Logan and Anya host a great conversation with Jesse Gavin, Wellness Director for the Baylor College of Medicine. They talk about the importance of workplace health and wellness and the increasing frequency of worker burnout.

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Logan Schmidt:

Hello, everyone and welcome back to From the Front Row, brought to you by The University of Iowa College of Public Health. My name is Logan Schmidt joined today by Anya Morozov. And if this is your first time with us, we welcome you. We’re a student-run podcast that talks about major issues in public health and how they are relevant to anyone, both in and outside of the field of public health. And you’ll definitely see this with this podcast today. Today, we are talking with Jesse Gavin, the wellness director for the Baylor College of Medicine. He is also currently a doctor of public health student at UT Health, where his research and advocacy focuses on things organizations can do to promote employee wellbeing and decrease burnout. Today, he is on the show to talk with us about exactly that. So we welcome you to the show, Jesse.

Jesse Gavin:

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here and share some of the knowledge I’ve learned over the years.

Logan Schmidt:

Well, first off, can you tell us about your journey to your position right now and how did you become a wellness director and what made you decide to pursue a doctor in public health?

Jesse Gavin:

Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I go against the grain. So I’ve actually been doing work side corporate health since I was in college. So I started in the field in college and just stayed with it and that’s what my degree’s in. And I know it is rare to work in what you get your degree, have that profession. Usually you just find whatever you can find. But I’ve been very fortunate and lucky in my circumstances whenever I was getting my bachelor’s degree at sister camp at UFH cool lake down here, south of Houston, Texas. One of the classes we had to take, my degree plan was actually physical therapy. So a transitional program with another hospital system that at UTMB in Galveston, which is a pretty big physical therapy institution.

Jesse Gavin:

And so one of the classes we had to take in that program was actually a health promotion class. So we learned the basics, primary prevention and secondary prevention, all those basic public health terms. But our professor was actually the wellness director of Johnson Space Center. So NASA and the South of Houston. So she came in one day and she used to always come in and of course our class was at night because she worked during the day and she worked in the wellness center and she used to come in gym clothes and talk about how fun her job was. And of course at that age, you’re like, this is amazing, we would just talk about this, but I could wear gym shorts and a t-shirt at my job every single day. That that’s great.

Jesse Gavin:

So she asked for interns and I jumped at it and I worked there until I got my master’s degree. Through the years, I’ve worked with a lot of different organizations in different sectors. So, white-collar, blue-collar, younger individuals, different generations. So I’ve worked at Shell Oil here in Houston, Texas, Beyond Petroleum BP in Houston, Texas. I used to work for a third-party company called First Life Prevention out at San Antonio. And so I actually did a lot of traveling. I was a nationwide manager of corporate accounts. And so I used to travel to different businesses in different states. And incidentally back in 2014, I wasn’t looking for another position, but a friend of mine, she was involved in writing grants for organizations, medical and collegiate organizations. She said, there’s this position at Baylor College of Medicine, I think you should look into it.

Jesse Gavin:

So fortunately I got the job and I owe her frozen yogurt for life. That was the deal. She got me this position and I owe frozen yogurt. But I love it. It it’s fun working in that space where everybody knows the importance of prevention and health promotion and getting everybody and they understand the concept of my job as a wellness director. And of course I was actually the first person hired in as for a full time wellness position at Baylor. So I started off as a wellness coordinator, which a lot of people have and moved up throughout the years. But they really understand, my job is to take care of you so you could take care of the others at your highest capabilities. Our COO says that we are all no matter what we do, the janitor staff all the way up to our practicing clinicians, we are all involved in improving human health.

Jesse Gavin:

And so we want to make sure that we’re on our a game whenever we’re doing it. And since I had this position in 2014, I never, I considered going back to get my doctorate at one time, but it just wasn’t the right time in that moment. But as I’ve been working at Baylor, it’s a very big research institution. So we receive a lot of NIH grants in those types of things. And so I realized that for me personally, to keep going and to really advocate for employees, which I think there’s a gap in that space. There used to be a lot of unions and those types of things, but now in the space of office workers and those types of things, there’s really nobody to fight for them and fight for their health and those types of things.

