Ep 17. Is AI a Psychosocial Hazard at Work?

Written By Aparna Rae

Episode 17 | Is AI a Psychosocial Hazard? with Ruhee Meghani

"We have lost the art of struggle... We need strong neural pathways built through pressure, not stress, but pressure. And that comes through challenging our thinking." — Ruhee Meghani

IN THIS EPISODE

The AI train has left the station. While media headlines fixate on tech giant valuations, compute power, and data center energy consumption, a quieter crisis is taking place inside the daily lives of white-collar workers. We are told AI will free up our time and build capacity, yet daily users are experiencing unprecedented levels of cognitive exhaustion, job precarity, and structural anxiety.

In this episode, Aparna Rae is joined by Ruhee Meghani, founder of Allied Collective, calling in from Melbourne, Australia. Australia leads the world in progressive workplace safety legislation, formally classifying workplace stress, low job control, and poor organizational change as legally enforceable psychosocial hazards.

Aparna and Ruhee examine AI through this regulatory lens, moving past tech hype to ask the human questions: How does cognitive offloading erode critical thinking and creativity? How is AI surveillance destroying psychological safety? And why is "AI transformation" often driven by executive FOMO rather than true organizational need?

TAKE THIS WITH YOU

  • The 17 Psychosocial Hazards: Australia legally regulates psychological injury from 17 distinct hazards - including high job demands, lack of job control, poor organizational change management, and remote isolation.

  • The Cognitive Gym: Replacing human reflection, writing, and problem-solving with AI shortcuts strips our brains of the "sustained pressure" required to build strong neural pathways, critical thinking, and emotional intelligence.

  • AI Surveillance as Structural Harm: Keystroke tracking, mouse-movement metrics, and video emotion/engagement scoring create intense workplace anxiety and erode workplace trust.

  • The "Work Slop" & Efficiency Paradox: AI tools rarely reduce workloads; they accelerate output expectations, compress deadlines, and flood workflows with low-quality content.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

CONNECT WITH RUHEE MEGHANI

Full Transcript

Host: Aparna Rae

Guest: Ruhee Meghani (Founder, Allied Collective)

Ruhee Meghani: We have lost the art of struggle. I gave this other example: let's say in yin yoga, you hold the pose for a long time to be able for the muscles to stretch long enough for them to relax. In the same way, the analogy of the braces, I'm not going to tell my dentist, "Just move this from here to there within a day." It's going to break. It takes long, sustained pressure over time. That is exactly how our neural pathways work. We need strong neural pathways built through pressure—not stress, but pressure. And that comes through challenging our thought, challenging our thinking. But we've got access to something that instantly validates, tells us we're right all the time, and it perpetuates the biggest problem that I see in organizations: the inability to be wrong.

Aparna Rae: Welcome to another episode of The Circle Back Club, and today we're going to be talking about AI and psychosocial hazards. Most of us know that the train has already left the station, and while in progressive circles we like to talk about how we could roll back some of these technologies, we're fixating on what's happening with NVIDIA's market cap or data centers that are draining power in rural areas across the United States, as well as in countries like India that don't have really good, safe access to running water for hundreds of millions of people.

There's another aspect of AI that rarely gets talked about, which is: what is the impact to our well-being as workers? We hear a lot of people talking about how AI can free up our time, it can increase our capacity, and yet I think it's safe to say that a lot of workers, especially the Uber users of AI tools, are experiencing unprecedented levels of cognitive exhaustion. There is widespread job precarity and just a lot of anxiety.

To help me make sense of all of this, I'm so excited to welcome Ruhee Meghani, who is the founder of Allied Collective, calling in from Melbourne, Australia. Australia is a country that is leading the world in some very progressive legislation around psychosocial workplace hazards and employee well-being, in addition to, of course, regulating things like pay transparency. So I'm super excited to welcome you. What a lovely... you slipped into my DMs a couple of months ago, and it has been one of the most fueling friendships all the way across the world.

Ruhee Meghani: Thank you for having me. I'm going to call you Aparna Rae of Sunshine, because that's exactly what you feel like.

