Podcast Ep. 137: Workplace Well-Being: Burnout Signs You May Be Avoiding

Allie Gabriel: 

This is Allie Gabriel, and you’re listening to, this is Purdue. 

Kate Young: 

Hi, I’m Kate Young, and you are listening to This is Purdue, the official podcast for Purdue University. As a Purdue alum and Indiana native, I know firsthand about the family of students and professors who are in it together, persistently pursuing and relentlessly rethinking who are the next game changers, difference makers, ceiling breakers, innovators, who are these Boilermakers? Join me as we feature students, faculty, and alumni, taking small steps towards their giant leaps and inspiring others to do the same. Working 

Allie Gabriel: 

Well to me means thriving at work and at home because I truly believe you cannot be well if you are suffering at work or suffering at home because these worlds are not as separate as we want them to be. 

Kate Young: 

In this episode of This is Purdue, we are talking to Allie Gabriel, the Thomas J. Howitt Chair in Management in the Mitch Daniels School of Business and Faculty Director of Purdue University’s Center for Working Well. Allie is an award-winning advocate for mental health and well-being in the workplace within Purdue’s Daniels School of Business. And she leads timely research efforts to understand how employees can thrive at work both in person and virtually. As part of this, she leads the Center for Working Well, which is at the forefront of various challenges facing modern workforces. Allie’s research and findings have been featured globally in publications like the Harvard Business Review and on outlets like CNBC and Forbes, and she recently added another accolade to her impressive resume when she was named a fellow of the American Psychological Association in recognition of her contributions in the field of psychology this summer. 

Today we’re diving into so much with Allie. We’re talking about managing stress and burnout, ways you can improve your work-life balance and emotional regulation, tips on becoming a better workplace leader, how to support working parents, and a phenomenon called Zoom fatigue. That’s right, Allie’s research on this shows there’s a reason behind why remote workers are exhausted after being on back-to-back on-camera meetings daily. So let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Allie. 

We are so excited to have you. Allie, welcome to This is Purdue. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Thank you for having me. 

Kate Young: 

We’re excited to get into all the things, work well-being mental health. We’re thrilled to dive into your impactful work here. So let’s start at the beginning. What would you say the state of mental health is right now in today’s world? 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, that’s a big question to start with because I feel like everybody wants this magic bullet of an answer of, “You just need to do this one thing and it’s all going to be better.” So, a couple of things right away. I think the state of mental health and well-being is just in a rough spot. We are inundated with all sorts of stressors, whether it’s stress at work, stress at home, the news coverage is stressful. We’re just kind of inundated all of the time with information that might feel personally relevant, personally impactful. And the reality is our brains are not programmed to handle that much information. You might have that feeling of information overload where you’re like, “Wow, I’m just processing a lot.” And so I think right now there’s just so much uncertainty. There’s a lot of information coming at people and folks are struggling, and I think what they’re struggling with is how to turn it off, how to step away from work, how to prioritize recovery, how to not feel guilty about prioritizing recovery. 

And so when I am thinking about this for myself or talking to people, a lot of folks are saying, “It feels like I am just going, going, going, going, going, and I’m looking for an off ramp and I don’t know how to find it.” And I think people want this magical answer of, what one of the terms I actually like the least is work-life balance. I think that sets people up for failure of thinking it’s work and whatever your non-work life is, and they’re just going to be equal in this total equilibrium state. And that’s just not how it works. Things are off kilter all the time. And so I like to tell people, “Okay, let’s not think about balance. Let’s think about the things that you value and how we can weight those depending on different seasons that we’re in.” Some seasons, work can be really important. You can sync to that. Some seasons your life, like a non-work life is going to be really important. Let’s sync into that. Sometimes it’s your community, whatever that is for you. 

So, yeah, I just think there’s a lot going on right now. I think people are craving balance. They want it and it’s just hard because it is a constant moving target. It’s a constant work in progress. 

Kate Young: 

A lot I think is there are good days and bad days, so when you have a really bad day, you at least for me, I can wake up and reset again at least. And so I liked how you said you’re way out, what’s important to you, but also knowing that there’s going to be rougher days than others, right? 

Allie Gabriel: 

There are. And our brains play a lot of tricks on us and our brains are wired to remember the bad stuff. So if you think about the day you had yesterday and I asked you, “Think about something that was really salient that happened to you,” the odds are pretty high that you’d be like, “Well, it was going pretty good, but this really stressful thing happened. I had this interaction, I had this email I didn’t like.” And that might overweight the plethora of good things that happened, that you had a great coffee date, that you had a great phone call, you had an outreach that you were really excited about, you had a great yoga class. So our brain, oh, going gym, I’m and ruminating on the negative things. And so we really need to make a concerted effort to rewire that and to say, “No, actually on a given day, things are pretty good sometimes,” and let’s think about that and reset off of that versus just ruminating and thinking about the most stressful things that are happening to us. 

Kate Young: 

So what are some of the common signs of burnout? How do you identify it and kind of course correct and pivot from there? 

