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The Power and Peril of Working on a Video Screen
Working behind screens brings both downsides and upsides for mental health.
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The nature of work is changing, and more and more of us have been working behind screens even before the pandemic. That brings both downsides – and some upsides – for mental health.
Host Morra Aarons-Mele speaks with SheSnaps, a Twitch streamer with a huge online following, about how she manages her screen time and why she opened up about her own depression. Plus, Jackson Jeyanayagam, a vice president at The Clorox Company, explains why he advocates for turning video off in online calls.
HBR Presents is a network of podcasts curated by HBR editors, bringing you the best business ideas from the leading minds in management. The views and opinions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Harvard Business Review or its affiliates.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever. We look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges, how they fell down, how they picked themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.
Even as we’re in the midst of a possible transition back to the office in the US, it’s no question that remote work and work that breaks any traditional mold of an office based 9:00 to 5:00 is here to stay. In many ways, the pandemic just accelerated what was already happening. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we consume media in our working lives and the people behind the screens. Later on, we’ll hear from Jackson Jeyanayagam, a general manager and VP at Clorox, who’s been thinking a lot about how to help employees manage their mental health at a time like this.
But first I was so excited to talk with someone who I actually learned about through my kids. One of my sons, both my sons love to watch streaming gamers, suggested that I do an episode of the show with an influencer, a professional streamer. I’m thrilled to talk with Jessica, better known as SheSnaps. She’s a gamer, a professional gamer, who’s gained a huge following on Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, and more. And she uses her platform to talk about a lot more than gaming, including mental health. She has a fantastic, very quick acronym that I think is super helpful, it’s called SHADES.
JESSICA: When it comes to some basics in terms of checking in with yourself and seeing if you’re burning out because you’re maybe not taking great care of yourself, my community has an acronym for that, which is just SHADES sleep, hydration, air, diet, exercise, and stillness.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: It was great to sit down with SheSnaps to talk about her work, her passionate community and her mission for better mental health among her followers. For people listening who may not understand necessarily what a streamer is or how a streamer makes a living, could you tell us a little bit about your day job?
JESSICA: Sure. It is very fun to try to introduce what I do to people when I’m out in the world at parties or meeting people in the world and they ask what I do. I’ve started just telling people I’m an online broadcaster and I just wait. I’m not going to go any further if you don’t ask questions. So some people just, “Oh.” Nod and move on and some people ask the questions and I’m like, “Oh boy, okay. Let’s hope you’ve got at least some basic technology so this isn’t super awkward for me to try to explain this.” So most people are familiar with YouTube, at least like people who do various live streams on YouTube. Twitch which is another really popular platform.
Essentially how I got my start was in gaming online. So my gaming feed would be shown to everyone, you would get to see whatever game I was playing, and then my video feed, me on camera, would be in a small box in the corner. So I’m talking to people in a live chat that can see everything I’m doing within usually a couple seconds delay and I’m playing the game and commenting on the games. So there’s this really fun community engagement where they can talk to each other. And then there’s the one-on-one where I can look at their messages and respond to them and answer questions about the game or whatever.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: What’s amazing to me is I got my start in the ’90s working on message board communities and I’ve been working in some form of internet community since 1999. So I am truly an old person in this industry. But when I watch my boys engage with Twitch or YouTube streaming, it’s like they know you or whichever of the streamers they’re following. They talk about you at dinner. We’re part of the extended family and it is such an intimate medium, it’s unbelievable to me the intimacy and the fact that my kids are living with you day in and day out.
JESSICA: Yeah. And that’s part of what’s really cool about the way the platform has evolved. Because initially I was a little bit more reserved about what I would talk about from my personal life and things like that. So we would just be us together and play the game and talk about gaming related things and whatever else. So now a lot of my streams, there’s no game played, I just play some chill music, and I just sit with the camera on me and I respond to people and talk about whatever it is that’s going on. I’m a pretty open book now so it’s so interesting to have that sense of community, that sense of togetherness even with people who don’t speak up very much.
I’ll people who are long-term lurkers, meaning they don’t really speak up but they tune in and listen or watch most streams, come up to me at events. And they’re recounting my days to me like, “Oh, so this thing that you did on this day, that was really awesome because…” And I’m just like, “God, I forget sometimes that so many people who I don’t know and so many people I do know are so involved in my day-to-day life, they know everything that’s going on.”
