Not Your Father’s Data Center - The State of Tech Burnout

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Burnout is a familiar concept in the tech field, with 40 percent of workers saying they want to quit due to stress, fatigue, and poor work-life balance. This can be especially true for startup companies, which face challenges and uncertainties that can place added stress on employees. But one company, Yerbo, is seeking to change that.   On today’s episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center by Compass Datacenters, podcast host Raymond Hawkins, speaks with Francisco Vieira Mendes, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Yerbo, about the origins of his company and what services they offer to tackle employee burnout in the tech world.  Mendes explained the value Yerbo’s assessments can bring to the table to change an organization when leaders share their own results with the team. “It’s really important that those of you that are listening that are leaders of an organization or leaders within a team—even if it’s just a two-person team—it’s important that you show by example…If you show that we’re open to discuss those items, if you bring your results…that’s really important.”  Mended went on to add “Because if you feel psychologically safe to be able to share that, that’s going to be very loud for your team, because your team is going to realize, ‘All right, I can share this because if you share this with me, maybe I can share this with him or her.’”  Francisco Vieira Mendes is a marketing professional who has a passion for helping Latin American startups grow. He is Co-Founder and Head of Growth at Yerbo and has served in past roles such as a Class Lead for KURIOS, VP of Marketing at treble.ai, and Director of Product-Led Growth at CleverTap. Mendes earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from the Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto and a Master’s degree in Attendance and Computer Science from Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto. 

All right, welcome again to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I'm your host, Raymond Hawkins, and today we are joined by the founder of Yerbo, Francisco. How are you today? Where are you calling from? Tell us a little bit about you and let's get rolling with what do we know about people being stressed at work? Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Raymond. It's a pleasure to be here and talking to your audience a little bit about the perils of burnout and maybe sharing some numbers that might help bring awareness to this and also some tips and tools that they can use to make sure that they

stay productive and healthy. All right. So I'm Francisco. I'm one of the founders of Yerbo. I'm currently in Bogota, Colombia. I have been traveling extensively. I've been living the digital nomad lifestyle for the past year or so, but i always end up coming back to colombia because this was my my first home outside of portugal i'm i'm originally from from portugal i lived there um the first 25 years of my life and then i i had a chance to um come to colombia um in in the program from the portuguese government and i i came here and I just ended up staying. And then I was working at a startup and we were expanding. So we opened offices in Brazil.

I had a chance to do that. Chile and then back in Portugal, opened up the European offices. So I've been crossing the pond quite often in the past decade, let's say. And yeah, in the past three years, I've been traveling extensively between Colombia and Argentina, Brazil,

both for professional and also personal reasons, trying to stay away from wintertime as much as I can. Well, we certainly agree about that. Cole Weather and I do not agree, Francisco. So university in portugal and and and and then gotcha okay and uh and moved um into south america and it sounds like you've run around south america a good bit but but colombia being home for now yeah i would say so yeah i would say so it's it's been 10 years since i first stepped on in and and i think that that i've always ended

up coming back because I like something here suddenly and so I have I have a lot of friends and and um and obviously I always go back to Portugal for for family and and friends and and and being with them but I I also feel like I'm home here in in Bogota gotcha as um so we appreciate getting to hear a bit of your personal journey and where you're from and where you live now and the time you spent in different places there in Latin America or South America, excuse me. Talk a little bit about how did you, what did your professional journey look like that led you to having a passion about, I mean, burnout and people's health and mental health and, you know, it's leading you to co-found Yerbo. How did that journey come about? Actually, I started off studying software engineering and I quickly realized that that was not for me. That was not the thing that I wanted to do.

And so I changed paths and I went and studied business and marketing. And yeah, you know how life is. And a couple of years into my working life, I was pulled into the technology space and I was working within marketing, but for a technology company. And quickly I came to the startup life and what I realized is that I really love what I do and I have a tough time dealing with the demands of my work and also my desire to overachieve and being able to basically deal with also the other sides of my life, right? So I need to have what we usually call work-life balance. And that's always something that I've struggled with. And I also think that at some point when 10 years ago, when I first started working with startups, it was kind of the way it was framed.

