Episode 188: You vs. Burnout
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…burnout has become a universal problem in the pandemic.
“I've never been a work at home person before and I know why. I cannot turn it off.”
But maybe it’s not your fault?
“How we still talk about burnout is that it's an individual problem to solve. You know, if you just do more yoga or you should listen to the sounds of rain on your app and we'll solve for systemic discrimination or 70 hour work weeks.”
And some managers are trying to stop it happening in the first place…
“It's very regular that something comes up like, well, I'm supposed to be off tomorrow, but I have to log in and take a couple calls, or ‘I'm supposed to take time off over Christmas, but I'm gonna have to work through it because I've got this big thing coming up,’ and I just try to be the person who's like, ‘I don't know. You probably could take the time off…I mean, sometimes you do better work if you take a break.”
Taking action against burnout. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
I will be honest, I was not entirely sure I wanted to take on the topic of burnout again on The Broad Experience. Because it seems wherever you look somebody else is covering this. But I knew some of you were interested in hearing more…I also realized the first show I did on this topic about 5 years ago didn’t dwell on the role of organizations in causing burnout..and what they can do to change things. We’re going to talk about that quite a bit later in this show.
I know hearing from you on social media that a lot of you are experiencing burnout. You’re all in different industries and circumstances. For some of you, burnout goes way beyond work. I want to acknowledge here that I can’t tackle every aspect of this enormous problem, coming at a unique time in our history, in this one episode. But I hope there’s something for you in here.
With that, let’s get to my first guest.
When I heard from Danielle Fried in January she was just beginning to feel like herself again after hitting a wall last November. Danielle never thought of herself as a candidate for burnout. She’s not a healthcare worker or a teacher dealing face-to-face with the pandemic.
She loved her job as director of operations for a small business focused on spirituality and self-care…
“We sell items to help you relax, to help you focus, to set your intentions for your life. And yet I was working seven days a week, you know, 12 to 15 hours a day at the height of 2020.”
The company used to have a couple of storefronts but before Covid hit they went online-only. In March 2020, business exploded.
“I used to answer maybe 20 emails a day from a customer service standpoint, which I was doing at that time myself, alone, as well as making items and other things. And there was one Monday I came in and there were 500 customer emails.”
At the time, she was one of just three employees.
“So I was working all day and answering emails until like nine or 10 o'clock at night, and then getting up at six and doing it all over again. And we were just, you know, it just had to get done. And it was fine. We all also were thinking that there was going to be a light at the end of the tunnel. And so it wasn't a problem, you know? So I wasn't thinking, oh, I need to take time for myself or, oh, I need to slow down and take a day off. Like no one was going on vacation anyway. No one's taking days off. And when you are, you're just sitting in your house. My computer was just calling my name, right?”
Danielle is 38 and says she’s always worked a lot. She wants to give her all and with business up so much, her company needed her more than ever. But for those first months of the pandemic she was working at home…which she shares with her boyfriend of many years.
“I've never been a work at home person before and I know why. I cannot turn it off, you know? And so having an at-home office was just, I could just sit here for 30 more minutes and get, you know, this much more done, you know, ‘cause it'll always be there tomorrow. So that was partly me, and there was Jason, my partner, he did finally tell me, he was like, okay, it was nine o'clock one night. I remember I was doing customer emails and he was like, it's nine o'clock like, are you gonna go to bed? And I was like, oh my gosh, I didn't realize. And he was like, yeah, like you've been up here for hours.”
As the months dragged on, life and work blurred together. She lives in California and loves the outdoors, but was barely getting out. She says she used to see friends after work during the week and at the weekend. At first she missed seeing her friends, but then, after months of isolation…it just became normal for the two of them to keep to themselves. But seeing people even outside became complicated with everyone’s varying comfort levels around covid.
A sort of low-grade depression set in.
“All of the stuff that makes life outside of work happy…There's no work life balance because there's no life balance part of it, you know? So how can you have work life balance if the life part is completely out of whack?”
And that’s been the problem for a lot of people, right? When downtime is spent within your four walls, you end up doing the same kinds of things you always do at home. In Danielle’s case working, cleaning out the cat litter, and watching Netflix. Refreshing it was not.