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Well, truly. And the other thing, and I want to talk about how you think about your community because I was watching one of your streams when you talked very openly about your mental health and your over medication with antidepressants and antianxiety meds as a teenager. Chat just exploded with people talking, some of whom I think were still teenagers, some of who were grownups reflecting, sharing their experiences being medicated as young people. It was both heartbreaking and I imagine very cathartic, what kind of stewardship do you feel over this community? Because it gets really real.
JESSICA: Yeah, it really does. Oh man, it’s a really intense thing. I’m fortunate to know a lot of mental health experts and professionals, therapists and doctors and psychiatrists and whatnot, who anytime I’m like, “Am I walking a line that’s too far?” I reach out to them and I talked to them like, “Do you think that this is okay for me to have these types of discussions?” And what I’ve essentially been told, another friend told me, “You do a great job of staying in your lane.” So I’m like, “Okay, cool.” I’m just talking about my own experiences, the stuff that helped me. So I feel a very deep sense of responsibility towards the community. I try to watch what I say very carefully and monitor the conversations going on in the chat. So it’s not just the things that are coming out of my mouth, but it’s the things that people are being allowed to say in my chat that I have to keep a close eye on.
I’m very fortunate to have such wonderful moderators, they know what I’m about and they know that we have some general rules as far as how we’ll let people communicate in our channel, including that we don’t meet negativity with negativity. People come in and try to troll and we do what we can to meet them with compassion and kindness or silence and just give them the boot. We don’t allow any kind of passive aggressive commentary. If people walk that line, we’ll call it out like, “Hey, if we’re going to talk about serious things, whether it’s politics, religion, mental health, whatever, we have to do it kindly or else I’m shutting this conversation down and we’ll just go on to talking about fart jokes, we’ll be over this real fast.”
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m curious, what did gaming offer you initially as someone… What are your diagnoses, if you don’t mind sharing?
JESSICA: It’s so interesting because I haven’t been… I back to therapy very recently, but unfortunately the therapist didn’t feel equipped to work with me. So I haven’t been able to get any kind recent like, “Hey, do I still have this kind of conversation?” So when I was younger, it was severe depression, panic disorder, anxiety, I had really bad insomnia from like 10 years old up until just like a few years ago, and I used to deal a lot with social anxiety. Going out in the world would stress me out a great deal. So it felt like a little bit of everything. I was really sad and really nervous most of the time.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: What did gaming offer you? What about it compelled you?
JESSICA: It’s a complicated thing because I’ve been gaming in various ways since I was a kid, since we got our first NES. So the actual gaming itself has always been a really nice escape, a really nice pass time. I came to Twitch because of this game called Destiny that I had gotten really, really involved in, I really loved it. I would end my job or jobs because I was working multiple ones at the time and I would come home and right away I would just go straight to Destiny. It was the first thing I thought about in the morning, the whole weekend was gone to it. And part of the reason for that is because I was really unhappy, I was in a really bad relationship at the time, it was really controlling, really emotionally abusive.
I was starting to spend so much of my time gaming because it was something away from all of that. If we were gaming together, for the most part, as long as I didn’t do anything that upset him in some way, things were even, we were good. So when I went on Twitch, that was such an eye opening experience for me because I was really struggling with my mental health. And any time that I would bring it up, the response would be, “Oh, poor me. My life is so hard. Oh, poor me.” And then he would say stuff like, “You’re not in a wheelchair, you don’t have this going on. What is so bad about your life that you just have to go and talk to someone?” And it would essentially turn into this weird drawn-out thing of it was all just a ploy for me to go out and cheat on him.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Oh my God.
JESSICA: Yeah, so I wasn’t allowed to have passwords on any of my devices, I couldn’t have a journal anymore because he went through it, read the whole thing, used it against me, ripped it up. I had no sense of privacy, I really didn’t have anything that felt like my own. And then I started on Twitch, and even though I wasn’t allowed to talk about the fact that I was in a relationship and I wasn’t allowed to talk about a lot of personal things, people can see you, they really start to see you and see through you in a sense. I will never forget the way that that first year of streaming completely transformed my life.
