Latest / Love Letters to Troublemakers / E6. Workplaces are Health Hazards

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E6. Workplaces are Health Hazards · Love Letters to Troublemakers

• 0:00
  We don't want to think that we're part of this unfair system
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  that is perpetuating harm on a global scale.
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  At psychosocial conferences, one of the keynote sneakers got on
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  stage and said, hey, look at the US and do the opposite.
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  I don't think people in the US realize that this is how we're
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  viewed. Europe is putting laws into
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  place to prevent American practices like the vitality
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  curve because they've watched us and it's extraordinarily
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  damaging to culture. All right, hi, everybody.
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  Welcome to another episode of the Circle Back Club, a podcast
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  for workers who are done pretending that everything is
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  fine. I'm a partner, Ray, and I'm
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  joined, as always, by Lars Galleon.
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  And today, we're going somewhere most workplace conversations are
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  scared to go, at least the ones that are being had in the US.
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  Yeah, so there's there's a term by researchers and governments
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  around the world called psychosocial hazards.
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  It describes the conditions at work, the overload, the lack of
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  control, the job insecurity, the constant surveillance, the
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  'cause that is measurable and documented psychological harm.
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  And today we're asking why the US, one of the wealthiest
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  nations on Earth, does almost nothing about it legally.
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  And to have that conversation with us, I've invited one of the
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  smartest people I know working on this, doctor Nicole Decay.
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  She's an organizational psychologist and founder of
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  Human Analyst, a platform she built to democratize the
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  employee experience and reduce harm in the workplace using
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  data. Nicole, welcome to the club.
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  Why? Thank you for having me.
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  OK you all so I want to start with something a mentee shared
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  with me last week. She's pretty early career in her
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  late 20s and a few months ago she noticed that her manager was
• 1:59
  canceling her one-on-one calls pretty regularly.
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  And last week she calls me sobbing in the middle of a panic
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  attack because her manager put her on a pit and she didn't know
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  what to do or if she should chat with HR.
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  And I guess I'm curious to hear from you both, Nicole, as a
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  researcher and practitioner, what happens in our body and
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  mind when we're caught off guard in this manner?
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  The signs that I would point at for what's happening in our body
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  and mind, panic attack and sobbing.
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  So those are two severe responses that a person is
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  having to work situation. A panic attack is a, that's a,
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  that's a, those are overwhelming.
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  People go to the hospital for those because often they don't
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  understand what's happening to them when they happen.
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  So I want to name first, like there's a severe stress response
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  happening. And so you want to look at that.
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  And if you're into somatics and body, well, you know your
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  background, so you're into somatics and body work stuff,
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  right? You get them into their body so
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  that they, you can stop and calm down the immediate response that
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  is happening inside of them. But more specifically, what's
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  happening is that person is facing uncertainty and
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  uncertainty is stressful. One of the psychosocial hazards
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  that I don't, I don't know if you named, but it's poor change
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  management and New Zealand, they regulate this is one of the
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  psychosocial hazards, not looking out change and planning
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  for IT. People are the biggest predictor
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  of change failing. And so you should have a plan in
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  place for your people. There's a lot of tools to plan
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  for change for people. There's a lot of models like for
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  this as well because it's such an important aspect.
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  And so when you're giving people uncertainty all the time, you're
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  creating stress responses like in the body specifically you're
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  triggering a threat response. So that makes me think that like
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  your amygdala is getting triggered.
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  You might be having stress hormones like cortisol or
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  adrenaline coursing through your body because that's what happens
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  when you're faced with uncertainty.
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  And I also I wanted you've hit on something when it comes to
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  pips that I think are becoming too common in workplaces as
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  well. That I also, besides answering
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  the questions I kind of want to address because this reaction to
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  pips, people just getting put on pips out of nowhere is happening
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  due to harmful corporate practices that don't have
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  efficacy that they work. So a lot of people are being
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  exposed to this thing called the vitality curve, which Aparna,
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  you know, I, I am against the vitality curve.
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  There is no evidence, no peer reviewed evidence that this
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  works in any setting anywhere. And there is a lot of evidence
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  that it works poorly. Result.
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  It harms people. It harms people.
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  The only thing you can find is that it increases short term
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  profit because our financial systems are set up to have
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  people on the liability side. And we don't have another thing
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  that incorporates our IP and our brain and our knowledge that is
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  extremely valuable to the company that's not on our
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  assets. And so when they're trying to
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  get short term profit up, they fire us, bring down their
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  liabilities. And so it's good for short term
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  profit, it's bad for long term things.
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  There's a researcher of the University of Lucene who
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  identified this as a people practice that was used in every
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  major scandal and loss of life that he investigated over the
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  last several decades. This is a people practice like
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  where people are getting put on pips and gas lit just rampantly
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  because someone has decided one in 10 people should be fired
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  every year. And this just started in the
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  1980s. This is not something that like
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  we used to have job security. This is not something that's
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  common in other places they're talking about.
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  There's a law that would like up.
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  I don't know if it got passed, but the EU is looking at a law
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  against the vitality curve specifically because of how
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  harmful it is. So there's also this thing where
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  it's like, I mean, what part of the year is it?
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  Is it time for people to start firing for that that one in 10
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  that they need to get to? It is the time of the year.
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  And managers have to make up pips when they do this.
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  I've talked to managers who talk about that's why they quit being
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  a manager because they had to gaslight people into saying that
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  they weren't performing because they were required to.
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  So I was like, that's, that's a long answer.
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  But like there are these pieces of just it's a stress response.
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  It's AI would say it's a reasonable stress response,
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  especially since the last I sellers like 60% of above 60% of
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  the American workforce doesn't have any savings that are living
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  paycheck to paycheck. So when you're talking about
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  losing your job, it's not just loss of a job, It's not just
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  loss of an occupation. That might be loss of field,
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  loss of housing, loss of care, less of medical care if you have
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  serious medical conditions, since we don't get guaranteed
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  insurance here either. And we're in Washington state
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  where you can get unemployment. Sometimes you can't.
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  If you quit, you need to get fired.
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  Like, right, you have to get out somehow without quitting to keep
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  your dignity when you're being harmed at work or being put on a
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  PIP, something that is clearly setting you up for failure and
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  all you're going to do is stress about trying to meet it.
