How We Get Over Overwork to Build a Better Life
Episode 472 | Host: Emilie Aries | Guest: Brigid Schulte
What individual, organizational, and policy changes can transform the daily grind into the good life?
Sometimes, the conversation around women in the workplace feels like it’s stalled. So many of us speak out and speak up about the problems and inequity we see every day, and yet insufficient individual “hacks” remain the most common recommendations. This lack of broader change belies the deeply systemic issues at play here. Adjustments to these systems could improve the ability—of women and everyone else—to live and work in a more sustainable, harmonious way.
One of my favorite authors—whom I tend to quote on this podcast—has quite literally written the book on what’s up with women in the workplace, workers’ rights, and our ongoing struggle to achieve a balanced, joyful life. Brigid Schulte is director of New America’s Better Life Lab think tank and the author of 2014’s best-seller Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time. Her new book, Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life, drops today, so what better time for us to discuss what her research has revealed about our continuing struggle to make work actually work for us?
America’s broken work culture
After Brigid wrote Overwhelmed, she was moved to more deeply explore a problem she was familiar with: if she doesn’t have enough time or energy to successfully and joyfully balance parenthood, career, and leisure, then it’s all her fault—she obviously isn’t trying hard enough. Sound familiar?
Her research over the next decade revealed the alarming number of workplace structures and cultural attitudes that reinforce this feeling of personal failure that so many of us are left with a society that has set us up to fail by placing work and caretaking at irreconcilable odds. Though what she found proved that she was far from alone in her struggle, it also painted a depressingly clear picture of just how problematic our systems are, for everyone, but particularly for women.
The trouble with the American Dream
This familiar struggle can be traced back to the American Dream narrative. It’s a favored term, and at its root, it assures us that in this land of opportunity, only we stand in the way of our own success. If we work hard and dedicate ourselves to our craft, we will be successful. This staunch individualist perspective leaves us with only two possible outcomes: get successful or feel guilt and shame because we haven’t made it. But when we look at the details behind the growing number of people in that latter camp, it’s pretty hard to blame their work ethic alone.
What Brigid calls the “crapification” of American jobs has resulted in 44% of the workforce being considered low-wage; the federal minimum wage hasn’t risen since 2009; and CEOs who made about 60 times their workers’ salaries in the 1960s now make 400–1000 times.
As Brigid explains, “People are working harder and harder and getting less and less.” Better jobs simply aren’t available; plus, the deeply ingrained belief that care work isn’t valuable leaves most of those jobs (⅔ of which are held by women) underpaid, if they’re paid at all. Look no further than this chart from the Economic Policy Institute to understand that the vast increase in worker productivity in America over the past 50+ years has simply lined the pockets of the uber-wealthy in ways we’ve never seen before throughout history:
“Work” beyond paid work
In The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind, Jan Lucassen defines work as “all activity that is not leisure” and shares many proposed and implemented changes around the world that embrace this concept. We’re trained to think of work as exclusively what we do for pay. As a result, only this subset is taken into consideration when measuring GDP and the economic health of our country.
Unpaid work, while equally (and, arguably, more) important to the functioning of our society, is relegated to “a shadow sphere that is undervalued and almost invisible,” says Brigid. Paid work that reflects the same care-centered values, such as teaching and nursing (i.e., professional caregiving), is also undervalued and, as a result, underpaid. Brigid asks: Why do principals make so much more than teachers or janitors so much more than domestic cleaners?
“We have a sense that a labor of love shouldn’t be part of the market.” The problem with this belief is reflected in the workplace and life balance issues we face. In Over Work, Brigid uses the stories of changemakers striving to fix this problem to imbue this dire situation with hope.
The organizational change we need
Bossed Up shares a lot of individual ways to seize back control of our so-called work/life balance, but when we focus too heavily on these reactive options, we run the risk of perpetuating the American Dream mythology—that unsustainable workplace culture is your fault and your problem to fix. Brigid stresses that a combination of individual, organizational, and policy efforts are needed to foster meaningful change.