Aparna Rae: That started in middle school.

Ruhee Meghani: Stop. Okay, we were meant to be. This was just meant to be, and I'm so grateful for the universe to have sent you into my life or to have given me the revelation to slide into your DMs. It was such a weird DM that I'm not going to disclose! But this is an absolute privilege. Following your work, the perspectives and the beauty with which you bring forward disruption and challenge with that lens of equity and inclusion has been so inspiring to me from so many miles away. I'm just waiting for the day where we can meet in person in Australia.

Aparna Rae: It's going to happen.

Ruhee Meghani: It's going to happen, yes!

Aparna Rae: Will you tell our listeners a little bit more about you? How did you get to this place in your life and career where this is what you're working on?

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah, so a combination of being a lifelong learner—I love learning everything about everything. I have a very insatiable curiosity to learn about new concepts and bring seemingly unrelated concepts together. My academic background is in psychology, business management, and yoga philosophy, interestingly. My mom's a yoga teacher; I've been teaching yoga for about 14 years. I moved to Australia right about then. Since then, I've worked across sectors like retail and hospitality across the board, and really saw this opportunity to have the conversation at the intersection of well-being, inclusion, and leadership together.

They were often seen in silos—leadership in its own right, and inclusion and well-being. But it's not often talked about as an interrelated concept. So that's what Allied Collective was born out of in 2020. I found my love for facilitation around the same time. Being a teacher, facilitation provides such a unique foundation to build off perspectives and ideas, and to bring in challenging perspectives to create a better world through conversation. That's what I do: I facilitate workshops with organizations. We've worked with over 65 companies in around six years, and it's been an incredible journey. So that's a little bit about me.

Aparna Rae: Way to lean into entrepreneurship in the middle of a global pandemic.

Ruhee Meghani: It's always, yeah!

Aparna Rae: It's just the combination of cuckoo and resilience to say, "What am I going to do? Let me lean into this."

Ruhee Meghani: Absolutely.

Aparna Rae: Can we jump into talking about psychosocial hazards? In our first season of The Circle Back Club, we had on Dr. Nicole DeKay, who does a lot of work around human thriving at work. She's a longtime friend and colleague, and she's the first person who introduced me to this concept. Somewhere along my journey with Nicole, she was like, "And you know there are some countries that have actually regulated this." And I was like, "Seriously?" Because when I think about US work culture—and I've worked most of my life here in the States, a little bit in India (which I would say has, in some ways, an even worse work culture), a little bit in Canada (which is a little bit gentler, but roughly the same)—all of these countries treat stress and anxiety as a failure of your personhood. You're not resilient enough, you're not taking care of yourself enough, you don't have the right boundaries.

And in Australia, the government actually mandates that employers manage psychological risks, just like in the US we manage physical safety hazards. So for people that have never heard of this term, will you just help us understand what psychosocial hazards are? How does it play out in the day-to-day? A few weeks ago we were chatting, you were driving to a client location, and you were going to do an assessment. So yeah, just talk us through what this means and what it looks like in practice.

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah. I would say yes, I feel very lucky to live in a country like Australia that actually treats psychological and psychosocial hazards as injuries and potential for harm, as opposed to just physical injuries and harm. To put it in its simplest sense, psychosocial hazards are aspects of work that have the potential to cause psychological or physical harm.

This can be categorized in many different ways. There are actually 17 of them that are listed, but the broad categorizations are mainly around:

  1. Demands and Control: Do you have high job demand, excessive workload, or low job control (lack of autonomy)? We know that from a human perspective and purpose-driven perspective, we need autonomy to thrive at work.

  2. Support and Clarity: Change management, when done poorly, can actually impact not just employee morale, but employee mental well-being as well. That's why we see retention as one of the highest costs that companies grapple with.

  3. Organizational Environment: Looking at reward and recognition, and organizational justice. How do we perceive diversity and equity initiatives in the workplace and how they're applied?

  4. Workplace Conduct and Relationships: We know that conflict, harassment, bullying, sexual harassment, workplace violence, and verbal/physical aggression all come under this.

