Talented employees are looking for burnout-safe workplaces

Nike and Bumble  have recently taken bold measures to prevent employee burn-out, offering their staff a week's break. They are planning ahead for what the Financial Times calls the next pandemic: employee exhaustion and mental health challenges.

In the current war for talent (almost 4 million Americans quit their jobs in April, according to the Labor Department. The most on record since the government started recording labor turnover in 2000), employee wellbeing has become one of the hot fronts to attract talent.

Measuring employee emotional wellbeing not only provides critical information regarding how to improve it, but it also predicts employee turnover. In fact, when your employees emotional wellbeing declines, it is likely they will change jobs within the next 12 months. (See graph below. source: Elsevier. The differential impact of major life events on cognitive and affective wellbeing)

What is burnout?

Burnout was first described in the early 1970’s by American psychologist Herbert J. Freudenberger as “a state of constant mental and physical exhaustion”.

Mental and physical exhaustion are the result of losing three things: energy, enthusiasm, and confidence.

This is known as a “frenetic” type of burnout says Rachel Bostman, author and leading expert on trust.

How talented people slip down to burn-out?

In 2018, Dr Jochen Menges from the University of Cambridge published a study among 1,000 US, Uk and German workers.

“Nearly half of all employees were moderately to highly engaged in their work but also exhausted and ready to leave their organisations,”

To make things worse, the pandemic has added more to create the perfect storm. Imagine that you have had to simultaneously manage important professional and personal projects (and you feel that it has been too much for too long). At the same time, you were bombarded with worrying news, and the fear of possible economic or health turndowns was real. This situation has needed a lot of mental energy and focus.

But the good news is that there are plenty of things that we can do to attend to our wellbeing and protect ourselves from burnout.

There is no silver bullet for solving burnout. Instead try different options, evaluate, pivot and repeat!

Either we work less or we work better increasing focus and productivity while we reduce stressors

There are three main types of time-consuming distractions that prevent employees from focusing at work when they need to:

• social media: Facebook and the like
• working media: Slack and the like
• meetings: online or onsite

Let's talk about checking news on the media in the first place. Why is it that we are all pulled towards compulsively checking our emails, likes, trending topics, and so on? We are programmed to do so. It has to do with what type of information our brain values most. In fact, our brain has not evolved much since our species appeared. Around 300.000 years ago, the survival of our ancestors, Homo Sapiens, depended on the group. As a group, we hunted and defended ourselves from enemies. How is this connected to compulsively checking media? In two ways.

Firstly, in order to belong to the group, we needed to be sure of our value to the group. And what has for many become the modern currency of social value? The likes we have. 

Secondly, in order for a group to function well, it needs a high level of trust among its members. Getting informed about who does what and with whom, so gossip and news from the group is a type of information that our brain craves for. So yes, that pulls us towards checking on our friends’ feed. 

“At our very foundation, says cognitive neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, “humans are information-seeking creatures.” (source: discovermagazine)

Thus, the fear of missing has a high cost for our stress and productivity. But we do not realize it, because we think we are capable of multitasking.

“There’s a conflict between what we want to do and what we’re actually capable of doing,”

With each switch [of our attention from one task to another], there’s a cost. For example, one study found that it took 25 minutes, on average, for IT workers to resume a project after being interrupted. Besides putting a major crimp in efficiency, such juggling can lead to high levels of stress, frustration and fatigue”, Gazzaley says

What can we do? If people are going to check on their social media anyway, try giving them cues to concentrate for shorter periods of time with more breaks. Plan your meetings accordingly. The optimal time of intense cognitive work is 4 hours/day (read the whole article at The Atlantic).

This is one way of improving how we work. But we can also try to simply work less. For example reducing the hours worked, if your industry allows you for this flexibility. 

Flexible work arrangements. Remote work and onsite work

In an article for The Atlantic magazine, Joe Pinsker gives the example of one of the companies that has figured out how to work less, without reducing productivity.

"In 2018, Andrew Barnes approached the employees of his company, a New Zealand firm called Perpetual Guardian that manages wills, estates, and trusts, with an offer: If they could figure out how to get more done in a day, they could work one fewer day per week. In consultation with employees, the company installed lockers in which workers can voluntarily stash their phones for the day, and soundproofed meeting spaces to reduce the sound of ambient chatter. Meetings were shortened; employees started putting little flags in their pencil holders whenever they wanted to signal to coworkers that they didn’t want to be disturbed. It worked: Perpetual Guardian’s business didn’t suffer, and the four-day workweek is still in place three years later"

When employees are given a good reason to work harder, they often focus more ruthlessly on their most important tasks. Barnes found that even though weekly working hours were cut by 20 percent, employees’ time spent on nonwork websites fell by 35 percent. It also helped that employees had more time outside of work to manage the rest of their lives, so nonwork responsibilities were less likely to intrude on the workday. 

Before the pandemic, many managers were afraid of accepting remote working arrangements for their employees. They feared employees would work less time. The pandemic proved them wrong. As many employees were immediately put to work remotely, the result has been more hours worked than when at the office.

This article by The Guardian “Staff in countries including UK log on for two hours longer at home and face bigger workloads” illustrates the case.

Yes, most employees have been committed to proving that they were worthy of trust even when the boss was not “all over the place”.

Most people think about themselves to be hard workers, many think that other people do not invest themselves as much as they do. Numerous studies show the opposite, most people wish to do good and are really invested in their jobs.

If you ask yourself  if productivity has declined, this is a sensible legitimate question.  A thorough research of 2,000 tasks, 800 jobs, and nine countries conducted by McKinsey found that most industries can implement a certain level of remote work. On the high, we have Finance, where 70% of time can be remote work without losing productivity, and the lowest percentage of possible remote working happens to be in farming.

Finally, it is interesting to discuss what we mean by being engaged at work. Having worked in many different countries, I have found that in some countries/companies, the stick to measure your engagement is the number of hours worked, while in other countries it is the output of your work. Who do you think serves more your business? 

In order to find your perfect balance I find these two data interesting: 

• As we already mentioned, the optimal time of intense cognitive work is 4 hours/day (read the whole article at The Atlantic)
• Time worked does not necessarily correlate with productivity (check the graph published by the WSJ to come to your conclusions)

The shortfall of this reflection about increasing wellness and productivity while reducing stress comes when talking about employees who earn too low salaries and so they need more hours to work. And, for them, the stress of not having enough is certainly more important than their wellbeing. 

Trust people to help you find what best work for them

There is a final piece of advice, coming from research. John P. Kotter, award winning business and management thought leader, shares this as one of his clearest findings: “successful change efforts have early engagement and support from a broad, diverse employee base”. 

Humans fight back change when it comes from an external force, while they have a go-for-it attitude when they have come up with their own plan.  

If you find this hard to believe, watch this humorous enlightening video on how an  insane 7-circle roundabout actually works, that I discovered thanks to self-management and future of work expert, Doug Kirkpatrick.

As John P. Kotter mentioned in HBR last August,

“people place a disproportionately high value on things they helped create, often referred to as the Ikea effect”. 

Finally, to close the loop on increasing well-being and decreasing burn-out, there is another powerful reason why you will succeed if you involve your workforce on this journey. Which one? Lack of control over how one works is in itself a factor of burn-out that psychologists call “worn out”.

So, whether you decide to find a way for people to work less time, work better or both, the key for your organization to succeed is that you involve your staff in deciding what works for them and that you find different ways to acknowledge their efforts. 

About the author.

Silvia Garcia is a leading expert in how positive and negative emotions influence consumer and employee decisions. She is Coca-Cola`s former Marketing and Happiness Institute Global Director.