Over a decade of research, Brigid’s findings kept returning to a singular root for organizational solutions: leadership mindset, particularly at the middle-management level. Middle managers have a lot of power to transform the workplace cultures they oversee every day. Brigid profiles numerous creative leaders who took the reins and built innovative, flexible workplaces that listen and learn from the experiences of their frontline workers on the ground.
It’s the power of story, the former journalist explains. “Everything we believe comes from a story we’re told,” and if leaders speak only to those at their level or above in the pecking order, it’s little wonder they hear stories about how well the status quo works. When wealthy white men, for instance, don’t seek the input of the 70% of workers—particularly women workers—with regular care responsibilities, they aren’t moved to implement flexible working hours or shorter work weeks.
In our conversation, Brigid outlines even more organizational and policy initiatives that could transform our care infrastructure and level the playing field across the country. She hopes to disseminate “truer and more positive narratives to get us going in a nationwide, beneficial direction.” From paid leave for all to worker voices on boards, the ideas—and the solid evidence of their success—are out there. We need to turn up the volume on those stories to drown out the poisonous and outdated ones that persist.
What stands out to you from Brigid’s research and ideas for a better economy and working world? How are you inspired to advocate for the good life, both for yourself and at an organizational or policy level? Share your thoughts on this topic and engage with others in our Courage Community on Facebook or our group on LinkedIn.
Related links from today’s episode:
Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life
Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
Connect with Brigid on LinkedIn
Learn More About the Better Life Lab
The Economic Policy Institute’s Productivity Pay Gap
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together by Heather McGhee
Workism Is Making Americans Miserable by Derek Thompson
The Story of Work: A New History of Humankind by Jan Lucassen
Episode 452, Redefining Success: Women and the Fight for a Fair Economy
Episode 440, The Problem With Self-Help
Episode 468, Disrupting Elder Care: We Need To Talk More About Working Daughters
Episode 456, How Connection Can Cure What Ails Us
TAKE ACTION to support the shift to a better world of work:
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[INTRO MUSIC IN]
EMILIE: Hey, and welcome to the Bossed Up podcast, episode 472. I'm your host, Emilie Aries, the Founder and CEO of Bossed Up. I am so excited to dive into today's discussion
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all about life beyond the grind, life beyond the hustle, and really transforming the daily grind into the good life. And today's conversation really feels like a blast from the past because I get to sit down with one of my favorite authors of all time, an old friend of mine who I used to rub shoulders with quite a lot when I lived in DC, back about ten years ago now. And that is Brigid Schulte.
Brigid Schulte is someone I've referenced many times here before after her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love And Play When No One Has The Time, came out early in my Bossed Up journey. And truly that book has so many nuggets of wisdom. It's so well researched and so well written. I highly, highly recommend it for those who want to unpack burnout and understand how we all got this way. But I'm so excited to have Brigid back because her new book, Over Work, is out to today and it really feels like a beautiful extension of Overwhelmed that came out over a decade ago now.
I think the work Brigid does is truly some of the best journalism that's out there around the underlying systemic reasons why the conversation around women in the workplace has felt so stalled for so long, and why we need to be thinking systematically about how we can change things that make life and work better for everyone, and particularly for women.
But first, a little official background on Brigid. She's a journalist, a think tank program director, a keynote speaker, and author of the New York Times bestselling book on time pressure, gender, and modern Overwhelmed: Work, Love And Play When No One Has The Time. Her new book, Over Work: Transforming The Daily Grind In The Quest For A Better Life, is out today and available wherever books are sold. Brigid served as an award winning journalist for the Washington Post and the Washington Post Magazine and was part of the team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize there. She now serves as the director of the Better Life Lab, the work, family, justice, care, and gender equity narrative change program at New America. She hosts the Better Life Lab podcast on Slate, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, Slate, the Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, New York Magazine, and so much more.
Brigid, welcome to the Bossed Up podcast.
BRIGID: Yeah, thank you. So good to be here.
EMILIE: Congratulations on today's publication of Over Work: Transforming The Daily Grind In The Quest For A Better Life. How exciting.