  5. Environment and Well-being: Remote and isolated work is actually one of them, along with hazardous physical working environments and fatigue.

We've been talking about burnout for such a long time, and this puts language from a compliance and regulatory standpoint around what we've been talking about in that employee well-being context for a really long time. It puts it into a framework where it's no longer a nice-to-have or a fluffy concept.

Aparna Rae: Did you say remote and isolated work is a hazard?

Ruhee Meghani: Yes. Obviously there's so much to dissect there, but I would say an extended amount of remote work—especially if it's out of the control, autonomy, and agency of that person—loneliness is seen as one of society's massive dilemmas at the moment. So yeah, it is listed as that.

Aparna Rae: It's so interesting, because I'm sure you're tracking all of the fights over return-to-office in the States that have emerged in the last couple of years. Anytime there is a celebrity, especially if she is a woman, who comes out and says, "Remote work isn't great for your mental health," or "Remote work is not great for your career mobility," the pile-on is so intense, and the entitlement to work from home—even as it does impact our well-being.

I mean, there are some people that I know who work from home and see no human being other than their pets, if they have pets. Sometimes for the whole week, they'll go a whole week without seeing another person. But this is just a tiny side quest! I guess I'm curious what you think the impact of that is in our relationship with our colleagues.

Ruhee Meghani: In terms of remote and isolated work, I guess it's so subjective regarding how the person is in terms of their personality, their agency, and what loneliness and connection look like for them. You can argue both sides of that argument really well. Even in Australia, we are seeing some return-to-work mandates, and there was a proposal floated around that two days of remote work should be made compulsory by regulation.

Personally, I think choice and agency—which is something I know you talk about a lot—is really important. It's really about getting curious about that person and what that person needs. When we talk about human-centered design and decision-making, we often ask, "Who's missing at the decision-making table?" Every element of remote work can have its pros and cons, and it's about mitigating the hazard that comes with loneliness by putting controls in place. What are we doing to build connection within a remote team? Providing peer coaching, connection opportunities, extra resources around that, and so on.

Aparna Rae: It's so nuanced, because I've also heard researchers say that some amount of remote work is really essential because it helps you manage your life. You can't visit the doctor at 10:00 PM!

Back to psychosocial hazards. You've been writing and talking about the impact of AI on our well-being and mental health in particular. That's a conversation that I think is really lagging in the States. There's a lot of pressure for AI transformation, and there's very little conversation about the impact on white-collar workers. There are some conversations about cognitive harms for developing brains—school-age kids going back to school across the US now. The other conversation in the media is about workers in the Global South working to enable these models at great harm.

But the one conversation I don't see us having enough of is white-collar workers getting pushed to use these technologies—what are the consequences for them? How are you thinking about this, and how is Australia thinking about AI through the lens of psychosocial hazards?

Ruhee Meghani: Gosh, there's so much there! Are we ready to have that conversation as a society within a technology that is growing at a pace beyond our understanding and processing? I feel like we as a collective are still processing COVID and post-COVID, and what "normal" even looks like. Now we have a technology evolving at such a pace that a lot of people are grappling with. I don't think workplaces especially are ready to have that conversation when it comes to the impact of AI on our well-being overall and as a society.

I'm a university lecturer as well. Last year I taught Diploma of Business students emotional intelligence and critical thinking, which are my favorite subjects. We looked at how AI is becoming a reality. Rather than taking everything for its word, I got the students to do a debating exercise: ask an AI model whether AI is harming or helping our emotional intelligence and critical thinking, and then debate the answers that AI gave them. It's about encouraging that creativity.

When Sam Altman came to Melbourne, I was in the room when he was doing the interview, and he said there's no replacement for human curiosity and creativity. I 100% agree with that -probably one of the only things I'll agree with him on! But it is eroding that creativity, critical thinking, emotional regulation, and emotional intelligence aspect of us at all ages.

When it comes to the workplace, we're already talking about AI burnout and themes like "work slop." You have the really AI-forward enthusiasts who think this is the silver bullet that's going to solve all our problems. Then we've got healthy skepticism, which is needed—it can help us in some ways and perhaps remove some barriers. However, the main questions we need to ask are: who benefits, and who's left behind? Those key principles of equity.

