During speeches, I used to show pretty slides about how to understand your boundaries and set limits at work. I no longer talk about boundaries, even though audiences need them more than ever. I don’t talk about protecting your time at work anymore because I got so much pushback. People would tell me, “That's a fantasy you're selling me. I'm not able to set boundaries. My client or my boss won't let me. And if I log off for the evening but no one else does, I'm going to return to a full inbox and that’s more stressful.”

When it comes to workplace wellbeing in the U.S. we have a tendency to say, “fix yourself.” But when I talk to people I’m hearing, “I can take care of myself, but if no one else is going to take care of me or themselves, what's the point?”

For many high achieving professionals, the post pandemic “workday” has turned into a 18 hour blur. It's not unusual for people to be emailing at 11 p.m. and then again at 5 a.m. We may be told it’s our choice whether we respond quickly…but it is really our choice?

Many forces conspire to stress us out, but the erasure of time-delimited boundaries and the reliance on digital media is a big one. It’s difficult to be well when you’re in a constant state of arousal and anticipation. My guest Kristin Maczko is the former Director, Mental Health and Wellbeing at Google, and she agrees. “Much of the advice we've given in the wellbeing space is around personal boundaries. It’s important to have boundaries, but I think sometimes we can blame the victim a little bit. We tell people, well, you're just not setting boundaries that are strong enough. And I think people are often accurately perceiving, if I were to do that, I would become the bottleneck.”

In fact, new research published in the Industrial Relations Journal found “no evidence that individual-level mental wellbeing interventions like mindfulness, resilience and stress management, relaxation classes, and wellbeing apps benefit employees. The study's author, William Fleming, PhD, of the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, noted that organizational interventions such as changes to scheduling, management practices, staff resources, performance review, or job design, may be more beneficial for improving wellbeing in the workplace.”

We know that work is the determinative factor for many people’s mental health. But here’s why fixing individual wellbeing or mental health is a losing game. The culture of work right now keeps us activated, elevated, and drives anxiety. Urgency rules. And while some amount of stress and anxiety can motivate us, Maczko notes, “There's the Yerkes Dodson curve; the X axis is the amount of stress and the Y axis is productivity. It's an inverted U. So if the stress is really high or really low, your productivity drops and there's the sweet spot where your productivity is the highest…. increasingly organizations are trying to push us as close to the edge of that high stress level as they can without pushing people over the edge.” From my own recent experience, I think office culture keeps us on the curve almost every day. The whole point of the Yerkes Dodson curve is you're supposed to get a break!

Kristin Maczko wants to change how we approach workplace wellness. She notes that it's very alienating to the person that's struggling to tell them that it's within their control, when it's not actually within their control. ”I think it can be really freeing for people to realize when something is bigger than me versus the kind of self-doubt that can come if you're saying, ‘Oh, I just haven't set enough boundaries.’” Asking people to fix themselves does not work.

If you feel like you never get a break from the curve, here is advice from Maczko and me on how to get unstuck and drive meaningful change without feeling like you have to fix yourself.

Be Mindful of Tech’s Impact on Teams and Time

When you’re the only one setting boundaries, saying no, or refusing to work extra hours, it can feel shameful. It can make you feel anxious: Will they think I don’t care? I’m difficult? Not invested? Will I miss something important? Will I lose out? That’s why setting boundaries must be a group effort. It just doesn’t work on the individual level in most teams.

Technology plays a big role here, says Kristin Maczko. “The extent to which we're able to collaborate has exploded with tools and technologies, which of course are great and have benefits, but the result is that our collaboration has gone from being serial and constrained, to parallel and unconstrained. Once upon a time you could have one meeting at a time and then at some point people go home for the day and they’re done. Here’s how I experience work now: you’re in a video meeting, and during the meeting you'll be kind of catching up on your email and while you're doing that, someone might be sending you a ping or Slack message.” Maczko notes, during that hour span, you've probably had 20 different collaborations in various forms. “And so it's happening in parallel, which is really not good for the mind and then it's unconstrained, so there's no longer a reason that it needs to fit into the day. And so I think the collective nature of it is … concerning because it's really hard for one individual to do anything differently because that's kind of how the entire system is working.”

In my own everyday life, I’m finding that teams using tons of video meetings have eroded boundaries and are doing way too much multitasking. To give our brains and bodies a break, we need time for deep work and for in-person deep connection. It’s a mix of working in the way that suits you best and truly making time for the team. Maczko notes that since most modern work is really collaborative, she’s a fan of core collaboration hours. “To help both individual and collective needs, there needs to be some coordination of core hours. Maybe it's from 10 to two every day, but there's a set of hours where we're all going to be available to collaborate. And then there's other times where we're doing individual work or we're taking time off. Acknowledging the nature of the team I think is really important.”

Make Boundaries a Team Problem! Run a Relay

Many high stress, high stakes teams manage boundaries by working in shifts or relaying. Maczko notes that at Google, the site reliability engineers keep Google's data centers up and running. If a data center goes down, you have to address it within 30 seconds. "And so it has the potential to be awful for work-life balance," but they've set up a formalized call system with tiers of support.” Sometimes you're on call, but if you're off, you're off. It's the same thing in an Emergency Room. This is a good example of shifting from an individual mindset to a collective mindset to protect people's time.

She says, "We need to have an ER that's always available, and we acknowledge that nurses and trauma surgeons need to work in shifts. We need to have a data center that's always up. We're not going to compromise that. But we're also human beings and we have lives and we have families, and there's a certain formality and structure that helps great work get done. Things don't happen by accident. We plan and we structure. If we  want to have teams performing, but in a sustainable way, we have to have conversations about it and plan around it and talk about coverage and being on call and collaboration hours and whatever it might be. It's not going to happen by accident.”

Sometimes, a team can be run like a relay. If you need constant coverage, you need a way to pass the baton. It's tougher to do on teams with only one person in each role- and I must say in my decades as a marketer, I've never seen this approach. I've always worked in marketing and sales functions and communications functions. It’s not the kind of job where you work a shift, which means in our current culture, you’re sort of always on. And increasingly,  it's like if one is on, all are on. Life can feel like an experience of cascading Slack messages! As a friend said, "responding from home" is the norm. But maybe a relay is what we need in a no boundaries world!

If your team can't be a relay where you're passing the baton, Maczko suggests mimicking elite sports teams. “I think it's just the best analogy for the combination of performance and coordination and rest. And if you think about elite sports teams, they are not just pushing all the time. That is empirically bad for performance. There's a real recognition for the need for rest and recovery in professional sports. But when you get to team sports, it's coordinated. And so if you think about that soccer team, there's coordinated periods of training, you're in the off season, you're in a game, you're on rest within a game, you have substitution. On a "crew team where you're rowing together, you push, rest, push, rest, push."

One thing is for sure: boundaries won't happen by accident. We need to design work much more mindfully for the 18 hour work day. "You have to coordinate with other people to be able to get the collective rest and the collective productivity. It's not going to happen by accident," says Kristin Maczko.

Has your team innovated to help people manage time and boundaries? I'd love to hear about it!

Morra

PS: Do you host a podcast? Do you use LinkedIn? Then read this great article from the team at Spotify for Podcasters - featuring moi. I share how I've built the Anxious Achiever community on LinkedIn.