The Impact of Control on Stress and Health in the Workplace: Insights from the Whitehall Studies (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: But I think one of the things we're seeing, you know, is there's been a general feeling in the United States of lack of control. And control and the feeling of control is a remarkable thing in how it affects human beings. There were these studies done in the 1970s in the U.K. called the Whitehall studies. And they wanted, these social scientists wanted to understand this thing that they labeled executive stress syndrome, right? Which the assumption was the more senior you get, the more responsibility you have, the more impact your decisions can make, the more stress that puts upon you. So they did the study in government, in Whitehall, because they could control for variances in health care because everybody got the same. And here's what they discovered. The more senior you get, your stress goes down. Yes, you have more responsibility, yes, the stakes are higher, but you also have more agency. You get to decide how to spend your day. You get to have more control over how you solve a problem. And when you're in the most junior position, you have the least amount of agency because somebody tells you what to do and you're going to do it this way and there is no creativity and there is no variability. And it's the lack of control that actually increases diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers, right? A phenomenon that has happened, again, I blame the past 30, 40 years, where, you know, people give their entire lives to a company and then get the proverbial gold watch. There's an entire generation that when we talk about the gold watch, they don't know what we're talking about because it just doesn't exist anymore. And if you think about it, and again, because of the commonality, the frequency of the use of layoffs as a tool, right? For those who saw the better.com video, I don't know if you saw it, it was embarrassing. You know, the CEO made a video that he played to employees that over Zoom. So what, he fired 900 people? 900 people with a video saying if you're unlucky enough to be seeing this video, an effective immediately, you know, two weeks before Christmas, and when the CFO was interviewed about it, he said, well, we need to, and I love this terminology, we need to fortress the balance sheet. Like, this is why we should not let CFOs, like, talk to the public, you know, fairly. But the point is, is what he amplified is that if you have your own business, if you're a small business owner, you know you're going to go out of business months before. Like, no small business owner goes to work one day thinking everything's fine, then the next day there's nothing. It just doesn't exist. But we now live in a society where having a stable job with benefits could end tomorrow. Effective immediately is what they were told. Not a meritocracy, no fault of my own, the company's doing well. And so if you think about how twisted that is, that a quote-unquote stable job is actually not stable at all, and that stress sits with every single employee, you said we need to have a meeting, and fear is the first reaction, says something not necessarily about the company, but it says something about business, you know, and the way business and corporate America is viewed. And so the question is, is what can we as companies do to make people feel and have agency? One of the ways is accountability, right? Which is you have responsibility for this project. If it goes right, I will give you credit. And if it goes wrong, I will stand by you and support you as you try and mend it, right? I'm not swooping in, right? I'm not swooping in, and I'm not taking the credit. And we give people control. And this is a huge mistake that's made in leadership all the time, which is all the authority sits at the top, all the information sits at the bottom. This is David Marquet's work. And many falsely believe we have to push information up so that decisions can be made, which is inefficient and it never really happens. But the real responsibility is to push authority down. And I go back to the Marine Corps, you know, commander's intent. The company wants to go in this direction, and we would like to accomplish this. How would you like to solve that problem? Like, customer service. I mean, take something really basic, you know, which I find fascinating. The number of senior executives who sit in a room to fix a customer service problem, and yet why are there no frontline employees in that room? Because there's one group of people who knows much more about customer service than anybody else in the company, and it's the people who talk to the customers every day.