Allie Gabriel: 

So the running joke in our field is that we tend to study the things that we’re not very good at. So I study things like burnout and well-being and recovery because this is something that I’ve struggled with too over the years. And when it comes to noticing burnout, I think it creeps in very gradually. And if we don’t notice it, it can really spiral out of control. So sometimes it’s just feeling for a lot of people, it just starts feeling really exhausted. Like, “I feel mentally fatigued. I feel like I’m having a really hard time focusing. I used to be able to concentrate and really immerse myself in my work, and now my brain feels unfocused. It feels distracted. I’m starting to feel really disconnected from things I really liked doing before I don’t feel as identified.” And all of these little signs start to give you cues, okay, something is wrong. 

And it starts as just daily emotional exhaustion. It starts as daily disconnect from the things that we used to care about. And over time that keeps compounding. So if you don’t go ahead and realize like, “Hey, I’ve got to take a step back. Or your body can also physiologically respond to this, you get headaches, you get eye strain. If for me personally, I know I’m starting to get really burned out and stressed when I get this knot in my shoulder, it’s always on my left side. And it’s like this telltale sign like, “Hey, you’re going way too hard. You’re carrying tension, you’re carrying stress. You’ve got to start letting it go.” And so I think for a long time there was this sense that burnout was this badge of honor. I call it the suffering Olympics. We all for a long time, were like, “Oh, we should get a gold medal in suffering. Are you burned out? I’m more burned out than you.” 

And this used to be how we all talked about it, and now there’s more of an awareness of, “Wait a second, burnout is a problem. It’s going to affect every aspect of how your body functions, how your mind functions. And so looking for those little cues of, “Hey, I’m not really focused anymore, having a hard time concentrating. I feel really mentally fatigued. I don’t feel sharp.” Those are cues that, hey, burnout is starting to creep in and we need to put a stop to it as much as possible and find the source, figure out where it is. It could be the type of project you’re working on, it could be your whole job. That’s a rough day if it’s your whole job, because then we have to have a bigger conversation of how you fix that. It could be a particular person that you’re having a difficult time interacting with and maybe you need to recalibrate a relationship. But I just think even from a young age, we’re just kind of programmed to not pay attention to these things or to push through, keep pushing, keep pushing, and eventually it’ll go away and it just kind of compounds to a point where it gets pretty problematic. 

Kate Young: 

Allie dives into some real life examples and practical tips from her research on how to address burnout head on. 

Allie Gabriel: 

If it’s your boss, for instance, or a coworker you’re closely intertwined with, you can’t just go to your boss and be like, “Hey, you’re burning me out. Can you stop?” We need to rethink this. And we have had people in our research, for instance, say like, “Hey, I did realize it was my boss or it was this project team and that was my cue that I needed to find a new job. That was actually a point where I realized I needed to choose a career, a profession that really suited me and my well-being.” That is a really extreme example. It’s costly. That is finding a job. I’ve done it a couple of times. It’s exhausting, it’s stressful. So that’s a really big correction. But I think there are ways that you can then put boundaries around relationships to try to say, “Okay, these interactions may be stressful. So what can I do before the interaction is about to begin? I’m going to take five minutes and really ground myself. Afterwards, I’m going to go for a walk.” 

I joke that after really stressful meetings or really draining moments, I’ll take an emotional lap is what I call it. And I quite literally will go put my headphones on, take a walk out on our beautiful campus and just really recalibrate and reset. So if you know you’re about to walk into one of those interactions, building time for recovery and wellbeing around that is really important. You can also think about reframing it, saying, “Hey, not my favorite interaction I’m about to go through.” Or, “Hey, I’m about to be with a really, really tricky coworker. They might be going through a hard time too.” 

So maybe they’re being really tough on me and I’m struggling with that. Or maybe we just don’t see eye to eye. That’s okay. It’s not my job to necessarily be best friends and get along with everybody, but give somebody a little bit of grace realizing like, Hey, you don’t really know what they’re going through. They could be going through a lot on their own that could be feeding into some of the problematic behaviors, your experiences you’re having. And so I think recognizing too, just some of the humanness of other people sometimes can help if you are experiencing a lot of burnout. 

Kate Young: 

Chances are you’ve experienced those seasons in your lives where personal burnout is impacting your professional career. Allie shares more about trying to achieve success on your own terms when it comes to our personal and professional lives. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Really think about what success means to you in both domains and realize that you don’t have to strive to do everything at once. So I think that’s something I struggle with. In my research, I speak to a lot of working mothers who are high achieving amazing women, and they will just talk about being totally humbled by motherhood and the fact that they have had to recalibrate expectations and realize, “Okay, doing it all is setting me up to burn out, so I want to do it smarter. I want to think about what does it mean to be successful at work right now. That means showing up as my best self, putting in a lot of effort, building good relationships and clocking out, and then I get to go home. And what does it mean to be successful at home? It means being at the dinner table with everybody. It means making it to swim practice. Today, it means I’m making it to gymnastics for my five-year-old,” right? 