Jesse Gavin:

And so I went back in summer of 2020, and that was actually the fall of that year was actually, I think one of the highest administration groups at UTHealth. I think a lot of it had to do with COVID just the time that we were in, there was a lot of communication about public health and public health communication and how we get messages out vaccines.

Jesse Gavin:

And I think that really helped push people to seek for their degree so they can really help in that space advocacy and CDC and those types of things.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. I think that might be true for us here as well. COVID 19 really emphasize the importance of public health and hopefully that stays for many years to come. Moving on, just to get a basic overview. How would you define workplace wellness and how does it relate to public health?

Jesse Gavin:

So just general definitions, the of course, workplace wellness is just anything you can do for the employees. So if you think about public health science and preventing disease, your life and promoting health overall, so you really have different sectors in wellness. So you have a group of people that really focus on children, school wellness, and PE, and those types of things. You actually see a lot right now in older populations. So you see a lot of nursing homes, hiring wellness professionals, again, prolonging life and keeping that generation active. And then you have a huge population. So if you imagine 50 to 60% of our entire population are workers. They’re in the workspace and they’re spending, we’ll go into this in a little bit, but they’re spending 40, 50, 60 plus hours in this space. And it used to be thought of to where, okay, well, I’m giving my time, my creativity myself to this organization and say, okay, well, we’re paying you, but now we know that as an institution, while you’re choosing to spend your precious time, we have to do more.

Jesse Gavin:

So it’s not just, we’re paying you for your service. We also want to build you up as a person, both professionally and person. So that’s really what I see as work site wellness is really looking at the context, the environment that somebody works in and what we can do to help build that person up again, to make sure that they’re on their A game at work, but also to where they can thrive as an individual outside of work.

Logan Schmidt:

So you brought up COVID 19 and how there has been a shift to public health because of that. And actually looking into your LinkedIn, you wrote an article title 2020, the year of value based decision making. So could you speak a little bit about what you wrote in that article and just generally how COVID 19 has impacted your work?

Jesse Gavin:

So I think one of the main things that COVID 19 did from work site wellness perspective is around social wellness. So connectedness as an employee, as an individual, there’s really three a part of the self-determination, there’s really three basic needs that we need to focus on. One of them autonomy. So just having a feeling of control over your time, which is really where we get a lot of pushback in organizations. A lot of people feel like they don’t have control over what they do. They’re just told what to do and told where to be. Mastery, so you’re seeing a lot of continued education and intellectual wellness building people up in that regard, but also connection as human beings, we need connection. And that was one of the main things that we lost with COVID 19, because we had to go indoors.

Jesse Gavin:

We had to isolate, we couldn’t see our loved ones. As a program, we tried to do as a lot of in-person events to make sure employees can socialize with each other. And we had to cancel those immediately. So it really threw our year off. But one thing that it did from a positive perspective is that, I know there’s a lot of talk about zoom fatigue as we’re on a grocery card right now. But what it did was they opened the door for people that might not be able to participate otherwise. So we had a lot of people say, I’ve never been to an event with the wellness program because we have people that live on all over the state. We have people that work all over the world. And so they can still tap into the resource and even more now, because we’re videoing a lot more, a lot more of our presentations.

Jesse Gavin:

We’re putting those online. And so we’re getting a new wave of people that want to participate. I’m trying to remember exactly what the article was about. I think a lot of it was when people look at the decisions they make,they want to trust in what they’re buying into. They want to feel, and even employees, they want to work for companies that they know value them as a person. And not just here’s your employee ID number. And you really saw a shift, not just with Baylor, for example, but a as a whole, everybody’s probably heard of, it was the great, their great resignation. So you had a shift of power for people going into a hybrid environment. And now an employee can say, well, what else are you going to offer me?

