Thank you. It's great to be here.

Absolutely. I have been with Deloitte for 23 years, pretty much the entirety of my career. I started in a marketing role and in school I studied business and business management and ultimately marketing. The truth is that my father was an accountant. He also worked in a, I think it was the big 8, then the big 6, and now it's the big 4. He worked in one of the large accounting and consulting firms. The truth is, I didn't really know what I wanted to be when I went into college. I wanted to be a personal trainer and my parents didn't think that that was such a good idea. Although I still think it's a pretty good idea. I went into accounting actually and I got through accounting intermediate too and I said, "There's no way I can do this for the rest of my life."

At that time, I switched into business management marketing. I was still passionate about health and well-being, and in particular, at that time, exercise. I have a weird minor in exercise physiology but as I look back on my path and my career and what I'm doing now, perhaps there was some interesting foreshadowing there going on about how the worlds were going to come together later on in my life. As I started my career, I was in marketing and I did pretty well, moved up quickly through the ranks and then went on to be the chief of staff for one of our former CEOs here at Deloitte.

An incredible role, it gives you a ton of knowledge and exposure, but I would also say that for many of us that do the role, either knowingly or unknowingly, it's not the kind of role that has the most work life balance associated with it and that's okay. I counsel a lot of people about those types of roles and what I tell them is do it for a defined period of time, know what you want to put into it and know what you want to get out of it. I think that's true with anything in our career, but I didn't know that. I didn't get that guidance and counseling along the way. When I came out of that role and went back into our marketing organization, the truth is that I found myself in a complete state of burnout. This was 9 years ago, and we weren't talking about these things 9 years ago in the workplace.

I knew there was something wrong. I didn't know what I was experiencing but more importantly, as I look back on it, when we live and work in a culture that is high performing, we're also good at showing up and pretending like everything is okay. Because I didn't know what I was going through, I looked around and I saw many other people that seemed fine, seemed like they could handle it. I processed it as more of a personal failure, and that somehow, I couldn't cut it, that I didn't fit in here. I was afraid to ask for help because I thought that if I asked for help or I sought out help, that would be perceived as some sort of weakness.

So, I let it get bad that I eventually got to the point where I had to take time off from work, where I physically, mentally and emotionally couldn't engage in life or work in any meaningful way. I had to seek out the help that I needed, primarily from a mental health perspective. Truthfully, that personal journey, for many of us, unfortunately, is what changes us. It's the wakeup call that we need and going on that journey, myself in this recognition that there's much more to who we are as human beings and our well-being than just physical health. Because for me, it was always about, I was an athlete growing up, exercise was always a part of my life and still is today, a very important part. But there's much more. I didn't have that realization until I struggled with burnout, until I started to struggle with my mental health.

I took that time off, came back to work and sat down with my leader, who is still today a great friend and mentor. I was actually going to resign from Deloitte, and it was her vision, probably more than mine, where she said, "You're not resigning. You're not leaving. Because if you need this, there's a lot of other people here that need it too". That was kind of a mind-blowing moment of, "wait, what?" She's the one that really gave me the permission and the platform to go down the path of exploring what corporate well-being could and should look like. Again, this was 8 years ago, where we weren't talking about these things in the same way in the workplace. Not to say that organizations didn't care or didn't have good benefits or great benefits for their people, but we weren't embedding it into the culture, and we certainly didn't have a language to talk about it. We didn't have the research and the data to back it up in terms of the impact and the value of it that we now have. In some ways it's now easier but there's a lot of other things today that are making it harder too. I think we've come a long way, but we still have a lot of work to do, inside of the workplace and outside of the workplace, quite frankly.