Gradually she put up a few boundaries - she switched off notifications for work email on her phone, for one thing. They hired a bunch more people so Danielle was no longer answering hundreds of emails a day.
Finally, she and Jason planned a vacation. Last November they were headed to Paris, their first real break since 2019 And then…
“After spending like 18 months, two years of being very careful and working so carefully and getting vaccinated and everything, I got COVID, and it put me down for two and a half, three weeks, I was sick. And I just realized, like, I didn't have a choice. I had to be down, you know, and I would get on my computer and I could only see on the computer for about 30 minutes at a time, an hour, at a time. And then I'd have to get off the computer. My body just couldn't do it, my eyesight was kind of weird. I was exhausted in a way that I hadn't been exhausted before.
I was the frog in the pot and I was boiling a hundred percent and I didn't notice it until really that day. I had burnout before that, like probably at least a few months minimally. I just didn't recognize it until I was actually down for the count.”
It’s taken her weeks to feel anything much, and to get interested in work again. But recently things have been looking up.
“I feel better than I did before COVID. I mean, it's very odd. I just feel like I'm starting to come out. I, this sounds odd…I've been deep cleaning my house the last few days. And that just felt so good. It's like getting the dust from the last like, well, however long, honestly, like when you're working all those hours, dusting is definitely not a priority. And it wasn't the business' fault, really. It was just me not recognizing and not having the priorities where they should have been, like, not noticing that I was kind of going down the tubes a little bit.”
Danielle has two vacations planned this year…and really hopes to take both of them.
Individuals can certainly play a part in their own burnout, but it is also a societal problem. Jennifer Moss is the author of The Burnout Epidemic, which came out last year. I first started reading her work in the Harvard Business Review when she was writing about happiness at work. But it turns out that from that work, grew a realization that many employees all over the world were burning out - and this was before Covid came along.
“I think how we talked about burnout and how we still talk about burnout is that it's an individual problem to solve. You know, if you just do more yoga or you should engage in more self care or listen to the, you know, sounds of rain on your app and we'll solve for systemic discrimination or 70 hour work weeks, or constant lack of agency. And the fact that someone, you know, is dumping work on your lap in the middle of the evening and it's due the next day. Like all of these things cannot be solved with those tactics. And now what I'm trying to do, and I think with the World Health Organization in 2019, actually identifying burnout and classifying it as occupational phenomena, as workplace stress left unmanaged, that really does help the conversation move forward around organizations and leaders being responsible in a very big way.”
AM-T: “Do you have any sense from your research and the people you talk to the extent to which organizations during the pandemic have even acknowledged that we’re actually still in a pandemic? I’ve seen employees complain about this in forums and say, it’s as if my company has forgotten that I'm doing this under a lot of other pressures, and it’s not business as usual still.”
“Well, there was a recent poll that showed that basically people are feeling like their employers are addressing it. So it's being discussed, but then a large part of that group...So in this poll about 45% said that their employers were not doing anything about it, so they know what's going on…and then there was another, roughly, you know, 22% that said there was nothing going on. So there's only a small percentage of the global workforce that feels like their employers are talking about it and actioning some solutions. And so that is really where the problem is. I think there's an awareness, but a lot of leaders don't really know what to do. And they've been trying, what they've been told is really good from a wellness strategy, or they've been advised on how to fix it. And then they're coming to realize that some of these technologies that they've embedded and spent a lot of money on aren't working, and they have added extra vacation time or paid time off, or they've suggested for their burned out employees to take a week off and recoup, but then they come back and nothing's changed.”
AM-T: “Yeah, it’s interesting, I posted about this in several places, I did this post on LinkedIn and one of the responses I got there was from a woman, she felt her company’s heart was in the right place because it had given everybody one extra day off in October that they had to take by X time…but it was one day off.”
“Yeah. And it's interesting because you would've read in the book, you know, my interview with one of the tech CEOs saying, ‘I was giving my employees the Fridays off and I thought that was really awesome. And then I realized they were checking in and working on Saturday and Sunday to make up for the Friday off.’ And so we see a lot of that. And he made some changes and I provided that example of making sure that you manage for people's workload. And if you're gonna give them that time off or the Friday off, you can't create debt for them. So it's really about adjusting workload consistently.”