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  When the goal of Pips have been in rooms where they talk about
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  like, we only want 10% of Pips to pass once they get on the
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  PIP, it's time to go. And like the point of Pips is to
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  get people out. It's to document layoffs and
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  caught in without having to go through the process of actually
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  doing layoffs. It's cheaper.
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  It's so normalized that you're like, well, we everyone's just
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  like, well, we can do it. Everyone else is doing it like
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  we need to produce our workforce.
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  So let's not do it with a riff. Let's avoid the Warren Act.
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  Who cares? Like everyone does this.
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  So let's just keep keep it out. Thanks, Jack Welch.
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  We've done great things for this nation's businesses.
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  Oh, not. Jack Welch Lars, I'm curious,
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  you know, what you think of situations like this.
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  And one thing that we didn't actually do is like really frame
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  psychosocial hazards. So yeah, we'll have Lars go and
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  then let's actually frame what we're talking about.
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  There's the psychosocial side and then there's the hazard
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  side. And what you're talking about,
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  Nicole, and what I think about in answering this question and
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  thinking about this person's experiences, when you are
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  treated as a liability, your body is going to respond as
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  such. And that the other part of what
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  she was talking to you about a part of.
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  Should I talk to HR and trying to figure out if that is the
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  best way to keep you safe? And the first thing that I think
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  about and Nicole just touched on it is the documentation.
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  And documentation is one of the primary ways to maintain control
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  and a sense of safety in a large corporation because everything
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  is a liability. And my initial thought in
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  thinking about this person and the situation was, was she
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  documenting the managers cancel cancellations?
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  Is she documenting the lack of dissemination of knowledge that
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  she is getting? How can she protect herself when
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  more likely than not, if you are, if you are starting a PIP,
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  you are responsible for hyper documentation.
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  And so there's this, it's a really reasonable response to
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  libel driven top down surveillance that you're being
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  surprised by. And yeah, like what do we do in
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  those working conditions? It's it's not, it's not a
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  mediated conversation with HR. To Nicole's point, you're
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  already on a pit, so it's documentation land.
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  So, OK, let's frame psychosocial hazards.
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  When we talk about them, we're not talking just about having a
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  bad day at work, right? Like we're talking about
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  conditions at work that are by design.
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  It's the management, it's the culture of work that causes both
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  psychological and often physical harm.
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  And Nicole, you've been writing about and speaking about and
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  doing work on their workplace trauma, bullying, chronic
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  stress, harassment. What do people need to know
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  about psychosocial hazards? And is it something like OSHA
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  for which we have some regulations in the US?
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  Yeah, so we've covered that, you know, psychosocial harms,
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  they're health harming behaviors.
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  They're usually interpersonal in nature.
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  That's why people call them psychological.
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  But what that means is that they're they're the way that we
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  interact with each other is what causes the harm.
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  And they're tied to things that we know are health harming.
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  So anxiety, depression, PTSD, heart, heart attacks, but gut
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  and health like stomach problems that come with a lot of the
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  chronic stress symptoms in general are some these are some
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  of the things that I just named. And so when you have a whole
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  host of in the the US, when I tell when I describe these to
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  people, people are like, oh, those are social determinants of
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  health. And that's not a term used in in
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  my area. I think that's more from the
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  health research. And it's also not a term used
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  internationally to describe this.
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  They're, they're specific to the workplace.
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  The psychosocial hazards are also, they're usually talked
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  about in the context of work. So that's the big piece.
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  So what are they? And I think that, like I
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  mentioned, one that people wouldn't usually look at and
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  that's poor change management, right?
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  There's a lot of companies say the only thing constant has
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  changed that that's what you should be prepared for.
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  But there's a change cycle that gets you out of that uncertainty
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  piece that stops stress. If we don't, we're constantly
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  and uncertainty and constantly getting stress hormones
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  released, we're not doing well. You need to plan for change.
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  You need to plan and they need to go through the whole project,
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  give people a chance to rest and then start again.
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  Can't just constantly be expecting people to burn, burn,
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  burn, burn, burn. And that's another one like
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  extended work hours. A lot of salaried employees are
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  expected to work 60 to 80 hour weeks and forced overtime for
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  manufacturing employees. I don't know how many companies
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  I've worked out where they did that, where they did mandatory
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  overtime required 10 hours a week for employees like work on
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  your weekends, figure out how to fit in your 10 hours.
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  We need you to do this work instead of hiring people, which
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  would be a lot cheaper, both in terms of the turnover that
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  you're getting because you're burning people out and just the
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  cost because you're paying people 10 1/2 inadequate rewards
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  and recognition. And this is one that I'm like
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  when we talk about the pay in the United States and that's
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  part of your rewards and recognition.
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  And when no, no one on minimum wage can afford to live in the
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  US anymore, we have that here. Right.
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  Like there isn't a single, there isn't a single census tract
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  where you can live on a minimum wage.
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  And even living right now with the, the expectations, you know,
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  your housing isn't more than 30% of your income.
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  I don't know anybody that's got that situation right now unless
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  they bought in the early 2000s or earlier, right?
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  Well, I guess mid like up to like 2015 you had.
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  But there there's just these things that are against us that
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  create this as a psychosocial hazard that's systemically
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  happening to all of us. Like when I worked at Boeing, we
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  had these raise pools and that's, so your manager got a
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  percentage of like a pool that he got to give and it was 2
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  point like 7% of his staff's salaries.
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  And so he had to figure out how to.
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  And we, this was in years when Boeing was making record
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  profits. It was after the recession was
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  over. And we are getting the lowest
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  bonuses that we got in years too.
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  So we're not like they're making record profits, billions and
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  billions of dollars. We can see this on their
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  financials. And our race pools don't go up.
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  They don't match inflation. They're not doing anything.
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  And then my manager tells me that he has to do this force
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  distribution where he has to agree with the older person on
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  my team that doesn't need the money, that in order for me to
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  get above average, they have to get below average and a 1% raise
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  so that I can get 5. Like, these are the sorts of
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  things that we're giving people at work that's been so, so, so,
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  so normalized. And then we're told to, like, be
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  grateful that same year when we had record profits and got the
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  lowest bonuses in years as employees.
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  When I said that out loud, this guy next to me maybe 10 to 15
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  years older than me, immediately his response is, well, you
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  should just be grateful that you're getting a bonus.
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  I didn't get that when I was your age.
