions
of the future are wrong, including this one.
I feel like nobody knows what AI is going to do.
(15:43):
But in your interviews and the people research,
what have you heard that AI contributes
to this moment in time?
Gosh, it's having a major impact.
There is this data point that I thought was really
interesting and CEOs and their top disruptors,
technology was not even the top six
(16:06):
of their most biggest disruptors that they were worrying
about in 2019.
And that number went from in 2020,
it moved to maybe out of the six main disruptors,
it was on the list finally.
And within two years, it shot up to number one.
(16:26):
And now AI and technology and this rapid escalation
of adoption is really freaking out everyone,
because there's this pressure for senior leaders
and CEOs to adopt AI.
We gotta just, there's this mentality like,
we can't get behind, it's gonna make us not competitive,
(16:48):
it's going to impact our ability to be future ready
if we don't have AI.
But then there's also this other side where
I don't even know why I'm doing this.
Why am I doing this?
I don't really have a strategy, I don't really have a plan,
I don't really have a communication strategy
(17:09):
that I'm prepared to enact.
My employees are feeling like there's no plan,
they feel obsolete and the senior executives,
senior leaders are feeling this push and pull,
this battle of having to adopt something
that they don't even know why they're adopting.
And so I think that there needs to be a pause
and something happened in the pandemic
(17:31):
that created this toxic productivity,
this sense of false urgency.
And this false urgency has now made people,
and I think at the executive level,
feel like they have to be moving at such a fast pace
to be able to make sure that stakeholders
and shareholders are happy.
And yet what's come at the cost of that
(17:52):
is not having sustainability.
And I think that what AI is doing is amazing in a lot of ways,
but we're not really appreciating the promise of AI
because it's scattered in the way that we've assimilated
into the workforce.
It's ubiquitous in so many areas of our lives.
(18:12):
And a lot of people don't even understand
how much it is just assimilated in our lives.
When in the book I asked, there's this really great survey
that really asks people how much they use AI
and 50% of people say never.
And when you start to ask them, do you use this,
do you use this, do you use this?
And then all of a sudden it's actually 95% of AI
(18:33):
that they're using in their lives.
And so I think that component has been interesting,
but if leaders did a better job at work,
they wouldn't have so many people fearing
this kind of this doomsday scenario.
So I do think it's playing a big role in a lot of ways,
but I think we've missed the point on how to ensure
(18:56):
that AI is delivering on its promise.
There's a couple of topics in there
that are I think really big and important,
but you touched on earlier,
I don't know that I've ever heard anyone say it before.
So when you said it, I said, ah, that's what it is.
It's that, that's the name for it,
that fear of becoming obsolete.
And what does that mean?
And how does that happening in the workforce?
(19:20):
Gallup data and this Microsoft Trends report
that they partnered with LinkedIn
to really uncover how people are feeling.
And one and two workers globally
are expressing a sense of AI anxiety
and they had a very robust data set.
And what I think is most interesting that Gallup found
(19:40):
is that it is in our younger cohort
more than it has been before,
because obsolescence used to really be around automation
and being forced out through the new robots
that were coming into warehouses
and sectors weren't feeling as fear of obsolescence
as maybe others like manufacturing,
but now it's pervasive.
(20:01):
And that has a lot to do with AI.
And what happens when you feel a sense of obsolescence,
it reduces your hopefulness,
so you don't see yourself in the future of that organization.
It makes you less loyal
because you don't feel like you're necessarily
being cared for
and it can be very subconscious feeling,
but if you're uncertain about what your future looks like
(20:22):
and no one's telling you that you're safe
or that you're gonna even be skilled up
to be part of the organization,
whether AI or not is gonna take over
a certain aspect of your role,
all of these things make people tune out,
they disengage,
which is why we're seeing the highest level
of active disengagement that we've seen in 10 years.
And all of these new policies
(20:44):
that people are trying to bring back in
to impact engagement and improve productivity,
the thing is that we need to get to the root
behavioral barriers, which is I'm scared,
I don't know what is happening, I'm uncertain,
and you haven't done a good job of communicating to me.
(21:04):
And so I think that obsolescence can be rectified.
