Below, Daniel Coyle shares five key insights from his new book, Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment.
Coyle is the New York Times bestselling author of The Culture Code. He has served as an adviser to high…
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The other night, I heard cabinets opening in the kitchen and the shuffling of bags and containers. My husband was looking for snacks with our 9-year-old. After, he got him ready for bed, read him a book, and ordered us dinner. Then he sat down at his laptop and worked until 9 p.m. As I unloaded the dishwasher, I realized two things. First: My husband was killing it. Second: The second shift isn’t women’s work anymore. It’s everyone’s burnout.
The second shift, rewritten
In 1989, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild introduced “the second shift” to describe what happened when women got home from their paid job to an unpaid one: making dinner, folding laundry, shuttling kids to sports. Thirty-plus years ago, that division was clear. Today, it’s more like … murky. Couples expect both parents to be career-driven and active parents These days, most dual-income households assume both partners will be ambitious at work and hands-on at home. In fact, fathers are spending more time on childcare than ever before. According to Pew Research, they’ve doubled their involvement since the 1960s. Parenting is the most gender-equal it’s ever been. The problem is, most couples I talk to feel fried. Nobody’s workload has gotten lighter. It’s just doubled. Moms may still do the mental load, but dads are tired, too.
The mental load. It’s where the second shift truly lives. And despite how equitable we’ve become at dividing up chores, most households still put that “boss level” parenting role on mom. Who needs to be reminded about soccer practice? Who picks out which days they have guitar lessons and tutoring? Who keeps track of when new sneakers are needed? Hint: Whoever has the mental load. While mothers are traditionally expected to drive carpools, recent research shows that men are experiencing more work-family conflict than previous generations. They’re still expected to be hands-on dads who never miss a soccer game. But they’re also expected to be nothing but present at work, too. Society told dads they could be more involved. But workplace culture didn’t give them the space to do it. That’s why dads everywhere are loading up on after-hours email. Remote work came with the illusion of flexibility, then drove us all insane.
Remote work erased the finish line
When COVID sent millions of people into remote and hybrid work situations, we thought flexible schedules would solve all our problems. They kind of did. But they also left us with a handful of issues we hadn’t realized we needed to solve. Without a commute, there’s no transition from work to home life. There’s no off-ramp. Which means work eats into bedtimes, and work follows us home and sometimes to bed. When employees left the office for good, “having it all” became “doing it all at once.” And that’s when burnout started rearing its head (again). Parents wanted equality at home. Too many people wanted equality at home without discussing what equality at work would look like. We wanted to share the childcare AND be successful professionals. What we ended up with was equally divided childcare we were both responsible for and work that still demands we’re “on” 24/7. Kids still need to eat, bathe, and be nurtured. Work still treats you like you have unlimited bandwidth. So, we both started doing two jobs. And then we crashed.
Gen Z is already drawing the line
The second shift stopped being a women’s issue and became a systemic issue. Millennial parents are burnt out. Generation Z isn’t following suit. Earlier this year, CNBC reported that Gen Z employees were the happiest in the workplace. But they’re happy for one key reason: They know exactly what they won’t tolerate at work. Want flexibility? Sure. Mental health resources? Of course. Clear boundaries around your personal life? Absolutely. They’re not buying into hustle culture as identity. They’ve grown up seeing their parents work on reports during family vacations and answer client emails during soccer games. They don’t think that’s the version of success they want. They see it as depleting and it has made them draw a hard line in the sand when it comes to work. Which is why Gen Z will say no to policies like “flexible schedules” that actually require your schedule to be flexible … for their business. At 9 p.m. Companies like to brag about how they offer “flexible schedules.” Then they email their employees at 9 p.m. Expecting them to reply. And employees are calling BS. If you want to keep employees, especially parents you’ll have to offer actual flexibility. That means built-in boundaries. Actual hours you expect your employees to be offline. Actual limits on how many meetings they can attend in a day. And leaders that lead by example when it comes to quitting time. Because if they don’t get that flexibility from you high-performing employees will re-impose boundaries on themselves. Or they’ll leave. Actually, they’re already leaving.
