“It’s been at least a week. No. Longer than that…I don’t even know. I’ve just felt like this for a long time. And I haven’t stopped going long enough to let myself heal.”
I heard these words loud and clear this week when my neighbor called to let me know she’d tested positive for COVID. Our daughters play together frequently, and she wanted to tell me that would need to be on hiatus until she was well. For the next 30 minutes, we talked about how she felt, all the commitments to kids’ sports and community involvement she hadn’t wanted to back down on, and how they stopped her from taking time to rest and heal. She shared how she kept pushing because that’s what she does.
Her comments resonated deeply with me, and if you’re reading this, they likely resonate with you too. So, it made me wonder, why don’t we rest?
As this question nagged at me, I decided to look at the problem through the lens of theory.
First, I realized this wasn’t a unique situation. Thousands of people likely had similar conversations this week. Second, it’s clear that our society broadly, and especially mothers, are reluctant to rest.
We don’t hire rest when we need it, and it’s hurting our health and well-being.
Diving into the details of our current reality reveals that, according to a 2023 study, nearly 90% of working adults in the US worked through an illness in the prior 12 months. Part of this is likely due to the fact that in 2022, 20-25% of those working in the private sector didn’t have paid sick leave. Adding insult to injury, nearly 65% of workers say they have stress, anxiety, guilt, or fear about requesting sick time, even when they are ill, and 25% say they’ve felt pressured to or asked to work while sick.
Yet, not everyone is falling prey to this culture. Gen Z is bucking the don’t-take-a-sick-day culture and creating a trend in the other direction. While I can’t say the same for their fashion choices, perhaps when it comes to rest, Gen Z is onto something.
Overwork is killing us
While it may be slowly harming many of us, overwork and lack of rest are literally killing some members of our population.
In May of this year, a 35-year-old Bank of America associate, who was also an Army veteran, died after closing a deal. His tragic and untimely death sent shockwaves through Wall Street, sparking a series of news reports and C-suite discussions about the questionable working conditions and deeply ingrained culture of overwork. 100-hour-plus workweeks shouldn’t be the norm. Yet, they are.
It’s not just the banking sector that suffers from this culture. Last month, a 26-year-old EY employee in India also died from what appears to be a combination of factors, including overwork, work stress, and a lack of sleep.
So how do we reverse course and hire rest, which we know supports health and well-being?
The struggling moment is the seed of all innovation
The work-without-end culture has been part of our ethos for decades. But we no longer live in the same context that created this culture. Technology is different. Access to child care is different. The number of working parents is different. In short, our context has changed, and therefore, what we “hire” needs to change as well.
According to the theory of Jobs to Be Done, when our context changes, our struggling moments are different, and therefore, a different solution is often needed.
In our society, parents, employees, and employee-parents may find themselves in one or many of the following situations when they are struggling to hire rest. Potential contexts could be articulated as follows: “When I’m sick but…
- I want to be a good parent and also succeed at work…
- I have a child or children demanding my time and no backup childcare…
- I don’t want to let my team down at work…
- I’m afraid if I take a sick day I’ll miss the opportunity for promotion or be replaced…”
These statements all represent the struggles people face. And cultural norms, anxieties, and habits keep us from changing course. They stop us from hiring a new way or a new solution. In this case, they stop us from hiring rest.
The power of a different contextual framing
But what if we changed how we framed our context? What if instead of “When I’m sick, but…” we framed our situation as “When I’m sick, and…
- I need to heal to do my best work…
- I know I’ll feel better after a day or two of rest…
- I need to prioritize my health…”
I’m not saying this shift is easy, and I certainly don’t excel at it. Like you, I am also a product of the culture in which I operate.
Yet, our status quo is clearly unsustainable, and it’s literally killing US workers and those in other countries working for US companies. So, why are we so reluctant to dial down the accelerator when our bodies suggest we should?
And perhaps more importantly, how can we shift this mindset and change what we hire?
For all the cultural flack they receive, Gen Z might just have this one right. So let’s take the opportunity to learn from our younger colleagues—our health and our future are counting on it.