I remember one day, very specifically, we were passing each other in the hallway and I was already having a rough day. I was just, depression sucks, so I was just in a bad state of mind. And he just walked past me and it was like walking past a coworker in an office, there was just this very limited acknowledgement of existence happening and then we kept walking. So I was like, “Okay, that’s fine. You don’t see that I’m having a hard day, whatever, I’m going to go start stream.” I started the stream, I’m doing my best to pretend everything’s cool, and I start getting these messages, these private messages, which on Twitch are called whispers from people saying like, “Hey, you seem a little off today, I just want to let you know if you need something I’m here for you.” Or someone sending a really kind message, just, “I want you to know you’re a beautiful person and I hope you’re doing all right.” And I’m just looking at this like, “What’s, how do you see that? How do you see me? So it really blew me away.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: We’ve been through a period now where the pandemic has brought out online life, so starkly the realities of our lives. What do you say to people who say, “Well, video games are making us anxious. It’s being constantly online that is exacerbating mental illness and anxiety, especially for young people.” Do you have a single answer to that or is it complicated?
JESSICA: It is complicated. What I started to realize after… So I left that relationship, I somehow stumbled into this mindfulness mental health game where before it was I would talk about my mental health only to say, “Yeah, I’m suffering too, this sucks.” Then as I started to find ways to help myself, I started to feel better in a way that I never thought was possible.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: You found this on the internet?
JESSICA: Yeah, I started Googling stuff. One day I was just like, “I am sick and tired of being sick and tired and angry.” And I just started Googling. And my boyfriend, who we’re still together, he’s wonderful, and we’re expecting our first baby together, he introduced me to meditation and I always tell people that was my gateway drug into mindfulness. I was so immediately blown away by how much that helped and how much it showed me about what I was carrying and what I wasn’t addressing.
So I started feeling a lot better, things started changing. And over the last few years, because it’s really only been a few years that I personally would say I don’t believe that I struggle with panic disorder, depression, anything outside of the stuff that comes up from life, that I started evaluating my gaming and pretty much everything else by a couple of quick questions. Like, am I looking to do this to escape my life or am I looking to do this to enhance my life? So when it comes to gaming, if I go to my video games because I am agitated and frustrated or I’m just feeling like crap and I sit down and just lock into a game, I don’t think that helps anything. I think in situations like that, it makes more sense for me to deal with whatever it is that’s on my mind, stretch it out, do some meditations, create a new narrative, talk to someone, journal, whatever, and then go play video games when it becomes an enhancement to my life instead of an escape.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Gosh, that’s so interesting because when I think of reactions to gaming, I think of Frank Underwood in House of Cards, where he was this very angry, evil political character and his escape was to play really violent video games and take out his murderous urges on the video game. I think a lot of people who aren’t gamers think of video games as a channel for anger, as a channel for escape, for fantasy as a reaction to big feelings almost as if you’d take a drink or you’d try to escape from the real world. I think there’s many of us who don’t game might not think of it as an enhancement.
JESSICA: Yeah. And the studies out there because there’s so many people who are still like, “Violent video games are what’s wrong in the world. This is what’s causing X, Y, and Z.” There are so many studies out there that say the exact opposite. And gaming, especially in some of these multiplayer games has been shown to help increase communication and teamwork. There’s so many great things that you can get out of these games, especially now that so many of them can be played with other people online. I don’t actually find that I meet very many people who are like, “I got to go take out my anger in this game.” It’s usually they’re struggling already and then they go play the game because they don’t want to think about the fact they’re struggling. There’s not this, like, “I’m going to use this for this.”
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m going to shoot people in an imaginary sense. Although, for me as an introvert and someone with social anxiety, my online life has always been a way I can be very present and sometimes performative without always a lot of the anxiety that I feel when I’m with people in person. Do you feel like that’s true for you too? Because you’re right there on screen with people.
JESSICA: Yeah. So I haven’t really dealt with social anxiety the way that I did when I first started on stream. But yeah, it’s a very interesting thing to feel mostly comfortable being live and having a camera on you. It’s a very controlled situation. If someone says something you don’t like, you can ban them from your chat, if you look at yourself and you’re like, “You know what, I look weird today,” you can shut down stream. Which when I was really dealing with a lot of intense self-loathing, there were days where I would see myself on stream and be like, “Oh, I can’t look at that anymore, I got to go.” And I would just shut things down. Out in the world you don’t have that same-
MORRA AARONS-MELE: You can’t ban people.