You work for a startup, it's going to be hard work, but also hard play. And so you're always going to be in either extremes. You're either partying really hard or you're working really hard. And that might be interesting when you're in your 20s. When you're in your 30s, you need to sleep, you need to recover, right? And so what ended up happening was that I had experienced some mental health issues with work, but I think that I always kind of pulled through and got the other way, not too badly hurt. But then I saw some folks that were working for me, they were kind of mimicking my type of habits, bad habits in this case. And I started seeing that I was having a negative impact on these people. And that's the moment that I realized, okay, so there's something off here.

Why is this person saying Friday night, they want to keep working and then why don't we order pizzas and just work through the whole and put all nighter and then they told me that they wanted to do that because they had no one else in town that they could meet up on a Friday evening because they've been so so immersed in in in in in the work that they kind of lost track of of the rest of their lives and so when I saw that there was was a pretty clear wake-up call. So I started investigating, started learning about these things.

I was working at that time, leading marketing growth for talent management solution. So think of work environment surveys, like performance review, and that type of very formal HR focus, HR-centric type of assessments. And what I realized was that those assessments are needed, those surveys are needed,

but they are not the ones that are going to help you prevent mental health issues within an organization. When the HR is aware that something's off in terms of well-being, that's already too late. And so we sold that late. And so I, we sold that company. And so I was looking for what else should I, should I go into what, what, what, what, what am I passionate about? And, and one of the things that, and this was just as the pandemic was hitting. And so I was looking for folks that were talking about mental health

and they were trying to create some sort of technology that would somehow democratize access to the best tools to make sure that you can stay productive, but together with mental well-being. So I found my co-founder, Marcos. He had sold what at the time was the largest machine learning company in Latin America. And one of the things that contributed to the success of that company was that they had barely non-existent employee um turnover so they had

like three percent annual employee turnover and i'm sure your audience knows it's not it's not easy to keep uh uh data for us that's a great number yeah yeah yeah that's right that's a really good number i think everyone will will it. And one of the things that they did internally at Machinalis, this company, was that they, from the get-go, they had brought in psychologists to work at the team level and to empower leaders with tools. Some of them were assessments, some of them were just tips on how to read um others and how to so that they could actually have a better sense of everyone could have a better sense of their their their well-being their own uh so raising the awareness at the individual level but also

empowering managers so that they could take action so when we were talking marcos had the idea why don't i try and create a product around all of this that we were doing internally and how can we uh basically get these good practices within existing ceremonies so one-on-ones retrospectives the dailies etc how can we bring mental well-being consciousness and and and um tools and best practices to those moments. That's how the era got started. Sorry for the long answer, but... No, we really appreciate hearing your journey and how this mental health and awareness

of the condition of your employees, how that applied to you, and appreciate the humbleness with which you share that your drive can cause you to have challenges at work and concern for your employees and the story about Marcos' business. It's great to hear how you got here. It makes a lot of sense now as we think about what Yerbo's trying to do and the tools you guys are using.

So let's transition. That's a great setup for who and how you got to have a passion for this. Talk a little bit about how you set up Yerbo, what it's set up to do. You talked a little bit with me before about you're pivoting a little. Let's talk about, hey, here's the mission and here's how we're going about doing it today. Yeah, perfect. So our mission is, and even with the pivot, still is the same, which is how can we help folks achieve high productivity together with wellbeing, right? That's what we want to do. And we want to help them in any way we can.

