The tech industry is beginning to understand that for a company to be successful, its employees need to be emotionally and physically healthy. Stress, burnout, anxiety, and let's face it, the universal pains of adulting, drastically affect the bottom line. There are plenty of apps and products that claim to help with this, but a true culture of mental and emotional health must be built from the inside out. In this talk, psychologist and founder Dr. Emily Anhalt explores the importance of supporting your team with their emotional fitness and gives practical, concrete tips for building a true culture of wellness.
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Lead Turing Fest 2019
Weaving Mental Health into the DNA of Your Company
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Thank you. Hi everyone. So my name is Doctor. Emily Anhalt. I am a clinical psychologist and I am the co founder and chief clinical officer of BEAM, which is a gym for the mind. So I've been practicing clinical psychology about ten years, but I grew up in Silicon Valley.
And so I've been kind of steeped in the world of entrepreneurship for a long time. A lot of my community is in tech. And one thing that I saw a lot is that for a long time there was kind of this blind spot to how important self awareness and emotional health are if someone is going to be successful in the world of technology.
And I was interested in this and I decided I wanted to think about what it would look like to bridge the gap between interpersonal psychology and the startup world. As I did this, something came up time and time again and that was this interesting idea of the so called work life balance.
Balance. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't really know where to draw the line between my work and my personal life these days. I work from home a lot. My co founder has become a good friend. I think about my job all the time.
I answer emails until midnight, and this is all by choice. It's by choice because I love what I do. And I think more than ever, in the tech world, people are doing work they love, that they find meaning in, and so they're defining their life and their identity by their work in a new way.
So for this reason, who you are anywhere is who you are everywhere. And if you are bringing your whole emotional self to work, then it's really important that you are just as committed to working on your emotional self in the workplace as you are to working on it in your personal life.
Now, I'm sure a lot of you have noticed that mental health is kind of having a moment in tech right now. The stigma is starting to drop and a lot of people are being more vocal, not only about their mental health issues, but also about their mental wellness practices.
So people are being more outspoken about starting to see a therapist or getting a coach or meditating every morning or journaling or taking up yoga. Right? People are talking about these things more, and that's fantastic. But it's also started to happen in the name of self care.
Now, self care is really common language these days, and it's kind of gotten trendy to invest in your self care. And the positive aspect of this is that it spreads awareness. The more people hear about something, the more likely they are to try it.
But the downside of something gets the downside of when something gets trendy is that it can kind of get co opted by people who want to make money off it, and it can get a little bit bastardized, which means that it loses some of its original meaning.
So where self care used to mean making thoughtful, smart, compassionate choices for ourselves, now it's sort of used as an excuse to do whatever the hell we want. Right? So, sure, drinking a glass of wine in the tub while watching Netflix sounds lovely, but I don't know if I'd actually say that mixing alcohol, hot water and electronics is that good of an idea.
So instead of the term self care, I like to use the term emotional fitness. Emotional fitness is an ongoing, proactive practice that strengthens your resilience muscles, and it improves your emotional health, It increases your self awareness. It improves your relationships, and it's going to make you a better leader all around.
Just like with physical fitness, there's no quick fixes here. You can't work on your emotional health for a weekend and then think you're good to go. You have to be constantly investing on it and work on it over time. So I wanted to figure out what this actually looks like in the context of a workplace.
One thing I knew for sure is that it starts with leadership. And so I wanted to define what does it actually mean if a tech leader is emotionally fit. So I decided to do some research. I interviewed one hundred psychologists and entrepreneurs, and I took all of their answers around what it means to be an emotionally healthy leader.
I said, if you were sitting across the table from someone who was clearly mentally healthy, how would you know? What would it look like? What would it feel like? So I took all their answers and my own ten years of experience working clinically with founders and investors and entrepreneurs, and I did an interpretive phenomenological analysis, which is a fancy way of saying I transcribed the interviews and I coded them for themes.