All of these big, huge business challenges
that I think everyone's freaking out about,
they're actually very solvable.
And the thing is it's going back to the familiar,
it's novel because it's a different approach potentially
and it's dealing with a new problem.
(21:25):
But at the same time, the way that we take care
of these issues inside of our organization
is through humanity,
asking people what they're stressed out about,
finding out people's skill level,
making sure you're delivering on the promise of AI,
which is we were going to take away
the mundane and boring tasks and then fill your day up
(21:48):
with all of this creative, exciting work,
because that's what AI is supposed to do.
When you just take away someone's actual job
and then not replace it with creative opportunities,
it should be that person that was data mining
is now providing data insights.
They're looking at it with a different lens
and be able to communicate the benefits
(22:08):
of what they've learned.
We have to skill people up to do that.
And that hasn't happened.
And so I think these are all very solvable things,
making sure that we don't have ageism at work
with this idea of reverse mentorship,
making sure it's about peer mentorship.
Google does that really well,
where people that are cool and smart at stuff,
they just host classes randomly
(22:30):
and people can go and learn from different people.
You can be 55, you can be 25, it doesn't matter.
It's all about just learning cool stuff from other people.
It's all about learning.
It's all about curiosity, exploration.
And the more that becomes part of the culture,
which is not hard to do,
it just amplifies our excitement and our enthusiasm for AI.
(22:53):
Yeah, I speak to people all the time
who ask me questions like, do I need to get a PhD?
Or especially if they are younger,
they're wondering what happens to the entry level jobs.
And they seem to be disappearing a little bit
in some cases.
But is there anything in particular
that you would say to someone
who is fearing becoming obsolete
(23:15):
to help them deal with that?
It's really terrifying for a lot of young people
that are hearing 300 million jobs or whatever.
Everyone's, this is Elon,
everyone's gonna be replaced by AI.
I mean, that can feel terrifying.
What's the point?
And I have to put a caveat there.
AI is not gonna replace everyone's job
(23:36):
because that's an economic catastrophe.
What, are you gonna have everyone not working?
Then you can have no one buying anything.
That's just not how capitalism works.
So yeah, if everyone just had their jobs replaced,
we'd be in serious trouble.
Government would have to take care of billions of people
on their dime that aren't working.
So let's not worry about that.
(23:57):
If that comes to play,
I'm sure there'll be a lot of mandates
that will ensure that large organizations
are keeping humans hired.
So I think that it's just looking at the long goal
of what are the things that you really love to do?
And what do you care passionately about?
And understand that there's a role that you can play
(24:17):
in using AI to partner in that space.
I think what we've learned with this life is short mentality
is that if you are miserable, no matter what you do,
you're just not gonna be great at your job.
It just doesn't seem to be the thing that motivates us.
It becomes passionless.
And we're seeing our younger generation
just completely leave the standard route
(24:42):
of career pathing that Xers and Boomers have followed.
They're figuring out how to have four jobs maybe
that all bundle together to make a good enough life
that also includes work-life balance.
And work, life balance, and wellbeing
are not antithetical to work ethic.
It's about pulling those things together
to understand that this is about a life well lived
(25:03):
and work being fuel for that.
So I think it has to be A, that you feel connected
to what you're doing.
And then B, it's like, how do I make sure
that technology can be married with what I'm doing?
And then I know how to optimize technology
for that thing that I care about.
And it amplifies then what you're doing.
But I think worrying about obsolescence
(25:24):
is just holding us back from actually living a life
that work is fuel versus where work is a grind.
Yeah, I like that.
It's bringing it back to, I think you have a stat
in your book of something like 70% of people
find their meaning through work.
And that's intimidating, but I like,
(25:45):
you've framed it as a form of hope,
which is to find your meaning in a way
that doesn't necessarily rely
on that traditional definition of work.
It's really about life satisfaction.
And we get fairly, we got tunnel vision
because we spend 50% of our waking hours at work
it makes sense or 90.
Now I think it's around 110,000 hours
(26:06):
at work in a lifetime.
So you want it to be an enjoyable part of your life.
Like how can you have life satisfaction
and even longevity if you spend so many
of your hours stressed out and unwell.