And so I think really taking some time, and I’ve done this a few times where I say, what is it that I’m looking for right now and what are the goals I have and how can I stagger them in a way that it feels like I’m not missing out on something? Really what happens is it feels like if we prioritize a goal at home with family and with friends with your community, that it has to take away from a goal at work. And I don’t think it does, but what it might mean is just realizing, “Hey, this is not the time for this big community role that I really, really want because I’ve got this exciting thing going on at work, so let me see where that takes me,” and that will take you somewhere. And then you get the opportunity to say, “Okay, now I want to pivot and I want to think about this goal over here.” So rather than thinking, “I just got to do it all at once,” because that’s also the recipe for burning out. Because then you’re never going to stop. Then that means you just have no off. There’s no off ramp to anything, and that’s a pretty exhausting place to be. 

Kate Young: 

I think we all after the pandemic are familiar with Zoom, unfortunately, or fortunately. 

Allie Gabriel: 

We all thought it was going to be gone by now. There was a funny moment where in tweet we’re like, “This is just temporary.” 

Kate Young: 

“It’s a blip.” 

Allie Gabriel: 

It’s not. 

Kate Young: 

A lot of podcasts are recorded on Zoom still. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yes. 

Kate Young: 

But your research identified a phenomenon called Zoom fatigue. Tell us more about that. What does it mean for people and for organizations? 

Allie Gabriel: 

This is a project I never thought I would do because one, I didn’t think there’d be a pandemic and wouldn’t have to do it, but I was coming off of my maternity leave with my first kiddo, like a true pandemic baby, and one of my really close colleagues and friends in the field, Kristin Shockley, who’s at Auburn University, reached out to me and was like, so I’ve been thinking about studying Zoom fatigue. People just seem really exhausted being on camera all the time. And I was like, “Sure.” One of my favorite people to work with. So I was like, of course. Let’s see what we have here. And we had a company who was largely a remote workforce already before COVID. They allowed us to come in and study their employees for a month and manipulate who was taking all of their video calls on camera and who was taking them off of camera. Because what Zoom fatigue is, is that feeling of exhaustion, about having to essentially turn your camera on and be present and ready to engage in a video meeting. 

And there’s lots of components that might go into that. You are trying to get your space ready. A lot of us didn’t have at the beginning of the pandemic curated home offices that were beautiful and lovely. It could be physically getting ready, feeling like you’re put together enough to be on camera. It could be keeping your pets or your kids. There was that classic news episode- 

Kate Young: 

Yes, yes. When the baby bust in. 

Allie Gabriel: 

… of the guy who the baby bust in, and the poor mother’s like in the back, like, “Oh my goodness!” So Zoom fatigue is kind of the mental load of being on camera and having to deal with all those things. What we found with this set of employees was that the days that they were on camera, they reported feeling more fatigued on a day-to-day basis, and that then contributed to other problems, right? Because what’s the reason why people want cameras on? Because they want to know you’re paying attention. But what we found is when people felt that Zoom fatigue, they reported being less engaged that day, they also were less inclined to really be proactive and speak up. We found these effects were more pronounced for women. And if you think about when we were studying this, it was when there was still a lot of daycare closures and school closures, and so there are pressures associated with that, with caregiving roles. It was also more stressful for newcomers. Imagine starting at a new company during COVID and you’re on a meeting and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, I’m on a Zoom right now with the CEO, with the top management team, with my boss. What is this jargon? Do they think I look professional? Does it look like I am talking in a dorm room?” All these concerns that you could have. 

And I will say when we did the Zoom fatigue research and then we started talking about it, I was like, “Yeah, this is just a couple year thing.” But no, people are still like, “No, it’s exhausting. Being on camera is exhausting.” The other thing that contributes to it too is you’re so aware when you’re on camera, you are so aware. You see yourself and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, is that my face?” 

Kate Young: 

Totally. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Like, “Is that my face?” 

Kate Young: 

“Is that what I really look like?” 

Allie Gabriel: 

“Is that what I look like when I talk,” because right now you and I are talking, we’re probably not thinking about as much what we look like or how we’re presenting ourselves, but on Zoom, you’re very aware of that. 

Kate Young: 

You’re watching yourself. 

Allie Gabriel: 

You are the number of times I’m distracted just watching myself. 

Kate Young: 

And that sounds vain, but I mean, who hasn’t felt that? 

Allie Gabriel: 

No, you’re just so hyper aware of it, and that’s distracting, right? Because that’s just not how we naturally want to interact with other people, so that was our Zoom fatigue work, and it’s still being talked about. We’re still working with companies and organizations who are like, “Yeah, we’re still struggling with this problem with our employees.” 

Kate Young: 

And has it resulted in, “Hey, you can have your camera off?” I know something that we were like, “Let’s stop with the lunchtime stuff. People are trying to eat lunch.” 

Allie Gabriel: 

Oh yeah, that’s the worst. 

Kate Young: 

And nobody wants to eat on camera. 