When we talk about the impact of AI on our well-being, we are already seeing it. We are only scratching the surface, and we are not ready, Aparna. I don't mean that to say "be scared," but let's be aware of what's happening.

In terms of mental and emotional well-being: cognitive offloading, where we just get used to this. Just for one day, try not to use AI just to notice how much dependency exists for you! How are we accelerating expectations and changing how we process information? We are not designed as human beings to process this much information, ever. No wonder we're burnt out. We're seeing mental health anxiety spike in record-breaking statistics.

Also, are we outsourcing our emotional connections? I gave this example in an article I wrote about AI and well-being: I was sitting with my husband talking about decorating a corner of a wall in our home. I said, "Oh, we can do this and this," and he went, "Oh, let's just put the picture in AI and let it tell us what to do." My jaw dropped! I stopped, and that's when the realization came about how AI is stealing opportunities for social and emotional connection with each other. What is something you would call a friend or family member for—maybe a recipe—that you now just ask ChatGPT? We're seeing one of the highest uses of ChatGPT as a companion, coach, or therapist, and we know it enforces biases and is programmed to tell you that you're right all the time.

In terms of occupational well-being at work, we're seeing people's first recruitment processes being done by AI chatbots, which is so dystopian. What are your thoughts on that? Have you tried it?

Aparna Rae: I have tried it. I used to be a mentor with a startup accelerator called Techstars for years, and there were several HR applications over the years. With all of these examples—like the companionship examples—it's terrifying to discover that people are so lonely that they'd rather talk to a robot. But also, the sycophantic behavior leads people to sometimes commit suicide. That is so, so scary.

People using it for recipes—I'm like, "You don't know anybody that knows how to cook this thing?" There are literally 10,000 YouTube videos where you could watch somebody do it for five minutes!

Because so much of my world is people, culture, organizations, and org design, this thing about using AI for interviews pisses me off. What do you mean you don't have time to connect with a real human being? If you said, "Actually, this creates the least biased outcome with respect to hiring more women, people of color, people with disabilities, or veterans," I would be inclined to say sure. Like a double-blind audition, which we know a lot of orchestras use now because so few women were getting seats. When they moved to a double-blind audition process where the musician can't see the judges and the judges cannot see the musician, many more women got seats.

These AI models are not creating the same outcome as a double-blind audition. They're just scaling whatever biases exist in Fortune 500 companies whose data is being used to train all these tools. We saw that with the Workday settlement, where a applicant noticed a pattern of rejection and found that companies using Workday were rejecting him at higher rates.

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah, AI is just an amplifier of our biases. Coded Bias is an excellent documentary that talks about this and its real-life implications. People do experiments where they put the exact same resume but change the gender, and the expected salary is much lower for a female-identifying person. It's just being magnified—whether it's recruitment, career progression, workplace inclusion, or identifier markers around disability, person of color, sexuality, or gender. Minoritized or underserved groups will inevitably get the short end of the stick, which has been magnified for generations now.

Aparna Rae: That's the thing for me: when I think about AI usage, we know that a lot of compute is going towards generating CSAM content, which is—I don't have kids, but we love kids—it's so disheartening to think that this is what people think is a good use of our resources. So much of AI is not being used for solving cancer or reading mammograms and radiographs accurately; it's being used to scale biases that disproportionately harm certain groups.

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah, and data centers—we're already seeing the environmental cost of that as well, with waterways polluted, air, sound, flora, fauna, and wildlife being impacted. It impacts so many dimensions of our well-being. Most people are really excited right now, but it's going to take a while to come to that place where we reckon with the impact on our well-being.

Aparna Rae: Are there certain tools or implementations of this technology that worry you through this framework of psychosocial hazards? Are there things organizations are doing or ways they're deploying tools that worry you?