It's a really great question. You're going to laugh but it's the truth. The first thing that I did, I mean, obviously we laid out the business case and the strategy because I did have to put that together for the broader leadership. I will say that I think that at Deloitte, I got very lucky because the business case wasn't a hard sell to the leaders. It was framed around high performance in many ways, for sure requires people to be well. If we don't have a workforce that is well and taking care of themselves and feels supported to take care of themselves and all of the other things that we didn't know then that we now know that are impacting people's wellbeing at work, which we can get into, we're really sub-optimizing the bottom line of the business, right? Because what Deloitte does for our clients is our brainpower. It's helping clients. It's helping the world's largest, most important companies solve the most complex problems that they have, and the world has in many ways. You need really smart people performing really well to do that and to do it consistently. It's not like the research that I looked at at the time was really based on high performance and sports, because that was the only research that really existed. The comparison to high performance in sports, but where that diverges in the working world is that an athlete trains to perform for a season or an event. Someone in business trains to perform literally all the time.

It is in many ways the same, but also a very different animal. The part that I said you were going to laugh about is, one of the first things we did was to create a framework because we're accountants and consultants and we need a framework. Without a framework, we don't go anywhere. We created a framework of what does wellbeing mean at Deloitte? What can you, as an employee of Deloitte expect from a wellbeing perspective from the organization? How will we empower you? What does that look like? What's supported? But we also created a language, because we didn't talk about these things in the world of work 8 years ago. We kind of had to give people the language to speak about it and the permission to speak about it and show that we really meant something by it, because I think a lot of people can probably relate that in big organizations and probably a medium and small, sometimes we get really excited about initiatives, and we go all in on an initiative. Then 2 years later or even a year later, we all kind of look back and we are like, "Wait, what happened to that thing?"

It was really important to me and my colleagues and also my leaders that this wasn't an initiative, that this was truly something that we were committed to for the long term, which meant that we may not see ROI in year 1 or even year 2, although we do and we did. This was something that like any change management takes time because it's really challenging in many ways the mindsets and the behaviors of the world of work, and that continues to evolve and change. I don't know that that has calmed down any. I think as we learn more and the world gets more difficult to live in and operate in, that becomes even more of a need and perhaps even more challenging to accomplish, because we live in this world that seemingly feels and looks very divided.

What I will say about measurement and that's probably a whole different topic is, I know that this is difficult in business, but putting measurement aside, because although we can and will get to measurement, I think what you ultimately see, if done right in the first year or two, you actually see and feel the change, so you don't need to measure it or you can measure it but what you see and feel is impactful and meaningful. I think the most important thing that we all have a responsibility for, whether we are leaders or colleagues, regardless of our role or a level in the organization, is to talk about it, and to open up the conversation. But I do think that it's really important, as leaders of an organization, to authentically and meaningfully get behind the effort.

What I mean by authentically and meaningfully is you have to walk the talk. The workforce of today is really, really smart, and has a different set of expectations. They want to know who their leaders are and what their leaders stand for and what their leaders believe in. They can sniff it out when it's not real and authentic. Leaders do need to be authentic. That is going to look different for every single leader. Their stories are all going to be different. Their level of comfort in terms of vulnerability is going to be different. But leaders need to walk the talk. That's the first thing.

I think the other important thing that is showing up in the data now is well-being is actually a leadership skill set. It's a skill set that can be trained, however, we don't train it. It needs to move out of the realm of being a nice to have or a soft skill and become an essential skill, maybe not a hard skill because those are more technical in nature. It really is an essential leadership skill that to date most organizations have kind of left it to chance and said, "Well, we have some managers that are good at it and some that aren't," and that's just not cutting it. It really needs to be part of the leadership skill set. It needs to be something that people are taught, people that are gold against. That is part of the performance expectations, not a carrot and a stick. But this is something we genuinely care about, and you need to know how to lead through the lens of well-being if you are a people leader or manager at an organization or at our organization.

Then I think empowering your people, one of the things that we did fairly early on at Deloitte was, because we were getting much feedback and excitement from our workforce, they wanted to engage. Many of our people have this passion for different aspects of well-being outside of work, but they wanted a way to bring it to work with them. Whether they were certified meditation instructors or yoga instructors or something in nutrition or you name it, they exist in our workforce. They were reaching out. How can I help? How can I get involved?