BRIGID: Oh, thank you so much it's been a labor of labor and a labor of love.
EMILIE: Well, we're going to talk about all of those things today. And for those who've been following along the Bossed Up journey for over a decade now, we talked back in the day with your first major publication, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play, When No One Has The Time, which I've referenced countless times here on this podcast. What inspired this follow up almost a decade later?
BRIGID: Yeah, to me, it was such a natural progression. So overwhelmed really sprang out of my own experience. As, you know, a mother trying to, you know, enjoy that time and be a really great mother and take care of, you know, create a sense of home and safety and security, but also really wanting, being very passionate about being a journalist and a writer and wanting to do that really well as well, never mind have time to sleep or do anything fun, you know.
And I just felt like I was coming apart at the seams. It was just so. I was like, wow, it is so hard. And I just for years thought that it was just my own fault, and I was just. Maybe I wasn't this enough or I was too much of that, and, you know, really saw it through a very individual lens and then, you know, had an opportunity to explore it deeply in that book. And that's when sort of, like, the scales fell from my eyes. It's like, oh, wow, this is really systemic, and this is public policy, and this is corporate practice, and workplace structure, and these are cultural attitudes. And all of this makes it really difficult to combine work and care and particularly difficult for women, well, difficult for men as well. But the pressure is very intense for women and the time pressure.
So that was what that book was really all about. Kind of my search for trying to understand why is it so overwhelming? And so then I got to the end and had a much better sense of like, oh, now I get it. I'm not alone. I'm not the only one. So many people are kind of suffering in silence and blaming themselves, thinking there is this kind of individual failure. And so at the end of that, when it was so much clearer, the one thing that was obvious to me is that so much of the misery, so much of the overwhelm, really started in work and our work culture, the way we think about work, the way we organize it and do it. And so I just decided that would be what I would do, is I would dive headlong into trying to understand work and work culture.
And this has been a ten year journey, because what I started was really trying to understand it. And it was super depressing. And I thought, I don't want to write a book that's just all depressing. But at the same time, I didn't want to write a book. You know, I wanted to find hope like I did in overwhelmed. I wanted to find answers and solutions, but I didn't want it to be kind of like, you know, happy, frappy Pollyanna, because there's a lot of pain out there.
And so what I tried to do in the book is really honor that misery and pain that so many people are in, but really tell the story through change agents that I found through reporting, who are really making an effort to change, you know, not just that individual, you know, oh, you know, you're feeling burned out, go have a bath, you know? But really looking at changing, you know, corporate cultures and structures, looking at changing public policy, looking at changing our attitudes and really making a difference.
EMILIE: And I think you do that so well, not only in all the change agents who you profile and the different resources you bring into the book, but the stories you share are, you know, we're not making up the pain here. You're shining a spotlight on the very real pain that people are experiencing, particularly women, particularly underrepresented folks, particularly in America, which makes us sort of this miserable anomaly. And I do think this has so much to do with American Individualism.
So why don't we start there? You know, like a lot of the narrative, the public narrative around work, has always been about the American dream. You can work hard and get ahead. You can do better than your parents did in the generation before you. You can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and even the lean in message, you know, that Bossed Up came about, around is like, don't take your foot off the gas pedal until you have to. And maybe we can personally figure out how to hack our way into this system. And that individualist approach is something we've been really kind of evolving here at Bossed Up, ten years into having my own personal Feminist existential crisis and saying, okay, well, what might it look like if we detach from that American individualism?
So, what's particularly changed about work since the 1960’s that has made that narrative, that American dream, more of a myth now than it used to be?
BRIGID: It's such a good question. And before I get to that, one thing that really strikes me when you talk about American Individualism, which is so very powerful, if that's the narrative, if that's the story that we believe, that it's all up to you. And if you just worked harder, everything would be fine. And so you could be out there literally killing yourself, working harder and harder and trying to do what you think are all the right things and still not making it or not where you want to be. And so then where does that leave you? That leaves you feeling guilt and blame and shame, like, oh, it's my fault if I just worked a little harder. And I think that's what's so harmful, because that's not what's been happening.