JESSICA: Yeah. You don’t have that same awareness of yourself. So sometimes it’s like your vision in your head of like, “Oh my God, I’m talking too much, oh my gosh, I look really stupid right now don’t I? What, am I standing weird? Is everyone else standing like me?” You can judge yourself because you can’t see it as well. So initially I felt more comfortable online than I did in person. Over the years, it’s something that I’ve managed to work past. I think while it is way easier to not have to put on an outfit from the waist down basically and just sit in front of a camera and goof off, it’s not as hard for me to connect to people out in the world now because of the connections I’ve formed online.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Because now you’re really an entrepreneur, right? You have this business, you have a media business. How has your personal feeling towards the people who keep you going changed, both as an entrepreneur and as someone who’s a community owner, I suppose?
JESSICA: Oh man, that all changed after mindfulness really. After I learned to start liking myself, then suddenly it was a lot easier to like other people. Because I’ve heard that saying, something about the things we don’t like in other people are the things that we don’t like about ourselves, the things that we love in other people are the things we love about ourselves. I had a hard time loving other people because I really hated myself so very deeply. So when I got to a point of some radical self-acceptance, when I started to actually look at myself and say like, “Man, you had a rough go of it. You were just doing the best you could. This is all okay, you don’t have to hate yourself for this.” I cannot tell you anyone who I hate now. There are people who frustrate me of course but that goes into my daily compassion work, where the people who upset me the most are the people who I need to spend the most time thinking of.
So it’s a very different thing now where I’m up on a stage because I do speak still, well, before the pandemic. I do speak to in person and I’ve got my streams and everything. So instead of me being up there and saying, I don’t really care what you think, it’s I really do care, I care what they think, I care what they’re feeling, I want them to feel cared about, I want them to not have to feel the way that I felt for almost my entire life. Because I was 32 before I had my first moment of, “Oh man, maybe you don’t suck, maybe life actually doesn’t have to be so doom and gloom, maybe things can be okay.”
I didn’t think happiness was real and I used to really hate people. I tell people all the time if I had stumbled upon my own stream years ago, I would have been like, “Oh my God, she’s so fake. I hate her.” Because I thought everyone who was happy or seemed happy was just better at lying than the rest of us, and I hated them for it. Like, why are you feeding into this lie making other people feel bad? Just let them know everything sucks.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: But people would say to you, I’ve seen in your comments, “But you seem so happy.” When you would talk about your struggles with mental health and you would talk about your depression, then they’d be like, “Well, but you seem so happy.” I want you to talk about that because the thing that I think a lot of people don’t understand about those of us who walk with deep sadness and depression or clinical anxiety is that we get really good at seeming happy, especially at work or seeming in charge or seeming like we can stand up on stage and impress 1,000 people and you don’t see the darkness inside, that’s on purpose.
JESSICA: That’s actually what inspired me to start talking about my mental health when I was still struggling with it. Because it’s really interesting how quickly people start to idolize people online. Even when I was still very new in streaming and I didn’t have a very large audience or anything, I would start getting these private messages from people saying like, “You seem so happy, how do you do it?” And I’m like, “Oh man, now I’m that guy, I’m the one making you feel like stuff is okay when it sucks.” So I started speaking up and I did my first mental health stream probably I think like a year in, where I just came clean sort of and was like, “Listen, I wake up every day angry, I’m miserable, I hate myself, I’m really struggling. I feel you.”
And there were a lot of things I didn’t talk about like the fact that my older sister had passed away. I didn’t talk about the losses I had suffered in my life because one of my bigger fears was that someone would come in and they would use her name against me. Because people who are out to hurt people will use whatever is accessible to them, so I wouldn’t talk about her. And then after I started opening up a little bit more about the way that I was suffering, I started talking more about, and I lost my sister and she was my best friend, and this has been just terrible since. So that was what inspired me to start speaking up on it more.