She says it’s also about frequent check-ins with staff…even though doing that is more difficult in a digital-only world.
“We do need to be checking in on workload. We need our employees to be able to document what they're working on and how often their priority needs get bumped for urgent needs. How often do client needs come in and again, overtake all of the other work that we're doing? How do we manage expectations with clients? A lot of this is just communication, more frequency and consistency of that communication, knowing more about what's going on within your team as a leader. And then we also need to have really strong guidelines around the right to disconnect.”
She says Ontario, where she lives, passed a right to disconnect law that’ll come into effect this summer - France and Spain already have these laws, Ireland has something similar. Jennifer says the pandemic has made them even more necessary to keep employees from working all the time.
“When are those guidelines for people to disconnect? When does it make sense for them to feel like they can, you know, be away from work? How do we protect weekends and evenings? And we as leaders need to model that behavior so it becomes permitted within our organizations.”
Jamie Hand is trying to do just that.
“There's really two things as a leader you have to do to help your employees not burn out. And the first one is don't burn out yourself, because you can't be an excellent leader if you're burned out. And the second one is, role model what it looks like to not burn out.”
Jamie works for an insurance and financial services company in Illinois. She leads a team of four people - all women - that formed just before the pandemic started. Jamie is 36 and married with two boys, ages nine and seven. So she had her hands full when Covid first hit. But so did her team.
Everyone’s been working from home since the spring of 2020, and during this time Jamie has kept her eyes and ears open for signs of burnout. She sees consistent frustration is one sign…
“You can also tell when people talk about their families, there's different levels of stress. You can see kind of how it's going in their home life. And that always translates into work life. So picking up on cues that maybe my child is needing extra help. My kid is sick. My husband is working a lot and can't take time off.”
Jamie’s the kind of manager people open up to. She says on the one hand that’s good. She wants her team to feel they can confide in her. On the other she has to be careful to set boundaries or she could end up burning out herself.
One way she stays healthy? She takes her paid time off. And I know that may sound strange to anyone outside the US but in this country many people do not take their allotted number of vacation days.
So Jamie takes her 18 vacation days, and she rarely emails or texts her team when she’s off. She encourages them to take their vacation days, too, and to protect their time.
“It's very regular that something comes up like, well, I'm supposed to be off tomorrow, but I have to log in and take a couple calls, or ‘I'm supposed to take time off over Christmas, but I'm gonna have to work through it because I've got this big thing coming up,’ and I just try to be the person who's like, ‘I don't know. You probably could take the time off, the work’s still gonna be here. I mean, sometimes you do better work if you take a break.
And sometimes I'll do it with humor depending on the setting. And I'll be like, well, you know, we're not trying to find the COVID vaccine here. We're trying to sell insurance. Like it's okay for you to take some time off and spend time with your family. Because I am in a leadership role, I think people need to hear that from their leaders. Otherwise they're always kind of wondering, like, does she think I'm working hard enough? And I've noticed when I do that in a group setting, it does kind of unlock the permission for other people to be like, yeah, same. I mean, take your time off. The work will be here when you get back.”
She has other tactics as well. She’s cut down on multitasking and wants her team to follow suit.
So instead of being on a Zoom call and being only half-present while she checks email or finishes a slide deck…she skips the call. And she wants the others to do the same.
“I also really discourage like, parenting slash working multitasking, by that I mean, if we're having a team meeting and you have to take your kids to the doctor, I don't want you to feel like you have to call in and take the call from your minivan radio. Like it's usually not that important. We can reschedule the call or we can catch you up later. It just, both of those things, kind of constantly doing two things at once and constantly trying to parent and work at the same time, I think those things will accelerate burnout. And so unless it's really crucial to some timeline that can't be moved that we do those things, I really try to avoid both of those sorts of multitasking.”
Jamie also gives her team autonomy over their schedules. She says she doesn’t care what time of day they do their work as long as it gets done. And especially with covid, she knows people are craving a sense of control over their lives. Researchers point to a perceived lack of control as one of the main causes of burnout.