So we need to start looking at the bigger picture
of work being in our lives in partnership with our lives.
(26:26):
And it just doesn't need to be this balance.
It doesn't need to be this balance so one is equally balanced
against the other.
There's lots of times where I say it's like triage
whatever's bleeding,
whatever's bleeding the most in the moment.
Sometimes I just have to take care of that thing.
The idea of work being in partnership means
that it's beyond work.
(26:47):
It's like having that all integrated into our lives
in a very meaningful way.
It doesn't also mean that your purpose can't be pay
or a paycheck.
Do you know how many Uber drivers I spoke to
who were working in this role so that they could put
their kids into a good school?
It was just, that was a lot of part of caring about them,
(27:10):
making sure that they could have a home and a life
that was in a good environment for their children.
And that's great.
That's purpose right there.
So it can be anything that is part of what motivates you
and pay can be that.
And you don't have to love every part of your job
or every day has to be magical.
It's just, what are you, how are you looking at the tasks
(27:33):
that you do every single day and associate that
with something that connects to who you are and your values
and what matters to you in your life.
And if you can make those connections,
that's how you find the value and the purpose.
It's not gonna be a mission statement.
It's gonna be how you can live that out every day.
And I think that advice holds true regardless
(27:55):
of whether you're starting your career or ending it.
Absolutely.
And I actually think that what this younger cohort is doing
is A, doing what every other generation does,
pushing back on the status quo.
That's their job.
That's what they're supposed to do.
Why are we so shocked?
And then B, they're telling us that the model
(28:16):
we've given them for work is terrible
and they don't want, like we're terrible models.
So why would they want to follow in our footsteps?
They wanna look at this as, okay, what can be different
in the way that I lead my life?
And they've come in to a moment
(28:39):
of huge cataclysmic disruption.
So no wonder they're gonna also have that amplified.
So I think this idea that it's like,
we've labeled this generation,
there's huge rise in youngism,
which I find so unfortunate.
And that rise in youngism is just,
they're coming into a workforce
(28:59):
where people are already thinking
that they're lazy and entitled.
And that's really unfair because this is the generation
that is going to develop the workforce of the future.
And we're sort of opting them out already.
I think one of the things I liked about your book
was that you spend a lot of time on, I would call it,
(29:19):
holding the executives accountable
to say work could be different, it should be different.
And one of the things I like to encourage,
I've had a lot of co-ops at work report to me before,
and I always like to encourage them
that you should hold your bosses accountable.
It's not just something that they get
to do whatever they want.
(29:39):
What do you feel like someone who is entering the workforce
for the first time should expect?
You know, I think that it's really important
to understand that work is still boring and tedious sometimes.
Like, and that's just, that is how it is.
I love my job and there's days where I think,
oh my gosh, especially writing a book can feel,
there can be points where you really do feel
(30:01):
like it's a grind, it can feel tiring and exhausting.
And so I think it's important to have a reality check
that it is hard and it is challenging.
And having that ability to set that reality is critical.
But a lot of it is, there's a lot of,
in those early days where you have to recognize
(30:23):
first year university, where you're taking all
of these courses that you don't need.
And by the time you get into fourth year, it's specialized.
That's like your career.
Your first few years are really just getting acclimated
and learning how to manage up
and learning about conflict resolution
and learning how to just deal with going into work every day
(30:47):
and that can be boring and tedious.
And then after that, you start to move into places
with more autonomy and then you get to craft your career
a little bit more.
And as you move inside of an organization
or even as you move around in your career,
that it is, that there is this ability to have growth.
(31:08):
So there's stuff in our control and then there are things
that are not in our control, you know, bad policies,
a bad boss and a lot of things that we can't control
even inside of an organization, like a pandemic
and political disruption and big, huge things
that are happening.
So I think what is really critical to say,
(31:31):
okay, what is in my control?
What isn't in my control?
How am I going to make it work for me
inside of the kind of confines of the boundaries
that I'm in?
And also, when is it right for me to have conversations
with my boss about things that I know
that they are playing a role in,
whether it's positively or negatively?