Ruhee Meghani: One of the 17 psychosocial hazards is actually workplace surveillance. We now know that some AI applications are being used to surveil employee usage, like keystroke and mouse tracking. If workers are idle, it goes into their performance metrics. That data is then used to justify or explain layoffs, which are happening at a massive rate under the excuse, "Oh, we have AI, so we don't need that many people."

However, the jury is still out on what that productivity and saved time actually looks like! Some companies claim an X amount of productivity, but the jury is very much out. What are you doing with that saved time? Are you taking anything off their plate? How is it being put back in a way that actually makes a positive impact?

Aparna Rae: Employee surveillance tools are scary. It feels like such a violation of your core dignity, yet it's legal! My employer can read all of my emails, text messages, and communications on a company device—or on my personal device if I use it for company use. Who benefits?

Ruhee Meghani: Exactly. When it first came out, I used an AI note-taking app before it was mainstream, and people used to be fascinated. But I stopped using it very quickly, and I made a post about how it erodes psychological safety. A lot of people use it in meetings for transcripts, but now it's turned into emotion and engagement scoring on video calls that tracks your eye movements, your voice, and your likeness.

Also, within AI meetings, if you're talking about something sensitive before or after the meeting, it still gets captured. What if there's a disclosure around health? It's getting to that place where we have to ask: where does it stop being convenient or productive, and where does it start being manipulative and dystopian?

Aparna Rae: I have a really funny story about note-takers! In the early days of note-takers, before people had really figured out permissions and settings, I was in a meeting with somebody who had their note-taker on. We had the conversation, it was fine, and I left the meeting. They stayed on chatting, and the note-taker was right there. At the end of their meeting, it sent ME the notes and the transcript!

Ruhee Meghani: Was it interesting information?

Aparna Rae: They were trash-talking about other people! I'm Desi—I love gossip! I grabbed the popcorn! But I was like, "Whoa, okay, you would never have said this if you knew I was still on the call!"

Things like that used to happen in the early days. Like you, I've also stopped using note-takers because I feel less like myself when I know somebody else's note-taker is on. If I'm in a meeting where I'm trying to get work done or doing an interview for Forbes, I think of turning on the transcript the same way as turning on a voice recorder. I'm very clear with the person when I turn the transcript on and off. If we stay on to have a casual conversation, I'm not going to be recording that.

The habit and process of writing helps create stickiness. I literally have my Spanish homework printed, and I am writing it out by hand because it's so hard!

Ruhee Meghani: I love writing! I've got like 17 three-quarter-full journals! I love writing, and we're losing that effort. What I phrase it as is going to the "brain gym." You go and lift weights, you lift heavier weights, and you get stronger. Writing and pausing in the unknown and uncertain is where we grow as people.

Now, the top strengths that top-performing companies are looking for is not AI literacy—it's emotional intelligence. It's being able to have hard conversations, and critical thinking. You can't build that without practicing these hard moments of pause, reflection, and struggle. We have lost the art of struggle.

I gave this other example: in yin yoga, you hold the pose for a long time to allow the muscles to stretch long enough for them to relax. In the same way, with braces, I'm not going to tell my dentist, "Just move this tooth from here to there within a day." It's going to break. It takes long, sustained pressure over time. That is exactly how our neural pathways work. We need strong neural pathways built through pressure—not stress, but pressure. And that comes through challenging our thought and our thinking. But we've got access to something that instantly validates us, tells us we're right all the time, and it perpetuates the biggest problem that I see in organizations: the inability to be wrong. Hands down, if there was one gift I could give to anyone in the world!

Aparna Rae: I hear you saying that there is actually a sufficient evidence base that is concerning about the implications of this technology. It's not a hypothetical that it could cause harm; we already see so many ways in which it IS causing harm. From that evidence base, we can extrapolate future outcomes for our workforce, our mental health, our well-being, and our ability to be good partners, parents, and community members. Given everything we know, why do you think companies are mandating their employees jump headfirst into this, while lobbying against safety testing, regulation, or consultations with people in countries that have been regulating these things?

Ruhee Meghani: I think the first one would be FOMO.

Aparna Rae: FOMO! AI transformation driven by FOMO, fueled by FOMO!