Jesse Gavin:

What else are you going to offer me adoption assistance or, and these are just examples, but pet insurance, flexible working environment, increasing that autonomy mastery, how, how are you going to help me improve my skills so that I can progress in your company? And people aren’t afraid to say, well, if you can’t get me what I need, I’m going to go elsewhere. And you’re seeing a little bit of people kind of going back and saying, maybe that wasn’t the best decision. Because some of the people also as well, did lead because of money. And they’re realizing that they had a lot of those basic needs that are met. They had a great manager and all of these things in their other company that they might not have, but they have more money. So you really find that people Gallup, there’s a lot of research in this space about whenever you have that connection and you realize your purpose within the organization, money starts to slip down the priority list.

Anya Morozov:

So in your email before the show, you also mentioned that a lot of your research focuses on decreasing burnout in the workplace. So this isn’t the first episode where we’ve talked about burnout actually, but for people who haven’t heard the Joe Tye episode, can you talk about what burnout is and what some evidence-based strategies are to decrease burnout?

Jesse Gavin:

Yeah. So just from a simple conceptual mindset, burnout is really just prolonged chronic stress that goes unmanaged. I believe that’s the World Health Organization definition. Symptoms include just exhaustion, just overall fatigue. And this is from a workplace perspective, but also it’s not wanting to be connected. They’re being standoffish and alienating yourself. And then also just reduced self-efficacy. So feeling like you’re not able to perform anymore. And in a hospital system, you might start to question some of your things that you know you can do, but you start to question those things. You just don’t feel as confident in what you can do anymore, just because you’re so exhausted. It started off in a workplace sector. Of course, physicians, hospital sectors are really what has been in the research up until now a lot of heavy research on residents and physicians, nurses.

Jesse Gavin:

Now you’re seeing it somewhere on teachers and some of those other sectors. I really feel that burnout can also translate into your personal life as well. If we think about the main model, when you talk about burnout, which is the job demands resources theory, it basically just says, whenever the demands outweigh the resources, you have a higher risk of burnout. And that can happen as personally as well. If you just have demand stress on top of stress on top of stress and you have no way out of that, you can get burned out personally, just as quickly as you get burned out professionally. Some of the things that I’m actually working on and some of the things that has been the research so far, one of the things is those meeting the basic psychological meets.

Jesse Gavin:

So increasing autonomy, for example, so I did some qualitative research for one of my classes that we did the qualitative research. So I interviewed somebody that said, whenever she was a nurse, these were all managers, but she said, whenever she was a nurse, she used to go in and they would have a blank slate and they would say, okay, we need coverage here, here, here, and here. And then you were, you’re able to go in and pick your schedule. And then you could plan out your vacations and say, okay, well I want to work here. I want to work here. She said she had the most autonomy because she had a choice to say, I might need a break here. I want to work over here. I want to go on vacation here and she can plug and play. So autonomy is huge. And there’s a lot that goes into that manager communication, not being micromanager goes into that also as well.

Jesse Gavin:

The connection piece of it is huge. So social clubs, interest groups goes into that space and then mastery. So you’re having a lot of people that are adding in more learning management systems that has manager training. I know at Baylor, we actually just implemented one to where we can do anything from project management training, or you can get six Sigma certified from that training force to not have to spend hundreds of dollars outside of that. And that means a lot to people, they’re able to grow themselves and not have to spend money outside of that. And from a demand side, of course, resources, as far as wellness programs adding in those resources for financial wellness and those types of things, but also too, you’re having people looking at the demands that we’re putting on people.

Jesse Gavin:

So I’m actually really focused on organizational changes because I feel like a lot of times we’re always talking about what the individual can do. So even as a wellness director, what you can do? You can do meditation, you can practice resiliency, you can exercise, you can eat more fruit investors, the list goes on. But what is the organization doing to make sure it doesn’t happen in the first place? I always tell people if you’re burned out because you don’t have enough employees, you’re just short-staffed, that’s a demand. You have more demand on your time because you don’t have enough staff. And then I come to you and say, well, here’s a meditation app, how about you go meditate and come back tomorrow. You’re probably going to give me the bird, right? You’re like, I don’t have enough employees, I don’t care about meditation, I need more employees.

