#91: The Elephant in the Room: Institutional Resilience & Quiet Cracking

Speaker A: Mark, welcome to the stepsero podcast. It's a, uh, pleasure to connect with you here.

Speaker B: Thanks, Matteo. I'm happy to join you.

Speaker A: Mark, you are the clinical manager of Behavioral Health Services at Sedgwick, which is a renowned leading Risk and Claims administration partner. And May is Mental Health Awareness Month. So it feels like a suitable time to discuss some of the concerns related to mental health in the workplace. There's a, uh, a report by the national alliance on Mental Illness that recently came out. They state that one in four employees have thought about quitting their jobs because of the toll essentially that they're taking on their mental health. This is quite concerning, to say the least. It's 2026. We're still having these conversations. What do you make of that? And may I ask, are you surprised in any way?

Speaker B: To be honest with you, I'm surprised it's not higher. I. I think that if they were truly going to ask this question of people that felt safe answering the question, I think you'd probably look at maybe around 40, 45%. Um, I think, I mean, let's be honest, everyone is under a tremendous amount of stress right now, and there's a lot of events going on in the world that are certainly impacting us, but also just huge shifts in work itself, um, especially since the pandemic. And. And I think we're just in this period where there's a lot more awareness of mental health issues. And I think also we have this emerging Generation Z coming up in the workforce that's demanding conversations about these things. Um, there's almost a generational shift in the workforce that is expecting their employees to honor the employee's mental wellness and prioritize that. And so I think that's why we're also talking about these issues more now than we were even 10 years ago.

Speaker A: You mentioned that these issues, obviously they are more and more discussed these days. Do you think companies, on average, are really aware of the magnitude of these issues because it is growing concerns? Uh, yet I'm not really sure that we're doing enough about it.

Speaker B: You know, that's kind of a loaded question. I think that, um. M. Ideally, I think companies are probably aware of the issues, whether they have the resources or the focus on addressing those is a whole different matter. Um, and so a lot of our work here is to bring to light mental wellness issues, um, for employees and help managers prioritize that, because the alternative is the people will. And you talk about the survey. 25% are thinking about quitting their job. Um, I would Say, probably higher than that, are feeling burned out, or what they call quiet cracking. Uh, the people that are staying in their jobs but are also feeling overwhelmed, maybe overtaxed in their responsibilities, maybe they don't have the same focus on time management or work life balance. And I think a lot of the folks that are still working in their jobs, even if they're not truly thinking about quitting, they're getting close to burnout. And so I think, um, it's important for managers and organizations to, if they haven't already prioritized it, that they really do need to focus on supporting their employees.

Speaker A: Mark, you mentioned quiet cracking. Now, over the years on podcasts and news and online posts, we've seen many trends popping up, so to speak. Quiet quitting is one of them, indicating professionals, let's say not going above and beyond, but rather doing the bare minimum, so to speak. Where do you place quiet cracking in the conversation along quiet quitting Burnout? What is essentially quiet cracking? How would I best describe it to people who have never heard about it?

Speaker B: Okay. You know, it is one of those little PR type catchphrases that someone in a conference room or maybe in their bedroom just came up with and it just, it took. Um, but basically we're talking about quiet cracking. This is a phenomenon that happens sort of pre burnout. So you've got the early warning signs of burnout. And these are people that are usually your top performers that have a, uh, record of high performance, that have given above and beyond to their employers and their work product and time commitments and overall sense of duty to their work. And then they're starting to feel overwhelmed. And so you're seeing slight cracking. I call it crispy around the edges. It's, it's where you're starting to see evidence of burnout around the edges of somebody. And you're going to see this in things like absenteeism is going to go up. Uh, you're going to see this in increased mental health claims. If you've got a disability benefit for your employee group. You're going to see people calling off unexpectedly or taking their time to, maybe they're late to meetings or other things. You're going to start seeing some behavioral changes. They're still going to perform at a high level, but you're going to see some slipping in some of the attention to detail and some of the attention to timeliness in those types of things. And so those are the early warning signs that employers really should focus on, because the next step after quiet cracking is burnout. And once you hit burnout, there's really not a whole lot of cure for that.

Speaker A: Now this is a million dollar question and maybe there is no straightforward answer to this, but what can one do course correct this trend. So you mentioned some of the so to speak, signals that managers, um, can spot ahead of time. What can they do to prevent quiet cracking to turn into a fully fledged burnout?

