Is there Room for Wellness at Deloitte? Chief Well-Being Officer, Jen Fisher, Thinks So. Meet the Woman Advocating for Self-Care at One of the World's Most Powerful & Prolific Accounting Firms

Jen Fisher is Deloitte's Chief Well-Being Officer, a breast cancer survivor, and a wellness inspiration working women everywhere can look up to. We sat down with Fisher for an in-depth conversation on her journey, her new book, Work Better Together, the nature of burnout, and the future of work. Jen Fisher is Deloitte’s chief well-being officer in the United States. In this role, she drives the strategy and innovation around work-life, health, and wellness. She empowers Deloitte’s people to prioritize their well-being so they can be at their best in both their professional and personal lives.

Amy Cohen Epstein: After suffering from anxiety, losing sleep, and being perpetually stressed out, you made the case to her higher-ups at Deloitte that a chief wellbeing officer could benefit the company. Not only did you get your anxiety under control, but you beat breast cancer and are now a C-level executive at one of the biggest firms in the world.

There's so much to dig into, and I must break it into two parts. The first thing I'm going to ask is: Was health wellness something you had sort of always had in your life or always thought about in your life?

Jen Fisher: Yeah, it's a great question. I would say I believed that it was always a focus for me. And what I mean by that is I've always been very focused on my physical fitness. I was an athlete growing up, and played soccer all the way through college at the University of Miami. And so I was very focused on kind of the physical aspects of what was required to be an athlete.

Jen Fisher

I never really thought about or even talked to anybody about the mental health aspects of what was needed or what was required. You can't really separate physical and emotional and mental health, right? I mean, we are one person, and as far as I know, it doesn't stop at our neck, right? So while I thought I was focused on it, what I've learned in my own journey is that I was much too narrowly focused on one aspect of it.

Amy Cohen Epstein: I played competitive soccer too, which is interesting. Not in college. By the time I got to college, I was actually burned out, and I looked around, and I was like, "I don't think I can do this anymore. I don't want this to be my whole life. I need to see what else I can participate in." Physical wellbeing was what was ingrained in us. I think especially as girls and then young women playing competitive sports, you have to stay fit, you have to stay in shape, even during a short off-season. All those things were sort of just part of what became the norm I have to assume for you too.

Jen Fisher: I mean, I think that the interesting thing. I felt like we were always focused on training for our sport and not the kind of the value of rest, which I'm glad we're seeing so much more in athletics these days.

Amy Cohen Epstein: One of the things that I focus on so much is that incredible balance that we have to do as women. It's sort of taught in a way where we sort of focus on one or the other. Our mental health and our physical healthL it's all health and wellness. You just can't have one without the other. And how it plays out in the workplace, I think is also fascinating. So tell me that whole story and how... I mean, there are not that many chief well-being officers. There's more now than there used to be —

Jen Fisher: There's still not enough. There's still not enough of us. I'm on a mission to make sure every organization has one.

I've been with Deloitte for 20 years and I have been in my role as chief wellbeing officer for the last seven years. And so, if you rewind about seven and a half, eight years ago, where I was was actually in a complete state of burnout, I actually didn't really know what I was going through. I knew that there was something wrong, but I kind of looked around at other people in the organization and was like, "Huh, well, I must be doing something wrong or I must be a failure. Or I must not be able to cut it here because if I look at my other colleagues, they seem to be just fine."

“There was literally a day where I woke up and my eyes opened and I was alive, but I really could not get out of bed and continue to engage anymore”

So I convinced myself, like we do, that I would rest on the weekend or take a vacation when this project was done or, or, or, or, and just kind of kept kicking that proverbial can down the road — if you will. But that proverbial can down the road was my health and wellbeing. And so I got to a point where my brain and my body were like, "Okay, we've given you plenty of chances to do something about this, and if you're not going to do something about it, we'll do it for you." And so there was literally a day where I woke up and my eyes opened and I was alive, but I really could not get out of bed and continue to engage anymore. And not just my work life, but everything about my life. I was so completely burnt out.

And so I was forced to take a leave of absence. I started going to a therapist. I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression at the time, and so I had to really figure out how I was going to deal with that and treat that and what my treatment plan was. So I had to take a step back and really get well, both mentally and physically. And in doing that, learning to set boundaries, learning to or deciding the role that work would play in my life in addition to kind of other things that were important to me, I became very passionate about wanting to make sure that others didn't get to where I got. Or if they felt like they were getting to where I got, that they would speak up and ask for help because I didn't know who to ask for help.

