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Why employee mental health should be top priority for CEOs

Alexi Robichaux, Co-Founder & CEO at BetterUp, joins Yahoo Finance’s Kristin Myers and Alexis Christoforous to discuss employee’s languishing and how to improve mental health.

Video transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: As part of our continuing coverage of Mental Health Awareness Month, we're taking a closer look at the impact the pandemic has had on our mental health in the workplace. Joining us now with some insights is Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO at BetterUp. Alexi, good to see you again. I was looking through some of your new research, and you found that more than half of the employees, 57%, say they are languishing. That doesn't sound terribly productive. Can you tell us what you mean when you say most workers these days are languishing?

ALEXI ROBICHAUX: Sure, thanks for having us back. Absolutely. So I think this term has been, in a positive way, popularized or made aware in the last few weeks by one of our Science Board members and Wharton professor, Adam Grant, who wrote a New" York Times" article about that blah feeling you may have at work. And that's called languishing in the literature or in the research of psychology. So in psychology, we like to think of mental health as a spectrum from depression on one end to flourishing. Or you can think of that as peak performance on the other end.

And then the middle is this area called languishing, where you may not have a clinical diagnosis or be feeling an acute mental illness, such as depression or other forms of mental illness, but you also aren't flourishing. That means you don't feel like you have a strong sense of purpose. You may not be feeling like yourself. You have lower levels of psychological engagement in your work and in your life.

And what we're finding in our data and research is one of the biggest outputs or results of the pandemic and the shelter in place is that we're seeing scores of Americans and workers languishing, which we can talk about, as an employer, has some really salient repercussions in terms of people's creative potential, their ability to contribute, and bring their whole selves to work, and also their motivation and their performance at their jobs and in life, writ large.

KRISTIN MYERS: Yeah, Alexi, I can only imagine that if you have a huge amount of your employees essentially burned out, tired, languishing, that it completely impacts their productivity, the work products that they are putting out. So I guess then, a two-part question, what then is that result of those employees languishing? And then, on the other end, what should employers do to help some of their employees that are clearly struggling?

ALEXI ROBICHAUX: Absolutely, I think, you know, I'm a CEO, albeit at a smaller company. But if I was a public company CEO, this would be one of my number one priorities right now. If we think about what is the unit of productivity for most industrialized countries and firms in those countries, it's no longer the human body-- it's the human mind. And so when we say people are languishing, what we're really saying is they have an impaired ability to be at their best and perform in a peak state.

And so, to your point, here's what we know that impacts. That impacts everything from civic behaviors in the workforce related to collaboration, civic engagement, citizenship behaviors, we know that things like creativity go out the window when people aren't in these states. And when we talk about how do you address this, well, at the atomic level, there's a few things that show up in the research and literature time and time again as almost antidotes to this, but also can be-- you can think of it as almost like prophylactics or prevention when you think about languushing.

One is celebrating small wins. As simple as that sounds, a sense of purpose and progress is huge in helping people feel psychologically engaged and motivated. And so taking time in the workplace to structure ways to celebrate small wins, especially coming out of this pandemic, where it's been a long haul for all of us, can go a long way.

The second thing-- and there's quite a few, but I think the second one is what's called flow states in the literature and research. And so this comes from [? Mehi, ?] Chuck [? Mehi ?] at Claremont Graduate School or University. And this is about being deeply immersed in your work. The reality is, as human beings, when we get in a state of flow, which is intense focus, where we achieve almost a sense of timelessness and lose ourselves in whatever we're engaged with, whether that's something related to work or something related to leisure, it actually has a healing impact on our psyche and our soul.

And so, helping workers find pockets of focus where they can quietly work on work, they have less context switching, which we know is actually an enemy of flow, and hence, an accelerant to languishing, is hugely important right now as you think about returning to work. And so, as we think about, do we come back to offices, are we staying remote, what companies should be designing around is, how can I increase the propensity of flow states in my workforce? Because when I do this, I reduce languishing and I increase flourishing, which increases peak performance and ultimately, contributes to the bottom line.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yeah, also reduces anxiety. I know I've been in what you're talking about, that workflow where you just know that it feels good and you feel accomplished at the end of the day. It's a good kind of mental tiredness to feel at the end of the day. So, tell us, Alexi, what employees can do? What are some telltale signs that their workers might be struggling with this, might be languishing, as you say? Especially with so many of us working remotely, you don't get to see that employee or interact with them the way you might pre-pandemic.

ALEXI ROBICHAUX: Absolutely. So languishing, you can think of as this-- Adam Grant said it beautifully. It's, sadly, a forgotten middle child of mental health. And so languishing, what you're almost looking for is the absence of wellbeing. Because it's not a clinic-- it's not clinical depression. And so you're looking for things like [INAUDIBLE] motivation. Maybe you find in the morning you just don't have that pep in your step, and you're not looking forward to the day the way you used to. The inability to focus for long periods of time, so the ability that focusing is extra tiresome or troublesome for you to do.

What we also find is sometimes cynicism can come in, right? So an extra cynical perspective or world view may take hold as a result of this. So if you're feeling these things, don't worry. That's called being a human being in 2020 and 2021. The majority of us are somewhere in this middle state on this spectrum of mental health today. And so if you're experiencing these things, what you want to do is try to take hold and partner to have these positive behaviors we talked about.

So how can you be intentional about celebrating small wins? In fact, the work of Martin Seligman at UPenn gives us some really simple ways to do this. It's simple gratitude exercise. As [? woo-woo ?] as this may sound, it has significant research basis that just counting your blessings before you go to bed, three things you're thankful for, can have huge positive impacts and increasing your positive emotion and your sense of meaningfulness and purpose in your life.

Additionally, structure your time so that you have pockets to deep dive. So one thing that's happened in the pandemic I find is although workers are more likely to be at home, there's so much coordination cost with Slack or email or text messages because we're not in person, and we feel like we constantly need to be in communication.

And so one powerful tool employees can do is take hold of their calendar and their time management and put long working blocks or even thinking blocks where you're undisturbed, and you're able to slip into those flow states. Those flow states really are-- they are the elixir here, so to speak, that helps rejuvenate the mind and is going to help you feel less like that blah feeling and see more of that pep in your step, so to speak.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Wow, some great ideas for us all to consider as we continue to deal with this very strange year. Alexi Robichaux, CEO and co-founder of BetterUp, thanks so much.