So kind of going back to that big picture, you know, there were a couple things that I found very influential as I was reporting the book to kind of shape my thinking. And one is the Economic Policy Institute has put out this really powerful graphic, and they show productivity in the United States increasing. And they start at the end of the Second World War, where there was a big productivity boom. And what you saw is that for several decades, as productivity rose, so did workers wages. It's like workers were enjoying the fruits of their labor. So if you worked harder, you were rewarded for it. And then what started happening in the 70’s, for a whole host of reasons, is that productivity continued to rise, and you could just see it just going exponentially up. But wages stopped rising, and they started to flatten out and stagnate.
And one of the things that drives me nuts is when I hear mainstream media reports talking about, like, oh, wages are rising, and now we're worried about inflation. It misses this decades long perspective that that little bump in wages that they're talking about is still. Still trillions of dollars off where it should be, you know? And so what's been happening is that people are working harder and harder, but they're getting less and less for it because costs are rising. And that who's really enjoying the fruits of all that labor are the top 1%.
Because at the same time, if you look at what's happened with, like, CEO or C-Suite salaries, there was at one time, back in the sixties, a CEO would make maybe 60x what the average worker made. Now it's 400 to 1000. And God only knows what Elon Musk's ratio is. So there is continued productivity, but it's all going to the owners and not to the workers. And that's been incredibly painful for so many people.
EMILIE: Right. It makes it feel almost like we're just digging in quicksand here, you know? If we're not going to be part of that 1%, which, that's the lottery mentality, right? That kind of hooks all of us, like, oh, I'm going to live in America. I think someone in your book that you quoted said, yeah, if you can be in the 1%, you should definitely work in America. But if you don't believe that your odds are in your favor that you're going to somehow be in that top 1% of income earners, America's not the best country to live in as a worker.
BRIGID: It's really not. And one of the reasons why, you know, we talk about public policy, and that's really important, you know, that we don't have, you know, we haven't raised the federal minimum wage since like, 2008 or nine, you know, it's still $7 in some sense, you know, which is outrageous. We don't create really good jobs that are big enough for people to live on anymore.
One of the other things that I found really astounding, you know, we think if people, you know, if they're living in poverty or you're just not making it, again, that individualistic narrative, you just need to work harder, you need to get more education, you should get workforce training. You just need to get a better job. But we're not asking the bigger question is, what better job? They just aren't there. What we've got, I call it in the book, the crapification of jobs. You know, we've got a lot of low wage work. I was shocked. 44% of the workforce is considered low wage in the United States. And yet, if you read The Business Press, all of it is about like the 30%, the knowledge workers, the more elite workers.
And when you look at the people earning the lowest wages, two thirds of them are women. So if you're a Feminist and you care about equity and you care about gender equality, you have to care about all the care workers who are literally earning poverty wages and the service workers and the hospitality workers and the cleaners, those need to be good, life sustaining jobs, too.
EMILIE: Right. Absolutely. There's a couple other big ideas in your book I want to kind of create some space base for up top. One is a broad definition that you bring to work itself. So when you're talking about work throughout the book, you're not really just talking about paid labor. Right. Why is that?
BRIGID: Exactly. We have always thought, or we're trained to think of work as what we do for pay in the market. And because there's, like, money attached to it, you know, that's what we measure for GDP growth. That's what we value. That market work is what's important to. And that mentality has meant that all the unpaid work of care and home, you know, civic involvement, volunteering, that's sort of like this shadow sphere where it's really invisible and it's undervalued.
And so then you see that also happening in the paid work, because then you have paid care work, or teaching, or nursing. And when you look at kind of like, where people are on the income spectrum, why do doctors earn so much more than nurses? You know? Yes, there is education, obviously, but why do janitors earn so much more than cleaners? You know, why do principals earn so much more than teachers? It's still very gendered, and the care work that mostly women do is very low paid, because we have that sense that it's a labor of love. It shouldn't be part of the market. And so I think that was one of my first revelations.
