Alleviating Burnout at Work

This widespread societal malaise has led many organizations to focus on employee well-being, with initiatives aimed at improving working conditions, such as counselling services, meditation classes and fitness programmes, being launched almost every month.  At the height of the pandemic, for example, online dating company Bumble offered all staff a week’s break to combat burnout. More recently, Nike announced that it would close its offices worldwide for an additional week over the summer months to “give employees time to recover and rest.”² On the one hand, these moves acknowledge that burnout is real.³ On the other hand, it is tokenism in the extreme.

When it comes to the way in which organizations are responding to burnout, some are falling dismally short, but others are clearly trying to reimagine a fairer, healthier workplace.

We began to research the symptoms, causes and potential healing and prevention practices for burnout during the pandemic, as a response to the growing crisis we were seeing in our work in the field of leadership development and coaching.

When it comes to the way in which organizations are responding to burnout, some are falling dismally short^4, but others are clearly trying to reimagine a fairer, healthier workplace. For example, there has been a rise in the ‘work-from-anywhere’ phenomenon,⁵ which heralds choice, flexibility, the end of the daily commute and improved work–life balance for many employees. In 2020 Australia-based software company Atlassian introduced its Team Anywhere policy, offering its 7,000-strong workforce the opportunity to move to any Atlassian site around the world.⁶ Two years later and around 10% of the company’s staff had relocated. Relocated employees cite advantages such as being closer to family, reduced living costs and gaining a healthier lifestyle.⁷

While some workers benefit from more flexibility through work-from-anywhere schemes, we are seeing that these measures are helpful to some, but not all employees. Organizations also benefit from them by retaining talent, eliminating real estate costs and improving productivity. As such, although such moves in service of improving working conditions are well intended, ultimately, they do little more than prune the branches of burnout rather than tackle it at its roots.

Addressing the root causes of burnout may require wholesale system change, such as challenging the basis upon which we currently measure our ‘contribution’ at work. It may require us, for example, to move beyond time as the primary measure. As working professionals, many of us have become so anxious about justifying our time to clients, or demonstrating our use and utilization to our employers, we even measure ourselves in terms of monetizable hours.

During our research, we came across an organization that asked customer-facing employees to demonstrate their individual productivity, with utilization being measured in 30-minute units. As is common in many sectors, these employees were asked to keep timesheets and when it came to their performance review, anyone who demonstrated 80% or more utilization over an annual period was coloured green on a publicly accessible staff performance table. Anyone who found themselves less than 80% utilized was either coloured amber or put on red. Amber was taken as a watchlist and red triggered a performance conversation. With this time-driven indicator of performance, employees had become so focused on measuring their worth in 30-minute units, it is no coincidence that that staff turnover had begun to increase.

Instead, it has been suggested that we move to outcome-based work as a means of beginning to unshackle ourselves from the time–productivity equation.⁸ One person we interviewed suggested that to move towards a healthier relationship with our work, it is not only how we measure our impact, but also how important we see work in relation to our lives overall:

"Perhaps if we work less, we loosen the grip work has on us in terms of being defined by our work. We need to disentangle ourselves from our identity being wrapped up in what we do and this comes from working less and caring less about work."

There may already be moves afoot in this regard, with over 10,000 employees worldwide trialling a four-day work week as of mid-2022.⁹ But, despite widespread enthusiasm for shortening the standard working week, it remains to be seen whether this simply creates pressure on employees in different ways. As one article suggests, the four-day week campaign wrongly assumes that 100% productivity is possible, and its blanket approach fails to take into account individuals’ needs and circumstances.

Addressing the root causes of burnout may require wholesale system change, such as challenging the basis upon which we currently measure our ‘contribution’ at work. 

While those employers who are concerned about addressing burnout can take steps to improve the conditions of work, we also have a responsibility as individuals to notice and recognize the disconnect as it emerges between our aspirations for work and our lived experience of work itself. We understood from those who have contributed to our research that some people find themselves so dependent on their work as a means of gaining self-worth that they become unable to detach, despite becoming increasingly dissatisfied with their day-to-day experiences of work. Some of our co-contributors talked about having become so seduced by the material benefits of work, such as salary and status, that they felt unable to get out. Others talked about how the “promise” of reward and the metaphorical pot of gold at the end of the rainbow had kept them striving until the point at which they burnt out and could give no more.

It is for these reasons that the answers to burnout not only lie at the doors of employers but also belong to us as individuals, through a duty to redress the balance. In the move towards eradicating burnout, work should play a part, but not the whole part, in bringing purpose to our lives, with us deriving meaning from other domains such as our hobbies, volunteering activities, community work, families, friendships and creative endeavours. If we are to truly tackle burnout, this must happen collectively with each of us holding one another to account in ways that honour our dignity and our humanity.

One thing is certain and that is that we will not eradicate burnout alone. Individuals, organizations and societies will all need to play their part to move us beyond self-interest and towards reciprocity and collective action in order to design sustainable future workplaces for the benefit of all.

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Read the authors’ recently published book, ‘Running on Empty: Navigating the Dangers of Burnout at Work,’ Amy Bradley and Katherine Semler. Published by LID Publishing, October 2022, ISBN 978-1-911687-32-0

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Dr Amy Bradley is a Professor of Leadership and Management and author of The Human Moment. In 2020, she was named on the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar of global management thinkers. She contributes as adjunct faculty at several leading business schools.

Dr Katherine Semler works with leaders and organizations to help them define and live their purpose. She is a senior partner at global consulting firm, Korn Ferry and adjunct faculty at Ashridge Hult nternational Business School.

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NOTES

[1] State of the Global Workplace Report.

2 Ciment, S., Here’s how Nike, Lululemon, Nordstream + more are balancing mental health priorities with return to office, Footwear News, 9 May 2022, https://footwearnews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/footwearnews.com/2022/business/retail/retailers-balance-mental-health-during-return-to-office-1203284099/amp.

3 Jones, L., Bumble closes to give ‘burnt-out’ staff a week’s break, BBC News, 21 June 2021, https://www-bbc-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-57562230.amp.

3 Louis, S., Worker beware: These are the 22 worst companies to work for, Money Wise, 10 December 2020, https://moneywise.com/employment/the-worst-companies-to-work-for.

4 Choudhury, P., Our work-from-anywhere future, Harvard Business Review, November–December 2020, https://hbr.org/2020/11/our-work-from-anywhere-future.

5 Our distributed workforce, Atlassian, 2022, https://www.atlassian.com/practices/use-cases/team-anywhere.

6 Liu, J., 4 people on how their company’s switch to work from anywhere spurred them to move around the world, CNBC, 17 April 2022, https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/17/4-atlassian-workers-share-how-work-from-anywhere-spurred-them-to-move.html.

7 Harper, B., Hybrid Work and Outcome-based Performance Management, Medium, 19 August 2021, https://medium.com/slalom-business/hybrid-work-and-outcome-based-performance-management-970db7886c29#:~:text=Outcomes%2Dbased%20performance%20management%20supports,collaborate%20will%20continue%20to%20grow.

8 See https://www.4dayweek.com.

9 Hamilton, C., The problems with a four-day week, Unleash, 4 February 2022, https://www.unleash.ai/future-of-work/the problems-with-a-four-day-week.

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