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  Yeah. Well, and I think something that
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  gets me about this topic, right, because, well, this topic,
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  nobody's talking about psychosocial hazards.
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  People are talking though, about bullying.
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  They're talking about chronic stress and burnout.
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  What gets me is that it's always a personal feeling, You know,
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  that you're stressed, that you're having gastro issues.
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  You need therapy, you need boundaries, you need a gratitude
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  practice. I had a coach once tell me,
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  well, have you thought of journaling?
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  And besides the fact that I actually can't read my own
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  handwriting. And sure, there's also a world
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  in which, like, all of these things are helpful and useful
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  for us to consider, but the structure of the job is causing
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  harm at a rate that a breathing exercise isn't going to fix.
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  And Lars, you've jumped from, you know, 15 years as a
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  corporate leader and now you've transitioned to being a somatic
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  practitioner. Like what's coming up for you?
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  And, and I guess, you know, I'm also curious, like, when did you
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  become acquainted with this term psychosocial hazards?
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  Well, it's because of you, Aparna.
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  You brought this. Language into my life.
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  And Nicole brought into my life. Here and here we are.
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  Yeah, I think, you know, for me it was personal before I found
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  it in the data or found it as you know.
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  I didn't know that this was something that was documented,
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  you know, like the CDC is reporting psychosocial hazards
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  kind of, but it's not something that our HR teams ever talked
• 15:49
  about. We didn't sit down in our org
• 15:51
  design meetings and look at our sentiment data or in our
• 15:55
  engagement strategy and talk about how can we actually
• 15:57
  measure the health of our employees, How can we share that
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  responsibility. And what I saw especially in the
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  larger corporations that I was in, the higher up you got the
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  sicker you became. And it was shocking to me to
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  experience leaders getting sick, going on sabbatical, coming back
• 16:23
  and getting promoted and taking on even more pressure and not,
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  and these are a lot of HR leaders, right.
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  So they're not actually change. I mean, we were leading a
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  strategic refresh every quarter and massive org design projects,
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  but not talking about the way that we are treating each other
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  and the way that work was treating us.
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  And I think what was really supportive about learning about
• 16:51
  the psychosocial hazards was, of course, this is not just white
• 16:55
  collar work that these measure. I mean, it's really, really
• 16:58
  important for blue collar labor. And I was interested in
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  understanding what are the differences of if you're in a
• 17:04
  white collar position, what are those big stressors of the high
• 17:08
  time pressure, high emotional labor, low job control, things
• 17:13
  that in HR teams are for me in DEI positions we never talked
• 17:17
  about, we never were getting interested in.
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  How do we measure that and understand the way that with
• 17:23
  this data is really what's causing the burnout, the
• 17:26
  depression, the absent absenteeism, the cardiovascular
• 17:30
  diseases. So yeah, my journey in this was
• 17:36
  seeing it first hand and the way that we avoided harm through
• 17:44
  moving people across the company.
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  You know, if someone did something bad, we just move them
• 17:50
  somewhere else because that was cheaper or something.
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  I never understand that strategy.
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  It's called passing the lemons. Very.
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  That's very common in education, like churches.
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  You move the bad priest to a different parish.
• 18:05
  Yeah. Yeah, across the lemons.
• 18:08
  Yeah. And then if you're sick, you
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  know, we just, we don't talk about it.
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  The person leaves and then they come back.
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  And so, yeah, this got me to a point of, of it was literally
• 18:21
  untenable for me to feel the somatic impact of it.
• 18:27
  And now I'm just trying to help people to feel more and make
• 18:29
  more choices. Speaking of harm, OK, I want to
• 18:32
  play before we get too deep into our conversation, I want to play
• 18:36
  this video that Nicole made titled Workplace Abuse is
• 18:40
  Complex Trauma. And Lars, I don't think you've
• 18:41
  listened to it yet. Workplace trauma and complex
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  trauma go hand in hand. Complex trauma is different than
• 18:51
  what we think of as the big T traumatic experiences that we
• 18:54
  associate with the word. Complex traumatic experiences
• 18:58
  are situations that you can't escape that result in stress,
• 19:04
  and they can be things that make you fear for your life here in
• 19:07
  the States. That's something for your PTSD
• 19:10
  diagnosis. If you want a diagnosis, they're
• 19:13
  like you got a fear for your life.
• 19:15
  And I think that you can easily say that for a lot of people
• 19:18
  here in America, if you lose your job, there is a fear for
• 19:21
  your life. Over 60% of Americans are living
• 19:23
  paycheck to paycheck. If you can't access food because
• 19:27
  you lost your job, I don't know how that's not a threat to your
• 19:30
  personhood and your life. And there are so many people,
• 19:33
  the majority of people actually are living in that reality with
• 19:37
  very little social backing. If you leave your job, there's
• 19:40
  very little net to fall on. And there's clinicians who do
• 19:44
  this work who point out that when they see people who are
• 19:48
  experiencing workplace abuse, their symptoms are the same as
• 19:51
  people who have complex PTSD because it is a situation that's
• 19:54
  chronically stressful that you can't escape, that we're stuck
• 19:57
  in. When you have complex trauma
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  symptoms, they're harder to get over, they're harder to treat.
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  If you expose someone to chronic levels of stress, it impacts
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  their sense of self, their body, their personhood, their
• 20:08
  Physiology, and. We don't talk about that being
• 20:12
  something that an office job can do enough.
• 20:14
  Because it is. It is a chronically stressful
• 20:16
  situation. If you have someone trying to
• 20:18
  set you up for failure and manipulating things so that they
• 20:20
  can get rid of you, you are extremely fearful of losing that
• 20:25
  job. OK, I'm going to pause it there.
• 20:27
  It's such a hard video to hear. And I think so many of these
• 20:31
  little clips, like educational clips, Nicole, that you've been
• 20:34
  making over the past year, they're hard because we don't
• 20:39
  think about work giving us PTSD. We think about going to war and
• 20:44
  coming back and getting PTSD right, or losing somebody in a
• 20:48
  really traumatic way and then getting PTSD from that.
• 20:52
  Do you remember last year you shared this like 30 page
• 20:54
  document with me that had? Do you remember this?
• 20:58
  I was gonna ask you to send it to me because I think that I
• 21:00
  lost it. I'm like, yeah, I remember that
• 21:02
  I've had. I can resend.