And one of the things that I found
(31:52):
that our younger cohorts are great at
that we need to develop some of these essential skills
for them is that they don't really know how to manage up.
They often will go to their boss and say,
I have this problem or we see this with a burnout.
I'm burned out.
Instead of going, okay, how am I burned out?
What are the things that I'm dealing with
(32:13):
that is stressing me out?
And doing an audit of your workload.
What's happening over the course of this two weeks?
Spend two weeks journaling.
Okay, I've got this area that maybe I've had to take on
because someone's left.
I'm not really skilled at this,
but I'm doing it anyways, because we're under resourced.
Maybe I've taken on a project
(32:34):
that I thought I could have extra time for.
And I said yes to, and maybe I don't really
have actually have the time for it
because all my other work is getting pushed down.
Maybe I need some more technical development
in certain areas that I thought I was really well versed in.
And I've pretended to everyone
that I've got this really strong technical skill,
(32:55):
but I actually need a little bit more training in it.
These are all inefficiencies in our own work,
in our workload that adds to our working in our pajamas
at 11 o'clock at night.
Spending two weeks and really analyzing
what is stressing me out?
What's burning me out?
What are some of the processes I could fix?
And going to your manager and saying,
(33:16):
so I audited my workload.
These are the areas where I think I could use more help
or I could use more training and have that conversation
where you're presenting an idea to your boss
so that they can help co-create solutions instead of it,
I need you as my boss to solve it for me.
And I think that certain generations just learn that
(33:40):
because they would maybe be met with you're fired
or get out of my office if you came to them like that.
So you had to figure it out and come up with these ideas
to help yourself.
But now there is an expectation for bosses and employees
to work together.
(34:00):
And so you have a choice of how you're gonna manage up.
And I do see that skill as something that we really need
our younger generation to practice.
We need leaders to develop that.
We need to be able to make it so that there's more
solutions driven conversation instead of solve my problem
for me.
And that's just skill building
that I think is missing right now.
(34:22):
And speaking of AI, I feel like that's somewhere
that journaling with ChatGPT can really help you reflect.
It does solve so many problems like that.
This is what's going with my workload.
Spend a bunch of time feeding ChatGPT
with what's going on your workload and ask for solutions.
It's incredible how it can help you think
(34:43):
through these kinds of issues.
And of course the nuances that there's not gonna be
any more resources potentially for.
Potentially for another hire.
It's understanding that like the scene within your team
and within the organization,
but it can really help you create a strategy.
(35:03):
And it also makes you feel more in control.
When you're feeling like everyone else is in control
of your happiness and healthiness at work,
you just feel very discouraged and hopeless.
But if you can come up with some solutions
and sometimes you don't even need to go to your boss.
Sometimes you can figure out,
okay, actually if I do this differently,
(35:25):
that might save me an hour a week.
And incrementally those minutes and hours add up
to get you back into a better manageable workload.
And so I think this is just one example
of what we could be doing better
to have more control over our potential risk
(35:45):
of stress and burnout.
But I think that our younger cohorts need to develop
those skills a little bit more.
And again, they're just starting in their career.
So this is where you're supposed to get that development.
You don't just show up and have that.
And I think this is a good opportunity
for leaders and managers to just reinforce
that kind of learning.
One of the things you mentioned in the book
is shiny object syndrome.
(36:07):
So coming at it from the perspective of the managers,
you call that rushing into AI
without fixing deeper workplace problems.
And could you share an example where AI was overhyped
versus when it actually improved work culture?
Oh my gosh, you saw that a lot in journalism right away.
And this whole idea of just coming in
and just replacing copy editors and journalists with AI
(36:31):
and some of the stuff that was coming out,
especially, I mean, we're in a better iteration of AI now
than we were even a couple of years ago,
but just wholesale adopting AI
and just focusing on that as being the core
part of your business and then having such backlash.
I cite an example of Gizmodo,
(36:52):
which has basically hired all these
or let go of their entire translation team,
started using AI and stuff was coming out like gobbledygook
and every one of their readers was just so angry about it.
And it really turned people off.
And so I think what that did was not good
(37:13):
for AI's reputation either.
It was like, see, AI just is ruining things
instead of AI could be really helpful
if we use it the right way.