So we started off by creating an MVP, which is the burnout index. Some of your audience surely will remember we did that at the beginning of the pandemic. So that's a self-assessment that you can take. I think Raymond, you know, starting to have some risk there, mid-level risk. And then on the engagement level, I'm a 4.7. So pretty high engagement. So I think the way you guys summarized it is I am high engagement, but I'm strained at this point, I think is how you guys characterize where I fall in the test. Yeah, that's exactly right. So we actually have created a different assessment just for founders and the leaders at startups. And the results are very similar. So what's happening there, Raymond, is that probably you are really engaged because you love what to wear multiple hats maybe it is because you're also placing some sort of work-life conflict and what the tool tries to do

is just start off by helping you understand better what it is that you're feeling and then breaking it down into the different components of burnout and work engagement so sorry to interrupt you can you repeat all that because I'm gonna forward this part to our HR department for when my next salary negotiation. So, but yeah, I appreciate you summarizing. No, but that's, I think this is really important. The fact that we were talking about this and internally within the organizations, being able to talk about these things is super important. And it's also a way, obviously, of calling the attention that you maybe need another pair of hands to help you if you're continuously overworked. So that's another thing that's important. This assessment that we created, and it's still available.

It's for free. We don't ask for an email. There's nothing there. We're not identifying you in any way. So you can take it, and it will just deliver the immediate insights to you and recommendations. So all your audiences. Can I plug it real quick, Francisco? So I took the assessment, and there were two things that jumped off the page of me.

Fast, easy to understand, and you just said it. You guys weren't doing any data collection. I didn't have to register. I didn't give you my email or contact info. So it's clear you're not trying to data mine to find somebody to market or sell to. You are genuinely interested in collecting information and understanding how to help, you know, those of us in the stressed out work world. And I really, really appreciated that.

If I remember right, I think I typed in, I think somethingassessment.com. You may know off the top of your head. Yeah, yeah. Burnout Assessment. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can go burnoutindex.org, or you can go burnoutindex.yervo.co, or you can just go to yervo.co, and I'm sure in the show notes,

it will also be listed there. Yeah, Burnout Index is the one I hit, yeah. Burnout Index. Yeah, if you Google Burnout here, surely you will find it. So we do use the aggregate data to improve the method itself. So to improve the questionnaire, we have changed some things based on not only feedback, but also on the volume of responses that we've gathered. But we also use it to create reports. And we can talk a little bit about some of the benchmarks that we found when we looked at the whole sample.

But we don't identify individuals at all. We always keep those results anonymous as well. So, yeah, so help me. Where were we? We were talking about Berkeley. Yeah, yeah. So we started, yeah, sorry, I drove you off talking about my salary negotiations. I apologize.

Hey, the mission, let's help people perform at a high level and maintain their mental health. And where is the business from a business model perspective going today? Because I know you talked about tools and what you're trying to be from an enablement perspective. So let's go, let's dig into that. Okay. So let me tell you what we built and then I'll tell you what it is that we realize and where we're pivoting towards right now. So we released this burnout index a couple of years back, almost three years now, and we saw a huge engagement, right? So in the first week, there were like a hundred thousand people going through the burnout clinic.

So clearly there was a lot of interest in people realizing what it is that they're feeling and how that might be impacting them. So we decided to create a business around that, not only with the awareness part. So we also wanted folks to take action and be able to improve on their wellbeing. So we've created a tool.

We had a great deal of companies from all over the world, but especially companies that are very focused on the IT and they are heavy on the product side. So engineers were the first ones to adopt us. And so we had a lot of banking, a lot of high-tech companies using us, a lot of also Forbes 500 companies using us, either just a unit or a vice presidency using us or the whole company were using us. So we charge per user per month for the usage of Yerbo. Yerbo would have then the mental well-being tool had like integrations

with Slack, with email, with calendar. So the full stack that developers use. And so they could keep track of their well-being through week in, week in, week out. They could take those assessments and also receive early signal alerts. So if something was going all right, the tool would say, hey, we know that when this starts going down, we know that this is a leading indicator of something that's that's that's that's going to happen in a few weeks or in a month's time. So you should take action. So we started having a lot of community create just together with us, creating

action programs so that you could take action and prevent burnout or correct factors of burnout that you were struggling with. And this was what we've been doing for the last couple of years. Now, we're a venture-backed company,

so we have, obviously, the need to grow substantially. And what we've seen is that we've started losing steam through time. So right now we're not seeing the same levels of engagement and all that. So we decided to, we obviously conducted, we have thousands of unique users.