I read this book by a Dutch Historian. His name is Jan Lucassen. It's called the Story Of Work. And it was like this huge tome. And that's one of the arguments that he made, is they said, you know, and I attribute this to him in the book, you know, so I don't want to be stealing his idea, but I want to be building on it. He just said, all activity that is not leisure is work. And that just like, that was like, these bells went off in my mind. It's like, work is what we do for pay, but it is also all of that unpaid care work. And all of that work needs to be good work, valued, visible. And what I loved, again, you know, again, being very influenced by Jan Lucassen, he said that throughout human history, good work has always been defined by three principles, meaning, fairness, and cooperation.
And I think that's so important in all the ways that we work, paid and unpaid, is that we do get a sense of meaning, purpose, and identity from that work. We have an innate sense as human beings of what's fair, which is why people can get so angry when things are so unfair. And, like, we've got so much income inequality, and there's so much unfairness in that. And the third thing is that cooperation, which is that we are not islands, that we, as human beings, are cooperative, and that the best work is when we work together. You know, that that's when it's most meaningful.
EMILIE: And, again, that butts up against Individualism and, like, this consumer culture that especially millennial parents are feeling. Because so many of my peers don't live near family, I'm very fortunate that my whole East Coast family moved out here to Denver, which is great.
BRIGID: Oh, that's wonderful. Nice.
EMILIE: And, you know, it's a game changer, because we were never meant to do this alone, I think, in overwhelmed. Did you mention alloparents in that book?
BRIGID: Yes, I did.
EMILIE: You know, I learned that term from you, and I think about it a lot, honestly, because. Because we were never meant to parent with just two parents or just one parent, God forbid. Right? So that, again, that whole collectivist approach and social approach to work, unpaid and paid, really butts up against this hyper individualism that has turned us all into consumers who pay for care, who pay for help, who pay for Uber Eats, because mom isn't around or dad isn't around to go pick up some food when you're nursing a newborn for you, you know? So, I love that book. I'm gonna have to pick up that Jan book because I love how you weave those ideas throughout this piece.
So when we think about the combination of paid and unpaid labor and the fact that purpose filled work has always been central to people's sense of meaning and contribution in the world, what I really like about this book is it's not a takedown of work. It's not at all part of the anti-work conversation, which is kind of a big one lately. Right?
BRIGID: It is. Work is central to our lives. What I do take down is the way that we do work, because that's the problem. Work is not the problem. Derek Thompson talks about workism and how work has become a religion. That's a problem. Overwork is a problem. Workaholism is a problem. Worker exploitation is a problem. But, you know, even going back to the Protestant Work Ethic that people talk about, it was always defined by doing something meaningful. That was kind of a challenge, but that you did in concert with other people to make the world a better place.
The Buddhists call it Dharma. We come unto this earth and this short life we have. What are we going to do with that time? And I think that's the work of our lives. And I just think that the care that we do, the volunteering in the classroom, the, you know, how you contribute to the, to your community, the mural that you might paint, you know, the friend that you visit, all of that. All of that is valuable. All of that is work.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And it used to be more possible before everything you described happening, since the 1960s and 70’s, it used to be more possible to have a living wage, even if you weren't, you know, a knowledge worker in the white collar kind of work environment, to find meaning in your retail work, to find meaning in your care work, in whatever paid labor keeps the world turning, and then have a life outside of work.
And so it is depressing. I'm not gonna lie. The first two chapters in your book, I was like, oh, my God, things are so bad, so systemically bad. It makes me overwhelmed just thinking, like, how do you untangle this ball of yarn? So let's talk solutions, because there are some great solutions out there, and I particularly, by the way, love your appendices, which are like a nice little cheat sheet for all the great ways that you can systemically unpack this. If we acknowledge, first and foremost that individual solutions, the wellness programs, the meditation apps, are, like, not cutting it.