And I noticed that the themes kind of coalesced around these seven traits, which I named the seven traits of the emotionally fit founder or the emotionally fit leader. So here are the traits really briefly. An emotionally fit leader has self awareness. They are aware of and they can manage their own emotions.
They have empathy. They are aware of and care about other people's emotions. They are playful. They incorporate play into the workplace. They are curious. They meet conflict and disagreement from a place of curiosity instead of defensiveness. They are mindful, or in other words, they are comfortable being uncomfortable.
They are resilient. They can bounce back from criticism, feedback, failure. They can weather the storm of entrepreneurship. And finally, they're able to communicate effectively. So I've spoken about these traits a lot, including yesterday at the founder event, and I've worked with a lot of leaders to cultivate these traits.
But this is actually not what I'm focusing on today. Because of the way startups work, it is not just our leaders who are emotionally invested in the success of a company. Now that we are doing work we love and now that we're spending such big chunks of our lives at work, it is just as important that the culture of work, the atmosphere that we work in, be mentally healthy as it is that any individual person be mentally healthy, because one begets the other.
Now, companies definitely have taken notice of this. I've seen a lot of companies try to invest more in the mental health of its employees, and I've seen this happening with all kinds of perks that range from really lovely to just completely ridiculous. So I've seen things like free yoga for all employees.
That sounds really nice. Right? It gets people a chance to recalibrate, to get emotionally ready for their next meeting after lunch. I've also seen things like all of the cars in an employee parking lot are just washed automatically every month so that employees have one less thing to worry about and feel a little taken care of by the company.
And then I've seen things that I don't really think are all that healthy, like free flowing, constant access to alcohol, beer on tap at work all through the day. But what actually works? What is it that actually increases emotional health and mental health in employees at a company?
This was what I wanted to find out. And luckily, Google had done some of this research for me with something they called Project Aristotle. So Project Aristotle was a long term research project Google did to try to answer the question, why are some of our teams outperforming the other teams?
They had this handful of teams that were just absolutely crushing it, doing all of this amazing work, really mentally healthy, and they wanted to understand why that was. Was it that these were teams of rock stars, where everyone on the team was really good at their job?
Was it that these were the teams that were working together the longest? They didn't know. So they did all this research, and the long and short of it is that what they found is that the most successful teams were the ones that found a way to cultivate an atmosphere of psychological safety.
And by that, what they meant is that everyone on those teams trusted that they had a voice that was going to be listened to and respected, that it would be heard and that people would care about that. They also people on these teams felt safe to be honest and to make mistakes and to harness the diverse perspectives of other people on the team.
In other words, there was a lot of trust on these teams. So this really resonated with me, but the question still remained, how does that happen? How do we cultivate this culture of psychological safety at work? So I did another round of research, but this time in pursuit of that, what a company can do to make this happen.
Interestingly, what I found were another seven traits that mapped really nicely against the seven traits of the emotionally fit leader. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to go over each of the seven traits of an emotionally fit culture, and I'm going give you a suggestion around how you can start to cultivate that at your company.
So the first trait is healthy leadership. This is the most important one, and it all starts here. That old saying, do as I say, not as I do, that just doesn't work. That's not how it works. If you want your employees and your culture to be mentally healthy, you have to be mentally healthy.
Or at least, you have to be invested in increasing your mental health and send the message that it's something worth investing in. If you're a founder, an executive, a manager, a leader of any kind, you are setting the ethos of the company. People are looking to you to figure out how they're supposed to be at work.
And so if you're saying a bunch of things about how policies should be and what people should be doing, but you're not doing any of them, other people are going to follow suit. So how do you increase your own healthy leadership? Well, I recommend investing in a really great coach or a fantastic therapist.
The work that you can do for the world is extremely tied to the work that you've been willing to do on your own self. I think a lot of leaders believe that they're supposed to do it all, and they're supposed to somehow be able to do it all on their own.