You know, I had people ask me like, "What would you do differently?" I would ask for help. And it's interesting because when I came back and I started to talk about it, so many people were like "Wow, me too. I've felt that way. I've experienced that." And especially now, since unfortunately, I think burnout is so much more prevalent, it's certainly something that is much more acceptable to talk about, which is great, but I think we're talking about it more because so many more people are experiencing it. So how do we get to prevention, to taking actions to make sure that people don't burnout before they raise their hand and say, "Hey, I need some help, and I can't do all of this," and feel okay with that. 

And so after my leave of absence, I came back to work. I thanked my leader, but I was actually going to resign from Deloitte because I felt so strongly that this was something that I wanted to do to help others, and there wasn't a role like a chief wellbeing officer at Deloitte or any other organization for that matter at that time. So it was more kind of like executive coaching or something like that that I thought I was going to go into. And my leader who is still a dear friend and mentor today was really the one who kind of had more of a vision than I did. And she was like, "You're not going anywhere, because if you need this, then there's a lot of other people that need it."

And so that kind of sent me on the path of putting together a business case about what wellbeing at Deloitte could and should look like. Because of the roles that I'd had previously and the organization and the relationships that I was able to develop, I was able to put together that business case and sit down with some of our most senior leaders and just ask them to give me a chance and see if it would work. And if it wouldn't work I kind of went as far as saying, "I'll leave the organization, so kind of no risk to you, but let's give it a try." And that was seven years ago in the journey… Because people are always evolving and the workplace is always evolving as we certainly have seen over the past two years. And so it's been an incredible journey to be a part of.

About nine months after taking on the role of chief wellbeing officer, I was very unexpectedly diagnosed with breast cancer. Kind of my own knowledge about breast cancer up to that point was that it was largely something that happened when you were older. It was also something that in large part was hereditary and ran in family lines. While it's true, it's a very small percentage of women actually have it in their families. And so I had just turned 40. I went for my annual mammogram and when I was at the women's diagnostic center, they were like, "Okay, we see something we don't like. We're going to do an ultrasound," like right then and there.

Yeah. So the very next day I got the phone call that I had breast cancer. And so I was stage three and I went through about eight months of surgeries, chemotherapy, radiation, everything. I remember talking to our head of HR, our chief talent officer at the time right after I got diagnosed. I said, "Listen, if you don't want me to be your chief wellbeing officer anymore, I completely understand."

Amy Cohen Epstein: Oh, quite the opposite.

Jen Fisher: Well, I mean, and this kind of goes to the stories we tell ourselves in our heads, right? And so there was this big silent pause and he was like, "You know, Jen, you're one of the smartest people I know, but that's got to be one of the dumbest things you've ever said." And I was like, "Oh, okay." And I kind of was like, "Well, why? It doesn't make any sense. Why would you have a chief well-being officer who has cancer? That doesn't make any sense."

And he was like, "Actually, it makes a ton of sense." He's like, "Because you have this and you are going to figure out a path forward and a way to overcome it and it's going to make you better at what you do…. This is just part of your story, right? You're going to help people even more, right? Now you're going to have this and overcome it. It's going to become part of your story in another way that you can help people."

And it was kind of in that moment that I changed my mindset from like, "Wow, I have cancer and I'm going to die," because that's where you go. Anybody that's ever been diagnosed with cancer, like you hear those words and it doesn't matter what the diagnosis is. It's just like hearing that you have cancer, you're like, "Oh my gosh, I'm going to die." Right? So it was like in that moment that I was like, "Wow, you know what? He's right. I'm going to take this and I'm going to use that as part of my platform in particular to help other women." And that's what I've done. And especially in an organization like Deloitte, I mean, we have over 100,000 people. You do the math: there's an unfortunate number of women that get diagnosed with breast cancer.

Since then, I've used my platform as a way to help those women. And I'm always just a phone call away from anybody that gets diagnosed or has a spouse or a friend or a partner or whatever it may be. It's like an open-door policy for me. So it's just kind of become part of my mission to say like, "Hey, if you know anyone or you need to talk to anyone, please, I'm here." So it's my way of turning a negative into a positive. Or a couple of negatives into a positive.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Lemons into lemonade. You know, I just recently interviewed, and she's a dear friend, this gal, Elissa Goodman. She's a holistic nutritionist and her story is not so dissimilar, but she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And she went to see many different doctors, and one of the few doctors that she ended up connecting with, the only one to ask was, "How are you? What are you doing? How is your state of mind right now? Without the cancer diagnosis, what is in your life right now? Are you happy?" And her entire next chapter is about that complete connection between... No one can tell us that stress, burnout, anxiety, and depression cause cancer.

