Google Chief Medical Officer: Managers need to recognize employee burnout

Fortune

Google's Chief Medical Officer for Global Employee Health discusses the factors that affect worker's mental, physical, and social health and the importance of recognizing burnout.

Transcript

00:00We're not trying to make everyone diagnosticians.

00:02You don't need to be able to diagnose that a person has depression or anxiety or whatever the case may be.

00:07But you have to be able to recognize when somebody on your team is struggling

00:10and know how to direct them in a way that's safe and effective.

00:14Burnout is a symptom of something that is going to affect the person's entire well-being and their health.

00:20It will affect their physical health, it will affect their mental health, and it affects their social health.

00:24It affects how they're connecting to other people at work and what those future relationships look like as well.

00:30So from a cultural perspective, building on what you said about those factors that we have control over,

00:36we like to think about at Google both the organizational factors but also the environmental factors

00:42that can really help to either affect negatively or positively the experience that somebody is having

00:49with their relationship with the workplace and can help actually be protective against some of the things

00:55that are known pretty widely to be triggers for burnout.

00:59And so we think about not just how we are setting up things like prioritization, goal setting, expectation setting,

01:09things like that, which has to be really clear.

01:13Communication also has to be really effective in order to help people.

01:18But we also think about the environment.

01:20How is the environment supporting meaningful connection in the workplace,

01:24which we know there's a body of research to support, is protective.

01:28And on the flip side, a lack of meaningful connection in your life can make you at higher risk

01:35for experiencing things like burnout and other conditions.

01:38So that's the environment.

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