Allie Gabriel: 

And some people view that as rude when you eat on camera. We have some follow-up work we’ve been doing, and we asked people, what does it mean to be rude or disrespectful on a virtual call? And there were some typical things you would think like being late time waste, not managing time, holding people too long, but another big one was appearance, showing up, scattered and not like you were put together or ready for the call. And then eating. People were like, “I think it’s really rude and people are eating.” 

Kate Young: 

If you have 10 meetings in a row, you have to eat. 

Allie Gabriel: 

And that’s the problem. I think when we started relying on Zoom, all of a sudden at some point we all decided we don’t need breaks anymore. We’re like, “You know what I can do is I can have a meeting at 10:00, 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00, back, to back, to back, to back, and this is fine because I’m home.” 

Kate Young: 

“I’m not commuting, I’m not…” 

Allie Gabriel: 

Right. “I’m not commuting. I’m secretly in my sweatpants. I can do whatever I want,” but going back to where we started, that also is leading to burnout, because we’re not taking care of ourselves anymore. 

Kate Young: 

Absolutely. That’s so interesting. What do you think organizations and leaders can do to better help their employees thrive at work, whether it’s in person or remote work? 

Allie Gabriel: 

Have intentional conversations of what it means to be at work, which sounds so obvious, but I don’t think we do that. I don’t think we have very intentional conversations when we all get together for a meeting to say, “Okay, what’s the tone of the meeting today? What do we want to get out of this? What do we want to do today? If virtual, what norms do we want to set around being on camera or not being on camera? Do we all want to call it and just get on the phone and all go for a walk? “That’s been my new favorite pivot, by the way, is rather than sitting on Zoom, I’ll send notes to people and be like, “Why don’t we actually just call each other-” 

Kate Young: 

Walk and talk? I love it. 

Allie Gabriel: 

“… and I get back on the phone and get outside and walk and actually get some movement in.” I think having some intentionality behind meetings, behind gathering behind what is in person, what can be virtual or hybrid, and really thinking about what it means to be at work. What do we want the workday to feel like? That would be really nice if everybody did that because instead what tends to happen is we all show up to work and we just start. It’s very rare that you actually have a moment of collection where you’re like, “Hey, everybody, what’s the vibe today?” We all try to get out of this. We’re all here. What are our collective goals? What do we want to work on? How do we want today to feel? How do we want to view breaks and our well-being? We don’t do that, and that’s a quick fix that doesn’t cost anything. It costs a little bit of time, but I think it can have a really profound impact then on how people experience their time at work and make it feel more in tuned with how they feel and how the collective’s feeling. 

Kate Young: 

I think even I’ll catch myself typing a message to someone first thing in the morning, and then I’m like, “Whoa, whoa. First of all, good morning.” 

Allie Gabriel: 

“Hi, who are you?” 

Kate Young: 

Just right out the gate and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, Kate.” No. If you were in person, you would be like, “Hey, what’s up? Good morning. Yeah, nice to see you.” 

Allie Gabriel: 

Those are the small talk pleasantries. 

Kate Young: 

That we’re missing with the virtual and remote work? I think so, yeah. Oh, there’s so many things. We could talk for hours. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, that’s fine. We can do that. 

Kate Young: 

Yeah. Okay, so we’ve covered topics that you’ve experienced firsthand. You had your first daughter, your baby in March of 2020, literally right before the world kind of shut down. And how did that experience influence your path today? Yeah, yeah. 

Allie Gabriel: 

So not only was she a pandemic baby, so she was born weekly on March 10th, 2020. So literally we walked into the hospital in one world and we walked out in a different one. And when you’re pregnant, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy physically at the end, got the flu, was on bed rest, the whole thing. So we weren’t paying as much attention. We knew, for instance, that COVID was a thing, but we were not paying attention to the reality that was setting in, because you’re just, “Oh my gosh, I’m about to have a small human for the first time.” What are we going to do? And I have the flu and we need to make sure I’m healthy, and so on. So we just went in blind. And so we were driving home and we put on the news and we’re listening and we’re like, “Okay.” And it just immediately was in lockdown, which was incredibly isolating. 

I think there’s already lots of challenges being a new parent or just being a parent, having a baby in general. You want that village that’s so hard to curate on a good day, and we just immediately found ourselves completely locked down with this little newborn baby, precious, precious, newborn baby who’s now five and thriving and going to kindergarten, which is so hard to believe. But at the time, it was really isolating. It was really, really lonely. We were lucky that we had some support from my parents and a little pandemic bubble, so to speak, but there’s no play dates, there’s no transitioning back to work and feeling like you can reclaim part of yourself, because at least you get to dress like a real person again, right? Yeah. 

You get to feel like you’re using a different part of your brain, and truly it was not a good place for me. I had really, really struggled with postpartum depression and postpartum anxiety and just found myself asking a lot of pretty existential questions about what are we doing, what did we do? And where that ended up was me feeling really passionate about helping other, I was already passionate about helping other working moms because I feel like all parents obviously are doing a lot, but I really believe working moms are doing the most in terms of just the physicality of pregnancy and childbirth and the recovery and then the struggle to reenter the workforce and feel like yourself again. But then going through this experience, I was like, “Okay, if I’m suffering and I feel pretty privileged that we have financial stability and some support, what is going on for other people?” 