Jesse Gavin:

So I’m looking at things like adding in protected time. So in a 40 hour work week, if you have a company that says, well, you have 1.5 hours to just focus on self-care. You can talk to a health coach, you can talk to a financial coach. You can go for a walk. You can work out in a gym. It’s just protected time for you. So that increases autonomy. We’re looking at actually my dissertation is going to be on manager training to increase implementation intentions, to add in things like wellness programs and some of those organizational change methods. So what makes a manager decide to implement those things in the first place? And there’s a long list of reasons as well, and also last the 40 hour work week itself. And that’s actually something that is happening right now.

Jesse Gavin:

There’s a representative out California that actually introduced a bill last year. I believe in the summer of last year, that would reduce the 40 hour work week to 32 hours. And there’s a lot of pilots. There’s a nonprofit 4 Day Week Global, I believe is their name, but they’re doing pilots in the UK. They’re doing pilots in the US. And I believe they’re doing a pilot about to start in Canada about that not decreasing pay, but you’re getting paid the same, but you’re working 32 hours instead of 40 hours. And I think that would be amazing, because if you think about the 40-hour work week, it was created in 1940. You can imagine both professionally and personally how different we are than 1940. And we’re still using that same model and thinking that it works and it just doesn’t fit our modern lifestyle anymore. So I’m really excited about that one.

Logan Schmidt:

You brought up so many different points of how burnout can look in different ways. Organization can be short-staffed and not adopt different strategies. Or there could be burnout also, if a place is well staffed and there’s not satisfaction in the work, there’s no opportunities to grow as professionals or individuals within that work. It can vary so much. And this leads into my next question. How can these strategies vary depending on the organization? You talked about how you have a background in blue-collar and white collar work, oil company experience, now Baylor college of medicine, how can these strategies be malleable to different organizations and even labor bodies? How does it compare? And maybe there’s some roadblocks when workers are unionized compared to not unionized. Can you speak upon those different aspects?

Jesse Gavin:

Yeah. And I’ll tell you that I think that’s really why it’s important that these pilots are happy right now. I’m very excited that they actually just started the one in US and the UK started this month in June, and it’s a six-month pilot. So I’m really looking forward to seeing what they come out with. That there was one down in Ireland that kicked all this off that showed people could still be productive and work 32 hours rather than 40 hours. But one of the things I think is very important is open communication. You have to have communication between employees and managers to figure out what that employee needs. And I’ll tell you, it is not always going to be the same. One employee might need to work certain hours, another employee might be able to work different.

Jesse Gavin:

So some flexibility in that is important. Of course, customer facing would be different than just like you said, in a factory or something like that. Also being flexible on the day. So just because you’re moving to 32 hours, doesn’t mean that it has to be the same day. If you need to provide coverage, some can be on Monday, some can be on Tuesday, some can be on Wednesday or some people can work every day. You’re just knocking off a couple hours. So they might work six something hours a day rather than eight. So that could be looked at as well. The Ireland study actually looked at some things like meeting autonomy. So you could probably imagine, I’m not sure you’d probably sit in meetings, but everybody that’s listening has been in a meeting that they come at that meeting and they’re like, I had no reason to be there.

Jesse Gavin:

I didn’t get anything out of it. I didn’t provide any say any input. And so they actually practice meeting autonomy. So being able to choose which meetings you go to and it freed up a lot of time, you can also imagine in any given day and full transparency, I do it as well. So you think in an eight hour day that you’re strictly in a project all eight hours, not really right. You might sneak on YouTube. You might send a text here and there, walk and talk to people would take up some time. So you can imagine that in that eight hour days, you’re probably, and I don’t know the research on this, I’m just hypothesizing brainstorming, but you might be busy five, six other hours, if you could press everything together.

Jesse Gavin:

So that’s another strategy that they looked at, but it is difficult and it’s not going to look the same for everybody. Somebody asking you the other day about part-time workers, somebody works 20 hours here, and 20 hours here, they’re still working 40 hours and not 30 hours. So with any new concept, I think that you’re going to come away with it and be that doesn’t work for this group. And that’s really why I wanted to focus on some of the other strategies, like the manager training and just adding protective time. So if at reducing to 32 hours, doesn’t work, maybe you can just give people a couple hours a week and whatever it is, we’re actually looking at implementing it because we have a new employee care clinic.