But if there's one thing I've learned as a therapist, it's that if you're in a helper position, it's very important that you have support yourself. A coach is someone that's going to help you make better leadership decisions, and a therapist is someone who's going to help you understand your patterns and your emotions and your relationships.
And I think there's a lot of misconceptions about therapy, that it's only for people who are really in crisis or something's wrong with them. And actually, therapy is for anyone who wants to better understand their place in the world. I really can't think of a better investment with higher returns than this kind of investment in yourself.
The second trait of an emotionally fit culture is one where employees feel a sense of agency and trust. It's really important that your employees feel like they have a voice and that you trust them to do their job. Employees should feel like they can fail and make mistakes and try again and learn.
And it's also important that you empower them to do the work of having the agency to figure out what it is they actually need to do their best work and then to ask for it. Because different people work differently and learn differently, and that's actually okay.
A lot of accommodations can be made for that. So at my company, what we do is something called an emotional fitness survey. What this is is as part of onboarding, any new employee gets sent this survey that they fill out that's all about who they are and how they work best and what they need from us as leaders and what they need from the company.
And now we have all this information about them. And part of why this is so useful is that it's a lot easier to talk about what you need before you need it. So we send this to them right when they come in, and then the information comes in really handy later.
So not only does this survey give us access to this important information, but just by sending the survey, we're communicating to them that we care about them as people, and we care about how to make sure they're getting what they need. So I'm going to show you some examples of questions on our emotional fitness survey.
You, of course, should tailor it to what makes the most sense for you and your company. So one of our questions is, do you like to be praised in public or in private? Those of us who like to be praised in public might take it for granted that not everyone's like that.
There are some people who really would prefer to be pulled aside and be told what they're doing well on their own rather than it happening in front of other colleagues. So that's a good thing to know. Another question is, do you prefer feedback that's direct and blunt or gentle and sympathetic?
Now, is it always going to be possible to do this for them? No. But if you know how they tend to take things in best, that's going to help you when you have to tell them something difficult. How do you like to be cared for or cheered up during tough times?
This one really comes in handy a lot because it's an inevitable thing that over the lifespan of someone working at your company, difficult things are going to happen in their life, or they're going to have down periods. So knowing things about them like, hey, when I'm down, I really love flowers.
Or, you know what, when I'm down, I actually like to be given space, and I want to be sort of left alone. Or, you know, for me, it's as simple as, I just want to know you're there for me, don't try to fix anything.
Right? So knowing this about people gives you the tools you need to help them when they need it the most. Another question is, do you prefer to be supported closely or given space and freedom? So a newer employee who maybe wants a lot of mentorship and wants to learn is going to feel a little bit differently than someone who prefers to be given an assignment and then kind of left alone.
Right? So knowing this in advance, maybe it helps you decide which manager to put them with, or maybe it just helps you decide how to manage them. And then finally, we always include the question, what else would you like your manager to know?
Right? This gives people the agency to include anything we might not have thought of. So maybe someone says, oh, you know, something that's good to know about me is I don't feel comfortable speaking up in meetings, so I'd love to schedule a one on one with you regularly to share my ideas.
Or someone might say, you know, I have been told that when I talk to people, it comes across really harsh, but please give me the benefit of the doubt. It's all coming from a place of caring. Right? So those are some of our questions.
Of course, you're not always going to be able to tailor everything you do to what people want from you, but you'd be surprised how many issues are prevented just by knowing these things in advance. Alright. The third trait of emotionally fit culture is one that is filled with play.
I think play is hugely undervalued in the workplace, and I also think it's a little misunderstood. Most people think of play as a sports game or a board game or a video game, and these are great kinds of play. But in the context of work, I really like to think of the improv definition of play.
In improv, when someone comes to you with an idea, you don't say, Oh, yes, but and you don't even just say, Yes. You say yes, and. You meet them at their idea, you expand on their idea, and together, the two of you get somewhere that neither of you could have gotten alone.