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah, it's become such a frenzy. Leaders think they're missing out on something without actually pausing and asking, "Okay, what is this adding?" Lego trialed it, and they found no benefit in creative output. Lego is one of the most innovative companies in the world, and they were like, "Nope, this is not for us." Sure, you can experiment, but can you stay in curiosity long enough to actually make sure whether it's working or not?

It comes back to that change management piece. A lot of organizations see it as a tech initiative rather than a change management perspective. Poor organizational change management and role clarity fall under psychosocial hazards. You're adopting it expecting employees to come along on the ride without giving them context, without having the conversation, or being curious about how they feel about it. That co-design perspective is missing in the frenzy of "we should be doing this more."

Also, they ask the wrong questions—asking, "How is this going to make things more productive, save time, and make money?" instead of asking, "What hazards and risks is it introducing?" It can be a huge cybersecurity risk as well. We're already seeing instances of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, with female leaders' and colleagues' likenesses being used to create distressing and sexually explicit content. That is one lawsuit away from the company going away, basically.

Aparna Rae: Amazon is famous for having really high churn within its warehouses—upwards of 100%, replacing all workers on an annual basis. In some geographies, Amazon is running out of workers because people have already worked there! Churn for white-collar workers tends to be lower, but I suspect the way AI technologies are being implemented will increase churn. What happens when you've run out of workers? You're not investing in entry-level talent because those tasks are being automated away—like your assistant taking notes. It takes wonky notes, but it's "good enough" and doesn't require a human being. And you're burning out your senior people because now they have to use a technology they may or may not want or need to use.

Ruhee Meghani: There's so many things in that. Firstly, it's going to amplify the generational divide of what passing on wisdom looks like. There's an expectation for everyone in the workforce to become experts overnight, but some things can only be learned through time, effort, and mistakes—which is the most critical component to success.

The second part is: who decides what is "good enough"? The discernment that only a human eye through experience, perspective, empathy, and curiosity can have to decide what in a meeting is worth noting! If you've got someone biased thinking, "These are the actions I'm going to prioritize," versus "No, I see an opportunity where one quiet person said three words, and that's what we need to hone in on." Who gets to discern?

It's grim when we're losing workers. Generational interaction in the workplace is already increasing in a negative way, where Gen Z is jaded, to say the least. It's largely an anti-AI sentiment, as you'll see in a lot of graduation speeches. Among older generations, it's a new technology that takes time and change management to adopt, and they get overwhelmed. What does change management look like intergenerationally? What does the passing on of wisdom look like? What does discernment look like for the next generation?

Aparna Rae: I was having a conversation with colleagues who are older Millennials, and it really felt like we are the last generation that had an opportunity to cultivate critical thinking skills and discernment. We were the generation still submitting homework in pen and paper through high school and college twenty years ago! We're the last generation that experienced that. Everyone who came after us is a digital native, and now there's an AI-native generation—kids who have had AI learning tools installed in classrooms since they were five years old.

Ruhee Meghani: I have a question on that for you: do you think we're going to circle back to analog ways of working and learning?

Aparna Rae: I think there are already a lot of conversations happening about analog forms of everything. I had a conversation with a startup attorney who said one of the best books she read this year was Analog Marketing for Lawyers! She meant going back to being in person, making coffee dates, being at events, picking up the phone, and calling people.

In the past couple of years, I've noticed a wave where, even if there's reluctance to call, people send long voice memos—mini podcasts with friends! I think that is analog-adjacent. Education is going to move back to Scantrons. The Los Angeles School District said no more laptops for the littles, because it's not good for kids. We're starting to see some of that.

There's such an intense desire for human connection, with people forming meetup groups or climbing groups where you meet once a week to climb and build community. I wonder if some of those things are going to reach workers. We spend the majority of our lives working—not with our spouse, kids, or friends, but with our colleagues. Can some of those things come back to work?

