Even royalty can suffer from burnout.
Speaking at an event hosted by coaching platform BetterUp on Thursday, Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex — who serves as the company’s chief impact officer — shared his struggles with
“I was getting to the very end of everything I had,” he said. “And that is when you are forced to look inside yourself. With everything else around you seemingly feeling as though it's working against you, the only way that you could really combat it, and the only way you can build resilience for the outside world, is through inner work.”
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The idea of “inner work” was the focus of the BetterUp event, which gathered business leaders and notable speakers including Prince Harry and tennis superstar and entrepreneur Serena Williams to discuss how self-reflection through mindfulness practices can help improve mental health.
“We've all been in a situation where we have to learn that we need boundaries, because it truly helps our performance and how we are going to get our best out of ourselves,” Williams said. “It's like you're on a plane ride — you can't help anybody else until you put your mask on first. That's a situation that I've been in a few times where I'm literally trying to help people, or trying to help my career, but what I really needed to do was, in effect, put my mask on and make sure that I was okay internally.”
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In the workplace, employers continue to grapple with a rampant
“Inner work is work,” Alexi Robichaux, co-founder and CEO BetterUp, said during the event. “It’s purposeful and it's intentional, and it can be challenging. Investing in who we are, how we show up and what we value is one of the best ways for us to do better work outside of ourselves.”
Prioritizing inner work and self reflection has been
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When WarnerMedia was rolling out HBO Max to the world at the start of the pandemic, the company realized it was asking its employees to take on the task of competing in an entirely new market — against giants like Amazon and Netflix — while also navigating the unprecedented stress created by COVID-19.
“We set really ambitious goals and stretched our teams in ways that they hadn't been prior to the pandemic,” said Rebecca Josephson, vice president of people growth and leadership development at WarnerMedia. “We really wanted to be super conscious of the risk of employee burnout. For us, that meant taking an approach where we're really fostering balanced well-being.”
In an effort to go beyond the standard wellness and EAP offerings, WarnerMedia looked at its underlying processes and the way in which leaders communicate with employees in order to introduce wellness into performance conversations.
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“We’re equipping our leaders and employees to be able to have those effective conversations about their balance and their emotional well-being in a way that sounds really psychologically safe to do so,” Josephson said. “Other tactics we employed was rolling out an unlimited time-off policy, and in many parts of our business, folks started to encourage no-meeting Fridays. That really creates a space for that reflection, to focus on self growth, and to really be able to take a break from the screen and do some self-focused thinking.”
WarnerMedia isn’t alone in this approach. Salesforce took action to help employees prioritize their own inner work by setting up policies including wellness days, and “async weeks,” where there are no meetings scheduled.
“Inner work isn't about just meditating or doing yoga,” Angela McKenna, senior vice president of global talent development at Salesforce, said during the event. “It is really about pausing and taking the time to reflect. What's going on for me right now? How am I showing up for myself? How am I showing up for my family? How am I showing up at work? It's one of the things that, as organizations, we haven’t necessarily encouraged or role modeled in the past, but I think it is going to be a huge part of the future.”