Now I would say for the most part, I think it’s okay to label myself as a happy person because I don’t think of happiness the way I did before. I think it is a conscious choice, it is daily effort, daily, daily effort to pay attention to what’s going on in my mind, what’s going on in my body, what I’m consuming, whether it’s through my actual diet or what I’m consuming online, the type of music I’m listening to, everything. And it doesn’t mean I don’t still struggle. I just lost my brother and my niece on the same day three months ago, I lost my dad just a couple of years ago. Grief is something that is an ever-present part of my life. So it’s been tough, but I would still comfortably say I’m happy because there are some moments where I look around at my life and I’m able to be present in a way I never was before. And it brings me to tears. Like I’m just so happy to know there’s another way
MORRA AARONS-MELE: While we’re talking about working in an online world, our worlds being shared through tiny computer screens for hours a day. I wanted to share a conversation that I had with Jackson Jeyanayagam. He’s a VP at Clorox, giant company, and I follow him on LinkedIn. He posted something a while back that really had me thinking, he said the single best thing he’s done to maintain his sanity during the pandemic has been to limit the video calls he has on his calendar and not do them for every single meeting. And wow, that resonated with me. So I started by asking him about why he posted that comment and the reaction that he got.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: It was interesting because I I posted it, and I’ll tell you about the background there, and I got some comments actually from friends who said, “Well, did you pay? Did you your sponsor that boost? And like, “No, I just posted what I thought.” And usually I get decent engagement, especially when I have a job opening. But this one you’re right, it was so fascinating to see all the comments from all over the world. People in different roles, senior, junior, all industries even debating the merit of it and even counterpoints to what I said. Then what was really cool was I must have gotten at least 30 DMs on LinkedIn, direct messages from people saying, “I’m glad you said that, I’ve been struggling with this. I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to my team or my boss about this.” Or, “Your team’s very lucky that you think that way and you don’t put that pressure on them.”
And that one really hit me hard, I’m like, “Man, it’s sad that someone would have to think that my team is lucky just because I don’t expect them to be on video all the time.” And that’s just really sad that someone feels like they have to be, whether it’s true or not it doesn’t matter [crosstalk 00:27:19].
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I think it’s true.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: Yeah, and that’s sad to me. So the background was, it wasn’t even like nothing crazy happened. It’s been a year, exactly a year I think since we got into that moment, the White House press briefing and everyone freaked out and so forth. So I would say it was building up. I found it funny that all of a sudden March 3rd or whenever everyone essentially went into work from home, all of a sudden the phones weren’t good enough and we had to see each other even though I might’ve just seen you two days ago. We got into this, and I think this is a common societal thing, I don’t think it’s just American thing, I think it’s a very knee-jerk reaction to overcompensating. You know how it is, 80-20 rule. Once a few people go there, everyone jumps on it. And it was like, oh, video all the time, this is it. We’re fine, we don’t need to be in the office, this is how we’re going to cope.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Can I ask you a question?
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: Yeah.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Was there any corporate memo that went out? Because I was actually thinking about this, who said, where is it written as my grandfather would say, that all of a sudden everything had to be video? It almost felt like there was an unwritten edict from the White House or CDC
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: CDC, yeah, Dr. Fauci is like, “By the way reduce coronavirus if you’re on video.” That’s a good point actually. In fact I was on a call the other day with someone very senior and they’re like, “Oh, you’re not on video.” They didn’t see my posts. “Is that okay? Is that where your are on Clorox?” And I’m like, “I don’t think it’s a Clorox thing, I think that exactly is [inaudible]. I started thinking like, “No one has said ever that I’m aware of any major company, you have to be on video ever.” But we say it and people in certain levels at a certain hierarchy and just go, every company is like this with comments, with not being more proactive and saying, “It’s okay, you’re not on video.” Or not sending a dial in or not being on video themselves.
So I think, and God forbid you get the passive aggressive comments, which I’ll talk about in a second. I think that and those actions and non-action to be quite honest, that’s what built up into the expectation. You’re a 100% right Morra, no one ever said we have to be on video. But somehow that became the thing March 2nd or March 3rd, or whenever we actually officially went into quarantine. Then we had that knee jerk reaction, everyone was on video. And all of a sudden, we all went through this. Your meetings somebody went from three to nine a day because you weren’t seeing people. And every single one of them had a Zoom link and it was just overwhelming. The first few weeks it was cute, it was funny. Some people don’t laugh and smile as much when kids come into the room anymore and there’s a funny thing that happens they’re just like, whatever. But those first couple month, it was all about the personality and your background and comments on your apartment for 10 minutes and your kids and that was the thing.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: It was like we were getting to know each other in a whole new way.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: That’s right.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Although I personally think a lot of people found it really invasive, but you couldn’t say that, right?
