CHAPTER 3 BURNOUT

THE ORGANIZATION’S ROLE IN BURNOUT

Sometimes I wish I just had a summer job here.

– JOHN F. KENNEDY, TO STUDENTS IN WASHINGTON, D.C.

Interesting, isn’t it—even a position that someone spends years and a fortune to attain is not always what it’s cracked up to be. While there are downsides and upsides to any position, the workplace environment deserves closer attention. In the Introduction, I promised to look at the organizational factors that prompt burnout conditions: specifically, leader behaviors and cultural conditioning.

For those of you who are managers in your organization, it’s time to do an honest evaluation. As you read this, consider the questions I pose. Maybe it’s time to break out from outmoded ways of thinking, feeling, and acting in order to break through to create a workplace that allows people to refuel, recharge, and reclaim what matters! And if you are not in a leadership position, perhaps you’ll consider sharing this chapter with your manager!

LEADERS DRIVE PEOPLE TO BURNOUT

“Wait,” you say! “We have all these wellness programs in place. We have nap rooms and yoga classes and we provide smoking cessation programs.” That’s a start, but it’s not enough. Corporate spending on workplace wellness programs is estimated at $50 billion globally and is expected to grow 7 percent annually to 2025. Yet according to the National Institute of Mental Health, workplace wellness programs have failed to improve people’s health or change their work experience.¹

The reason? Wellness programs put the onus on the employee instead of acknowledging that the employer might be part of the problem. In the book Building Resilience for Success,² the authors do a great job of listing workplace practices that push people over the top and into burnout. How many of these practices are present in your workplace?

RESOURCES AND COMMUNICATION: Infrequent feedback and communication; inadequate training; out-of-date technology and equipment.

CONTROL: Ideas not listened to; lack of control over job and decisions; performance goals imposed rather than created collaboratively.

WORKLOAD: Unreasonable expectations; too little time to complete tasks; work unreasonably interfering with home life.

JOB SECURITY AND CHANGE: Job insecurity; fear of skill redundancy; change for the sake of change.

WORK RELATIONSHIPS: Aggressive management style; others taking credit for your success; isolation and/or lack of support.

JOB CONDITIONS: Inequality in pay and benefits; dull, repetitive work; difficult customers.

OVERLOADING MEETINGS AND EMAILS: In too many organizations, the corporate culture requires meetings upon meetings, often involving people who do not need to be there or with content that could have been handled by a phone call or a simple email (sent only to the people who need to see it). Not everyone has to “become aligned” or sign off. And emails alone often stand for escalation and error. The average frontline supervisor devotes about eight hours each week to sending, reading, and answering emails—many of which should never have been sent.

OVERLOADING TALENT WITH TOO MUCH WORK: How many times have I heard employees say that the organization was downsized but the workload never changed! Capable employees are inundated, and too often no one stopped to question if the “work” was really efficient and required. There’s too much redundancy. I hear a common refrain, “But we have new technology.” Often that poses an even bigger time drain, particularly if there’s no work-around during a learning curve.

Overworking is the norm, with little time-management discipline. It’s not only the volume of work that pushes people into burnout but also the unwritten expectation that employees must be constantly “on” even when they are at home in the evening or on the weekends. Additionally, many executives have no idea how long work activities actually take and whether those activities really add value at the end of the day.

KEEPING DIFFICULT MANAGERS AND INCOMPETENT EMPLOYEES IN PLACE: I remember leaving an organization—finally—after I had had enough of working for a vice president who screamed at her staff, took credit for other people’s work, and demanded fealty despite her incompetence. But I was lucky. I had fortunately lined up a job before I turned in my resignation. Others were not so graced.

Incompetent employees can also be a drain on the team. I’ve seen what happens to engagement when there is no proper feedback or remediation. Ignoring the situation or passing that employee along to another department is not only foolish but also unfair to all involved.

A VARIATION ON THIS THEME FOR LEADERS—WHAT POSITIVE ACTIONS TO TAKE

Another way to explore how your organization can create an environment that supports employee well-being is an exercise recommended by leadership guru Jim Collins, author of Good to Great.³ He calls it the Mars Group.

Collins asks a group of fifty to sixty people to imagine they are recreating the best attributes of their organization on another planet. (For our purposes, you’d want attributes for employee well-being.) The trick is that there are seats for only five to seven people on the rocket ship. In Collins’s experience, those selected are invariably a powerful, credible group because they live those attributes. When this group reports back, leaders will have a roadmap for creating or strengthening the organizational culture in relation to controlling burnout and building resilience to refuel and recharge.

CONSIDER A GROSS PROGRAM

Doctors, nurses, and clinicians report massive rates of burnout. Hawaii Pacific Health created an initiative, the Get Rid of Stupid Stuff (GROSS) program, through which personnel are asked to identify work that does not add value—such as documentation that does not need to be routine or could be done in a more efficient manner. This program was described in the New England Journal of Medicine in November 2018, and GROSS went viral.⁴

WHEN EMPLOYEES DEFINE A COMPANY’S CULTURE

The advertising agency 22squared recognized that an always-on culture can result in high turnover. According to Chris Tuff, partner at the agency, employees are offered five days off every year to volunteer for the community. After three years, they can give one month of their time, all expenses paid, to a nonprofit anywhere in the world. Tuff says employees are empowered to define the culture on their own terms and he often hears that 22squared’s culture is a major factor in why people have chosen to work for them. Meetings are also device-free to encourage a focused, collaborative environment.⁵

Check out Instagram at hashtag #22Culture. You’ll see almost 4,000 posts of happy people, babies, parties, and Tuff’s book, The Millennial Whisperer.

WHAT YOU CAN DO NOW IF YOU ARE NOT IN A LEADERSHIP POSITION

If you are now feeling discouraged about your organization because you are not in a leadership position, please stop. I know it’s much easier to blame the organization, our genes, the cycle of the moon, our parents, the 1 percent, and anything else you’d like to put into the fire. Moving from burnout to breakthrough requires an honest evaluation that, depending upon your current situation, can be an easy exercise or a challenging exorcism.

But as you will read in subsequent chapters, you are not powerless. You do have choices. You have a sphere of influence. And you have the ability to discover what Shawn Achor calls the Happiness Advantage.⁶ Achor has taught his seven principles of positive psychology to companies worldwide—companies like KPMG and UBS—with the result that employees learned how to become more engaged, motivated, resilient, and productive through retraining their brains to see patterns of possibilities. I’ll share more of Achor’s wisdom in chapter 9.

If you haven’t done so, please go back and look at the triggers and the questions I posed at the start of chapter 2. Write out your responses—either in real time on real—gasp—paper, or type them into the note section of your smart phone. Don’t want to write? Then talk your answers into your phone. You’ll want to look at them again.