And so we talked to a lot of them and we decided to reach out to consultants, executive coaches, and see if maybe if we added a layer of service, maybe that's what our users needed to be able to take action and start improving. And what we realized quickly is that what the consultants and coaches and even companies, what they want to do is they actually want to have their own burnout index. So what I mean by that is that not necessarily measuring burnout. Maybe it's another thing that you want to measure.

Maybe you want to measure transformational leadership. Maybe you want to measure positive leadership. Maybe you want to measure, say, your remote preparedness, if you're a team that's going remote now or hybrid work or something like that. So we started seeing this. And so what we decided to do is we've opened up our technology so that any coach consultant um company research center can develop their own assessment in a really easy way get their assessment live and the big difference is that you can set all the conditional logic so that depending on each result each

individual will get immediate feedback in the form logic so that depending on each result, each individual will get immediate feedback in the form of recommendations that they can take action. So think of what you just got with the burnout index. You got to realize what your burnout risk is, and then there's four dimensions within burnout risk. So maybe if you're a consultant and you want to use your method and create an assessment, you can use it for lead generation. You can use it to validate your model. You can use it as an entry assessment to figure out how a team is feeling and then deliver your consultancy.

So that's where we're heading right now. So I want to make sure I got my arms around this, Francisco, correctly. You guys have lots of experience, especially there at the beginning of the pandemic, with people engaging with your tool and people giving you data around the burnout index. And that back-end engine that you use to handle that assessment and manage that data, you're now taking that tool and offering it to executive coaches and other kinds of counseling and professional service teams to say, you can use this tool or you can use this tool, meaning our burnout index,

or you can use our backend engine and logic to create your own index and allow you to have assessments. I liked your one of, hey, what level of preparedness if we wanted to distribute our workforce would we have? So you're taking the skills that Yerbo developed around creating your own index and making that tool available for other people to do the same thing. I want to get this snippet of our conversation because I'm going to give that to our copywriter because I want to get that on our website. Yeah. Very good. Okay. Well, excellent. More than anything, especially for our audience, right? We're a technology service provider. We're here providing the environment for people to run the digital world. And there's incredible hours and incredible expectations and incredible pressure, especially on the developer and engineer community.

And I also think that not only is that community highly taxed, but that community doesn't have the best interaction with other people in the business. So hard to know how well they're doing, right? They work different hours than the rest of us. And they're usually very technology focused. They're touching a keyboard, they're looking at a screen and trying to recognize that, hey, just because somebody's a super smart developer doesn't mean they're not still a person and we need to be concerned about their mental health. I loved what you said at the beginning. We want high performance, but we want high performance without the risk of mental struggles and mental degradation. So how do we stay ahead of it? You made the comment. You said, hey, if HR knows you have a mental health issue, you've already gotten way past where the problem was.

And so this preventative front-end awareness, management, know your risk, get ahead of it, schedule naps. You said something to me when we talked earlier. Hey, you may need to have somebody lean into how you manage your calendar, clean your calendar up, get you an assistant, grow your team. Let's be on the front end before people at the end of the day burn out. That's what we're trying to help prevent. And what a great service, service to our industry, service to just, you know, mankind. We love the heart behind what you guys are building. And there's a business in there as well. And we all recognize we're in this to get paid. But man, love what y'all are doing and love the heart behind it and

the why behind it. And so how is that transition going? Have you had some initial coach feedback and how is that working today? Well, it's working really well. In January, we haven't sunset our previous product, the well-being management tool, but we've already surpassed the revenue coming from these assessments, the custom branded assessments compared to our existing service. So it's going really well. We have dozens of assessments already developed. And so we're being able to bring that time down.

So we're able to deliver an assessment, put it live with a landing page, with a result page that's conditional, be it individual team assessments or peer assessments. We have that. In a couple of days, we can have it running if you have the questionnaire and the logic behind it. If not, we're also working with the coaches because of all of our experience creating assessments and all the best practices that we've basically acquired through experience.

