The $1T Burnout Blindspot + The Well-Being Dashboard Every Leader Needs

0:00 Welcome back to the Create Podcast. As you know, I'm the JumpCutKing. And usually we talk about all sorts of things here from branding to entrepreneurship to marketing to some cool strategies, even talk about pricing. But today I'm gonna talk about if you have employees, if you have contractors, if you have people that are the bread and butter, the meat and bones of your operation and about a specific metric you can use that's not only going to, if you're aware of it, help lower your bottom line, keep employee efficiency high and not have extreme turnover.

1:01 like the service I am going to offer. It's more than a web design platform. It's more than a web app platform, but it is a unique platform designed to help you conduct business and do so much more than you can. So if you've got 30 seconds, 60 seconds, click that link. Okay, so let's go down to the cruel kind of cold math of things. So typically, a business and organization will find metrics to use for their employees to determine who's performing and who to trim.

2:02 your performance is tanking, or that you need some sort of assistance in something. And a lot of people use generic tasks lists for this. I don't recommend that because one task can be two, three, four times more complicated than the next task. But quantifying metrics, like if you're on a sales floor, how many sales did you make versus how many customers came in the door? We can track how many customers come in the door.

3:02 Now we're saying, okay, based off of the volume of people that have walked in the door that our marketing team has brought in, that word of mouth has brought in, that our advertising campaign has brought in, now have you converted those based off of similar data, similar numbers? That's a much more honorable metric that both gives the employee room for success and lets you know if they succeed.

4:04 an employee should have. They should save you money by cutting costs, by cutting the time to answer support calls, by performing their tasks faster, more efficiently. They should be making you money by direct sales, by building marketing campaigns, by direct messaging on Instagram and all those kinds of social media components. Or they should be saving you time, which equates directly to money. They should be able to, if you hired an assistant, they should be able to take three to four hours of your day off of your plate, answering emails, answering phone calls, general text messages, doing errands, so that way you can lock in and focus.

5:04 that performance metrics are not bad. Being held accountable is not bad. But what happens that major corporations do is they look at the bottom line and they don't look at the person. When I look at someone who's working with me or working on a team or I'm partnering with or I'm doing some consulting work with, I'd rather assess the full person. I want to assess, A, are you making healthy lifestyle choices?

6:05 someone's spiritual well-being. Are you doing well? Are you meditating regularly? Are you a student of the word? Are you coming in with a positive outlook every day? Is there something going on that you're fighting with? Are you fighting with lust? Are you fighting with a lethargic attitude? Are you fighting with people at home? Are you, is there an argumentative nature? Is there some sort of spiritual component that we can help you fight with, whether it's counseling, whether it's prayer, whether it's just daily accountability and checking in?

7:06 And what that means is if I'm constantly, constantly requiring you to perform at 100%, you know, you're always constantly requiring 120%, what will happen is, is they'll dip underneath that, right, to about an 80%, to a 60%. They can't handle the stress, so they start to have altercations at work. They're not able to maneuver problems solving and that causes them to have altercations, which causes them to get bitter, which causes them to get burnout, which causes them to have all of this mental stressors and these indicators that their job environment is causing them to drop their performance, which then eventually either causes them to leave or the corporation just blatant out, fires them.

8:07 of the full person and the mental aspect of your talent because the worst thing you can do is lose someone that you might be paying $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 for and they're a salesperson or they work in marketing and they're banking you $3,000, $6,000, $9 million. The worst thing you can do is to have them burn out, not see the warning signs and instead of working with them and figuring out how to better help them improve, you lose them.

9:08 and I would say they're probably 120% always above and beyond expectations and I'd say that a good employee is only going to perform consistently at 80%. They may go above that. If they drop below that 80%, that's where you need to start seeing those warning signs and decide if you're going to nurture them or tell them straightforward, hey, I don't think this is a good fit for you anymore because you're dropping on this performance, this performance, this performance.

10:09 if I'm to say it honestly, it's actually a balance sheet problem. So we go back to the balance sheet. Okay, here's an employee, they're a liability, usually not an asset, unless they're high perform and then become an asset. Having them makes me money so then they produce an asset. But when you're looking at the balance sheet, employees can consume quite a substantial amount of your revenue. Now, if in case anyone's wondering, profit is what you take home after all of your expenses.