BRIGID: They play a role. So I don't, again, it's like, I'm not hating on work, and I'm also not hating on those individual solutions. But what I do argue is that for real change, and I think the change agent stories really show that you need to be thinking about it on three levels. What can we do as individuals? Because we do, that's where we live. We need that sense of agency. What can I do? What can I do if I'm a leader on my team? What individual change can we make? But we also need to look at organizations. What organizational change, and then look at public policy, cultural attitudes, those larger changes. We need all three of those. We need to push on all three of those levers.
EMILIE: Okay, I love that. Let's jump ahead to lever number two, then. What organizational solutions? Just because Bossed Up, here at Bossed Up, we've covered a lot of the individual angles. What are some of the highlights that stood out to you in terms of organizations who are doing this right, who are willing to reimagine work?
BRIGID: Do you know, probably the most shocking thing to me. And, you know, I spent ten years researching and reporting this book, and I've talked to a lot of people. I've read a lot of stuff, and it's going to sound so simplistic, but it really all comes down to leader mindset. It is shocking to me. I read so many wonderful research reports about organizations that would have a creative leader pop up, and they would try a really innovative work redesign, and they would design it well and implement it well, and they would gather data, and they would iterate. They'd learn from it, and it worked beautifully. And people were happy, and well being was high. So was productivity, profits, you know, the work got better. It was better for everybody. But then a new leader would come in. Oh, what is this, I don't work this way, and then just trash can it over, and over, and over, and over again. And so what I came to see, a key driver of any organizational change, is really leadership mindset and what leaders choose to believe and just the power of story.
You know, Heather McGhee wrote, I was so influenced by this. She said, everything we believe comes from a story we've been told. So, you know, a lot of leaders buy a story of work that they succeeded in, and let's look at who the leaders are. Most of them are white men. Most of them have not had primary responsibility, or maybe any responsibility for care, the work of care at home. They've had a partner do all of that, or they don't have it, or they don't know their children's names, or they don't have children. You know, that's been very kind of ideal worker work focus. So that's who's in charge. And they grew up in that very masculinized, overworked, work devoted system, um, where you kind of hide your, you know, any kind of duties that you might have outside of work, or any interests you have outside of work.
And what's interesting is, like, where they go for information is not down. It's not like they don't even know. Most companies don't even know what care responsibilities people have. And there was a Harvard Business School study that showed 70% of employees, you know, of workers have some kind of care responsibilities, particularly as our population ages, and more people have, like, aging parents that they need to care for. I mean, that's sort of where I've moved. My kids are older. I've got a 93 year old mother. 92 year old mother. Sorry. I'm giving her a little bit of extra, extra, extra heft there. But, so, 70% have care responsibilities. But most leaders don't know that. So they don't know who's working for them. They don't know what their pressures are. They don't know the styles that would work for people, and they talk to their peers. And so what we've got is this corporate monoculture echo chamber, and it's all based on a story that they believe, based on their own personal experience. And I don't know any better definition of bias than that, right there.
EMILIE: Yeah, absolutely. And as a Leadership Development Professional, my heart is just singing, as you say, all of this. Because even in the appendix, you say, like, get the basics right, right. You know, like, what does good management look like? Let's be creative here. When we enable people to have some agency for getting things done. But good management should be outcome-oriented, should be crystal freaking clear, and should be, you know, open to listening in a mutually beneficial way about, like, what will work for folks. And you even go as far as to advocate, you know, for middle managers to have, first of all, you say middle managers have a lot of influence here…
BRIGID: A lot of power.
EMILIE: …do you want to speak to that?
BRIGID: Yeah. So all of these are sort of like these big aha moments. So I was really interested. You talk about the Anti-Work Movement, and there is that, but there's also this other really exciting movement that's sort of picking up steam of shorter work hours or the four day work week movement. And so I was tracking that. I was following it, and I got to tell you, in the States, I got a little frustrated with it because it tends to be, I think it's better now. But when I started working on the book, it tended to be very knowledge worker, you know, kind of tech bro, you know...
EMILIE: We can say his name, Tim Ferriss, is just outsourcing all of this labor to no benefit contractors. That's like his whole hack, right?