And that really was a catalyst to asking bigger questions about how can we support people when they’re coming back to work? How can we better support women who might be going through postpartum depression? Because that diagnosis happens when people are on parental leave usually. It’s usually in the first two to 12 weeks that you get diagnosed. It could be a year. And so if you think about where that intersects with a parental leave, it’s smack in the middle. So you’re not only had this crazy life event because childbirth is crazy, having just started again five months ago, it’s crazy. But you go through that and then you layer on this really difficult diagnosis and now you have to come back to work and pretend like you’re okay and that you’re not fundamentally changed. And so it really just showed me how much work we still have to do, and I feel really, really lucky that I get to spend time asking those questions and trying to understand those experiences. 

Kate Young: 

So based on that, what do you think organizations can do to better support the success of working parents who are coming back from parental leave? 

Allie Gabriel: 

I will say, so we just had our second baby five months ago. 

Kate Young: 

Congrats. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah. So you’re one of the first humans I’ve seen. 

Kate Young: 

I hope it’s a positive experience. 

Allie Gabriel: 

This is a positive experience. I am like, “Oh, this is…” I see lights and beautiful things here. No, I had it five months ago, and it’s been as hard as my first experience was. That’s how blissful and wonderful the second time around has been. And part of that of course is it’s a different time, but I think we were very lucky here to have a lot of proactivity in how people approached me going out on leave. And I think that is the best thing organizations can do. So there tends to be a lot of reactivity around working moms like, “Okay, there’s taboo around disclosing when a pregnancy is happening.” Or women may feel that there is, right? That you can’t share early. Candidly, I had to tell somebody here at Purdue last summer when I was I think five weeks along, which was risky, but I was thinking ahead about teaching. I was like, “Hey, I love my job. I don’t want to teach 38 weeks pregnant, so can we think about how this is going to work,” right? Or people don’t want to, maybe they don’t say it at all. 

Kate Young: 

Exactly. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Well, and going back to Zoom, there were some women who had full pregnancies during COVID and could hide it because of how Zoom is set up. And so I think because of a bunch of factors, there’s a lot of reactivity to it, that people react and you’re like, “oh, okay, you’re pregnant. Okay, nobody’s done that here in a while-” 

Kate Young: 

“So what do we do?” 

Allie Gabriel: 

“Let’s figure out how this works. And I think you get some leave. I don’t know if it’s paid,” and there’s just not clear support structures, versus having more proactivity, letting people know ahead of time, “Hey, here’s some policies we have. Here’s some things in place. So if this is something that happens in your life, we are ready and here’s what we can offer you.” 

Kate Young: 

“And we support you.” 

Allie Gabriel: 

“We support you. Here’s what we can offer you.” Having a coalition of other folks who have done this where maybe your a boss and you yourself have not used this benefits, you’re like, “I actually don’t know. However, we have a working moms group here or just a parent group and let’s get you over to those folks and they can tell you about their experiences on leave,” and that’s kind of what happened here is I had a lot of support and then they connected me to other people who either helped write the leave policies or had used the leave policies. 

And there was just a lot of creativity and proactivity of saying, “Okay, let’s think really creatively about your teaching. Let’s think about how this is going to look for advising students. Let’s think about what your next year will look like.” And I love that. And again, think that’s an easy thing organizations can do. The other part is to really think about how you celebrate people when they come back to work. So I think it’s twofold. One is celebrating that they’re back to work, that they were not on vacation. We have interviewed so many women who are like, “I’m so tired of people telling me to enjoy my vacation. It’s maternity leave.” 

Kate Young: 

Not vacation. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, not vacation. Lovely time, but totally different. But acknowledging that somebody just came back and that you’ve missed their contributions. So what happens sometimes is somebody comes back and they’re like, “Oh my gosh, thank goodness you’re back because it has been so chaotic since you left. We have had a cover for you. Have fun in your inbox because we have just blown it up.” 

And imagine that experience versus someone being like, “Oh my gosh, I’m so glad you’re back. Let’s take the next week and let’s just gradually catch you up to speed and you just spend the next week control-alt-deleting your inbox, and let’s start over and really welcome you back, ease you in. Why don’t you sit in meetings to hear what we’ve been doing?” And then the other part of it is like, “Hey, let’s also acknowledge that you’re now a mom and can you show me your baby pictures? How are you feeling?” How are feeling right now? And just asking again, these humanizing questions I think is really important for moms to feel like they’re being seen, both as a valued member of the organization and just a valued person who’s had this incredible thing happen to them. 

Kate Young: 

I love that. And it’s thoughtful and it’s… 

Allie Gabriel: 

It’s thoughtful. 