Creating a community, we call it well-being wizards, but we've created a several thousand. I think we're about up to 7,000 by this point of our people, where we've created a community and a platform and a way for them to bring their passion around well-being to work with them within their teams, within the organization. I think the power and beauty of that is, number one, no organization is going to have a huge wellbeing team. We don't at Deloitte. That's just kind of the way it is. You have to learn to influence and leverage the resources within your organization in a different way and there's no better way, I think, than empowering your own people to say this is something we really care about here. If this is your passion, by all means bring it to work with you. The experience for them is enhanced but then I think also the ripple effect is, if I see my colleague doing it, that means I can also do it too. Because we tend to kind of look around, like I said, in my own story, when I was burning out, I looked around and I was "Okay, well, it's only me". This is the flip side, right? If I see my colleague showing up to our team meeting and leading a meditation or talking about something from a well-being perspective, that permits me to do the same. Permission when it comes to well-being, I think in our organizations is still really, really important. I hope we get to the point one day where people don't feel like they need permission, but they still do.

Yeah. It's been both, bottom up and top down. Absolutely. I think that the bottom up in most organizations is already happening. The workforce is demanding it and doing it, and it is showing up in many different ways beyond just somebody leading a meditation. The workforce is speaking their mind, but it has to be top down and bottom up.

In terms of top down and some of the things that we do at Deloitte that have been really impactful, we call it team behaviors and norms. Through our research and my co-author, Anh Phillips and I talk a lot about this in our book, "Work Better Together." The research that we did, and probably not surprising, but we wanted the data behind it, is that the people that have the biggest impact on your well-being day in and day out are, number one, your direct leader and manager. We've seen that research beyond that the direct leader and manager or manager has as big of an impact on your mental health as your partner or spouse. That's pretty amazing and alarming at the same time. But beyond that, it's our team.

How do you define a team? Team is the people that I spend the most time engaging with on a day in and day out basis. They are the ones that have the biggest impact on both my well-being and my behavior around my well-being. We created a program that's around team behaviors and norms, where we empower all of our teams to come together on a regular basis. This is not just one and done but come together on a regular basis and talk about what's important to each individual on that team when it comes to their well-being. What do they need? What type of support do they need from the team, and to generally talk about and put into place working norms. What do I mean by that? We are a global organization. We have a huge workforce that is in India, and we work across time zones. What are our expectations when it comes to work? What are the expectations in terms of email response time? What are the expectations of when I'm supposed to be on or need to be on?

A lot of this came about honestly, as a result of the pandemic. We were hybrid before, but we all went completely virtual. A lot of people at Deloitte and otherwise were working more hours, probably because it was a coping mechanism, because we felt like we could control work and we couldn't control anything else that was going on. But that led to higher levels of exhaustion and overwhelm. Therefore, setting parameters around, "Okay, these are our standard working hours as a team," and there might be a team across time zones but these are the hours where we can all expect to be online and collaborate with each other. When I started in the role 8 years ago, the things that we thought about or the things that we implemented nationally were really programs, tools and resources to help educate our people on the importance of movement and exercise, the importance of rest, recovery and sleep, the importance of nutrition and how to fuel your body in ways that allow you to, not from a diet perspective, but just an understanding of how food impacts your ability to be present and engaged and how it affects you cognitively, those types of things. If you step back, not that those are unimportant, they're still very important and foundational, but a lot of those things happen outside of the traditional workday. What we didn't think about at the time, 8 years ago, was the impact that work was actually having on people's well-being.

I think what the pandemic highlighted for us, and you step back now and you're like, "Well, that was dumb. Why didn't you think about that?" Is the actual impact that like the way that we're working and the expectations around work, and also, more importantly, the lack of clarity around how I'm supposed to work, when I'm supposed to work and where I'm supposed to work. You're seeing that play out across the globe and in the media, in the big swings of everybody's going to the office, nobody's going to the office. There's no clarity of when to go to the office, how to go to the office, what the expectations are? Now you're seeing headlines that people who work remotely aren't getting promoted or getting laid off more, those types of things. We still haven't figured it out. But I do think the fact that the conversation is being had more and more is a positive. I just don't think that any organization has it fully figured out. But I think the fact that we're talking about it is a positive thing, even though it's being talked about in a very negative way sometimes.