BRIGID: …Well, you know, the people who are doing the four day work week movement, that's not going to get you to gender equality necessarily. You know, that's like people who are going to do it so they can go surfing on Friday. So it's a very elite group. And again, what I'm most driven by in my life is I want equitable access to the good life across race and class and gender. I am all about gender equality. That's what drove Overwhelm. Over Work is really all about gender equality, you know. It's about a lot of things, but that's really what drives it.
So I wanted to know more about the four day work week, but I ended up going to Iceland. And I know everybody's like, oh, my god, Iceland. They're so small, and why did you go there? And we could never be Iceland. That's true. It's homogenous, it's teeny tiny. But what's fascinating is that they made short work hours available to 85% of the workforce. So, yes, the tech bros, but also nurses and doctors, police officers, childcare workers, shift workers, pool attendants, you know?
And they did it for two reasons. One was for well being and stress and making people's lives better, having more and time for your life. Well actually, three reasons. The second reason was for gender equality, and the third was to make work better. And so I went to see, well, how do you do that? Okay? Because I would love to work a four day work week, but I end up working way too much. I love my work. I also have too much to do, and I get tired, and so then I become inefficient. All of those things. I struggle with all of this. So I'm not here as a Guru. Listen, I wrote this book because I need it, too.
But I went to see, like, well, how do you do it? And it comes back to your point of, like, leaders and managers and middle managers, because what was fascinating to me is what they had to do is really, organizational excellence mission and figure out from the start, who are we? What do we do? How do we make our money? What's our value? What do we do differently? What's the best way to do it? Who needs to do what? Why? When? What's the best way to do that? What's the process? And they redesigned all of that, and, you know, a lot of what they found were like, wow, why do we do this meeting? Why do we do that meeting? Why do we just, you know. They had to interrogate the way they worked because they were just going off on a status quo bias. You know, and I love it now that I think the four day work week movement has evolved and there's now more class equity, which I think is good.
But when you talk to some of those leaders, they'll say, really, a shorter work hours, pilot, or effort is really an organizational excellence mission in disguise. And middle managers are the key to that, because the leaders need to set the vision and kind of give you the permission to do it, but the middle managers are the ones who execute it. And I think that was what was so interesting in Iceland. I met with the architects, and I had lunch with, like, someone from the federal government and someone from the big unions, and they would have this meeting every week to try to help people figure out how to do it. And they just said, middle managers will make or break any kind of work redesign that you got going.
EMILIE: Absolutely. And like, that precision of people management, that, like, next level leadership skill set is just, to me, like, the missing link in so many organizations that can help make or break it. Like, yes, you need clear KPI's or a vision set from the senior leadership team, and then we have to really empower the level beneath them and the level beneath them, if it exists, to actually meet those goals however they see fit.
I know our time is limited, but I would be remiss to not ask about some of the biggest public policy initiatives that can help unlock the good life for everyone to really drive equity, to your point. We've talked at length on this podcast about our childcare affordability crisis, about rights for pregnant workers, about sort of the renewal and renaissance around unions and workers rights. What, among all the public policy levers that you think our federal government can actually pull, do you feel most optimistic about right now?
BRIGID: Well,... [EXASPERATED NOISE]
EMILIE: If any. [LAUGHTER]
BRIGID: …how about I, yeah. Well, I mean, I'm fighting the good fight here, you know, and it's astounding to me how difficult it is. You know, in the United States, we are so far behind in some of these policies that would make work and life better for people, but also make the society stronger and businesses stronger and democracy stronger. So I think we are kind of frozen in some very poisonous and outdated narratives, which is why at the Better Life Lab, we're trying to work on narrative change, on truer and more positive narratives to get us going in a direction that can actually benefit people.
But to answer your question, let me go aspirational, because we know we need better, not just childcare, we need better care infrastructure. We need a lot more federal investment, federal and state investment in that, because it's a market that doesn't work. Parents pay too much, care workers earn too little. There's not enough to go around. Providers don't earn any money. It's a system like schools. It needs to be considered a public good, like a school, like a library. That care is something that helps all of us live better lives, helps our economy go, helps businesses run. And so it's something, we need to embrace and work on together.