11:09 even firing someone technically has a red cost to it. Because especially if you want to fire someone, let's say, and they've been a good performer, you want to give them time to find the next thing and so you want to give them severance. Severance is designed so that a corporation can leave you with the ability to go find your next place, especially if they're laying off, as opposed to just cutting you out from the blue.

12:10 and free yogurt and free beer. Not this company. But they'll offer all these frilly things that are designed to band-aid to make work life feel like family or to feel like you're a part of something. That's not what I want for you and your business. So even if you're an entrepreneur and you don't own a business or you're a small business or a medium-sized business, I believe these measurable metrics and I'm about to give you break down the mental fatigue that your talent may be experiencing and or give you some professional tips that you can use to prevent your business from having these issues in the future.

13:11 and as a friend to a lot of people I work with, I like to make sure that they're at least keeping a disciplined lifestyle. It doesn't have to be perfectly disciplined because to be honest, I don't have the perfect discipline. I don't wake up every morning at 4.30 and read the Word and do everything. Like I don't wake up consistently at the same time every morning, but I do have consistent things that I do in my life such as calisthenic workouts, normal workouts, cardios, praying, meditating, reading the words, studying, being accountable with friends, sharing information with a group of people, working with consultants, working with clients and things of that nature.

14:12 they weren't hardworking, they weren't positive, they were negative and they may have been a problem child that you have to either build back up which is going to take a while and take a lot of investment or you have to send on their way. That does happen. Sometimes they're not a fit for your organization and sometimes they let on their resume. I've seen a lot of people have golden resumes and they turn out to be black holes.

15:12 to hire or fire them. This is a safe place to let us know if there are warning issues and where we need to help you intervene as we partner with you in life. We understand that one-third minimum, one-third of your life and if you're driving back and forth to work probably more like half of your life is going to be work. That's just how it is. And the other half you're probably sleeping and or dealing with children.

16:12 monthly especially for onboarding someone new. Then Psychological Safety that's another index you can do some simple team level questions. These are based off Amy Edmondson's work Teams High and Psychological Centers Learn Faster and Perform Better and Psychological Safety if they feel safe if they feel like they're not being threatened if it's not argumentative there's no negative people in there. Hey, if you find people that are high performers but have a negative attitude your best bet is to get rid of the negative attitude immediately.

17:14 long-term sick days, low-output days, present-ism. I don't know if I'm saying that right. Those are two data points that map to hidden costs.

18:15 that something is really, really wrong. And that metric is easy to track, whether people have badges that they sign in when they walk through the door, or whether it's a security system that's recognizing their face and knowing what part of this building they have access to, or whether it's just simply being observant and letting your internal team keep track of people's whereabouts, like your management team. I'm not saying that you're going to keep a black book and say, well, this person showed up five minutes late today and now we're gonna go have a conversation with HR. I'm saying just observe people pretending to be present and actually being absent in body. That's usually an indication that there's something going on that is above the surface.

19:16 remove people from management if I'm losing gold star, cosmic employees, unicorns, and I'm losing left and right. I look at management. I'll say this because I've been around organizations: well, it's this fault, it's this fault, it's this fault, it's this fault, it's this fault. But if you have a high turnover in a couple months, a year, two years, even if it's five-year turnover, that's an indication that there are some debts, and we're going to talk about these debts in just a minute, that you need to overcome in your work environment.

20:16 and how that employee's mental wealth and mental state of being literally factors into your performance, not your performance as a manager, but the performance as the company on a task. And something, if they have extreme high employee morale, they'll stick in the late nights, they'll argue less, they'll complain less, you're growing great. That's probably 100 to 110 percent, right where that employee is as they go into the day-to-day operations of things. Kind of like the rut, if you will, of just, you know, nothing major is going on, but we're just doing the day-to-day tasks, they probably will rest to about 80 percent. It's completely natural for your employees to converse during the work hours. It's completely natural for people to be near the phone taking phone calls and things of that nature. If I'm getting six hours of good work for you on a non-high-performance day, it's also a healthy component of letting off steam, of building relationships, of being social, especially since

21:16 one-third of your life is at work. But I will say there's a time and a place for that, and if it comes to high performance requirements, you get closer to deadlines, projects aren't being completed, then that's when we look at, we should assess that.

