“If talent is our greatest asset, burnout is our greatest threat.”

<aside> ⭐ Key takeaways

• A high-performance culture, coupled with remote & autonomous work makes us more susceptible to burnout.
• Burnout is a threat to our long-term sustainability at work.
• Being overinvested, in addition to overworking, are two factors that create conditions for burnout.
  • Guard against overwork by controlling your workload and staying focused.
  • Guard against overinvestment by maintaining a “purpose portfolio” that separates your personal identity from work.
• Know that if you were underperforming, your manager would let you know. There’s nothing to worry about unless there’s something to worry about. </aside>

Background

As we enter the next phase of the company, it’s important to share learnings and thoughts on the topic of burnout, work-life balance, and overall work commitment and intensity.

Depending on where you are in your life and career trajectory, this topic will look different. You might be at a stage where you can pour yourself in your work, and you really hope to for a few years so you can progress quickly. On the other hand, you might have been around the block a few times and already have a framework and system in place to manage your level of commitment.

Wherever you are, the goal of this memo is to name and address what we believe to be the causes of burnout, to provide tools and a mindset that can avoid it, and open up the conversation in our context.

We care about you (and your contributions!) and want you to think deeply about what you need to do for yourself to work here sustainably for as long as you’d like.

So, let’s get into it by setting the stage with a two-part context.

1. We’re building one of the most progressive and innovative company cultures.

After our mission, our team culture is one of the primary things that drew many of us here.

We’re a group of people that genuinely care about making this a great place to work, and we iterate on culture intentionally, keeping people top of mind.

We care for one another not only as coworkers but as fellow human beings. We don’t see one another as assets to be exploited as part of a soulless machine. This is great!

2. Our unique environment makes us more susceptible to burnout.

There are a few reasons for this:

1. We have a meaningful mission. We’re working on a problem that many of us have personal connections to, is massive in scale, and is defining a new consumer category in health and tech. This is exciting and fast-paced, and few have the opportunity to work on something like this in their lifetimes. This is something most of us want to hold close.
2. We allow for a lot of individual autonomy and freedom. Having the space and freedom to manage your own responsibilities is great in both theory and practice – it feels like the most humane way of working in 2022. The flip side of this condition is that no one is there to meter your work. And since we treat people like adults, there might be a feeling that this is on you to figure out on your own.
3. Remote makes stress harder to detect. No one will see when you work extra late multiple nights in a row, or when you skip your workout or coffee break because you are “slammed”. Elevating stress, irregular moods, and general variability can be hard to detect because we can’t see one another physically or gauge emotion as easily.
4. An environment of talented coworkers doing great work. When you look around at the team we’ve assembled (not ego-pumping here, this is truly exceptional), it’s easy to slip into feeling symptoms of imposter syndrome. If imposter syndrome isn’t recognized and addressed, you instead work harder to keep up with the need to prove yourself daily.
   1. Working hard, staying on the hamster wheel, and keeping up with all the happenings can feel really good and provides reliable dopamine hits. A culture of fast-paced performance and high achievement is a positive one we want to foster, but the dose makes the poison.
5. Positive reinforcement. We have a culture of recognition and positive praise, which can make you feel like an imposter. Your internal voice might say, “thanks for the recognition, but if only they knew what a mess this project was...”. That’s a tough truth to acknowledge, so you double down and work harder. We are our own harshest critics, and are surrounded by people who do great work.
6. This is an early-stage startup. We’re building something from scratch, so the work appears endless (as opposed to simply keeping the machine running in a big established company, where jobs are much more narrowly defined). In addition, we all have equity in the company, so there’s a very real financial reward if we reach our goals. That can help you justify why you have to work to burnout.

Working at a company with an employee-friendly culture, an exciting mission, and a ton of freedom and autonomy isn’t a bad thing. The problem is that these conditions can – in some cases, and for some people – lead to over-working and over-investing. We’ll dig into what those terms mean, and how they lead to the burnout that we want to avoid.

Over-worked