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: You couldn’t say it, you would definitely be the outcast. So for me, I felt that way too. And even before, you did video, how many times a week did you do a video before? I did it maybe five to eight times a week, maybe one a day, maybe two. And usually that was eight of you in a conference room and four people remote. You know what I mean? And sometimes you’re not on video but you’re in a conference room, so that’s not the same.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: But you’re not in your bedroom.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: That’s right. And looking at yourself. Honestly, a lot of this is also self perpetrated. You’re looking at yourself, you’re feeling that anxiety, that anxiousness. So there’s a lot going on there from a psychology standpoint. So we were immediately going into this moment of all video all the time, no one’s given a chance to even consider a phone call, which is so crazy. I literally stopped getting phone calls from people. Even one-on-ones went from, I literally had a one-on-one with you via phone last week now they’re all video? I don’t understand what’s changed from last week, nothing’s changed. So this built up in me more and I actually, from the get-go, I just didn’t turn video on, I just refuse to do it. And oh my God, Morra, the comments I got, the jokes, it was always something.vIt was really interesting what I went through, it was almost like being a teenager again. The first one was denial and excuses, I wasn’t owning it. I was like, “Well, I have bandwidth issues,” which sometimes was actually the case or I was multitasking, also the case. I was walking around, which by the way is a good thing it’s healthy. I was walking around my apartment, whatever it was. Or just sometimes my hair, I have long hair and I haven’t showered and no one’s going to take me seriously. Literally I think you’d have a hard time concentrating if you saw me sometimes. But to have to explain all this is absurd.
And then all of a sudden, five, six months into it, eight months into it, I was the guy who was never on video. And half the time people wouldn’t say anything, it was just expected. But if there’s anyone new or someone who loves to make the joke, there’s always a class clown or someone to make the comment, then that would come up, it’d be a two-minute dialogue. Then when I was on video, oh my God, that was like a four-minute thing like, “Oh, Jackson’s on video.” I’d go with it, it wasn’t a big deal. Somebody was building up and I got to the point, I guess somewhere in the spring or sorry, the winter, when I posted that, I just think someone made one comment. I’m like, “You know what? I can’t be the only one feeling this, I’m just going to say something.”
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I think it’s really interesting, and also an interesting comment on where we are in terms of work culture, that for you it sounds like it wasn’t even being on video all the time, it was that people were giving you so much crap. And it was that sledging, that passive aggressive sledging that we all know so well that built up. And, of course, it’s my belief that people do that because they’re anxious, it’s making them uncomfortable because they’re like, “I don’t really want to be on video, why isn’t he on video? Why is he so special? What’s going on?” It gets them all worked up.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: That’s a great point. To me, it was a freedom of choice. Even though I was making that choice, I didn’t feel like I truly was empowered because of those comments. Now because my posts, some people haven’t read it, I feel truly it’s like I feel free. I’m like I made the post, everyone knows where I stand on this, so there’s no reason to make a big issue of it. I’ll joke around if you want about the broader context of it, but don’t put me on the spot and put me in this place where I defend it. So now I feel like I have this freedom of choice and I don’t know, is there anything more important this world than your freedom of choice? That’s one of those things about America, is we all have this freedom, and I think that was robbed from me to be honest. And now it is.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Losing autonomy is a huge factor in burnout, right? And so when people don’t feel that they have autonomy in their work and certainly autonomy over their personal space and time, they really start to feel burnt out. So where is this going? I just want to just shift for a minute thinking about the next six months, what are you doing in terms of your team and thinking about the other barriers may be to their mental health and their wellbeing right now? What are you talking about?
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: Honestly it’s a continuation. I’m probably unique and I know I’m probably the minority here. But before COVID, I had a very… I had a dinner with someone actually and I said my theory on hours, I’ve never been a big person on 8:30 to 5:30, 9:30 to 6:30. Obviously, if you work in education, you work in law, you work in Wall Street, there are certain things that got to control. There are hours you have to have. But for the most of us, if you think about time when you start, there’s really no meaning to it. For me, I told my team before COVID, I’m like “Guys, this is not a place where I’m checking when you’re on Slack or when you’re on email or if you’re in the office when I see you, I genuinely do not care. If you’re going to come in at 11:00 and leave at 8:00 come in at 11:00 and leave at 12:00 because you have stuff to do, it’s about the outcomes and even about the output. It’s about what the results are because I’ve seen people who deliver a lot of output but no outcomes.
So that wasn’t something that I wanted to make sure even more so we continued through COVID, especially with new people we hired. And of course the same went for being in the office FaceTime, it’s the same deal. Me seeing you everyday doesn’t mean you’re producing great outcomes. So I try to hold that even more so now, I’m like, “Guys, just because we’re not in the office doesn’t mean you still can’t take a nap if you need to or play a video game or walk your dog for an extended period time or even have go have coffee or beer at 3:00 PM with a friend, you probably do that in the office. You got a long week, this is different.