For sure. I think that is very much reflective of the thinking behind well-being as a leadership skill set. Being able to identify when somebody is struggling. Not that we don't see it now, but I think it's not different from your story, I have a story like that. But we tend to personalize it and make it about us when it really hasn't, I think that's human nature. Maybe, it's our own insecurities as opposed to stepping outside of ourselves and saying 9/10 and even 10/10, it has nothing to do with you.

As a leader, how do you lean in and have the right conversations with people, and how do you feel comfortable doing that? Because I think what we've seen and what we've found, especially when someone is struggling with their mental health or struggling emotionally, I think that a lot of people are afraid to have those conversations or uncomfortable having those conversations, not because they're bad people, but because they're afraid they're going to say something wrong or do something wrong. That's the absolute worst thing you can do is not have the conversation because you're scared of saying something wrong, because most of the time, the person doesn't expect you to fix it. They know it's not your job to fix it, but they also want to know that they're seen and heard and not alone.

As somebody who's struggled with her mental health, especially grief can be very isolating, I just published an article on this. Grief can be very isolating. Because we live in a society where we don't talk about grief, we certainly don't talk about death. They're almost taboo topics. Grief by the way can come about by way more than just death. We just don't talk about it. It's a misunderstood emotion. So when somebody is going through it, it's very isolating for them but when we perceive somebody might be struggling, it feels so uncomfortable to have that conversation. But I think as a leader, the most important role you play is having that conversation. What I mean by well-being is a leadership skill set, because we don't teach people how to have those conversations, and you can teach people how to have those conversations. That's not to say that you won't always feel uncomfortable, but at least you'll have this skill set or the knowledge in, "Okay, how do I approach this? What do I say? How do I just sit and be there with the person and not try to fix it?" Because I also think in the business world and for very high performing individuals, we want to jump in and fix things. When we can't fix things, it drives us crazy. Just being able to sit there and be with somebody is uncomfortable and to sit and metaphorically hold their hand through it is uncomfortable for a lot of people. I understand that and that's why we do need to teach it.

We wouldn't still be here if we didn't have it.

I love that. I think that unlike many of the headlines that we read about generative AI, and certainly there's risks and threats associated with it, but I think that there's an incredible opportunity to use generative AI to really enhance who we are as human beings or said differently, allow us to be truly human. To know that when we show up as humans, that's what's valued. That truly is the work and the definition, if you will, for human sustainability. We do have a big thought leadership piece coming out on 6 February, but really human sustainability is from an organizational perspective, what is the responsibility of an organization and its leaders to create value for people as human beings? When you think about the traditional or historical work model and not that it was bad, but much has changed and humans have evolved in a very different way, there are very different needs, we have to move away from this extractive view of an organization that hires you to do a job and they pay you and that's the end of the relationship. Because the most important thing for every organization, whether it's a business, a university, a school, or otherwise is human relationships and will always be human relationships.

So yes. We have generative AI, and we have the promise of all of these technologies, but humans are still here and will still always be here. We need to think differently. We need to adopt a different mindset and a different behavior on how we view and how we engage and interact in those relationships with humans in the workplace and inside and out. One thing we haven't touched on is that it is also kind of a threat to our humanity and the way that we live and work in many ways is climate change.

All the work that is being done around climate change, the regulations and the rigor around ESG. But if you look deeply into that, the S, which is the human component, the social component is the component of ESG that has the least amount of rigor, the least amount of investment. Quite frankly, the least amount of understanding. it's not that people don't want to do anything about it or that leaders don't think that it's valuable. They just don't know what to do and we're lacking in that definition and how do we move forward with these human relationships when there is much going on that is changing from a technological perspective, but also the things in our world that continue to divide us. To me, that's a real threat and a real concern.