Going in and making sure that you have a resource
or a academic journal that's going to support your argument,
(37:36):
like those types of things.
And understanding too that this technology
is still right, rife with errors.
It provides date, what it sometimes it's called
placeholder data and it will just come up
with the statistic like, oh, 70% of women feel like
they don't wanna go to work tomorrow.
(37:56):
And you'll say, oh, can you fact check that?
Well, actually that was placeholder data.
And a lot of people are still using it like it is the law,
it has been fact checked.
And so we have a long way to come before it really is
that strong enough that you could use it to write something
because it's just, there's so many errors still with it.
(38:20):
And I think that this idea of shiny object syndrome
is that we just are putting way too much trust in something
to take over like the core products
that we are offering people.
And instead it's about us slowing down,
which again is so terrifying for people,
this idea of slowing down.
(38:42):
And I said something so provocative
in this massive state of burnout that we're in.
How about we don't grow this year?
How about we just have a year where we're not growing?
And that's impossible, but I've had some conversations now
with CEOs that said, we've decided to look at this
as a flat year so we can take a breath.
(39:03):
And I've been really excited to see CEOs say that
because they know that it's not sustainable
because they've been in this mode for five years.
And they've said, we've decided to just look at this
as a flat year.
And they have to explain that to shareholders
and stakeholders and that can be scary,
(39:23):
but it seems like more people are starting
to understand that we need to just take some time
to really do this so that people feel like that AI is there
to support them, that it makes sense,
that the senior leadership have understood the why,
(39:43):
they know the assignment,
and then we can all together cohesively move
into the future kind of as a team with a shared vision.
Because CEOs also know if you don't have people connected
to a shared vision, then you're gonna have a really hard time
meeting those goals.
That reminds me actually, as I was reading,
(40:07):
I think it was chapter four on compassion,
I wondered what's the motivation for a CEO
to adopt a compassionate mindset
to help people feel like it's not my job that's at risk,
that AI actually, I think you put it in a wonderful way,
it's AI and human that have to work together.
But other than being an altruistic person,
(40:27):
what would motivate someone to say,
yes, this will be a flat year?
Yeah, I think this is progressive,
and I do think that it feels like that doesn't make sense
from a business outcome strategy.
But I keep saying, this isn't a benevolent strategy,
it's a business strategy.
(40:47):
It's not just because I'm nice that I'm doing this.
These executives, and when I get them in the room
and talk about it with them,
because I've been pushing them for a long time
to talk about maybe having a year
that is not in growth mode,
and they wouldn't hear it inside of 2023, I would say,
and even early 2024.
(41:08):
And what's interesting is in 2023,
we had the highest CEO resignations and turnover of CEOs
that we've seen in two decades.
There was just massive shift,
and CEOs were burned out themselves.
And so when you, as a CEO, at that level, burn out,
you also recognize and have empathy
(41:31):
for what that feels like to be running at that level
and knowing that it isn't sustainable.
And so what I've found is a lot of CEOs
that have hit that wall have realized
that this isn't going to be good for business
if I'm losing talent, because it's the high performers
and the talent that leave,
(41:52):
and you lose them to your competitors.
It's not the people that are quiet quitting
and rage applying.
They're the ones just sitting there
until they get a new job and not productive, not engaged.
They're not leaving.
They're going to leave when they find a new job,
or if it makes sense,
but it's your high performers
and that top talent that you're losing.
And it is also when you want to have an organization
(42:16):
that is hitting targets, they can't be exhausted.
They just, you cannot work if you're exhausted like that.
And this is what we're seeing is a lot
of this burnout conversation is hitting the bottom line
in a big way.
And when it becomes a bottom line issue,
that's when you start to see CEOs making pivots
(42:36):
around what their former strategy has been.
When it stops working, then you realize,
okay, this is a factor that I need to bring
into my strategy and it could be that we need
to rest our workers a little bit.
I like that.
It becomes a productivity and a bottom line problem.
(42:56):
And you quote Bill Gates in part of the book
and I love his advice,
which is who is solving this problem well
and what can we learn from them?
So who is solving this problem well
and what can we learn from them?