Jen Fisher: It does.

Amy Cohen Epstein: But scientifically, there are hormones released when you're in that state that aren't good for your body, and everyone's body reacts differently to that. But it's just back to what we began this with, which is that health and wellness are mental and physical health together.

Jen Fisher: It is.

Amy Cohen Epstein: And so it's awful, but it's not so shocking that you had that really intense episode in your life, and then... How long later were you diagnosed with breast cancer?

Jen Fisher: It was a few years.

Amy Cohen Epstein: And so when had you last seen your... When did you last have a mammogram?

Jen Fisher: It was my first mammogram because I had just turned 40. I was following the guidelines, right?

Amy Cohen Epstein: Of course.

Jen Fisher: Because I wasn't high risk.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Right. And you were diagnosed with stage three.

Jen Fisher: Stage three.

Amy Cohen Epstein: So I'm not a doctor. I don't pretend to be. But the idea that the cancer had been around for a while is a pretty decent conclusion, which just hammers home, the point that especially as women, we brush our personal health to the side or we deal with it when we literally physically can't get out of bed. You're not the first person who's told me that.

Jen Fisher: Yeah. And you're absolutely right. I mean, I talk about that all the time. Your doctor or your oncologist won't tell you that it's stress or burnout or any of those lifestyle factors. Because when you're diagnosed with something like cancer, you also want to know why me? And in kind of my search for a why it was like, well, okay, if I look at the way I was living my life for five, six, seven years and what that does to your immune system. One thing my oncologist did say is that everybody has cancer, right? We all have cancer cells.

Amy Cohen Epstein: We all have cancer cells.

Jen Fisher: We all have cancer cells. So it's whether or not your body does its job… I didn't have any of the risk factors, but if you rewind in my life, three, four, and five years prior, I wasn't sleeping, I was highly stressed. I mean, the lifestyle that I was living and what it did to my immunity, I fully, without having a doctor tell me, I fully believe that that was a big contributor to the reason why I got cancer.

Amy Cohen Epstein: I don't think that that's shameful and I don't think that we turn around and shame ourselves or blame ourselves. I think instead you do what you did, unbelievably and amazingly, and you turn your lemons into lemonade and then you help as many women, people, as we can. And I think that's the beautiful thing that you've done above and beyond.

So tell me a little bit about two different avenues. One, some lifestyle changes that you've made in your personal life to help combat the stress, the anxiety, the overwork because that still exists. We're high-paced women who do a lot. I can assume you have a lot on your plate and you get it all done. And then the other side of it is what are the things that you then do as a chief wellbeing officer? Like how does that translate into real life?

Jen Fisher: Yeah. So I would say that the number one reason for my success in my chief well-being officer role is that I have an amazing team. And so while it seems like I do a lot, and I do, I wouldn't be able to accomplish probably any of it without them. And so I want to make sure that that's clear because none of us get where we're going or where we are without a lot of people helping us. And so for me, my personal definition of well-being is: eat, move, sleep, and find joy. And so prior to my burnout, prior to my cancer diagnosis, my lifestyle was that I worked probably 19, 20 hours a day. I prided myself on the fact that I got to the gym, no matter what I got to the gym for an hour a day, and that left, what, like three, four hours of sleep or doing whatever else it was I was doing in my life. And, to your point earlier, I thought I was great. I was like, "I get to the gym an hour a day. Who can actually say that? Like how many other people actually get to the gym an hour a day?" I thought that I was invincible. Well, what you learn is like, okay, well, you know what? Some days going to the gym for an hour a day isn't actually the right answer….

Sleep. I used to be that person that said I would sleep when I'm dead, that there'll be plenty of time. And little did I know that I was going to die sooner than later if I didn't get more sleep. And so sleep is something I do not negotiate away under any circumstances. My team and even my friends. I mean, I am famous for being at a friend's gathering and just disappearing because it's time for me to go to bed. And I don't apologize. I mean, now that's kind of the point where they expect it. They're just like, "Oh, where's Jen?" "Oh, Jen's not here."

My team used to travel, we don't travel as much anymore, but it gets 8:30, 9:00 and they're like, "Jen, it's getting close to your bedtime." I tease them and I'm like, "You guys send me to bed because you know what it's like to work with a Jen that's not well-rested." And I tease them about it, but it's absolutely true. I mean, if you don't get enough sleep or good quality sleep and you're able to make that transition to getting good quality and quantity sleep, as you have... I just remember this reaction of like, "Wow, I didn't know that I could actually feel this good."