• 21:03
  It to you. OK, send it back to me because
• 21:05
  I'm like, I don't remember where that went.
• 21:06
  Yes, when he pulled all the facts, I was like, God, that was
• 21:08
  good of me. Put those all in one place.
• 21:10
  Yeah. So Lars, she put all of this
• 21:12
  information in this like massive document and I pulled out a
• 21:16
  couple of stats from that, you know, So one that's really stood
• 21:20
  out to me over the past year as I've gone back to that document
• 21:22
  is that workplace stress is the cause of 120,000 deaths in the
• 21:29
  US each year and 83% of US workers suffer from work related
• 21:33
  stress. And I am assuming that these are
• 21:35
  preventable deaths, right? We also know that nearly half of
• 21:39
  American Canadian workers report experiencing work related stress
• 21:43
  daily and for people under 35 S younger millennials and Gen.
• 21:48
  Z that jumps to almost 60%. People working 40 hours or more
• 21:54
  show significantly higher psychological risk and burnout
• 21:58
  people in and Lars you said this right.
• 22:00
  Jobs with high demands or high pressure and low control
• 22:03
  associated with a 23% increase in coronary heart disease and a
• 22:08
  30% increase in stroke risk. And when I hear data like this,
• 22:13
  I guess, Nicole, when you see what's happening in the US,
• 22:18
  what's a trend that actually still shocks you even with
• 22:22
  everything that you know about psychosocial hazards and how
• 22:27
  workplaces are designed? There's two, I want to say
• 22:29
  really quick one I already mentioned, and it's the like
• 22:33
  older generations and people who have been through this
• 22:36
  reinforcing the system. I think of those, the experiment
• 22:39
  that they talk about with the monkeys that like go up the
• 22:40
  ladder and they would try to grab something and the
• 22:42
  experimenters taught them like it was dangerous and they would
• 22:45
  punish them. And so the monkeys started, they
• 22:46
  would pull each other down to protect each other and to stop
• 22:48
  them from like going forward. And they get passed down through
• 22:50
  generation and generation and they don't know why they keep
• 22:53
  pulling people down, but they're not going to let them get them
• 22:54
  to the prize at the top. And that's kind of how it feels
• 22:57
  when you've got these older generations that are like, just
• 23:00
  be like us. Do what we did.
• 23:02
  Shut up like that. We are not, we are not faced
• 23:07
  with the same economic reality that you were.
• 23:10
  Even people who are like 2009, that's when I graduated from
• 23:14
  college. That is the last time the
• 23:15
  minimum minimum wage has been raised in this country.
• 23:18
  That's 17 years, and in that time we've experienced so much
• 23:24
  inflation and so much wealth inequality and redistribution to
• 23:28
  the top and this vitality curve that's only rewarding the 20%
• 23:31
  and then giving everyone else below.
• 23:36
  Yeah. Below at like raises that don't
• 23:39
  even keep up with the cost of living.
• 23:40
  So it's there's that piece of like the the older generations
• 23:44
  that just keep saying when people are bringing this up, the
• 23:46
  gas lighting, they're like, just be like us and be quiet, you
• 23:49
  lazy little those are not that's not that's not this, that's not
• 23:54
  what's happening. We are not lazy.
• 23:55
  We are not entitled. This is a completely different
• 23:57
  economic reality where right now in my house, 75% of our income
• 24:03
  goes towards housing because that's how much it costs to live
• 24:05
  in the city of Seattle. Like this is not, this is not
• 24:10
  attendable anyway. So that's like one of them.
• 24:12
  The other one is, and I'm going to say this really quickly, just
• 24:14
  like CEO pay disparity that people are so OK with this.
• 24:18
  I do not understand why people are like, yeah, we should
• 24:20
  absolutely let CEO pay go up over 1000%.
• 24:24
  And the time period where worker pay goes up 27 or 28.
• 24:30
  No, like I don't understand why more people are so mad about
• 24:33
  this. The Economic Policy Institute
• 24:36
  put out a report that showed that CEO pay in the last five
• 24:39
  years is between 280 to 408 times more than average
• 24:43
  employee. And when you look up what an
• 24:45
  average employee makes, that's $64,000 a year.
• 24:48
  Do you think that ACEO is worth between 300 and 400 times like
• 24:53
  of people making 65 grand a year?
• 24:55
  But that seems not rational to me at all because they're not,
• 25:00
  no one is. No one is that bringing in that
• 25:03
  much productivity. And just because they own it
• 25:05
  doesn't mean that they should get 90% of the spoils when
• 25:09
  people are what's making it happen.
• 25:11
  So those two are like the quick ones.
• 25:13
  But I I think like labor, labor rights in general, the fact that
• 25:18
  we are regressing as a nation while our peers are moving it
• 25:21
  forward. There's a whole plan to
• 25:23
  dismantle labor that is not moving forward because labor is
• 25:28
  bipartisan. Everyone across the board has to
• 25:32
  work and we all need labor rights.
• 25:34
  But we've got companies trying to.
• 25:36
  We've got company owned to two companies that are owned by two
• 25:40
  of the most anti labor billionaires in the world that
• 25:42
  are going after the National Labor Review Board, which for
• 25:45
  people outside of the US, that is what makes our that's the
• 25:48
  government agency that gives our unions the power that they have
• 25:52
  to actually stand up for workers.
• 25:53
  And say what you want about unions, but as a group, people
• 25:57
  in unions are better off than people outside of unions.
• 26:00
  So like there might be individuals that do not match
• 26:02
  that trend, but as a group they bring up the Wellness of
• 26:06
  workforces. And communities and communities
• 26:08
  where there's more, we're going to talk about labor rights and
• 26:12
  the labor rights IT labor rights index in a second.
• 26:15
  But Nicole, do you remember we worked, We had this one client
• 26:19
  that we worked on together who got so upset with us because the
• 26:23
  way in which we had written the goals, we're going to jeopardize
• 26:26
  the bonuses of the executive suite.
• 26:30
  And this senior leader was livid, was livid with us.
• 26:37
  And yeah, it's it's a the thing about the CEO and I think
• 26:41
  executive compensation at large across all sectors, not just the
• 26:45
  private sector. We see a lot of this happening
• 26:47
  in philanthropy and in nonprofits as well.