So I love that too, because it's a belonging strategy too.
And it's an inclusive kind of question
(43:17):
because when you're just celebrating people
for coming up with really great ideas to solve problems,
we're not looking at demographic data,
we're just looking at the ideas
that people are coming up with.
And so from celebrating people coming up with ways
to make business better and to do things easier
and more efficiently is a big part of what I think
(43:41):
from an inclusion conversation is what we should be doing
more, but from who's solving this problem.
I believe it's companies like Atlassian
and organizations that are not burning people out
to the point that they are throwing all of these policies
(44:01):
at them to try to fix it,
but it's actually increasing the stress
and it's making people within the organization
less likely to stay, it's creating all of this turmoil.
And so what I love about Atlassian
is they're a fully distributed workforce.
They have a lot of trust in the people that they hire.
They really believe in still having connectivity.
(44:25):
So Annie Dean, I interviewed her and she's in the book
and she's the lead of Team Anywhere at Atlassian.
And what I love about her is she just really said,
work is broken, we need to rethink it.
And that means, yeah, we have to see each other
and still be friends and hang out,
but let's create these satellite offices
where people can go around to and we'll pay for them
(44:45):
to come into and travel.
50% of the New York office is always filled with people
not from New York.
So people were really encouraged to travel
to different places and they have 91% occupancy
in these buildings at any one time,
but they're fully distributed.
So there's just a sense of that feeling
(45:05):
that you have when culture's great,
it's in the walls, it's in the spaces.
And they've been able to capture that
and they've measured when they have,
what they do is bring their executives around
to these different satellite offices.
So you also could be like very junior product developer
and be meeting with the CEO or senior executives.
(45:26):
So it's making it so that there's accessibility
to these people that honestly, in most cases,
it's like a monolith and they live in the big tower
in New York City and you never get to ever meet them here.
It's they're coming to you.
And they found that these team anywhere
when they have these kind of three or four day
connection events, that they find that employees
(45:50):
actually increase by three times their number
of ad hoc lunches that they have afterwards.
So it like creates this sort of multiplex relationships,
which is not just transactional,
it's like these building of bridges.
And you also aren't siloed then to your team
because if you're going to these different satellite offices,
you're meeting all these different people
(46:10):
across the organization.
So it's not, so you feel a shared vision.
And then they have these great hackathons every quarter
where people get together and they just solve big problems
using their skills.
And a lot of the products have come out of these hackathons
and anyone can participate.
And it's just, it was really true to their culture.
They have this tagline, it's all about getting done.
(46:32):
And so they say that's what it is.
It's still, we're working on things.
We're still moving the needle,
but we're doing it in a way that feels
much more community driven.
And they've had, in the last three or four years,
they've had the best years of growth and sustainable growth.
They've incredibly, they're incredibly profitable.
They've hired lots of great new people.
(46:53):
They've expanded their product offerings
and their human resources.
So it just, I think they're an example
of how we could be doing things really smartly and scalable.
They really, they continue to scale.
This is a very scalable thing.
And I think that they're a good example of doing it right,
(47:13):
but also getting shit done.
Yeah, I like how you referenced that earlier too,
that a work ethic is not the opposite
of finding purpose at work.
So I would love to ask you more questions
when we're at time, unfortunately.
There's so much more to be said.
So I'll just say, please, everybody listening,
read your book, it's good stuff.
(47:35):
So thank you very much, Jennifer.
Thank you so much, Daniel.
This was such a great conversation.
I started this podcast because I wanted to stand at the gate
of businesses using AI and see what separated hype
from lasting impact.
Back when cities had walls,
you had to go into the city to do business at the market.
So if you wanted to talk to someone,
(47:57):
you waited by the gate until they came in or came out.
Do that enough times and you could talk to everyone.
That's what I want to do.
Stand at the gate of people doing business with AI
and talk to them, see what they do and why they do it.
If you know someone that's making an impact
in the world of AI, would you connect them with me?
(48:17):
You can find me on LinkedIn
or shoot me an email at daniel@manary.haus.
That's daniel@manary.haus.
A-R-Y dot H-A-U-S.
Thanks for listening.
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