So brainstorming is a type of play in this way. And play has a lot of huge benefits in the workplace. Play increases creativity and spontaneity. It builds community and culture. It improves memory. I actually read one study that showed that people who play on a regular basis live longer by a significant number of years than people who don't play regularly.
The thing about play though is it's a little bit vulnerable. Right? So that makes it kind of tough to do. When you play, your guard comes down naturally, and that can be tough for people who work hard to keep their guards up, especially in the context of work.
But if you build it into your culture, you're signaling to your employees that this is a safe thing to do here, and they will lean into it. So my suggestion here is, try starting your meetings with an icebreaker game. Icebreaker games connect people, it gets them on the same level, it really prepares them to work collaboratively, and also, it's fun, and it makes people feel more excited to come to work.
This is something that I can actually help you with personally because I've put together a packet of work appropriate games, many of which we played at the founder event yesterday, and I will give you access to that packet at the end of this talk.
Alright. The fourth trait of an emotionally fit culture is one where employees feel a sense of community and belonging. All of those things that Google found to be important, confidence you can take risks and fail, the ability to challenge each other, feeling heard.
Right? These are things that happen when you feel confident and safe about your place in a community. It has been proven that people will go to extraordinary lengths to protect and defend a community that they feel a part of. And this is what you want for your business.
You want employees who feel so loyal and so much a part of what you're doing that they're as invested in the success of what happens to the company as you are. So there are a lot of ways to build community. Right? You can do team off sites, or you can just be really welcoming and make people feel like they belong.
But it's important to go the extra mile to make sure that there's inclusivity for all. Whether this is through the language you use, so making sure your job descriptions aren't gendered, or maybe it's through photography, making sure that the photos on your website represent a diverse group of people, or even events.
If have an accompanying event, making sure there are vegetarian and non alcoholic options available to your employees. Now, these are three of many, many examples. And, you know, there's so much more to this, but the main thing here is that this is impossible to do on your own because you are one person with one perspective.
Right? If the only people who really feel like they belong at your company are the ones who think like you, then you're in trouble. In order to see things from many perspectives, you have to have many perspectives. So a diversity and inclusion three sixty means you bring in professionals whose job it is to look at your policies and to speak to your employees and to figure out how to give you an assessment and suggestions around making sure your culture is being mindful of inclusivity.
So I recommend investing in this. The fifth trait of an emotionally fit culture is a proactive mindset. In almost all things, issues are easier to prevent than they are to fix. Right? Just like it's probably better to work out and eat healthy now than it is to wait until you get sick and then try to fix that illness, it's really important to be proactive in the workplace.
Burnout, for example, is much easier to prevent than it is to fix. If you wait until people are already way past their limit to encourage them to take care of themselves, a lot has already been lost. So, by adding policies into your culture that prevent burnout, you're going to save yourself time and money and frustration.
So some examples of how to do this are things like offering a no questions asked mental health day policy, or discouraging email and Slack on weekends, making people feel like they can really turn off and take a break. Allowing work from home days for people who genuinely feel like they work better from home, or even just making sure people actually take their vacation.
Right? They've proved that this new thing of unlimited vacation days is actually not that effective because people end up not taking any of the vacation days. So you as the leader should probably be taking your vacation to signal to other people that they can take their vacation.
So this is an email exchange that went kind of viral that between a CEO of a company and an employee. Essentially, the employee who has some anxiety and some depression wrote to the CEO and said, hey, just to give you a heads up, I'm going to take tomorrow off to take care of my mental health.
I should be feeling better and back to work on Monday. And the CEO wrote back and said, thank you for this, not only for taking care of yourself, but also for helping to reduce the stigma around what it means to ask for what you need around your mental health.