• 26:50
  It it is also really wild to me that you have half of your
• 26:55
  workforce living in poverty, but you're paying yourselves $30
• 26:59
  million a year. I got a screenshot from somebody
• 27:03
  who was a warehouse employee and on their onboarding documents
• 27:07
  was don't forget to sign up for SNAP.
• 27:10
  And so SNAP is Washington state, right?
• 27:13
  So this is Washington state food stamps on their onboarding.
• 27:17
  Some HR person was like, hey, we got to reduce harm.
• 27:19
  Let's make sure that they know they're being paid so little
• 27:21
  that they qualify for SNAP. They can't lose out on those
• 27:24
  benefits. That is wild.
• 27:27
  Like we are and we are normalizing so much horror.
• 27:31
  It's wild, right? But I can see someone in in high
• 27:34
  level HR being like, hey, hey, we got to let them know that
• 27:36
  they qualify for food stamps. Like make sure they know that
• 27:40
  they got to eat because we're not paying them enough to do
• 27:42
  that. It's unbelievable and I think
• 27:46
  that the lack of Labor rights policy means that this is these
• 27:52
  are the decisions that HR leaders are making, you know,
• 27:55
  doing the bidding of this unbelievable pay and equity.
• 27:59
  So let's talk about it. The US scores near the bottom of
• 28:03
  developed nations on the wage indicator Labor Rights Index.
• 28:07
  And just for context for listeners, this index evaluates
• 28:11
  145 countries on the legal protections for workers on 10
• 28:16
  different dimensions. So some of them are fair wages,
• 28:19
  employment security, working hours, family responsibilities,
• 28:23
  freedom of association, which is what we're talking about, of the
• 28:26
  right to form groups, organizations, unions.
• 28:29
  And the point of it is to make this information accessible and
• 28:33
  ultimately improve workers rights and the conditions
• 28:36
  globally. For the context of where the US
• 28:39
  sits, we're ranked worse than our neighbor country, Mexico, in
• 28:43
  labor rights protections. We're closer to India, Niger,
• 28:47
  Egypt, China ranks higher. Countries like Canada, Angolia,
• 28:51
  Australia are much higher. And of course, the EU with all
• 28:55
  of their protections are at the top.
• 28:57
  So Nicole, what's going on? What's going on in the US?
• 29:02
  What are we up to? I think that it is a combination
• 29:06
  of almost like institutional gaslighting.
• 29:12
  We like to think that we have a lot of rights here in America
• 29:15
  and that trickle down economics is going to work and that people
• 29:19
  are going to take care of us and right.
• 29:22
  It's this freedom thing. We think we're free, The land of
• 29:24
  the free, home of the brave. I don't think that people know
• 29:30
  this. First of all, the labor, right,
• 29:33
  the labor rights index is the only one of its kind that I've
• 29:36
  been able to find, and it came out in the last four to five
• 29:39
  years. So I knew a lot of this stuff.
• 29:43
  I did it early in my career. I was a market researcher for
• 29:48
  the supply chain and the research and development
• 29:50
  organization, and one of the things that we did was we looked
• 29:52
  at economic indicators regularly.
• 29:54
  I built an index myself on R&D, aerospace capability in the
• 29:58
  world so that we could figure out where to place things for
• 30:01
  our supply chain. That was my job.
• 30:03
  And so I've been aware of the US lagging behind in a lot of these
• 30:06
  indicators. I remember part of this was cost
• 30:09
  of placement of work. And I did, I did this, I did
• 30:14
  this whole index had all the countries had a ton of
• 30:16
  indicators to figure out wage. Wage was really hard to find,
• 30:19
  but the US scored has the cheapest place to place labor
• 30:23
  every time. And my executives were like, we
• 30:25
  hire engineers. That's not true.
• 30:27
  That's going to look wrong and it's going to make everyone
• 30:29
  think that this whole analysis is wrong.
• 30:31
  You have to fix this. Nothing I did could fix it
• 30:34
  because on paper as our basic like minimum wage, things like
• 30:39
  that, we are not scoring well on the global stage.
• 30:43
  There's this thing called the Big Mac index too.
• 30:44
  That's a way to like look at like cost of living.
• 30:49
  Everything looks low in the US in terms of what people are
• 30:52
  paid. And we don't want to look at
• 30:59
  this. We don't want to think that
• 31:03
  we're part of this unfair system that is perpetuating harm on a
• 31:08
  global scale. At psychosocial conferences,
• 31:11
  there was one of the keynote speakers got on stage and said,
• 31:14
  hey, look at the US and do the opposite.
• 31:16
  Like, and I don't think, I don't think the US realizes.
• 31:20
  I don't think people in the US realize that this is how we're
• 31:23
  viewed. Europe is putting laws into
• 31:24
  place to prevent American practices like the vitality
• 31:29
  curve because they've watched us and it's extraordinarily
• 31:32
  damaging to culture. And I, I mean, I, I also think
• 31:36
  about I, one of the, I went to Catholic High schools and one of
• 31:41
  the priests at my high school, after he left my school, ended
• 31:44
  up going to become the house chaplain for the, the House of
• 31:50
  the United States. The speakers of the like he, he
• 31:53
  ended up making the news because Speaker Ryan asked him to leave
• 31:56
  at the time when he gave a sermon that they didn't like.
• 32:01
  But he did a podcast where he talked about the inhumanity of
• 32:05
  our highest, the jobs of our highest levels of leadership.
• 32:10
  And I listened to it and I, it really resonated with me in
• 32:13
  terms of how we trickle down dysfunction into the corporate
• 32:16
  when we've got our, our government employees who are
• 32:19
  supposed to be protecting us. They're supposed to be the ones
• 32:22
  that are putting things in place like psychosocial hazards.
• 32:25
  But look at their work conditions.
• 32:27
  They are required to come into DC where they live with three or
• 32:31
  four of their constituents in an apartment that they have to keep
• 32:35
  for themselves, where they're living during the week without
• 32:38
  their families because their constituents have demanded that
• 32:42
  their families stay in their state instead of move to DC
• 32:45
  where they have to work every week.
• 32:47
  Then they go home on the weekends where they don't get to
• 32:49
  spend time with their families and experience love and care.