Speaker B: Well, I think the first thing they need to focus on is prevention. Don't wait for the early warning signs of it. Know that it's there. M, you've got the survey telling you 25% are looking to change jobs. That should be a wake up call right there. You, you know this exists. Don't put your head in the sand. I mean this is, this is where we're at. And so I think as long as employers can be preventative, I think that is going to be the biggest influence on supporting mental wellness in the workplace. But if you're not used to doing that and you're not proactive in that, then step in and have conversations with your employees. I think managers, and this is something we talk about a lot in where I work is training managers on how to have emotional discussions with their employees, uh, without being their therapist obviously. Now it's a little different because I am a therapist, so I have a team of therapists. So we, we talk it a little differently. So I'm not thinking that what we do in my work group is going to translate to all work groups because we, we talk about emotions all day long. But managers do need to start talking in emotional ways to their employees and not just focusing on performance. And the ways to talk about emotions would be just to acknowledge that they exist. Check in. How are you feeling today? I mean it's just a simple question not how are you doing today? How are you doing today implies I want some information on tasks and where you are with deadlines and those types of things. But if you ask your employees how are you feeling today? Then the shift becomes on their mental wellness and that you are caring about that, to ask about it, um, and then be open minded to listen to things that may feel negative. You want to create an open space for people to feel comfortable sharing their, their feelings in a way that you can then support those feelings. And that's going to provide you with a lot of information to then address ways to resolve some stressors that somebody may be expressing or some time crunches that they may be experiencing or maybe there's some shifts in their work life balance that you as A manager can definitely address by encouraging people to take time off, encouraging people to attend to their personal, uh, business outside of work hours, but then try to make those work hours sometimes flexible to allow for personal lives to happen. Those are things that managers can influence very directly just by showing that they care, but also prioritizing that. Because if you have a happy employee, you're going to have a productive employee. I mean, that's the bottom line. And so there's a real business drive for having happy, engaged employees. If you have burned out employees, eventually you're going to have a high turnover and people are just going to leave in droves and you're going to have a hard time attracting new employees. If you've got a reputation out in the community that you don't prioritize mental wellness. Because I'll tell you, Gen Z, they want that, Millennials want that. Gen X, my generation, we didn't really prioritize it, but I'll tell you, we're prioritizing it more now as we're looking at the demands of elderly parents and children and sometimes even grandchildren in some cases. There's a lot of demands on our time that didn't exist in our 30s and now that we have in our 40s and 50s that, um, make a difference and make a difference on our satisfaction in where we're working.

Speaker A: Mark, I love that you touched on emotions and emotional intelligence. M. I am wondering, we hear a lot about empathy these days and to some people it may be somewhat an abstract concept. We hear about empathy, we don't exactly know how it manifests or how to, let's say, put it to use. Do you think empathy is something that can be learned as a skill and can you get better at it?

Speaker B: That's a great question. Matteo and I've actually done some trainings on empathy building. Um, yeah, I think there's this myth that empathy is something you either have or you don't have. And to some extent it is sort of decided your empathy skills are sort of formed in your early childhood through different, ah, play and storytelling and reading and movies and all sorts of things that force you to take other people's perspectives. And so a lot of empathy skills are developed in early childhood with good parenting. Empathy, though, is a skill. It's not, it's not an innate, genetic, immutable trait. It is something that like all skills, like listening is a skill that you can develop over time. It takes a little bit more effort, but you can develop it and become better at it or at least become better at expressing empathy because I think what sometimes happens with managers is that they feel this, they feel their employees struggles. They can see it, they can sense it, they have empathy for it, it. But they have a hard time communicating that empathy to their employees because they don't want to cross over into I don't want to get in their business mentality, or I don't want to make my employee uncomfortable by talking about something that I see that they're struggling about. And I think that is where managers can take a leap of faith and ask about those things. You don't have to judge. You don't. In fact, you don't want to judge, and you don't want to become someone's therapist, and you don't want to become a sounding board for every single complaint or gripe or stressor in their lives. You're not their best friend. However, you do need to be curious and compassionate with your employees to get to understand them better and to let them know that you truly care about them. And that goes a long way. So empathy is something you can learn, but I think more importantly, you need to learn how to express empathy. And that's, that's an easy skill to learn. It just takes some practice and some guidance.

Speaker A: There's another term that I want to ask you about. It wouldn't sit right with me if I didn't. It's resilience. And it's another term that gets thrown around a lot. It's one of those pass me the term buzzwords sometimes that attract an audience, but sometimes it's, I feel, addressed the wrong way. And some people would say that, um, employees should learn how to be more resilient in daring times. Is it something that you agree with or is there more to it?