Amy Cohen Epstein: It’s like the Wizard of Oz. It's like everything was black and white and then it becomes technicolor. Like, "Oh."

Jen Fisher: Yeah. Because I mean, again, back to some of the points you made. It's like we're just taught to believe that this is the way that it is: that we sacrifice our sleep or we sacrifice our health or we sacrifice our personal time, right? The other thing for me, and this is much more kind of since the beginning of the pandemic, but it's happened at other times in my life: I get very impacted, emotionally impacted by the news. And so at the beginning of the pandemic and just the negative news cycle and all the anxiety and just having anxiety already on my own, like it was really, really, really affecting me. And I was like, "Okay, this has got to stop."

And so every single day I do something that brings me joy. And I think when we think about what brings us joy, we think about like, oh, vacations and these big things. Like, oh, I have to plan a two-week vacation to somewhere fabulous in order to actually experience joy in my life. But that's not true. It could be playing with your kid or playing with your puppy or watching a funny YouTube video or watching something inspiring or writing a note of gratitude to somebody or writing your own list of gratitude. I mean, there are so many ways to kind of just experience joy and kind of cultivate that in your lives. And so that's really important for me to do on a daily basis. And just kind of remember that, yeah, while the world feels like it doesn't want to quit, there are still so many great things. There are so many great people, there are so good things. There are so many heartwarming things that still happen all around us. It's just not talked about on the news, unfortunately.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Yeah. It's taking back some of that power and that control to yourself and your own being, your own health and wellness. And it's saying no, you have control over this. You can't control a lot of other things, but you can control that.

Jen Fisher: Yeah. So and then in terms of my role at Deloitte, honestly, it's not all... I mean, it's different in that I'm trying to get a workforce of 100,000 plus people to recognize and feel permission and take power over their own personal wellbeing regardless of what their definition is. Understanding what lights them up, what allows them to be their best at home and at work, and really empowering them with the tools, the resources, and the education to make those decisions for themselves.

“you can put incredible programs in place that help people with their wellbeing. But if you don't actually take a good hard look at your culture and understand what the behavioral norms, whether they're spoken or unspoken, are that are keeping people from taking advantage of them or keeping people just in general from taking care of themselves, then the programs in large part, aren't going to work”

But it's also, I think the key focus of my role is actually about culture. Because what we've learned, and I think it's becoming really, really obvious now to so many organizational leaders is that you can put incredible programs in place that help people with their wellbeing. But if you don't actually take a good hard look at your culture and understand what the behavioral norms, whether they're spoken or unspoken, are that are keeping people from taking advantage of them or keeping people just in general from taking care of themselves, then the programs in large part, aren't going to work... They're going to be a little bit meaningless, right? Because if you roll up programs and nobody takes advantage of it doesn't mean that your well-being programs are wrong or that they failed, it means that there's another piece of the puzzle that you need to address.

And so I spend a lot of time with our leadership and with our teams, creating spaces and ways in which our teams can have these discussions to say, okay, what do we want our behavioral norms to be? I mean, it's things as simple as like, what do we want our standard working hours to be? When do we expect kind of in general, everyone to be online so we can collaborate or kind of in the office or wherever it is we're going to be, if we're going to co-locate that day, what does that look like for us as a team? Especially at an organization, the size of Deloitte, it's important to have organizational norms and behaviors, but what we've found and through a lot of research that we've done is that it's really the team. And that's not shocking, right? It's the people that you spend the most time I'm with during your Workday and your work week that have the biggest impact on your wellbeing.

And what we've also found is that it is a lack of clarity, right? When people know what the expectation is to be online, they'll be online. But the reason people are burning out is that there is no clarity, right? And so they think that they have to be on all the time. If you just have the conversation about, "Hey, no, I don't actually expect you to be online. And oh, by the way, if there's an emergency," I think it's important to define what an emergency is because not everything is an emergency and not everything is a priority, but if there's an emergency, find a different way other than email to communicate with each other, because if you need to communicate outside of standard working hours, you're basically telling people, "Yeah, we have standard working hours, but keep checking your email in case there's an emergency." So pick up the phone, and use some sort of different channel in the event that there's an emergency.

So things like that that are very clear to people around, "Hey, these are what the expectations are on our teams." And that's going to look different across organizations and across teams, but what's important is that you're empowering the people and the leaders on those teams to make those decisions for themselves about how they work. And then further kind of empowering conversations about what's important to each individual regarding, like related to their own personal wellbeing and their own personal wellbeing so we can create an environment where we collectively support one another.