• 32:52
  They go and get yelled at by the American populace and then they
• 32:55
  go back to DC where they had to do this all over again, where
• 32:58
  they sit in rooms, argue with people that they don't like
• 33:00
  trying to get things passed for us in ways that we know aren't
• 33:04
  effective. I don't know if you've ever seen
• 33:06
  that video that like Jennifer Lawrence has that that came out
• 33:08
  in 20. I wouldn't say 2016 at this
• 33:11
  point where she talks about like every law regardless of public
• 33:13
  opinion has a 30% chance of passing.
• 33:16
  It doesn't matter what public opinion is.
• 33:17
  If it's 0% has 30% chance of passing.
• 33:20
  If it's 100 percent, 30% chance of passing.
• 33:23
  So they're in the system where they can't really affect change
• 33:26
  even when their constituents want them to.
• 33:29
  And we're demanding this of them as the American populace.
• 33:31
  We're demanding you, you live this lifestyle, and we're not
• 33:34
  going to change it for you. And we're giving them these
• 33:36
  horrible working conditions, and then we're expecting them to
• 33:39
  change work for us. Yeah.
• 33:42
  And so. We've got no one has ever made
• 33:44
  Congress feel like the victim, the way that you you're just
• 33:49
  like, have you thought about them?
• 33:51
  It's real though. It's really, it's reasonable,
• 33:54
  yeah. When you're talking, when you
• 33:56
  said people at the top are the worst, Yeah, that's what the
• 33:59
  research shows too. Burnout is bad for everybody,
• 34:01
  but the higher up you go in an organization, the higher the
• 34:04
  burnout. And when our leaders are extra
• 34:06
  burned out and burnout is just workplace depression, we've just
• 34:09
  rebranded it as something that's acceptable.
• 34:11
  Like you want to use brand out burnout as a people strategy, Go
• 34:14
  for it. It's just burnout.
• 34:15
  But what like what you're doing is rampantly giving your
• 34:17
  workforce depression, which is a like a horrifying people
• 34:21
  strategy because of the trust workforce is not productive.
• 34:24
  And it takes a really long time to get over that.
• 34:26
  And so like it's going higher and higher.
• 34:29
  And then we're expecting the people at the top to take care
• 34:31
  of us when they're burnt out and it goes to our highest levels of
• 34:36
  leadership. And when we have those sorts of
• 34:39
  situations, like, of course, they can't regulate this.
• 34:42
  They're barely they're. They're barely regulated
• 34:46
  themselves. There's so much chaos in in our
• 34:49
  in our top levels of leadership that can help us with this.
• 34:51
  So there's. A lot of.
• 34:53
  There's not one right. There's not one answer to this
• 34:54
  question. There's a lot of different
• 34:55
  answers for why, but what I think is important to spread is
• 35:01
  that we are this far behind. And so it is important.
• 35:04
  Like Canada and Australia are passing legislation to improve
• 35:07
  workers rights, while we have people in some states trying to
• 35:10
  roll back child labor laws. Like these things that we accept
• 35:15
  as this is a harmful workplace practice are being questioned in
• 35:19
  ways that are so regressive. And I it goes back to like, why
• 35:26
  are more people not saying like we should not be doing this.
• 35:29
  We should be raising the minimum wage, we should be capping CEO
• 35:31
  pay. We should be going against the
• 35:33
  vitality curve. So we stopped this unfair
• 35:34
  redistribution of wealth. And it's, it's hard to also
• 35:38
  organize around this because like you got to do it state by
• 35:41
  state by state by state. And so having a national
• 35:43
  movement that goes along state by state by state by state
• 35:46
  that's effective and can get past is also a part of the
• 35:48
  problem. Well, I think there's like
• 35:50
  there's a couple of things that and this might be ungrounded,
• 35:54
  these are just feelings I'm having.
• 35:56
  We are a culture of hyper avoidance and hyper isolation.
• 36:00
  And I think we should talk about Australia today because, you
• 36:04
  know, one of the things that we don't learn in the US as workers
• 36:08
  is that there's other ways to do this, that countries are
• 36:11
  actually, you know, like the labor rights index, like there
• 36:15
  are countries who are doing this.
• 36:16
  So let's talk about Australia for a second.
• 36:18
  So in 2022, they did something that we have never done.
• 36:23
  They introduced a specific, a couple of specific amendments to
• 36:27
  their work health and safety regulations requiring employees
• 36:30
  to proactively identify and manage the psychosocial risk,
• 36:36
  not just responding to incidents, but systematically
• 36:39
  assessing and eliminating the hazards.
• 36:41
  Like if the floor is wet or there's a chemical spill, we're
• 36:45
  going to clean it up, right? And then in 2024, Australia's
• 36:49
  Commonwealth Code of Practice identified 17 specific
• 36:53
  psychosocial hazards that I think the cold these are global
• 36:58
  psychosocial hazards. Like we're all ish like close.
• 37:00
  OK, not quite. There's definition problems, I
• 37:04
  think in a lot of social science realms, right?
• 37:07
  I usually go to New Zealand and Australia for their definitions
• 37:12
  and if you look at their websites, they don't actually
• 37:14
  have definitions. They just have words.
• 37:15
  So they say low or high job demands, but it's not defined.
• 37:19
  And so there there's established frameworks for psychosocial
• 37:24
  hazards. But I think that, like, the list
• 37:26
  of what makes a psychosocial hazard is still up for debate.
• 37:30
  Yeah, OK, fair. But when what?
• 37:31
  What they're talking about and what they're measuring is job
• 37:34
  insecurity, fatigue, intrusive surveillance, low job control,
• 37:40
  high job demands, poor organizational justice.
• 37:44
  So these are actual what we care about listeners knowing is these
• 37:48
  are actual legal obligations. Employers who fail to identify
• 37:53
  and control psychosocial risk and face criminal liability,
• 37:57
  including penalties for industrial manslaughter, which I
• 38:01
  had never heard of before, I didn't know that existed,
• 38:04
  Industrial manslaughter if a worker dies as a result.
• 38:07
  So, you know, compared to the US and Occupational Safety and
• 38:13
  Health Administration here, we have no specific psychosocial
• 38:18
  hazard regulation whatsoever. The Max penalty for willful
• 38:24
  safety violation is just over $150,000.
• 38:28
  So that's not covering anything. So from your vantage point,
• 38:33
  Nicole, what would U.S. business culture have to believe
• 38:38
  differently to actually implement something like this?
• 38:42
  Like where, where fundamentally, I mean, I think you're getting
• 38:45
  to this, but what would it take to shift this resistance?