We absolutely need paid family and medical leave, paid annual leave, paid sick days. I mean, it's astounding that we are this huge economy, and we don't have any of those protections. We need better worker protections, worker rights, worker voice, you know, put workers on corporate boards like they do in Germany. We need better unemployment systems so that instead of a layoff or a firing, spiraling you into chaos and poverty, it can kind of, like, give you a buffer and help bounce you up and into the next thing.
But I would say the key to all of that, and this is why I want to go aspirational, and I write about it in the last chapter, is really rethinking our economy itself, really rethinking all of our systems and how we measure our value and success. And I was really struck by this other new movement, the well being economy movement, where you measure your success not by GDP, or growth, or quarterly profits, or your stock, you know, what the stocks are doing. You know, all of those things that we use to measure our wealth. It's wealth for whom? 50% of the people have not a dime in the stock market. So, you know, you tell me how the stocks do that doesn't tell me how I'm doing.
And so when you have a well being economy, and there is this nascent movement, I spent time in Scotland. They're sort of the directorate of the well being economies movement, government movements. The way you measure your success and your wealth is the health and well being of your people, the planet, your society, you know? So then, rather than looking at the stock market, you look at child poverty, or you include the stock market, and GDP, and child poverty, and maternal mortality, and, you know, how many public parks you have, and social isolation and loneliness. You look at all of that, because when you put all of that on the table and you get a clearer picture of the lives people are really living, it leads you to make different decisions about the policies that could make life better for everybody.
EMILIE: I love it. Talking about KPI's right? Like, that's good management of a government, of a country, like, what's on our leadership dashboard here, because it shouldn't just be quarterly profits. I love that reimagining. Brigid thank you so much for sharing such a aspiring, but also inspiring vision for where we can go to make this better and make work work for everyone. Where can my listeners learn more about you, the work you directed, the Better Life lab, and get their hands on a copy of Over Work?
BRIGID: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. It's so wonderful to reconnect with you. I love the work you're doing. You know, the book is available just anywhere that you buy books. There will also be an audiobook for people who like to walk and listen, which I do as well. I love reading and listening. People can find out about me. I've got my website is brigidschulte.com that's what. Pretty easy. I am on social media, though not very regularly, sadly after what had been, Twitter became sort of a dumpster fire. I don't really. I'm not on there as much anymore.
EMILIE: Same. First of all, same. Yeah. And RIP Twitter. [LAUGHTER]
BRIGID: Right, exactly. Sometimes I'm on LinkedIn and at the Better Life Lab, it's the work, family justice, intersectional gender equity, and elevating the value of care. That's the work we do for New America. And so you can go to the New America website and find the Better Life Lab there. We've got a newsletter, um, where you can kind of see what we've been up to and what we're reading. Kind of keep up on the issues of the day. We've got lots of big projects that we're working on, and we're all in to try to make the world a fairer and better place, particularly for women and caregivers.
EMILIE: Absolutely. Well, keep up the good work. Keep fighting the good fight. Brigid I'm a fan from afar, and it was so lovely to reconnect. Thank you.
BRIGID: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
EMILIE: For links to everything Brigid and I just discussed, as well as lots of related episodes that I've covered here on the podcast before that, so much of this dialogue kind of reminded me of, head to bossedup.org/episode472. That's bossedup.org/episode472. And there you'll also find a fully written out blog post, synthesizing all of Brigid's great key points in today's discussion. As well as a full transcript, if that's your jam.
I want to hear what you made of this conversation. What did Brigid say that really stood out to you, and what did it get you thinking about in terms of how we can all be advocates, not only in our own personal lives, around reaching for the good life and kind of wrestling the good life out of the daily grind, that is so entrapping and so suffocating for so many of us, as well as how we can be good advocates for systematic change at the organizational and policy levels.
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I'm really excited to hear more about what you think about today's conversation. So, as always, let's keep the convo going in the Bossed Up Courage Community on Facebook or in the Bossed Up LinkedIn Group. Until next time, let's keep bossin’ in pursuit of our purpose and together, let's lift as we climb.
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