Now, the fact that this went so viral signaled to me that this is this novel concept, that it's an okay thing to advocate for yourself, and it's an okay thing to give permission to your employees to take what they need around mental health.
But if someone had the flu and felt terrible or or felt like something was coming on, you would probably encourage them to stay home. Right? And so why wouldn't that also be the case if someone needs to rest and relax their mind? The sixth trait of an emotionally fit culture is stability and integrity.
So start ups are kind of defined by change. Right? The product will change. The teams will change. Everything about the entire company and the direction of what you're doing might change several times. But consistency is important for mental health from the time that we're babies and we take our nap at the same time every day.
When everything around you is changing, you need to have something that you can rely on, right, to help mark the passing of the time in a way that feels dependable. So maybe your whole product will change, but your core values, for example, should be something that people can count on staying the same.
So my suggestion here is create some traditions and rituals. Traditions and rituals are at the heart of every ongoing culture and community, and work should be no different. Right? So they strengthen bonds, and they create reliability, and they just increase joy. Right? There's something people can count on.
The thing about this one is you really don't need to overthink it. Try a bunch of different things, throw some things out there, see what sticks. People will lean into the ones they really like and run with them. So here are some examples I've seen at companies.
One startup I worked with does Above and Beyond Day. And what this looks like is, once a month, someone calls out a colleague who really went above and beyond that month. Maybe they worked really hard and finished a project. Maybe they just set a good example.
Maybe they were a good manager that month. Maybe they were just really kind. And so the person who got shouted out gets surprised. At this company, it was that they got to choose where lunch was catered in from that week. Right? And then the whole company benefits.
Everyone gets to eat lunch from that place. Then the next month, whoever got to choose lunch the previous month, it's now their job to shout out a different colleague who went above and beyond that month, and that person gets to pick lunch and on and on.
And what I heard at this company is that people tended to just naturally be good about trying to call out different people rather than the same ones over and over. So everyone eventually kind of got to do this. And it was just this way of validating and recognizing people, and also people knew.
Okay, the first Friday of the month, it's above and beyond day. Right? And there was an excitement about whether or not you might be chosen. Another tradition I've seen is anniversary markers. So I've seen this done a couple different ways. And, this is just a way to recognize how long someone has been at a company.
So at one place that I worked with, the founders were in the military. And so what they did was, at year one of working for the company, you got this really cool jacket with the company logo on it. And then at year two, you got these really amazing patches that go on the jacket.
And then at year three, you got this cool pin that goes on the back of the jacket. So you could look around and you could see how long people have been part of a community, and you could kind of look forward to the idea of adding something to that.
Right? I've also seen something like engraved wooden blocks that mark different occasions. So when you hit year one, you get a block with a one on it. When the company raises a series b, you get a block that says series b. And so you kind of have this collection of accomplishments and time markers that sit on your desk and it's just kind of a nice way of of recognizing the contributions you've made.
And then I've seen something that I love called Gratitudeuesday. This one's really simple. Every Tuesday, there's a Slack channel called Gratitudeuesday and everyone in the employ every employee adds one thing they're really grateful for to this Slack channel. This is a really easy thing, but people can count on it and they do it, and it gets everyone in this lovely mindset of feeling grateful for the small wins and for each other once a week.
So, these are all, you know, small things. None of them require an insane amount of money necessarily, but you can kind of start anywhere with these. Throw things out there, see what sticks. Finally, the seventh trait of an emotionally fit culture is one of communication and transparency.
I really cannot stress enough how important good communication is at a company. It prevents misunderstandings, it solves conflict, it just generally ensures that people are working toward the same goal. I think it's pretty common to assume that if something's going to hurt someone's feelings, that maybe you shouldn't say it.
And, actually, I really want to empower you to respect your employees enough to know that they can handle even difficult truths and they would probably rather hear what's true than have it hidden from them. When things are hidden from us, we can feel it.