And I’d argue you need it even more so. We all know the weekends feel like every other day where the laptop’s in front of you, you’re done with Netflix and you just jump on work because you can, and it’s there. At some point, you do need that break and you need that separation. So I’ve been actually trying to be as proactive, trying to lead by example with when I, even if I’m awake early, when I go on Slack for the first time. Sometimes I intentionally don’t work till 10:00 or 10:30 even if I’m on.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Really?
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: Yeah. Because I want people to know, I want them to even think maybe I’m sleeping in. Sometimes I do sleep until 9:30 if I don’t take my daughter to school, which is rare. But I want them to have that freedom because it’s one thing for me to say it, Morra, but it’s a very different thing for me to do it. Every week I have one-on-ones with all my direct reports, my executive team, there’s about seven of them. And they’ll tell you this, every week I Slack them, right before the meeting I say, “Keep, cancel, or Slack.” And that’s basically saying, you want to keep the one-on-one cool, do you want to slack it? Great. Or just want to cancel it.
And 80% of the time they canceled it. And I tell them, “It’s not that I want to meet with you, this is your meeting, your time, you’re in control. You tell me what we need to talk about. You’re an executive team member, I trust you to address the agenda. And if there’s anything urgent, I’ll come to you as needed, but we don’t need to keep this time and have this call just for the sake of insecurity that I might have that you’re not doing work, I don’t need that, I hired you for a reason.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I love that. Keep, cancel, or Slack. Last question. I love that, I’m stealing that. So what happens six, eight months from now when maybe you’re back in the office? So you guys have an office, and I want you to open up your crystal ball here, and half the people are dying to come back in the office because they’re bored, they’re lonely, they’re sick of their wife and kids, whatever. Then the other half are like, “No, I like this.” But they feel perhaps anxiety that they’re not in the office. What are leaders to do in this situation that’s surely coming for a lot of organizations?
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: It’s not going to have to be a sexy answer. I think you have to be redundant, you just have to keep hitting the message. I say this, “Hey, when you guys are ready to come back.” I for one cannot wait to your point, to be an office of one or two people even if that’s the case. But 100% no pressure, your call. It almost becomes so ridiculous if you keep saying it, but I have to. Because I can lead by action and I’m going to, I’m not in the office five days a week, I never was any way. But I think in this case I also have to be true to myself. This is an interesting balance of being a leader, but also, hey, I don’t want to just not go in just to prove a point so I just do it my word, my guys again, “Come in when you want.” I make sure no one chastises anyone, no one makes anyone feel bad, I don’t even make jokes. I love making jokes all the time, I don’t make jokes at all about it.
Now, I do say, “There are times you have to make the decision.” You’re an adult, Morra, you’re an adult Jackson, you’re an adult Bill, making that name up, you figure out when you need to be in, if you’re comfortable. Now, at the end of day, if you’re just not comfortable going out in public and being in New York right now, all good, I get that, do what you need to. But if you’re comfortable, you just don’t want to come in, that’s fine. But then you have to decide if you’re comfortable but there’s a time that you need to be in, then great. But if you’re not there yet, that’s all good.
It’s about communication, being clear with folks, and being okay with it. I think it’s honestly opening up the dialogue more for them to say, “I’m not comfortable yet.” And that’s okay. And it’s okay for people, like you said, to say, “I really need to get out of my house. I’m one of them, I love my wife, my two daughters, they’re homeschooling now. I need to be out of the house. I am an extrovert, I’m just driven by the energy of New York and the office, so I want to be there.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: I’m an introvert, but it’s been a long time.
JACKSON JEYANAYAGAM: Yeah. And everyone is different, everyone needs a choice. So I just give them a choice, I make it super clear over and over and over again even if it’s at nauseum to say, “It’s all good. You do you, come in when you want, don’t come in when you want, just communicate, no expectations.
MORRA AARONS-MELE: Thanks to my producer, Mary Dooe and the HBR team. If you like our music, it’s by Signal Sounds NYC. And if you have an idea or you want to ask me a question, tweet me @morraam or you can send me a message on LinkedIn.
From HBR Presents, this is The Anxious Achiever and I’m Morra Aarons-Mele.