Kate Young: 

And it’s humanizing, like you said. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, I love my department here with organizational behavior and human resources at the Daniels school. They’re incredible. There was a meal train, some colleagues showing up being like, “You don’t have to see me.” And I was like, beautiful because I’m not fit for consumption, so no thank you. And they’re like, “You don’t need to even answer the door, but on your doorstep is a chicken pot pie and a container of fruit.” Or, “Hey, I dropped a Starbucks at your doorstep. We’re thinking of you.” And just these little touch points that were like, “Okay, people see that I’ve gone through this and they’re valuing that. And that’s really lovely and I think speaks to this place as a whole. It’s just a good community.” 

Kate Young: 

Yes. And speaking of Daniels school, you came two years ago. You were part of Purdue’s first wave of Movable Dream hires. So what were your key experiences that led you to become a Boilermaker? 

Allie Gabriel: 

We’ve just been so happy to be here. So my educational background, so I’m a product of the Big 10 in the Midwest is how I like to view it. So I did my undergraduate degree at Penn State. So I love the Boilermakers. I do love the Nittany Lions too. 

Kate Young: 

That’s okay. That’s okay. 

Allie Gabriel: 

So did my undergrad at Penn State and just fell in love with I think Big 10 campuses are special and have just something about them and the students and the faculty that work there in the communities. So that was my first college experience, and I just immediately fell in love with that. I then went on to do my PhD in organizational psychology at University of Akron in Ohio, not too far from here. And that’s where I met my husband. He’s from that area as well. And then we kind of did this national tour. 

So I spent a couple years in Richmond, Virginia at Virginia Commonwealth University, and then we spent eight really incredible years out in the desert in Tucson, Arizona at the University of Arizona. And it was great. I grew so much. We had so much fun. Winter was great. Summer, not so much. Winter was great. And I professionally always pictured myself at a big, Big 10 campus. So we kind of ended up having this dual goal of, “Hey, we think we want to get back to the Midwest and we think we want to get back to the Big 10.” And then we came here and I was like, “Oh, this is the…” You ever have that feeling when you step into a place and you’re like, “Oh, I think I’m supposed to be here?” And I had that feeling when I was a high school senior touring college campuses, and I stepped on my foot on Penn State’s campus. 

I had that feeling of like, “Okay, I’m supposed to be here.” And my husband came with me for the interview and we stepped under the arch right outside the student union and somebody took our picture and I just looked at him. I was like, “Oh, I think I’m supposed to be here.” And it has just been so great. It’s fun being somewhere that’s growing and just reinventing themselves, kind of staying rooted in tradition, but also reinventing themselves. I feel like that really exemplifies what Purdue is, and it’s been so fun trying to find my little niche of how I can contribute to that in a meaningful way. 

Kate Young: 

What factors put Purdue and the Daniels School at the forefront of modern workforces and that employee wellness and well-being out in the workplace? 

Allie Gabriel: 

We really have, I think, an embarrassment of riches here in terms of the people that are asking questions that really translate into what people are going through at work and in their lives. So when I was also thinking about places that I would be happy, different schools take different approaches to building. If you think about a department, it’s like a portfolio. Some people take a real diversification approach where they want every faculty member to do something pretty different. So you can have a lot of coverage. And I think there’s strengths to doing that. A different approach though is to say, “Hey, what’s our core values? Who do we see ourselves as?” And we’re going to start to build around that. And so what was already happening before I came here is if you were interested in well-being, work-family issues, work-non-work recovery, leisure, meaningfulness at work, relationships, it’s Purdue. 

And so for me, I always viewed Purdue that way, and that’s how I view my own research. And so the thought of getting to join what was already happening was really, really exciting. I also really appreciated the push that was happening here and is still happening of an interdisciplinary connectedness, so to speak, that the Daniels school was not its own little island that just happens to be at Purdue, but rather there was a push to make sure it’s connected to engineering, to the sciences, just all over campus, that there’s a real value in building relationships. It’s quite literally baked into being a Boilermaker here, that there is an emphasis on well-being and just seeing how serious that was taken and that it was such a core part of who people are here and what the place is was amazing to me. I loved it because a lot of people view well-being or did for a long time as this ancillary thing, like, “No, no, no, we’re just here to perform.” And your well-being is, “You go take a nap on your own time. You go do yoga on your own time and get it together.” And now it’s like, “No, no, no. We actually could build workplaces and we could be the example. We could be the example here of what this could look like to really thrive at work.” 

Kate Young: 

As the Faculty Director of the Center for Working Well, what motivated you to research broader issues facing employees and organizations in the workplaces? Was it your personal experiences? Have you always been interested in that type of stuff since childhood? 

Allie Gabriel: 

So I’ve just always been fascinated by people, how our experiences changed so dramatically from one day to the next or even within the same day. My day to day is already a bit like a roller coaster, just up and down. I think that’s so fascinating, and trying to figure out what’s contributing to that. And part of being trained as an organizational psychologist is we care about what we call the science practice gap. So we care about doing really rigorous scholarship and science and then translating it out to practice. So making sure what we do gets into the hands of people who can actually use it, because most people on the street and organizations, wherever are not going to pick up one of our academic journals and be like, “Oh, this is a real page turner.” 