We're sharing that, and so we're helping them develop this. And so it's really exciting. We're seeing some use cases that we never thought of. So there's this company, a really big company that your audience would recognize are now using an assessment for customer success. So before they launch the product with their corporate customers,

they run an assessment that basically delivers pre-work. So depending on the results, each individual within the team that's going to be implementing the tool will get pre-work that they can go through. So it will be content like videos and whiteboards and stuff like that, so that they can work on it before they get into the kickoff stage. And so when that meeting is much more productive, so that they can work on it before they get into the kickoff stage. And so that meeting is much more productive because now they have both the customer success manager and the team have already started working on it and they have that awareness. So there's a lot of different things that we're seeing that are working, but maybe, Raymond, I'm all for talking about assessments as that's the path we're taking, but I would

love also to come back a little bit to burnout and maybe I can share also some data that we've collected through time. We have, yeah. Yeah, we'd love to hear the lessons you guys have learned. You guys have got a lot of understanding and insight and we'd love to hear you share that. That'd be great.

Yeah, definitely. So one thing that's really important is that we've talked about burnout. And I mentioned that HR, when HR discovers some issues regarding mental health, it's already too late. But we also need to realize that it's not all up to the individual. The individual has a big responsibility in taking care of themselves, but they don't live in a silo. So we are all within a society, within a company, et cetera. So there's a lot of things.

I remember that one of our first customers was actually had a, they were from the States, but they had a developer team in Belarus. And I don't know if you remember, but back in 2020, there was basically an election that obviously was stolen. And so there was like this proto-revolution where they were trying to move more towards the West. And there was a big crackdown. And so a lot of these developers, because they're working with an American company and because they're young and all that, they're all for joining the West,

say, in terms of lifestyle and all that. And so they were struggling really intensely. Why am I bringing this extreme example? It's just because obviously, even if each of those individuals was taking really good care of their well-being, making sure that they had a good calendar hygiene, as you were mentioning, Raymond. And if they are talking about this, again, there's this society aspect that they cannot control and that obviously will make it impossible for them to feel healthy. So obviously, this is an extreme case. Hopefully, your audience is not going through any of these sort of extreme cases, but they might be. So it's important for us to realize

that it's not all up to ourselves, but we do need to take care of ourselves. So that's the first thing I wanted to say. So what I would advise everyone to do is take one of these assessments. It can be burnout index by Yerbo, but you can find others, okay? And just try and realize what it is that you're feeling.

And then the second step that is really important, especially for tech folks, because not always are they the most social, the most talkative about these issues. It's really important that those of you that are listening that are leaders of an organization or leaders within a team, even if it's just a two-person team, it's important that you show by example. As a leader, if we're vulnerable, if you show that we're open to discuss these items, if you bring your own results, as Raymond was sharing, you're sharing your results earlier here, that's really important. Because by doing that, and I'm not saying that everyone needs to share their results, but if you feel psychologically safe to be able to share that, that's going to be really loud for your team. because your team is going to realize, all right, so I can share this, because if he's sharing this with me, then maybe I can share this with him or her, right? And so you'll start seeing that folks

will raise their hand and they will reach out and they will talk about this. So that's the first thing. Prevention is really important. And it comes from first getting to know yourself and then talking about this. It's really important to unlock these conversations. Yeah. So, Francisco, in all of our conversations, I've loved your approach, your humble and serve other approach, you personally, but as well as the business. At the end of the day, we all need to find ways to make a living and provide for our families, but doing it in a healthy, safe way, doing it in a way where we care for each other is far more important than just competing and winning and grinding people into dust and burning them out. Let's be more concerned about our people than our results. And I think especially us in the West,

as you referenced, and especially us in America, we don't handle vacation time or holiday well. We don't take enough time off. We think that there's some great value in production instead of great value in relationships. I'm going to share one story with you, Francisco, that I think might resonate with what I think is the mission behind Yerbo. I'm in Africa. I'm with some friends of mine in Africa doing some work for my church. And after lunch, me and my African friends, they said, hey, we're going to go home and we're going to be off for the next couple hours and work will start again around two o'clock. And I asked them,