As for whether all this is working, Jamie says it’s a mixed bag. The last employee survey showed workers at her company were veering towards disengagement. That’s the bad news. She discussed it with her team and found a lot of the reasons for that were organizational - in other words, bigger than her, outside of her control. One the plus side, her division got high scores on a few things…
“...one of them was work life balance, which meant a lot to me, it meant I was doing something right in that perspective. And then another one was valuing our wellbeing. ‘I feel like my employer values my wellbeing as a person.’ So I took those two to heart that, you know, kind of within my own sphere of control I'm doing what I can to help them not completely burn out.”
All this sounds good to burnout scholar Jennifer Moss.
“What she's doing is really, it is the sort of upstream factors that she's creating a culture where you're allowed to, to say, I need to take time off and you encourage people to take time off. You're creating guidelines around when you should be disconnecting. I mean, she's, this is where I really want leaders to start to focus and understand it. They're not heavy lifts. It's not this huge programmatic shift where we think of burnout...It's impossible to tackle because there's so many root causes and you know, I'm just a manager, I'm not gonna be able to solve for systemic discrimination, lack of fairness in my company. Yes, we have to control the controllables. What can we do, and how do we start executing? And usually it's just really small micro steps.”
Jennifer’s research shows that burnout is happening around the globe. And yet…certain cultures are surely more prone to burnout than others. For instance, many Americans at least when they’re starting out in a job get only 10 vacation days a year (and even that’s not guaranteed).
There have been a couple of threads about burnout and hustle on the show’s social media channels and one of you posted a heartfelt moan about American work culture that I wanted to discuss with Jennifer.
AM-T: “You’re Canadian, you’re living back in Canada. And one of the people who responded to this social media string is a Canadian who’s living in the US. and She wrote this post that made some interesting points. She feels it’s her husband who’s burned out but he won’t admit it. And she says ‘I feel like I really noticed this coming from Canada to the US. I noticed this crazy hustle immediately. It’s a different kind of intrusion on one’s life and balance, and I've seen it escalate in the pandemic to the point where companies ask for even more from employees.’ And I do keep coming back to this in my head. The American work culture is intense.”
“Well back in, and I wrote about this in the book when I talked about sort of the history of the evolution and the etymology of the word burnout…and there was a point in the 1800s where burnout was considered American-itis, which I thought was really interesting. And there is that mindset, absolutely.”
She says take some of the policies or so-called perks the big tech companies famously offer…
“The egg freezing policy, for example, I mean, let's get as much as we can out of people before they're in their, either their childbearing age or in the part where they're what is considered to be the most productive part of our lives, let's get the most outta people. And there is this expectation to be working all the time. And I recognize that too. And I recognize that coming back because I came back, sort of professionally growing up in the American style of working. And I came back and I was considered sort of a driver. I couldn't stay seated and people around me weren't used to that because they had sort of grown up in the Canadian culture of work.”
It took some time for her to settle back into life in Canada, with its different pace. Having burnt out badly herself in the past while running a business, Jennifer says she’d cultivated a certain level of mental fitness by the time the pandemic hit. She has three kids and a husband and says she’s terrible at home-schooling. But she didn’t share the experience of many other women trying to manage work, children and home during Covid.
Many would balance on the bed with a laptop while their kids begged for help with schoolwork, and their husbands or partners got a protected space somewhere else in the house.
“And that just became what the expectation was, that there was this protection around roles for males, and there was less protection around female roles. And then part of that too is organizations, just that expectation, you know, they didn't see men in that space the same way that they saw women in that space. So there was this, also this tolerance and acceptability for women to have that job versus the same sort of expectation around men. So again, all of these invisible societal behaviors really just exploded in these last two years.”
AM-T: “Do you think it’s harder for men to admit to burnout than it is for women?”
“Women are more likely to burn out according to the data, but they also are more likely to self report it, as you said. So there's both of those factors at play. So you can't really know what the evidence is showing if males are not as comfortable sharing that they're burning out. And in some cultures it's extremely stigmatized and in some industries it's extremely stigmatized for men to not be stoic, and not to show that they can weather it.”
Jennifer Moss, author of The Burnout Epidemic. Thanks to her, Danielle Fried and Jamie Hand for being my guests on this show.
I will link you to more information about Jennifer and her work under this episode at The Broad Experience.com.
If you are in the mood for more on burnout go back to episode 96 and episodes 119 and 170 were specifically about women in medicine and burnout.
That’s the Broad Experience for this time.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. Thanks for listening.