Parents aren’t just burning out at work. They’re quitting their jobs because of it. If we don’t change how we approach the second shift at work, we’re going to have a retention crisis. Businesses are seeing masses of Millennials and Gen Xers leave because they’re burnt out juggling homework and Slack messages. But Generation Z employees aren’t willing to accept that trade-off. And if businesses don’t start changing how they treat parents and caregivers who need to “switch gears” at the end of the day, they’re going to lose an entire generation of employees. Being a human who wants to recover from work is once again a must-have. And ambitious employees are about to show businesses just how valuable that flexibility is.
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We’ve been sold a lie. Somewhere between “go to school” and “get a job,” work became the central node of our lives—the very thing that defines us. We measure our worth by our output, our identity by our title, and our health by how much we can endure. The hours. The travel. The back-to-back meetings. The busyness.
That’s not the picture we painted for ourselves when we chose our major in college and envisioned what we thought would be a fulfilling career; that’s conditioning. The result of which has shaped our meaning of work and how we see ourselves in it. But meaning isn’t found in the busyness of the grind—rather, it’s found in alignment. And when our work has greater meaning, we change our relationship with it and, more importantly, with ourselves.
On our latest episode of the From the Culture podcast, we spoke with Lenore Skenazy, cofounder and president of the nonprofit Let Grow, about finding meaning at work. And she offered a unique framing for how to rethink work and find alignment. In response to the public backlash she received after penning a 2008 column in the New York Daily News about letting her 9-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone, Skenazy founded Let Grow with NYU business school professor Jonathan Haidt to help parents rethink the job of parenting.
In our venture to become parents, we didn’t imagine our job would be that of a supervisor or a concierge to our children. Instead, we imagined ourselves as guardians who would help our children grow. For Skenazy, the meaning of parenting is to prepare our children for adulthood, not to protect them from it.
A deep rethink
Although this may seem like a simple repositioning, it’s actually a profound recontextualization. When we think about parenting as a job of preparation as opposed to protection, it gives our work new meaning and, as a result, we engage in it differently. As Skenazy argues, when the work of parenting is about preparation, we grant our children freedom and independence to navigate the world on their own. Not in a way that endangers them but, rather, challenges them. When this happens, not only do they grow into more resilient humans who will likely be better prepared for the world, but we—as parents—get more fulfillment from our work.
The benefit of this recontextualization also applies to our professional work. When we reframe the meaning of work, we change our alignment with it. The result of this framing not only improves our well-being but also improves the work. The behavioral science is unambiguous to this fact. When work is more meaningful, we’re more engaged, more committed, and more satisfied. Moreover, these effects produce greater productivity and higher effort because we’re more willing to “go the extra mile” when we feel more fulfilled.
A win-win
This phenomenon happens on the individual level but scales when we consider the greater work of the organization. When workers collaborate in shared meanings, their collective outputs are optimized, and the organization is more likely to flourish because of it. This isn’t about “touchy-feely,” “woo-woo” vibes to make people feel good. This is a renegotiation of work that empirically changes how we work, the impact of our work on the organization, and its impact on us. It’s a win-win across the board.
But that’s not the world of work we occupy. Instead, our current framing of work is one that valorizes grind and prioritizes compensation—which is transactional at best, but in most cases adversarial. That’s not to say that labor should not be sufficiently compensated, but that the exchange between wages and work should be more than just monetary. They should be meaningful as well.
Suffice it to say that work is in desperate need of work. Not more grind, more hours, or more late nights, but more meaning. The best part about it is that meaning is socially negotiated and, therefore, we can change it ourselves. It doesn’t require permission or approval—just rethinking. We explore this in greater depth with Skenazy on our latest episode of From the Culture, available here or wherever you get your podcasts.
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