Amy Cohen Epstein: That's amazing. And then hopefully the programs compound that. So there are programs that offer education, but that also encourage interaction and within the team and within different teams, right?

Jen Fisher: Absolutely. Yes. I mean, we encourage teams to take advantage of our learning and development programs together, right? So you learn something together and then you discuss it and you put some of those things, the things that matter to you and your team, you put some of those things into practice. So absolutely. I'm not saying that programs are bad. I think the programs are foundational to success, but it's the programs and the cultural components.

Amy Cohen Epstein: Absolutely. With The Seam, we do webinars for big companies. A big law firm based in New York, but with offices all over the world, asked us to do a series of three on women's health and wellness. It was for a group of women who logged in from all over. So there were two real objectives. One was the information: how to Zoom. How to deal working at home as a mother. All of a sudden are stuck at home and you're supposed to work all day. And then it went on to other really interesting women's wellness topics. 50% of the reason why they want us to do this was that you had women completely not understanding how to interact outside of the work talk. And so it was an avenue to have discussions about topics that they were all really interested in, with an expert giving them the info…

I think there are fabulous things about working from home that are going to completely change the landscape of work in this country forever, at least in the next decade. But I also think there are some real downsides that need to be addressed as well, which is this isolation and loneliness and this idea that you're home or you're home a couple of days a week and technology means that you should be online all the time. I mean, that's awful.

Jen Fisher: We've all experienced what that feels like.

Amy Cohen Epstein: It feels like you never get to go to sleep. You never get to turn your brain off. You never get to do the other things.

Jen Fisher: Yeah. The other thing that I'm hearing came through, which has been really important for us at Deloitte is the notion of permission, right? That by creating these programs and these forums for people to connect with one another on topics related to wellbeing, the organization is signaling that they give their permission. It pains me a little bit to be like, wow, people actually feel like they need permission to take care of themselves, but the truth is yes. And so permission has been really important for us and continues honestly, to be important.

“People want to know that if I draw these boundaries, if I do these things that the organization is saying that they want me to do because it's important to who I am and it's important to the longevity and the bottom line of the organization, that it's going to be seen as a positive and not a negative.”

Like people want to know that if I draw these boundaries, if I do these things that the organization is saying that they want me to do because it's important to who I am and it's important to the longevity and the bottom line of the organization, that it's going to be seen as a positive and not a negative. And that comes about because in so many organizations, and it still exists today, we reward the person that stays up all night to finish [crosstalk 00:36:41].

Right? Like we hold them out as the employee of the month or the employee of the year. We give them raises and we give them promotions and all of those things. And so I think we're at a point now where... I mean, that's one of the things that you kind of have to step back and say like... I mean, when you reward a behavior, people are going to do it. Right? And so permission was big for us because it was kind of went against the grain of like, "Wait, hold on. You want me to take time out in the middle of the day to go to yoga class?" And we're like, "Yeah, if that's your jam, then go for it. And we're supportive of you."

But I think we also need to look at what is it, what's the behavior that we're rewarding. I think a lot of organizations also hear in particular from women, really high performing women, that the way that high performing women get rewarded is by being given more work. Like you did a fantastic job, so we're going to pile this on, right? Instead of saying, "Wow, you did a fantastic job. Hey, maybe it's time for some recovery or maybe we're going to give you some people to help you, to put around you so that you can advise and you can be more strategic and you can get more done, but it's not all resting on your shoulders."

Amy Cohen Epstein: Yeah. That's so important. Gosh, you have your work cut out for you.

Jen Fisher: Yeah. Look, as a society, as a globe, I think we have a long way to go. That's exciting though to me, because I think that business leaders are much more willing to listen now than ever before, because we're all standing on equal footing of kind of trying to figure out what does this future of work look like in a future of work that's much more human and humane than it's ever been. And so I think we have the attention that we need to really make some of these changes in a meaningful way. At least I remain very hopeful and optimistic about it.

Amy Cohen Epstein: You're amazing. Thank you so much for this time. I think it's amazing what you're doing and you're clearly making an enormous difference. And it's hard. I think a lot of times it takes us as individuals to go through the mud in order to really then come out the other side and then do something fabulous with it and change the lives of others, which you're clearly doing. I mean, what more could you ask for? So I don't work at Deloitte, but I just am thankful for talking to you and for all that you've put out in the world.