Simon Sinek on Avoiding Burnout and the Modern Work-Life Balance

Here is a summary of the key points from the transcript: The speaker discusses the importance of work-life balance and taking real vacations to stay healthy and perform well at work over the long-term. They give an analogy of two lumberjacks, where the one who takes a daily break to "sharpen his axe" is more productive. The speaker notes that it's not enough to just enforce vacation days - people need to fully disconnect from work to recharge. Checking emails or dialing into meetings while on vacation defeats the purpose. They explain how their views on work-life balance have evolved. They used to believe people should completely disconnect from work in the evenings and weekends. However, research shows that employees who want to occasionally work extra hours tend to be the highest performers and most engaged. The speaker concludes that vacation time is different - people should fully disconnect then to "sharpen their axes." They emphasize the importance of speaking up about needing breaks, and leaders modeling this behavior.

The question is, how do we take care of the health of our people so we can continue to perform over the long term? Two lumberjacks, every morning they go to work at the same time. Every day they end work at the same time. And every day one of the lumberjacks disappears in the middle of the day for about an hour. And every day the lumberjack that disappears for about an hour in the middle of the day chops more wood than the other lumberjack. This goes on for months, and then finally the guy who works all day, he stops. He says, I have to ask you. Every day we start at the same time. Every day we stop at the same time. Every day. You go away for about an hour in the middle of the day, and every day you chop more wood than me. Where do you go away for that hour? And the other lumberjack looks up and goes, oh, I go home and sharpen my ak. And I think when we. It's one thing to enforce people taking vacation, but I think we don't even do a good job of that. There's a huge difference between taking a vacation and telecommuting from the beach, you know? And I think where we get it wrong is where we allow people to dial in in the morning and miss breakfast with their family when they're on vacation, or we expect them to be on the call when they're sitting by the pool. That's not a vacation. That's telecommuting from just a foreign place. And so I think work life balance is becoming a more complicated thing to understand and achieve because of this world we live in, where now distributed workforces are now a thing where you can work remotely, and how and when people work and even what the definition of a full time job is, is all changing. And I've been forced to challenge my own beliefs. So I used to be very, very strict that once you leave the office at the end of the day, I don't want to hear from you, and don't you dare send me an email on the weekend, because you should be with your family. There was always going to be exceptions in rare circumstances, but unbalanced. I was pretty dogmatic about it, and I came across some research recently. There's a company called Watercooler, which I help that tracks sort of everybody's work behavior. It's kind of amazing stuff they do. And what they discovered is that people who never engage on weekends or evenings actually have high propensities to quit and very low engagement scores. People who work too much at nights and on weekends burn out very quickly. But there's this little sweet spot where people who want to work the occasional night do a little bit of work on the occasional weekend. Actually at the best performing and actually the happiest employees. The reason they work on the occasional night and weekend is because they care. And so it really flew in the face of what I used to believe. So now I tend to sort of take a set back, and I just want to make sure people aren't overdoing it. But vacation is different. I expect people to disconnect when they're on vacation because I need them to sharpen their acts. I also expect people to speak out if they need a break, and the way to do that is for me to lead the way.