Kate Young: 

Yes, yes. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Like, “Let me go ahead and read this,” right? They’re not going to do that. But they might read A, they might listen to a podcast, they might listen to a webinar series. 

And so that really was the spirit behind the Center for Working Well is I saw that there were already so many great people here that so much good work was being done, and I wanted to create a conduit to get that out to people. And so we do workshops, we’re doing engagements like Greater Lafayette, Chamber of Commerce, getting to speak to people, say, “Hey, we’re here. If you’re struggling with issues tied to well-being, tricky relationships, conflict, motivation, making your work more meaningful, you can come talk to us. We’re here, have us come to your company.” And that’s what’s been happening, is we are getting contacted to actually come and share what we know, which is such a relief as a faculty member. That’s why we all love educating. And a lot of times education stops as a college student, and we want to keep educating people who are out there in the workforce saying, “you know what? People are messy and they’re a lot messier than I expected, and I’m having these issues. And can we talk about and how to go ahead and fix that?” 

Kate Young: 

What do you think Working Well means and what are the most pressing topics that the center is addressing right now? 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, Working Well to me means thriving at work and at home. I truly believe you cannot be well if you are suffering at work or suffering at home because these worlds are not as separate as we want them to be. There was a long time where, so a way people often think about work, and again, I call it nonwork, that can be your family. It could be your biological family, your chosen family, your friends, your church, your social club, your volunteer community league, whatever that is to you, that is important. And for a long time, we viewed these domains as something that you can choose to integrate. You could be somebody, I’m a high integrator, I don’t mind talking about my family, talking about my experiences, bringing those into the workplace. There’s a little bit of a privilege to be able to do that. With more status, you can do these things maybe a little bit more freely, or there’s people who are segmenters, they want to keep this separate, and people can do this really extremely. So if you come to my office on campus, there are family pictures everywhere. My five-year-old, sometimes she’ll come in, and I have a model on my whiteboard for my research, and she’ll start coloring it in and drawing her own picture. It’s very clear I have children when you come in my office ,or I have really weird hobbies and I’m doodling on my whiteboard. 

So I’m an integrator. But some people will not even bring family pictures to their office. They won’t take family calls when they’re at work. And I think people thought that that was the norm, but that’s not how this works. It’s really hard to do that. It’s hard to mentally shut these worlds down. 

If you think about a work day where maybe you and your partner got off on the wrong foot, you might be able to kind of cool that off on a commute, but those thoughts are still going to keep following you. And so I like to remind people that Working Well means you’re feeling like you can thrive at both work and at home, because those are going to cross back and forth. So if you have a bad work day, you probably go home and you’re not as great to your friends, to your spouse, to your kids, and vice versa. If your kid drops a cup of milk all over your kitchen in the morning and you have a stressful commute and then somebody misses the bus, that’s going to carry over to work. So how can we think about Working Well as building structures and supports that let people really dedicate the time they need to take care of themselves at work and take care of themselves when they are off the clock? 

Kate Young: 

I think too, with all the technology elements, it used to be when my parents were working that you almost could at least shut it off a little bit more. 

Allie Gabriel: 

It’s so bad. 

Kate Young: 

They’re not looking at their phone and their email. My father-in-law is always like, I missed the days where I could go to a conference and not be contacted by work, because I was in the conference actually learning things. 

Allie Gabriel: 

“I miss the days when nobody could find me.” 

Kate Young: 

Yeah. And so I’m sure there’s that element too, of and you can text people while you’re at work and you can look on social media and that might put you down or you see something on there, right? So there’s so many more elements in today’s world, 

Allie Gabriel: 

Right? Yeah. The constant connectivity is so much, it’s just so much. And yeah, so I think then it just makes it hard to shut down. And I think we make those mistakes all the time where we’re like, “Okay, I’m working at 8:00 PM tonight. You must also be working at 8:00 PM, so let me just send this email over here.” And what that does is it sends signals that that’s the norm. So you sending an email to somebody at eight 9:00 PM is now the norm of, okay, I’m working. 

Kate Young: 

And you can schedule alerts to everyone. You can schedule Teams messages and emails. 

Allie Gabriel: 

You can. in my email signature now. I put one of those disclaimers in, that’s like, “My work hours may not be yours.” Because really what I want to say is I have two kids now, and life is crazy. You’re going to get emails at really weird times of day. Please do not respond if this is not your time. And respond when you are able. 

Kate Young: 

Yes, I love those. Those are cool. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah. And it’s within reason. I think the tricky part here with prioritizing well-being is there’s a way to also go too far and say, oh, go non-responsive for several days and say like, “No, no, no. I was prioritizing well-being.” Like, okay, wait, “I wasn’t doing my job.” 

Kate Young: 

Yeah, wait a second. 

Allie Gabriel: 

You’re like, “Wait, wait, wait. We’re taking this too far.” And so how can we do this professionally still? And I think there’s a way to do that, which is, “Hey, I’m having a little bit of burnout right now. I see your email, I see your message. Normally I would get to this today. I need to take a beat today, but I’ll get to it tomorrow. So don’t be surprised when you don’t hear from you today, but I see it. I see you. This is important to me.” 