It's multiple things. Every year, Deloitte does what is called our annual human capital trends. It's a big in-depth look at what we believe the trends in the human capital and the human space are going to be. A key trend for 2024, amongst other things, is human sustainability. There's a handful of other topics. One most notably is around measurement and productivity and why we need to move away from productivity as a true measure of success in the workplace, which I am a huge advocate for. But that's a whole different conversation that we would probably need to have. Anyway, if people are interested, there's a lot in there, obviously, about AI and generative AI and its impact on all these things. That comes out in early February.

I think that would significantly change the world of work. I do think that this notion of well-being as a leadership skill set has to start with you first. Because it is almost impossible to create an environment or a culture of work that puts the human at the center, promotes and supports human health and well-being if the leader isn't leading in that way or isn't doing it for themselves. I talk a little bit about this in my TEDx talk that it has to start with us, right? Because it's true. I mean, even as leaders, if we try to mask that it comes out in different ways and people see it and feel it and our workforce is looking to us, as I said previously, leaders have to walk the talk. If you're just talking the talk and not actually walking the talk, that's more detrimental than actually doing nothing at all because people are looking to you to role model what's accepted here and how I can be successful here. If you're saying one thing and doing another, what's more important than what you're saying is the perception of what it takes to be successful here, right? People see and feel that so we have to lead ourselves first. 100% count me in. However I can help move that journey forward, I think that would be a huge disrupter for the world of work and much needed.

They innately understood it without having to be taught. I think that's so true. I think that the other thing that we all have a responsibility for, but leaders and just societally, I think that along with that comes the definition of success. What does success mean? What does success look like for you? Not what society tells you success is or looks like, but I think that we've kind of gone a little off kilter on that. We have created this societal definition of success that most people will never reach in their life, and many that do, you ultimately find, aren't very happy.

That comes from the inside and that's work that needs to be done to say, this is my definition of success. It doesn't actually matter what yours is or anybody else's is. That's what I reflect on when I think of that. What you're saying that wouldn't or was saying is right? If you are good here and you're meeting your own needs and expectations, then you can truly show up and serve others.

Yeah. It's a really great question. I do think it's not one that we have fully solved, because I do think that the nature of our digital world, I mean, we know that, even prior to the pandemic, we were living in an epidemic of loneliness. The US surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, and his team have done much work on this.

From an organizational perspective, this is not something that Deloitte actively does right now. But it is something that we are talking about. In a world of work where there is much going on, both from a work perspective and in a personal perspective, how can we give people time and space or actually give people credit for time and space so that we can nurture these connections? What does that look like, and how do you do it in a way that is authentic? Because the last thing that anybody needs is an appointment on their calendar that feels like a waste of time, I'm just doing this because Deloitte told me I have to. That's not a true human connection.

What I can say is that the beauty of human connection and reaching out to someone not only benefits them but benefits you. I think that we need to remember that, because I do think our tendency in a digital and virtual world is to scroll social media instead of reaching out to somebody. How can we stop that behavior and remind ourselves that it's much more beneficial to me and the other person that instead of looking at what they're doing on social media, call them. If you don't want to call them, send them a text and say, "Hey, I'm thinking of you. What's going on in your life? What's going on in your world?" It's simple acts like that that don't take very much time that have huge benefits.

I think that's what people need to realize, because I think when we talk about or think about social connection, yes, huge chunks of time that being with people that you enjoy are really important. But human connections can come about in many different ways. I think there's a lot of promising technological tools that if we use them correctly, there's a big promise of eradicating loneliness and helping to promote human connection. But I think that we just need to all remember in the workplace, and you said it beautifully already is that we're all human beings, and there's a really good chance that we're all struggling with something at one point or another, or there's something going on in our personal life that is showing up at work and vice versa because there are no boundaries anymore when it comes to that.

I think that we just need to remember that and come to, as much as possible, every interaction with kindness and grace. If something feels off to you, that's the time to pick up the phone and say, "Hey, is everything okay?" That doesn't cost you anything, literally costs you nothing. As a matter of fact, you get more back from it than you probably give. Not a concrete answer, but the best I got right now.