Jesse Gavin:

And I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the Houston area or anybody’s familiar with the Houston area, but we’re very dispersed. So you have Houston, but most people live outside Houston. And right now our employee care clinic is inside Houston. So we have to make sure that people are comfortable taking the time off while they’re in the medical center while they’re at work to go to the clinic. Cause most people will say why I don’t have time to do that? Cause you need probably a little bit over an hour. So we’re really trying to reduce the barriers for self-care and get people in there.

Anya Morozov:

I think you’ve already touched on some points that you might get at in this next question, but it does feed in nicely. We in public health, to center health equity within the 10 central services of public health. So related to that, how can you ensure that wellness strategies in an organization are truly benefiting everyone within that organization from the frontline workers who at a hospital might be like hourly all the way up to administrators or people with more like office type jobs.

Jesse Gavin:

So one of the things I think is very important is being in line with HR. And so throughout my 15 to 20 year career in worksite wellness, I’ve been under facilities, health and safety. I’ve seen wellness under legal, it’s just what are you doing today? You’re now in charge of the wellness program? But being in line with HR now, you’re really linking that mindset that this is really a benefit to you as an employee here. So we actually oversee our onsite wellness center. We oversee our onsite mother’s aid stations. So when new moms have to come and pump and those types of things, so we manage those rooms. And so it’s really about bridging the gaps. I think so often that people are siloed. They have their project and they have their group and they don’t want nobody to step in. But to make sure that we are doing the most we can again, to reduce the demands and increase the resources for everybody.

Jesse Gavin:

We really need to bridge the gap between all groups. Like for example, we also do a portion of our student wellness program, but we also have a group that’s like student affairs or we call them office or student training services. That does another piece. So if we don’t work together, that’s a disservice for our student population. So we’re working with, I mentioned the onsite clinic, internally our HR department, where we with retirement, we work with benefits. We work with office, student training services, our security monitors, our bike racks we work with them on a lot of different initiatives. We work with our office of professionalism sometimes again, instilling our core values, engagement and appreciation is huge right now. Just showing an employee that you’re valued. You’re important to this organization. That’s huge. So bridging the gaps is one, but also senior leadership.

Jesse Gavin:

And I’ll say that I’ve been so fortunate with Baylor college of medicine. And part of the reason I was something I mentioned before is that they know the value of wellness. They know that we can’t say okay, as a community, as a Houston community, we want you to do these things, but we’re not going to do those for our employees. So I’ve really never, sometimes at wellness, you feel like you need to show your worth and always fight because the wellness program is the first thing to go. Whenever you have cuts, it’s not at Baylor cause medicine at all, whenever COVID 19 happen. I know a lot of wellness initiatives that got pulled back or either cut completely because people need to save money that was never considered because we know the value that it provides on employees.

Logan Schmidt:

You touch on a couple good things there. And the first thing is the siloing effect just in healthcare, in general with what I’m studying, different departments, units, different like HIM and collaboration with the service lines. There is that silo effect and the interdisciplinary collaboration is so essential to have things men together and actually work. When it comes to wellness programs, you hit on how these wellness programs can be out there and they can they’re there. But it’s up to it’s based on that collaboration with other areas to make sure it’s actually implemented. And then it’s going back to what you’re focusing on with the manager training for implementation. Again, those programs can be there, but they need to be advocated for and known that we actually want you to be using these things. It’s beneficial for you, but it’s also beneficial for us as an employer. So you hit on some really important things that I’ve even learned in my experiences with healthcare administration. And the last thing we touch on with our podcast guests is what is one thing you thought you knew, but were later wrong about.

Jesse Gavin:

I’ve been thinking about that question for two days. It’s actually you brought up managers, managers are one of them. Whenever I was working through wellness in the beginning, some of it sometimes it’s easy and I thought it was easy and it is not. Probably like you said, senior leadership, even the CEO could say that, yes, this is important. We want you to participate. And Laura Putnam actually does a lot of our managers and they’re the concrete layer, like you said, senior leadership can say something and if it doesn’t pass middle management level, it’ll never get implemented. And that culture is probably one of the hardest things to change in wellness. Because we still have people that tell us, I don’t feel like I can get up to take my lunch break, because my manager side eye me, or I feel like we’re like, okay, well get up and take a walk.