Kate Young: 

Okay, so we’ll wrap it up here, but what small steps can current business leaders, anyone who leads a team, really take now to start improving their own workplace? 

Allie Gabriel: 

Ask questions, ask people how they’re feeling and mean it, right? And not just the small talk like, “Hi, how are you?” 

Kate Young: 

“How was your weekend.” Yeah. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Yeah, yeah. Which I’m terrible at small talk. That’s its own separate podcast. With small talk where you’re like, “Hi, how are you?” I’m like, “Oh, let me tell you.” And you’re like, “No, I didn’t ask that. I just wanted to know how’s the weather?” Ask questions and really listen to people. If you have people who are saying like, “Hey, I’m feeling really fatigued, I’m feeling really anxious.” I think there’s a tendency to be like, “Yeah, get in line. We’re all busy, we’re all anxious.” Actually, listen, because there’s great researcher at Wharton, she passed away a few years ago very, very tragically from glioblastoma, from brain cancer. She was an emotions’ researcher. I just looked up to her so, so much for the type of work she did. And she has this great talk where she talks about the power of emotions, and she’s like, “Emotions are data. They are not these things to not be felt, to not be listened to. They are data. They’re telling you something’s wrong. They’re telling you something’s good.” 

And I think managers asking questions of how people are, asking for instance, Kate, when was the last time somebody was like, “Hey, what do you want to get out of this job? What would make you happy?” My favorite interview question ever was actually when I interviewed here at Purdue, it was that when David Hummels was the dean at the time, it was this last year before Dean Jim Bullard stepped in and I was interviewing and I was just, I’d been out for a while, but I was still nervous. I’m like, “You’re meeting the dean.” And I was nervous and I really wanted this. So I was like, “Okay, get it together. Get it together.” And we’re having the normal questions. And all of a sudden he’s like, “So I have a question. What’s something that you want to do that’ll make you happy that you have not been able to do before that you think you could do here?” 

And I was just flabbergasted. And I was like, “I don’t know the last time somebody asked me what would make me happy.” That’s actually how the Center for Working Well was created, was that question wow. Where I was like, “Well, I’ve had this idea and I just word vomited.” I was like, “I think it could do this and I think it could do this.” And he just was listening and he’s like, “Okay, go write a couple pages,” and that was it. And then it went from page to real life in less than a year. And I was like, “How often though do people get asked, ‘What’s something you want to do that would make you happy?'” 

And I think it’s these easy little micro moments of humanizing people, going all the way back to the beginning of asking people how they are, what would make them happy, what is their life like outside of here, learning who they are. That would start to make work feel a lot better, especially as people are going through so many stressful things. I don’t think a lot of my colleagues necessarily knew I had postpartum depression. A few did, and I told some more people later and they’re like, “Well, why didn’t you tell me?” And I’m like, “I didn’t want to burden you.” 

Kate Young: 

And it’s intimidating. 

Allie Gabriel: 

It’s intimidating. Yeah, “I didn’t want to burden you.” And they were like, “You should have.” And I think good managers ask questions and listen and think about it and say, “Okay, I hear you, and maybe we can’t fix exactly what you’re saying or maybe I can’t do the exact thing you said that would make you happy, but let’s get close.” And I think it’s those little inching towards goodness that can be really, really impactful at work. And it all starts with talking and listening and building a culture where that is encouraged and supported. 

Kate Young: 

Well, Allie, this was a total pleasure. I could go on and on. Maybe we will. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Thank you for making me put on real people clothes for the first time in like five months. 

Kate Young: 

It is so great. Thank you so much. 

Allie Gabriel: 

Oh, thank you for having me. 

Kate Young: 

This interview was a mix of interesting and fun. Allie is such a genuine person, and Purdue is incredibly lucky to have her. If you want to hear more workplace tips from Allie, including how many exclamation marks is too many to add in an email, head over to our podcast YouTube channel youtube.com/@thisispurdue. 

This is Purdue has a very special series coming out this month. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and follow life at Purdue on social media for some hints and Easter eggs, and stay tuned for Monday, October 20th. Trust us, you will not want to miss it. This is Purdue is hosted and written by me, Kate Young. Our podcast videography for this episode was led by Thad Boone, in collaboration with John Garcia, Zack Mogenson and Alli Chaney. Our social media marketing is led by Maria Welch. Our podcast distribution strategy is led by Carly Eastman. Our podcast design is led by Cheryl Glotzbach. Our podcast photography is led by John Underwood. Our podcast team, project manager is Rain Guo. Our podcast YouTube Promotions is managed by Megan Hoskins. Additional writing and research assistant is led by Sophie Ritz and Ashvini Malshe. And our creative production assistant is Delaney Young. 

Thanks for listening to This is Purdue. For more information on this episode, visit our website at purdue.edu slash podcast. From there, you can head over to your favorite podcast app to subscribe. And don’t forget, you can also check out all of our podcast content on our podcast YouTube page, youtube.com/@thisispurdue. And as always, Boiler up.