Speaker B: Well, I think, I mean, it's similar to empathy where a lot of companies now throwing around, oh, we have empathy, or, you know, we, we support resilience and our employees. I mean, it is a buzzword. You're absolutely right. And I think with any buzzword, I think there's some kernel of truth behind it that is trying to sneak through. Um, resilience is one of those things. And I think the thing about resilience is. Let me just kind of back up. Resilience is, is someone's basically their, their personal fortitude and ability to handle stress based on a whole variety of factors. Usually things that are developed that support growing humans to, to be able to tackle stressful situations. And it's kind of done through trial and error throughout your life. How you handle adversity and inconveniences and, and how you develop coping skills. It's, it's sort of this network of coping skills that you've developed over time that help you navigate stressful situations. That's what resilience is. Employers will sometimes focus on and I don't even know if it's sometimes it seems to be more frequently now where they put the focus of resilience on the employees. Like that is your, that's your problem and you need to get better at it. And if you are better at resilience, then you can handle all this extra workload that I'm dumping on you. That, that seems to be where a lot of managers get tripped up on this. They think of resilience in terms of it's an employee's responsibility, it's the individual's responsibility, when in fact there's resilient cultures, there's resilient workforces, there's resilient work teams and the managers really need to focus on how do we as a collective, uh, support each other and help each other become more resilient during this. And it isn't so much, you know, a bottom up approach where the employees have to then speak up and ask for things in order to set boundaries that are healthy for them. The employer, the manager needs to be aware that boundaries need to exist. They need to be aware of what that workload is that they're giving their employees, what impact that will have on them emotionally stress wise and time. All of those things employers need to be aware of and need to be conscious of. And they need to make some adjustments on some of that or at least provide some resources and some tools for their employees to navigate some of those very stressful things. So it's a two way street. It's not something that employees need to speak up and become more resilient. We have this phrase, you know, pull yourself up from your bootstraps and tackle the world. Yeah, that, that, but that's a myth. People don't do that. There's a lot of other barriers to that that are institutional barriers and those are things that managers, frontline managers, are well equipped or well positioned, maybe not well equipped, but well positioned to make an impact, a real positive impact on the resilience of their own employees. And that's something that um, I think a lot of workforces aren't really addressing and there's definitely room for, there's definitely opportunities to improve or upon that.

Speaker A: I wonder if we should speak about companies, leaders or managers Having an opportunity to impact their employees mental well being, or rather an obligation. It sounds like a strong word. Can you help me with that? What do you think is the right approach?

Speaker B: I think both, I think both. I think there's an obligation, I think just ethically and morally there's an obligation. But I think from a business standpoint, it makes good business sense to treat your employees well and to be mindful of your impact on their stress levels. That makes good business because if you don't do that, then the repercussions are going to be pretty severe. People are going to quit, they're going to, and you know, you have a disgruntled employee, they quit and you're placing one person. It takes a long time to replace a person, it takes a long time to train a person, it takes a long time to get them proficient. And all this while you were losing out on potential historical knowledge and expertise. And all these things are going to hurt your bottom line. So it just makes good business sense, not even from a moral or ethical standpoint, but just good business sense to treat your employees well and to prioritize supporting them in their mental wellness. So yes, there's, there's an obligation, but there's definitely an opportunity there too, because most employers could benefit from improving upon those skills. Nobody's perfect, Nobody. Some employers are doing a great job of it. There's always room for improvement. Other employers aren't doing a fantastic job of it and it shows with turnover. Uh, and I think, I think there's an opportunity to improve kind of across the board, um, by not only talking about it, but then supporting your employees directly.

Speaker A: Mark, as we head towards the end of our conversation with the, let's say 30 seconds, one minute we have left, let me conclude, if I may, with the final question. And uh, I think the question is, could be the following. Let's say it's the year 2050, you know, about 24, 25 years from now, you open your laptop. I mean by then it will might be like a hologram or something. You are reading the news and my question to you is, are you reading anything about quiet cracking, individual resilience, or are you somewhat pleasantly surprised that we reached a different stage when it comes to mental well being at work?

Speaker B: Well, Matteo, I, I'm a social worker by background, so I have this built in optimism for us as a society that we will eventually get this right. Um, so I am, I'm hopeful that these issues will be issues of the past. I think mental wellness will always be an issue that people struggle with, but I think our tools will be different, um, and how we handle that, and we support our employees. Um, so I don't want to give you, like, a yes or no, but I'm hopeful. I am absolutely hopeful about it.

Speaker A: Mark, thank you so much for your time. I'm very grateful for this conversation, and hopefully we'll get to this soon.

Speaker B: Again, thanks, Matteo.