Jesse Gavin:

Or we’re doing a walking challenge. And people still don’t do it because their coworker looks at them funny because, they think they don’t have enough work to do. And that’s why they’re able to go for a walk or something like that. So those perceptions in that culture is the hardest thing to change. And also as well, I think going through the DRPH program, I learned a lot more about theory and mapping out an intervention. Then you really get to put a practice in the workplace. Because you learn all these concepts and then you think about it. And you’re in a real life setting that would never work because you always look at, you always have somebody that’s like, I need this by tomorrow. And you’re like, well, this, I was taught that this takes months.

Jesse Gavin:

And so I really learned about how to think of things, not just, okay, we’re going to do a walking challenge, or we’re going to do a nutrition challenge, or we’re going to offer personal financial coaching, but theoretically behavior change theory. Why do people make the decisions that they do? Why would somebody decide to get up and put on their walking shoes and go for a walk? That’s what we really need to target, not just get 10,000 steps. We really have to think about those things. And so that was really eye opening, I love that class. And I’m still learning a lot about it, about behavioral change theory and the different ones I mentioned, the basic needs theory and self-determination, which talks about motivation and stuff like that. So I guess to answer your question, that’d probably be it, I thought I knew wellness, but until I got into DRPI, we could be doing so much more and organization changes is exactly an example of that as well.

Anya Morozov:

Yeah. Shout out to Dr. Vander Weg in my health promotion and disease prevention class. We also learned a lot of theories that are about like behavior change and health. And I realized that there’s a lot more that goes into those interventions than I thought as well. Well, I guess it’s about time to wrap up Logan. Do you have any closing thoughts?

Logan Schmidt:

Jesse has been super informative and you’re a candidate in your program that’s well-suited for what you’re going into.

Jesse Gavin:

I appreciate that.

Logan Schmidt:

Yeah. Your enthusiasm for how to change wellness in an organization. And for the employees specifically, you talked about how wellness can be looked at like a pediatric level or like a youth level and for the elderly, but you mentioned how 60% of the population and give or take is in the workforce. And we’re in a different generation. Now, our parents were in a generation where the workforce was more of you’re there to get your work done, and then you leave, you punch out. So we’re in a new era of where employers are looking to retain the workforce and make sure there’s high productivity, but also happy workforce where they want to come to work. They do, they do a good job for their employer, but the employees are also happy and they’re fulfilled and they go home and we have work-life balance and all that. So the things that you’re doing with being a director of your wellness program at Baylor, and then what you’re studying, we can all thank you for the initiatives and the things that you’re doing to employee wellness. So thank you.

Jesse Gavin:

Yeah. You’re very welcome, I appreciate it. And you hit the nail on the head, is that there is a transition, I think, happening in worksite wellness, it’s becoming more commonplace. And I think a lot of that is, like you said, a lot of our new CEOs and leaders in the company are younger individuals. And they grew up in that space, where employees were a lot more valued. So it’s good that whenever they get in a leadership position, they instill that in their company. And so it’s really good to see. I’m very excited about the future of employee benefits, employee health, human capital, enhancing the employee experience. I’m glad that there’s still a lot of research and it’s still so new. It’s so crazy how new the concept really is. Whenever I started in 2016, wellness wasn’t really talked about worksite wellness, a couple companies had it but not a lot. And it’s really coming on full force. So yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much again for having me.

Anya Morozov:

That’s it for our episode this week, big, thanks to Jesse Gavin for coming on with us today and to Corey Dal Lewis for connecting us. This episode was hosted and written by Logan Schmidt and myself and edited and produced by me, Anya Morozov. You can learn more about the University of Iowa College of Public Health on Facebook. If you enjoyed this episode and would like to help support the podcast, please share it with your colleagues, friends, or anyone interested in public health, have a suggestion for our team. You can reach us at cph-gradambassador@uiowa.edu. This episode was brought to you by the University of Iowa College of Public Health. Until next week, stay healthy, stay curious, and take care.