People are perceptive and it doesn't feel good. So my recommendation here is create a system of ongoing proactive structured feedback. A lot of startups will wait until something goes wrong to give people feedback, but by doing this in an ongoing way, you're allowing people transparency into how they're doing.
You're going to catch a lot of the small problems before they become big problems. One thing we do at my company is called Feelings Friday. Every Friday, my co founder and I take some time and we share one thing that we feel the other person did really well, a moment where we felt supported or that we saw them really work hard or that something went well and and we share that.
And then, we share one moment where we maybe felt a little disappointed or let down or unseen by the other. Now, the latter is really important because unprocessed disappointment calcifies into resentment, and resentment is a really toxic thing for a company. So by processing through disappointment as it happens, you're going be able to put it behind you and move forward.
And the other part of this ritual, the sharing positive aspects, is just as important. We tend to be really detailed and give a lot of examples when we're giving negative feedback, but when we give positive feedback, it's like, oh, good job. Right? You should be just as invested in making sure people know that they are making a difference at your company and why as you are in making sure they know if something isn't going well.
So those are the seven traits, and what I really like about them is that they're really interconnected. They all influence each other. Play improves communication, communication fosters trust, trust builds community, etcetera, etcetera. So you can start anywhere with these traits, and the others will kind of naturally improve.
So I wanted to give you five things you could do in the next week if you wanted to kick start some emotional fitness in the culture of your company. The first one is design your own mental fitness routine. Maybe as a leader, it's time that you start seeing a therapist or a coach or meditate every morning, download Calm or Headspace, go to a yoga class, whatever it might be.
It's not going to happen overnight that you're going to become suddenly extremely emotionally healthy as compared to before, but just the fact that you're doing it is going to signal to your employees that they should think about investing in it as well. My second suggestion is create that emotional fitness survey.
What kind of questions should be on there? What do you want to know about your employees? What would come in handy? And my big suggestion here is when you do this, you should fill it out too. And the employees should have access to the information so they know more about what you need in order to do your best work.
My third suggestion is download this packet of games that I mentioned. So if you pull out your camera and zoom in on this QR code, it will auto prompt you to download this packet of games. And, these are games that I've put together over the years and you can use them to bring people together at the start of meetings.
If for whatever reason the code doesn't work for you, you can also email me and I will send it to you. My next suggestion is take a nonviolent communication course around workplace communication. So nonviolent communication is a conflict resolution language that was invented in the seventies.
And, what I really like it about it is that it kind of gets people on the same page to communicate when they really aren't in agreement with each other. So if you go take a course on this and it really resonates with you, you can bring this language to your company, and now everyone will speak the same language.
It makes it a lot easier to get through conflict together. And then finally, think about starting a new tradition or ritual yourself. It can be anything. Right? Maybe you love to bake, so once a month, you bake for the company and bring something new.
Or maybe it's that from now on, there's a game of capture the flag every year that all employees play in for some fun prize. Whatever it might be, just give it a try. If this all resonates with you and you want to continue your education on it, here are three books I like.
No Hard Feelings is a great book around why it is important to make space for emotions at work. So especially if you're like, do we really need to prioritize that? Check out this book, it will convince you. The second one is Radical Candor.
This is essentially just a really straightforward and clear book that tells you how to give feedback that is transparent and helpful at work. And then finally, this book, Nonviolent Communication, will tell you about this conflict resolution language and how to implement it. Now, I'm also working to build a home and community for emotional fitness through my startup, Beam.
At Beam, you'll be able to take classes and workshops on topics like this one, you can see a therapist, and it's all in the context of a community, other people who are also committed to doing this kind of work. So if you're interested in learning more, you can scan this QR code, it'll take you to our website, or you can just go to findyourbeam dot com, put in your email, and you'll stay up to date on our launch.
So my digital door is always open. I would really love to continue this conversation and hear your ongoing success stories as you build mental health into the culture of your company. Thank you so much, and have a wonderful Turing Fest.