I said, well, it doesn't take two hours to eat. What are we going to do? In America, I take 15 minutes for lunch. I usually eat it sitting right here at my desk. And I'm probably doing some work while I'm eating. And my African friend said, well, Raymond, we're going to go home and talk to each other. And I'm like, wait a minute. We're just going to leave work and we're going to go home and talk. And we're just going to rest and talk for two hours and then we'll come back to work at two o'clock. And they're like, yeah, we're going to talk for two hours. And to me, that was such a good, healthy human thing. And so foreign to me as a commercial guy and a corporate guy and an American business guy. And I wish I tip my hat to my friends, my African friends. What a healthy way. And that's what I think you guys in Europe are promoting.

How do we be productive, but how do we be mentally safe and mentally healthy? Yeah. We could all use two-hour conversations with our friends in the middle of the day. Here's the point of my story. Yeah, that's a great story. I'm sure that those that are listening are thinking, hey, I cannot take a two-hour lunch break every day. And that's okay. We understand that.

But it's really important what you're saying because we are social animals. And one of the biggest, there's a lot of studies around this. There's this big Harvard study that I think it's the longest continuous human science study where folks from, I believe, from right after the Second World War entered into this study and they follow these Harvard graduates through life and now they're following their kids. And the thing that correlates the most with happiness, well-being, health, etc., is having a good social circle. So it's really important because we're working and most of us are working in either a remote or hybrid type of jobs.

Some of us are working fully onsite, but still we're spending a lot of time at work, a lot of time at work. And now there's no, let's forget about the idea of leaving work at work and going home and not having to care about, because we all carry our work with us wherever we go, because we have our smartphones and all that. And there's things that you can do there. Obviously all of you will, will know you can pause your notifications. You can, you can, you can close down some apps after

certain hours and stuff like that. You can do that. And that, that, that helps, but we need to realize that work is always with us. So we need to figure out how can we have a better relationship with work. So we need to be the ones that set the boundaries. And so, Raymond, next time you're having lunch, why not just step outside? Maybe you're not going to take a two-hour break, but maybe you'll go and eat your salad 30 minutes at some place and you'll say hello to the waitress and we talk to folks. And that's really important. We really get our energy from that, from those human interactions. So that's super important, especially for those of us that are working. And even as a digital nomad, everything seems like it's really fun. Tomorrow I can be at the beach and I can work

from that. And then I can be at the Amazon or whatever. And that's right. But you also lose your roots, right? You don't have your friends and family close by. And so if you're struggling with something at work, if things aren't working out, then you don't have that to fall back into it. So you need to create your own habits of reaching out, talking to folks, making sure that you have that healthy social lifestyle. And then there's quite a, making sure that you have that healthy social lifestyle. And then there's quite a few other things that you can do. One is setting realistic goals, right? We're not all too good at setting goals.

We always feel like, at least I do, that tomorrow's Francisco will be super productive. That's why I'm always like, well, it's still like, yeah, next week. No, next week I can get all of this done, right? So we need to make sure that we have that. We need to stop and celebrate small wins. There are a lot of small things that you can do that have an impact.

But first of all, try and get to know yourself. I would go back to that. Yeah. Well, Francisco, you hit on something there that resonates with me. My to-do list next week is always full. I always think I'm going to get so much more done than I'm ever going to get done. Well, Francisco, hearing your story, hearing your heart for mankind and how we handle things and our growth and our health and still being productive is touching. We love it.

It lines up beautifully with our culture here at Compass and so grateful for you sharing the Yerbo story with us. We wish you guys the best of luck. Excited to see how your tools get used to help people assess what's going on in their organization and grow and be healthier. And we couldn't agree with you more. We were designed to be in relationship and that's what ultimately leads to the greatest level of happiness. And we couldn't agree more. So thank you for being with us, Francisco. Thank you so much for having me, Raymond, and for bringing awareness of your audience to these subjects. And I'm happy to connect with anyone. If you have any questions, be it about burnout, be it about assessments, whatever it is, I'm always happy to chat. So reach out and I'll connect.

Awesome. Sounds good. Thank you so much.