Deloitte's human-sustainability chief wants to help employees beat burnout. She says the best solutions go beyond vacation and office yoga — and involve undoing 100 years of routine.

• Jen Fisher is the human sustainability leader at Deloitte and is focused on making work better.
• To combat burnout, it will take more than vacations and a few yoga classes, she told Insider.

Jen Fisher used to be the type of boss who'd email her team at 2 a.m.

"I wasn't a person that anybody wanted to work for," she told Insider.

Fisher, the human sustainability leader at Deloitte, said she was a far different type of boss before she realized she was going full tilt, surging in her career, yet feeling burned out. A subsequent cancer diagnosis only underscored the need for change.

She ended up beating both cancer and burnout. But between the two, breaking free of her hard-charging approach to work proved more difficult. "I often felt that cancer was easier than burnout. When you're going through chemo, it's visible. Burnout isn't," she said in a recent talk at TEDxMiami.

The challenges Fisher faced in remaking her relationship with her job is why she thinks many of the recent debates over how and where we work are falling short. To really fix what's wrong with work, Fisher said, we need to have deeper, more thoughtful conversations. And, she added, we need to recognize these are systemic issues that will take time and effort to fix.

"We've been working the same way for 100 years. The only difference is that we have technology. So this is not an easy solve," she said in a recent interview. Fisher said leaders need to step back and think about all the issues swirling around work — from debates over returning to the office to how much of our lives we should devote to our jobs — in novel ways.

Stepping back is something Fisher has learned to do. Before her reckoning with how she did her job, she said, she didn't prioritize getting to know what made those who worked for her tick, what their personal lives looked like, what their needs were, and what "lit them up or bummed them out."

"I didn't take the time to do that because I was a taskmaster. I was like, 'We're here to get a job done and we're gonna get it done.'"

Now, seven years cancer-free, Fisher is trying, in part, to make up for lost time. In her role, she's focused on helping leaders inside and outside of Deloitte focus on the well-being of individuals, organizations, climate, and society.

Yoga and meditation apps won't do

Fisher sees a complex challenge facing employers. Various snapshots indicate workers across industries are feeling stressed out and overworked. And there can be gaps in perception: Bosses can overestimate how well their people are feeling.

Part of the disconnect could be because many employers have spent heavily in recent years to offer programs designed to help workers zap stress.

Fisher said that leaders and others are taking well-intentioned — and often useful — steps to help workers but that, on their own, yoga classes, meditation apps, or subsidies for other activities that promote well-being won't cut it.

"Anybody that has been in a place of experiencing overwork or overwhelm or even trending towards burnout knows that those things are good, but they're not going to solve the problem," she said.

Workers are resetting their expectations

Younger people, in particular, have challenged workplace norms that began to crack during the pandemic. Fisher said generational tug of war over how we should work is nothing new but that settling some of the disputes will require a willingness to rethink how work is structured.

"How do we come together and have these real conversations to say, 'It's not that anybody is lazy or doesn't want to work hard. It's just that they want to work differently.' And how can we adapt our business and our models to serve that?"

Fisher said buzzy phrases like quiet quitting and lazy girl jobs — "I don't know why it's only girls," she quipped — signal a resetting of expectations for many workers.

"They're very clearly saying to leaders, 'I want to work for an organization that cares about me and who I am,'" Fisher said, adding that those workers want employers that care about their lives outside of work and that care about more than just raking in money.

Flexibility isn't a cure-all

Fisher said developments like hybrid work can help though they won't fix everything. One reason is because giving workers some choice over where they work might not matter much if they're overwhelmed.

"Flexibility doesn't solve all the problems of well-being." If workloads are too heavy — and people are still toiling away in the middle of the night like Fisher often did — that's not good for well-being, she said.

Fisher said employers need to push back on the idea that workers who cut through piles of work must be in good shape. "I was highly productive. But I was struggling with my mental health. I was on my way to burnout and the downstream impacts of my actions and behaviors on my team were detrimental," she said.

"If we are truly rewarding and promoting people that work 24 hours a day or respond to email in 10 seconds flat, then that's the perception of what it takes to be successful," Fisher said.

Her own journey toward a more balanced approach to work leaves Fisher optimistic that broader change is possible.

"We're at the point of having these really hard conversations," she said.