22:17 measure the well-being the same way you measure revenue. Okay, here's someone's well-being, here's their performance percentages dropping, you know, you're measuring, okay, this is what it is, and you're measuring it so that's quantifiable to you, so you have an understanding. People are generally not quantifiable, but their performance is, and should be. I'm not someone who's going to pay someone to sit around and do nothing. Neither should you. And I don't mean that disrespectfully, just saying, if you're sitting around just taking a paycheck, that's an entitlement that you feel like you have, but that's not the agreement that you made when you worked, the agreement of performing tasks and that kind of thing.

23:17 built a well-being framework: mental, physical, emotional and purpose. Sign mental health commitments across regions and links to performance and retention efforts. Remember, we want good performance, 80 or plus, and I know what you're saying, you want 120. I get it, but you got to build there, and we'll tell you how to get there in just a second. And then you want to keep those gold star, cosmic employees, those unicorns that are going to do a bug-go above and beyond and do more than you ever thought possible for your company. Those people you want to retain, you don't want to lose them.

24:18 Okay, so now let's talk about how you can battle some of this debt. Now, this is very, very important. Now, when we think about debt, we think about credit card debt, you know, most Americans have ten to twelve thousand dollars of credit card debt. People have debt, right? Things that they owe, and it has a stressor, a natural stressor that applies to them when it, and it happens physically, it happens emotionally, that kind of thing. When you're cutting costs and you're shaving people's salaries or shaving people's hourlies or shaving their work hours, you have to understand that that has a stressor, a negative connotation to their performance immediately when it happens, because you're messing with their money. And most people are consistent people. They want to know that every day they wake up, they go to work, they get home and they get paid, and they hate it when you mess with their money. They hate it when rent goes up, they hate it when the electricity bill goes up, costs raise, and you're lowering their pay, and especially if you're expecting the same result. And now, from COVID, many businesses had to do this or make cutbacks and

25:18 such as the economy was adjusting and still trying to figure out how that all works and where things fit out, and it could take years before we see the turnaround on that for normal businesses, outside of AI and tech startups and some bigger formed companies. I mean, even your banks are taking cutouts. I mean, I've seen banks get bought off left and right. I saw a whole payment network get bought by a, what was just a credit card, they'd bought a whole payment network, and I was extremely surprised on that. And I don't mean by payment network like, you know, payment processor, I mean like a whole payment network. That was really surprising, and that got approved by the SEC, that was also surprising.

26:19 in my opinion. I don't believe that anyone should have less than 16 gigs of RAM, let alone less than 32 gigs of RAM, and it should be a top-of-the-line CPU, graphics card. Okay, great laptop, great. Give them an M3 and M4 Apple Silicon. Teach them how to use Apple. Teach them about the difference between the Control and the Command key versus Windows. Give them a little bit of training. It's locked down, it's consistent, and it just performs. It outperforms most laptops that you can get on the market and is way more stable, in my personal and humble opinion.

27:19 you invest into a, you know, thousand-dollar, fifteen-hundred-dollar machine instead of a three-hundred-dollar machine, their performance will be increased, especially since people do not close their Chrome tabs. So even if you're just using Microsoft Word, using Excel spreadsheets, using Microsoft Teams, using Chrome, I gotta tell you, people do not know how to close their Chrome tabs. They don't know how to use Chrome efficiently. People don't know how to use Word efficiently. I've seen Excel spreadsheets take hours to load so people can just enter simple statistics. I've seen it everywhere. That's The Universe platform is going to fix some of that. I'm offering that solution soon. There's gonna be a whole data component to that. I'm very excited about it. But until that day happens, you have people who have year-wide Excel spreadsheets with just random data that they don't have in a Salesforce, or in, uh, Monday, or in ClickUp's, or in their project management

28:20 choice, or an internal database structure or system. And just basically, if your computer is just loading and loading and loading and loading and dying and dying and dying, you can literally take 35 minutes of someone's day and give it back to them by investing on a new machine. And if they're in marketing or in sales and they're sitting around waiting for something to happen, or their printer is malfunctioning, or this happens, all these tech debt processes, they're slowing you down, can just be literally helped by improving their processing capabilities. I strongly recommend you don't cheap out on hardware and software. Doesn't matter who they are, don't cheap out on it.