• 38:50
  The laws are not going to help us.
• 38:51
  It takes people, it takes individuals, it takes small
• 38:55
  businesses deciding that they're not going to copy these harmful
• 38:59
  practices like this. People have to make decisions to
• 39:05
  do things differently. I've been interviewing in jobs.
• 39:09
  I did employee survey work as well.
• 39:12
  And one of the things that is really hard about employee
• 39:15
  survey work is that you're not asking things that are important
• 39:18
  to employee health often because it's a legal liability, right?
• 39:22
  If, and most people don't know that your employee survey
• 39:24
  questions go through a legal review and that they'll get
• 39:27
  removed if it opens the company up to liability, you're not
• 39:30
  allowed to check it. You're not allowed to do
• 39:32
  intersectional analysis without written permission because if
• 39:35
  you find some sort of discrimination in your data,
• 39:39
  your company can sue you for doing the analysis.
• 39:44
  Yeah, and we've, and we've been in that fire pit together so
• 39:47
  many times with the client saying, Nope, I we're not going
• 39:52
  to ask the question. And I'm like, oh, but this is a
• 39:54
  really good question for you to ask.
• 39:57
  Yeah, yeah. OK.
• 40:03
  So you said, OK, you said we're not going to get get to it by
• 40:06
  passing different laws like people have to, you know, show
• 40:10
  up differently. I also think like for me
• 40:13
  personally, that was what I was going to say.
• 40:16
  I think you have for if we want to change things, we have to do
• 40:21
  something differently. And to me that means giving
• 40:23
  people the tools that they need to do the right thing if they
• 40:27
  care. So trauma informed is the way
• 40:30
  that I go. I look at trauma in a Trauma is
• 40:34
  a big word for a lot of people. You cover this apartment.
• 40:36
  Often people think of it as like PTSD.
• 40:38
  Complex trauma is not PTSD. And so many people are walking
• 40:42
  around with complex trauma, trauma, these chronic stressors
• 40:46
  that you cannot escape. You want people to do these
• 40:50
  sorts of things. I think you give it to them.
• 40:52
  There's this patronizing belief in the employee survey world
• 40:55
  that we should control what managers get on the survey.
• 41:00
  And I don't think that that is true.
• 41:03
  But there's so few people like me in the world.
• 41:05
  There's so few IO psychologists. I don't think people realize how
• 41:07
  few of us there are. Usually it's a PhD level IO
• 41:10
  psych running your employee surveys.
• 41:12
  And there's only 2000 of us in the United States.
• 41:14
  Less than 2000 is the highest estimate I've ever seen.
• 41:17
  And when you've got 75,000 clinical psychologists, like we
• 41:20
  are a tiny, tiny Guild of people that most people have never
• 41:23
  heard of. And so the model is to go in
• 41:27
  like executives picked out the survey questions.
• 41:30
  They decide what the questions are that align to the strategy
• 41:33
  of the company and that, you know, what's the latest that
• 41:36
  should be measured. Look at belonging.
• 41:38
  Let's look at engagement. Let's look at a turnover
• 41:39
  intention. But asking things about employee
• 41:42
  health when you don't have the resources, tools, or ability to
• 41:46
  do anything? About them?
• 41:48
  It might. That's not helpful inside of an
• 41:50
  organization, but if you have a manager that's committed to
• 41:52
  that, give them the tools that they need to do that.
• 41:53
  Give them the platform and the resources and the surveys that
• 41:56
  they need to measure employee health so that they can identify
• 41:59
  pockets within their realm of control that they can stop even
• 42:04
  little things like on a survey that I have put out that I'll
• 42:08
  be, I'm building an app in the background with a developer
• 42:11
  right now to codify this research into something that
• 42:13
  people can take and take with their teams.
• 42:17
  But what you'll see is that people themselves want to make
• 42:21
  these changes. And when you give them the tools
• 42:23
  to measure it, to name it, then they can stop harm from
• 42:27
  happening. When you measure harm directly,
• 42:29
  you're going to take different actions, like as a team, you're
• 42:32
  going to do things that make people feel more like they
• 42:34
  belong, that make people feel like they're not being
• 42:37
  ostracized or isolated. And if you give them also the
• 42:40
  comment boxes, this is something I learned that was really
• 42:43
  interesting. We're taught to survey people to
• 42:45
  not use a lot of comments, one or two, one or two, maybe 3 at
• 42:48
  the most, right? But what I found in practice,
• 42:52
  what's actually most helpful is just a shorter survey, no more
• 42:55
  than 20 questions, with a survey box at the like, a open text box
• 42:59
  at the end of every question so that managers can get direct
• 43:02
  feedback about what's actually happening on the team so they
• 43:04
  can change it. And so it's changing these.
• 43:06
  Tools and giving people the actual tools that they need to
• 43:09
  identify this proactively and removing the control from the
• 43:12
  companies, because I just don't think we're ever going to get to
• 43:15
  a place where companies, we're going with all of the
• 43:20
  complicated systems that are involved.
• 43:22
  Legal's not going to let us do this.
• 43:23
  Legal's not going to let an IO psych like me that's like, hey,
• 43:25
  hey, hey, let's measure abuse and trauma in the workplace and
• 43:28
  like, so we can change it. They're going to be like,
• 43:29
  absolutely not. Absolutely not.
• 43:33
  Yeah. Full stop.
• 43:35
  Full stop. OK Nicole, we end every episode
• 43:39
  with doing a short rapid fire round.
• 43:44
  It's like whatever comes up for you first, we have 5 questions.
• 43:47
  Lars will play as well. So here we go.
• 43:51
  OK, one law you'd pass tomorrow if you could for psych safety in
• 43:56
  the US. Easy, make the vitality curve
• 44:00
  illegal. Lars, what do you got?
• 44:04
  Australia style accountability for chronic workplace stress.
• 44:09
  OK, what's a psychosocial hazard hiding in plain sight that most
• 44:12
  white collar workers don't recognize as harm?
• 44:18
  Besides constant change. It can be constant change.
• 44:24
  Moving people who have harmed other people to other
• 44:27
  departments. OK, so Japan has a word for
• 44:32
  death by overwork. Give us a word for the US
• 44:37
  version of that. Salaried like, Oh no.
• 44:50
  Not exempt that I'm dead. That just ended me.