I think you said it, right? Trust. I know that it was a huge topic at the World Economic Forum this year, its trust and the erosion of trust in our organizations, in all of our institutions and governments and things like that. The only way to rebuild trust is through building deep and respectful relationships with other human beings. That's something that cannot be replaced by any technology. Full stop.

I agree with you, and I do think that it's again like many of our other identities, of which all of us have many. We can't ask our workforce to leave any part of their identity at home. That would include faith and spirituality regardless of where your faith is or what your faith is in or where your spirituality comes from. We also know from a pure well-being perspective, but also purpose and sustainability, that faith and spirituality for many people is really an important aspect of their well-being. It is what fuels them. It's what lights them up. I don't think that we can ignore that, and, in many ways, I think I am a student of hope. I recently wrote a piece that hope is one of the most important strategies, because we always hear that hope isn't a strategy. Again, I think hope is a strategy, and it's a strategy that all business leaders need right now, because hope gives people a different mindset for the future, it gives them a path out of where we are now. They may not feel great, but hope is what allows us to move forward. Otherwise, we get stuck. To me, hope comes from a very spiritual place because it's not rooted in data. Yes, there is some science behind it. There's a whole theory behind it, but it's hard to measure. You can't measure or quantify the value of hope. I put that in that spirituality frame as well. I think that it's important, and I think that many organizations are recognizing that. At Deloitte we do have faith in allies, BRG group that we've created recently because of feedback from our workforce that, "Hey, this is an important part of who I am, and I want to be able to show up in the workplace."

Like you said, we've lost our ability for some reason to have these types of conversations with people in a respectful way, and that's hurting us as human beings. I want to know about you, who you are, what makes you resilient, what you believe in. That doesn't mean I have to agree with it, or I have to believe in it myself. But you know what? I might learn something and that makes me a better person. I think we have to stop coming at things like, "Oh, well, I don't believe that. Therefore, it's taboo or has no place here." It has a place, and you don't have to believe it, but you have to show up in a way that you're willing to have the conversation and do it in a way that is safe and inclusive of other people that it matters to.

But the rest of us are still stuck.

Yeah, and I hope that grows because we need to get better at accepting and acknowledging all of the identities that exist within the workforce, within the human race, quite frankly. Because that only makes us better.

What excites me is that these topics in large part were never discussed, or in some cases were either relegated to HR because they were people related issues or even taboo in the minds of many, and I think that the top has been blown off of that. I think that you would be hard pressed to find a business leader today that would tell you that well-being and human sustainability doesn't matter. That's what excites me, because there's recognition, there's talking about it and that's where it starts, right? If we don't recognize that there's a problem, we're going to have a really hard time fixing it. I think that there's a burning platform for a whole lot of reasons that you and I have covered during this conversation. I think there still exists a gap between knowing and doing. How do we move? We need to move quickly on some of these things. With all of the things that business leaders are dealing with now, and there's a lot, and all of them are a priority, which makes it very hard to make any one of them a priority. How do we move this to the top of the C-suite agenda? Because that is truly where it needs to be. It needs to sit right next to generative AI and right next to climate change, right next to trust. Because we're going to have a really hard time accomplishing any of our stated goals in any of those other areas if we don't get the human component right.

Maybe I have read his work; I've read a lot of work on regenerativity and regenerative humans and how they need to rise to meet the need. I may not recognize the name, but I probably read his work.

I mean, you mentioned a whole bunch of them at the beginning, but I am pretty active on LinkedIn and happy to connect with people through LinkedIn. Obviously, I am the host of a podcast called WorkWell by Deloitte, where I have the opportunity to talk to thought leaders and others in the space of well-being and well-being at work, as well as the book "Work Better Together." I have a TEDx talk called "The Future of Work," where I touch on many of the things that we talked about today. Lots of ways to connect and see what we're up to at Deloitte and beyond. I'd be happy to connect with anybody that wants to.

Thank you so much. This is a wonderful conversation.