29:20 use a strong hardline ethernet, upgrade your entire network infrastructure so you're working at 10 gigs per second and all of that stuff. So your file sharing on internal networks, God forbid anyone knows what file sharing is on internal networks. I rent a whole team of people that was like, "We're using Google Drive," and I'm like, "You're right there, you're right there, and you're across the hall. Like, you have to upload a Google Drive, wait for it to upload, then you're gonna go down." Like, no, no, no, no, no. Internal shared network files, you know, give the network a boost. Sometimes it's worth replacing that piece of equipment, or at the very least upgrading it from Windows XP. There are a lot of factories and press shops out there that are still running Windows XP because they have to replace this machine, replace that machine, and frankly the process is 35 to 45 minutes waiting for a machine to just spool printer data. If you're waiting any amount of time, if computer's taking any amount of time to process that's not less than a minute, you're causing this

30:22 deficit, and I'll tell you this deficit adds up to negative experience. I have to stay later, or I have to wait till tomorrow, you're pushing me in a deadline, I can't get it done because the machine's not working. If the machine is crashing, if it is not responding to service requests, if things are happening that you're just bogging down my experience, you're adding to that negative morale experience, and you're adding that emotional strainers, which is going to lower performance.

31:23 someone's on the phone call and they're going to one system and they have to go copy from this system to system B and have to go to copy system C. I mean, Apple's customer service has this problem. I was on the phone with an Apple representative dealing with a purchase for an educational non-profit, and they wanted to make XYZ purchase, and they made the purchase online. They needed to speed it up because originally it said delivery date would be by X, but something happened and it got delayed. They had to get some verification, so they just called in and they put in another order, and now they had these two orders, and this guy had to go in and cancel the other order, otherwise it was a big charge. And frankly, at the end of the day, he said he had to go from one system, wait for another system, load, populate that system, go to another system to load this. Man, you were on the phone for 30, 45 minutes.

32:23 copy that you're manually going through and revising, helping breakthrough writer's block. All of those things, adding that, is going to increase your performance as a company, not just for employee morale, because the more an employee is waiting, the more they're struggling, the more they're hitting their head on a wall trying to figure out how do I, how write this copy? I don't know how to approach this. I don't have an idea. Well, we don't use AI here, we're not allowed to. Okay, great. I'm not saying you use the full AI copy that AI is going to generate. I'm saying let it spark ideas and partner with it. We use AI in development, and only 15 to 30 percent of our code actually stays AI origination, because we have different concepts, different precepts, and different way of documentation that works well for myself and works well for the editor.

33:25 expect a process to take. And you can, you literally don't have to increase your prices, but you can also fix your processes to deliver faster. It's the biggest thing. If you're looking for something to do and you're afraid of increasing your prices and you're afraid of people dropping out, fix your processes, change your processes, improve. Strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly recommend.

34:27 knowledge." That lack of knowledge is actually translatable into a lack of restraint. My people were destroyed by a lack of boundaries. You can interpret it that way, and I don't want you or your organization or your team to be started by a lack of boundaries, a lack of clear defined roles, a lack of high efficient processes. I shouldn't have to wait for 15 people to get back to me on something that should only take one, two, three people. I shouldn't have to make phone calls, log them into a system, and set up another system, and when I hang up a phone call, at that phone call should be done. I shouldn't be taking next to 15, 20, 30 minutes to write notes, update systems. I should be able to do that all on the phone. Now, that's just using an example that some businesses connect with, but I have to say, bring that efficiency back. Handling process debt and handling people debt is a big, big thing, if you have high performers and they're being constrained because the leadership isn't

35:30 supporting them, or their management isn't supporting them. But you have to be mindful of how you're using your resources. After all, it is a human resource to a company. Sounds so dystopian to say your human resource, but when you come to a company or corporation, you have a profit and loss statement. This is working, this is not working. At the end of the day, that's where your decisions come from. If it's working, do it. If it's not working, lose it. If it's a benefit to you in some way and it's worth the cost, do it. If it's not a benefit to you, don't do it. And sometimes revising performance. The biggest thing is if management is not participating in the tasks and they're just orchestrating for, like, two hours a day and sitting around in fantasy football for six hours a day. I hope the person I'm talking about does not see this, and there's no one, you know, when any of my clients know this, is someone from back when I worked in a different state, and they would literally, would, they were