• 44:59
  Mine I couldn't like it past. Like burnout.
• 45:02
  And I said charred, but it feels too.
• 45:05
  Yeah. So.
• 45:07
  OK, vegan. Listeners, we apologize, but
• 45:11
  charred it is. You can have charred vegetables.
• 45:15
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK, finish this sentence.
• 45:19
  The Wellness industry exists to blank.
• 45:24
  Make you feel better about the extractive systems that you're
• 45:27
  living in. Give you the false hope of
• 45:33
  individual control. Oh.
• 45:35
  Ouch. OK, last question.
• 45:38
  What's something you've learned from data that you can't
• 45:41
  unlearn? Something about how harm at work
• 45:45
  really works? What can't you Unsee?
• 45:51
  That there's so many sides to every story that anyone can be a
• 45:55
  person that does harm. Mine's on the other side of the
• 46:01
  fence, which is that social emotional intelligence always
• 46:06
  comes up as a top need in corporations, but it is the
• 46:10
  least funded. And I believe if we actually
• 46:13
  invested in building these skills, to Nicole's point, we'll
• 46:16
  have skills to talk about what really matters and protect each
• 46:19
  other. OK, I feel like I could have
• 46:23
  this conversation for three more hours, but unfortunately we have
• 46:28
  to wrap up. So we ask, we always ask our
• 46:31
  guests to share one take away and one action item for
• 46:35
  listeners. You've given people a lot of
• 46:38
  action items already, but is there anything else, Anything
• 46:43
  that gives you hope? Any bright spots?
• 46:46
  I have hope that we can collectively start working
• 46:50
  together outside of corporate systems to try to tackle these
• 46:56
  in the near future, because I don't think we can tackle them
• 47:02
  within the systems under which are heartliness.
• 47:08
  And that's one of the big things that I hope, I hope I can get
• 47:13
  off the ground this year because I think that's the only way, the
• 47:18
  only way that we stop this. Like we have to have hope that
• 47:23
  we can do this together. Yeah, I've I, yeah, I think one
• 47:27
  of the things that I just am always saying at the end of our
• 47:29
  episodes is talk to each other. So in this from this vantage
• 47:33
  point, if you heard a psychosocial hazard that you're
• 47:36
  like, huh, that's actually something I experienced.
• 47:38
  Talk to your Co worker about it. Talk to each other about it.
• 47:42
  And for us, you know, acknowledging the class
• 47:46
  privilege that we have and what we're afraid of talking about
• 47:51
  for the sake of these golden handcuffs, we need to be honest
• 47:54
  about the cost. We need to be honest about what
• 47:58
  we put up with structurally to avoid the accountability and
• 48:03
  start talking to each other about it so we can break it.
• 48:06
  Let's do it. OK.
• 48:08
  My take away is the comment boxes add more comment boxes,
• 48:12
  give people more space to share there.
• 48:16
  Yeah, I mean, and look, every tool allows you to do that now.
• 48:19
  So there's no reason to not my, you know, honestly my action
• 48:22
  item. I would direct this to folks
• 48:25
  that work in HR, especially in larger companies where HR really
• 48:30
  plays a strategic role in the business.
• 48:33
  Ask yourself why, why you're not capping executive compensation
• 48:38
  with your lowest, you know, tethered to your lowest paid
• 48:41
  employee? What is the reason that it is
• 48:44
  300 X? Like why is it not 20X?
• 48:47
  Because that actually would give you incentive to redistribute
• 48:51
  your profits downwards rather than, you know, like hiding them
• 48:55
  upwards. So yeah, if you're listening and
• 48:57
  you work in HR like a different world as possible.
• 49:01
  And what would it take to get there?
• 49:05
  All right, Nicole, thank you for thank you for coming today.
• 49:11
  On this episode, we got to name some of the things that
• 49:16
  companies are still pretending. Is it a legal or economic or
• 49:22
  human rights issue, Right. These psychosocial hazards are
• 49:24
  built into how work is organized in this country and actually
• 49:28
  many others. We're going to put the the labor
• 49:32
  rights index in the show notes the so that folks can actually
• 49:35
  see that there is a big chunk of the world is getting it right.
• 49:39
  And then the other half that's getting it very wrong.
• 49:43
  And you can explore like all the things that you want to explore,
• 49:47
  you can also find, well, actually, Nicole, tell us where
• 49:50
  we people can find you. Yeah, I've been most active on
• 49:54
  LinkedIn in the last few weeks as I've started putting out
• 49:58
  actual videos. You can also find me now on
• 50:01
  Instagram and TikTok. You're on TikTok.
• 50:05
  I got on TikTok. It was really funny.
• 50:08
  I got like a notification. I have like 75 followers on
• 50:11
  TikTok 'cause I just started posting on there a few weeks ago
• 50:14
  and or yeah, 2 and I what am I posted better than 90% of people
• 50:19
  with the amount of followers that I have is like, all right,
• 50:22
  like cool, great. I'm on TikTok.
• 50:25
  We have 75 followers. Well, everything is relative,
• 50:28
  including data and how we present presented.
• 50:32
  But you know, for I think for our listeners, I will say that
• 50:35
  you were the advice that you offer on LinkedIn is, is
• 50:38
  actually really incredible. And even though we've known each
• 50:42
  other for seven years now, I learned something new all of the
• 50:47
  time from you. So thank you so much.
• 50:50
  Thank you. Thank you for being with us.
• 50:53
  And the next episode we are going to continue this topic in
• 50:57
  a way and focus in the realm that's very important to me,
• 51:01
  which is semantics at work. So we are going to talk about
• 51:05
  what are the skills that you can build to be connected to your
• 51:09
  body, be responsive to your body at work, lead through your body
• 51:12
  at work. And if that sounds weird and woo
• 51:15
  woo, come on and and listen because it's right here and
• 51:19
  waiting for you and can really help.
• 51:21
  So if this episode made you think, share it with one another
• 51:26
  person. Share it with someone at work,
• 51:29
  probably someone that you trust, right?
• 51:32
  And follow us. Leave a review and remember the
• 51:35
  person next to you is not your competition.
• 51:40
  They are your comrade. They are your friend.
• 51:42
  And our liberation is indeed collective.
• 51:46
  I'm Lars. And I'm a Parna.
• 51:48
  We'll circle back.