My friend Rob jokes that my favorite part of my early career was cake in the break room! But genuinely, when I was 25 and we had monthly birthday lunches, I loved that for a couple of hours everybody stopped working. I was very lucky to work in a very diverse organization with immigrant and refugee colleagues who brought big trays of food. You were never going home hungry! For two weeks after, you got your dabba! Someone brought plastic takeout containers for us to take leftovers home. I loved it because it was an opportunity to eat with my colleagues, learn a little bit, celebrate their birthdays, and learn about someone's hopes and dreams for the year. There's no way to create that connection virtually.

Ruhee Meghani: Digital spaces can facilitate human connection. I was listening to your podcast on being visible on LinkedIn, and you and I wouldn't have become friends if digital channels hadn't facilitated that space! How do we use digital space as a facilitator to have in-person, human moments of connection? Nothing is going to replace that.

Aparna Rae: You can't. The joy you feel when you're with people is wild. You know who made it through COVID the best? Mid-career people. We had been at work long enough that we knew how to do our jobs, and we already had relationships. When we went into lockdown and talked over Zoom, we already knew each other, ate cake together, and gone to happy hour. It didn't feel as alien. I felt so bad for the young folks entering the workforce in those early pandemic years who didn't know how to do their job, didn't have relationships, and were trying to figure it out with a screen in between.

Ruhee Meghani: Yeah, what does social connection look like at work? Now we have this added layer and urgency to adopt AI. Do we even know three to five years out how that will impact our health and well-being? Public health researchers would agree that we're still processing the collective trauma of a global pandemic. When our nervous systems are overloaded and fried, our decision-making, memory, and empathy all go down, perpetuating the cycle of loneliness and lack of compassion which leads to most psychosocial hazards in the workplace. It's so interconnected. I hope we can get to a place where we're able to have these conversations with courage, curiosity, and persistence.

Aparna Rae: What is one thing you wish leaders and decision-makers would consider, and one thing workers can try?

Ruhee Meghani: It comes back to the purpose that leadership starts with the self, regardless of your title or position. What does leading myself look like? That involves your responsibility to look after your own well-being. Well-being is a collective and structural responsibility, but it starts with the self. Define what well-being looks like for you. Digital well-being is something we do a lot of work on in organizations. Stay in curiosity and practice things that increase your capacity for critical thinking. Be okay with being wrong—that would be the biggest thing.

Aparna Rae: That's so hard for so many of us!

Ruhee Meghani: It really is, but it's a beautiful thing when you get to that perspective. As a facilitator, one of my most fulfilling moments is when someone has an "aha" moment—not from a place of shame, but from discovery and learning: "Oh, I actually found new information that overwrote my old information." It's a euphoric moment! Discovery of new information gives us joy and purpose on that path of self-actualization, also called samadhi in yoga.

Aparna Rae: I'm like, "Tactically, what can people do?" and you're like, "You have to move beyond the tactical into the existential!"

Ruhee Meghani: You can be practical and existential at the same time! Being existential can help you get more practical.

Aparna Rae: If somebody wants to have this conversation with you, where can they find you?

Ruhee Meghani: Your email will not find me for two weeks because I'll be on holiday! But you can find me on LinkedIn or at my website, alliedcollective.com.au.

Aparna Rae: We will link all of those in the show notes. Ruhee, thank you so much. I feel like we could continue having this conversation for two more hours and pull on lots of threads. I so appreciate that you're talking about this, because there is so much FOMO to lean into things that cause harm, and not enough FOMO about, "Hmm, what about my brain? What about my heart?"

Ruhee Meghani: Thank you for facilitating these incredible conversations. Each podcast episode of yours opens a new channel in my brain. I love your brain so much, and I'm so glad we met. Thank you for being you, and I really hope we can meet in person really soon!

Aparna Rae: All right, thanks everybody for listening in. If you've made it this far, please check the show notes. We're going to link all the studies we've referenced, as well as Australia's 17 hazards so you can start to think about how much of that is happening where you work. We'll be back again soon. Thank you!

CircleBackClub #WorkplaceAI #PsychosocialHazards #FutureOfWork #LaborRights #AparnaRae #RuheeMeghani #Burnout

Aparna Rae https://aparnarae.com
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Ep. 12 Reclaiming Dignity