36:32 an IT professional. They were the leader of this IT, their group, and literally two hours a day they worked, the other six hours a day they were in fantasy football and doing all sorts of political stuff, reading news articles and things. And one day I walked in and the president said, "Hey, you fix this problem yesterday when they were around?" I said, "Yeah." And, like, I realized this person isn't doing anything, and to be honest, I can give you the two hours of work, because I think we have it in the ability to do so, and I think even if something gets lost, I'm gonna save this person's salary. And everybody walked in, they were fired, literally. Now, it took two and a half years for them to find out that this person's job wasn't needed. That's a problem. And I'll be honest, I see that every single day and every corporation, every small business, any business of any size that has employees or staff, there's always that one person that you hope is working, whether in management or sales associate, and you find out they're not

37:33 performing at all. Cut them. Cut them almost immediately. These are interest-bearing liabilities. They compound, they steal time, which steals money, and create relentless frustration, and all of this degrades someone's performance from the 120 you expect down to the 80 or the 60 you're actually getting. And let's be honest, some employees are getting 40 or less, and some of it, if not a huge, huge, huge component of it, if you fix the processes, eliminate this debt, do an investment to upgrade the equipment, do investment to upgrade procedures and processes, sit down, hone in, focus, excellence, all these things help the organization restructure. Let your organization know who's in charge, who's doing this, who's doing that, redefine roles. Doing that may jump up performance back in that 80 percent, back in that 100 percent that you really, really want, and that's imperative for you to do so you have, so you live long as an organization. 20 to 25 percent daily, that's daily, is how

38:38 much debt of repetitive work that could be automated. People generating reports, that's the biggest thing. If you're generating any type of report and it requires multiple systems, you can have someone write a Python script or any form of code that can generate the data set that can build your report. And repetitive work is a problem. Google SRE playbook calls toil a morale killer and recommends automation, refactoring to stop people from doing low-leverage tasks. DevOps Research, DORA, Accelerate, ties healthy practices and reduced debt to higher performance. Think of any tech debt you have, any percentage that you have. If you remove that debt, you're increasing employee morale, you're increasing their mental well-being, their ability to perform for you, and their longevity in your organization, just by fixing tech debt, operational debt, process debt, and all those kinds of components. Automation and paying

39:39 down debt is therapy for you as an organization, for you and your team, and for your customers. It's a great way to save money and make more money by higher performance, by having more time to your employees' pocket, having more time for you to do things, and being able to take on more customers, more clients, being able to complete more projects, complete more tasks, etc., because you have better efficiencies. It will take investment of time and money at the front end. Great, do it now before it's too late. You can create processes and you can remove debt, and you can have structures in place that supports, kind of builds a solid foundation, the same cornerstone that we have spiritually in Jesus Christ, the same cornerstone your organization can have by using wisdom, understanding and peace, prayer.

40:39 by faith, not by sight, that any stressors that come against you, any weapon formed against you, God said will not prosper, and anyone that speaks anything against you in judgment, that God himself will condemn. That's the heritage that we have for those who are in Christ Jesus. And I pray right now that you don't live in a world where you're being attacked mentally, you don't live in a world where you're being physically, in the name of Jesus Christ, we, I pray right now that anxiety and depression breaks off of you, breaks off of your staff, breaks off of your employees, breaks off of your organization, that you're going to continue to thrive, and you're going to begin to thrive again, and so not only survive, just barely making an existence, but you're going to be able to thrive in any economy regardless of situation, because you are the head, not to tell, you are above and not beneath. And whatever God says and puts in your heart to do, he will be faithful to perform it. He's always faithful to perform this word. If it gives you word, he's faithful to perform it. He's just, and I pray that you get to live in that righteousness and that justness and that wisdom and grace and mercy. If you do make mistakes, that grace

41:40 and mercy shall follow you all the days of your life, and you shall dwell in the house, Lord, forever. That's a house full of peace, patience, God's presence and infinite resources. I pray this for you right now in Jesus' mighty name. Be at peace, have wisdom and understanding, and the boldness to do what needs to be done, and do so in a God-ordained way. The path of righteous not only are made stronger every day, but the path of the righteous are ordered by the Lord. I pray this in Jesus' name for you and your organization. Again, if you have 30 seconds, just click the link, give me your opinion. I'd greatly appreciate it. You