SPOTLIGHT: Addressing the Burnout Epidemic With Jennifer Moss

Speaker A: Slowly but surely, you know, we're seeing that idea of that bifurcation between 9 to 5 completely gone. I mean we are looking at an integrated 24 hour, seven day a week, you know, 365 day a year connection to our jobs.

Speaker B: G' day everyone. Dion Love here with the Gartner talent angle. Exhausted, overwhelmed, burnt out, whatever you call it, many of us are feeling it. And as we're coming up on the two year anniversary of the COVID 19 pandemic, organizations can no longer ignore the growing burnout epidemic. So today I welcome back my inimitable Gartner colleague Peter Aitkens for this important and timely discussion. Peter is practice Vice president of HR Research here at Gartner and he's joined by Jennifer Moss. Jennifer is the author of the Burnout the Rise in Chronic Stress and How We Can Fix It. And in the interview Jennifer makes a compelling case for the role organisations must play in stopping employees chronic stress cycles. Employees can't do it alone. They need organisations to promote sustainable working conditions. Whether you're a leader, manager or individual contributor, this one you won't want to miss.

Speaker C: Jennifer, welcome to the talent angle.

Speaker A: I'm looking forward to this conversation. Thanks for hosting me.

Speaker C: Yes, and this particular issue, the issue of burnout has been very top of mind to me, to my colleagues, to our clients. So I know that I for one have been really looking forward to learning more from you about this important and quite significant serious issue to be sure, both as a leader of teams and personally, maybe just to begin the conversation, would love to know from you the origin story of the work, what brought you to look at the issue of burnout. It seemed to me a little bit in reading through the book that it wasn't purely academic interest, that there was some personal motivations behind it as well. But I would just love to know what caught your attention and why the interest in exploring birdout.

Speaker A: You know I had a precipitating event in 2009 where we were living in California. My husband actually was a pro athlete and contracted Guillain Barre syndrome and he became acutely paralyzed. And what we found in that moment is just, you know, just you level set and you as uh, what we found as athletes you do get a lot of sort of emotional intelligence, psychological fitness building over the years you're sort of identified as a high performer and then treated as such. And what we also came to understand is that mindset played a huge role in Jim's recovery. He ended up walking out of the hospital after six weeks um, and that led us to actually level again, level set, and bring us back to Canada where we realized we were really far away from our family. We wanted to really try to focus on meaningful work to make sense of sort of what happened with Jim and the learnings that we, we gleaned from being, going through this post traumatic sort of stress event. And um, and so then we focused really on the place where we spend most of our time, which is at work. About 50% of our waking hours are there. And why so many people are unhappy was part of that, that reason. You know, why does some people love their job and they're fueled by it. But why do most people actually feel this level of chronic stress? Um, the focus at that time, happiness in building wellbeing strategies. We were strategists for, you know, large organizations and startups and helping them define what that looks like for them. Um, but the more we spend time in those spaces, we realize like, there's like this 20% that are high performing, that are, you know, optimization is good for them, where we can motivate, where all of those, uh, traditional ways of kind of providing these sort of wellness perks work for them. But then there's this giant group of people that are extremely unhappy and they're burning out and we're realizing that it's really tone deaf to just treat those people at that high level that, you know, where we can talk about happiness and motivation, where the rest of people just feel like it's toxic. And so my goal became getting into the work around burnout and chronic stress and how we can prevent it way further upstream so that downstream people are more well and healthier and higher performing.

Speaker C: Great. Well, first off, um, I'm glad that the origin story sounds like it turned out well. I'm sure that was a very difficult time of your and, uh, your husband's life. And it also, I guess, sets up that while there's a lot of references to the current moment, this pandemic moment, as contributing to a lot of stress and burnout, that this is not a pandemic story. This is a story that does go back for you, I guess, over a decade, many, many decades. Is that, is that fair? Is that true?

Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, we've been dealing with burnout for a long time. Uh, we talk about, you know, the issue with overwork. Overwork has been a legacy and institutionalized in lots of different industries for years. I mean, when you look at when burnout was really first identified, it was identified as caregiver syndrome. And really within the healthcare field, because at that point there were so many people, particularly physicians that, and nurses that were, um, were not taking care of themselves and not being taken care of, but they were expected to heal other people and working astronomical hours and being faced with a huge amount of personal risk to be able to fulfill their roles. And that's like 1970s. So we've been already talking about this for a long time. And what the pandemic did was just exacerbate those existing problems, those sort of boiling issues that you knew were just right under the surface, but no one was really tackling them. And then you have a crisis and it changes everything.

Speaker C: And I'd like to just explore that a little bit more because it is an issue that like you said, has been recognized as an issue for many years and yet it seems to be getting worse, not better. I'm just curious your sense of both. What are the drivers you think that are making the issue worse? And then maybe just as a follow up to that, why is there not more action or hasn't been more action to try to address it?

Speaker A: Uh, you know, the drivers are really legacy. I mean when you look first at healthcare, which is having the highest attrition rates right now, and has been sort of catastrophically, uh, unwell for a long time and has been the most burned out sector, a lot of the drivers are like, it starts way early on in a person's cycle. Talked about this in the book. I did some research with those physicians who talk about it a lot. And what they said is that, you know, you're really starting in high school almost of that level of performance that's required, level of perfectionism that's required. Personalities at risk for burnout are high levels of perfectionist. So you've sort of got this recipe for creating the individual that's most at risk for burnout, that's attracted to the industry of health care. And then again it becomes highly competitive, uh, culture of overwork. Inside of, you know, pre med and med, you're working again these uh, intense hours and then going into the workplace, you're already almost burned out before you even start your career in that field. And I'm hearing the same things within tech where you have this mindset of, you know, it's 80 hours to achieve a dream per week. And that's the only way that you can be competitive and not be obsolete in tech is if you're working these obscene hours. Uh, you know, we see that again in finance. We're in those first almost like Six to seven years. I uh, continue to hear and, and see in the research and our data that is almost like a hazing that happens in those first few years where people are, because the people before them had to do it. They have to demonstrate that the only way they're going to survive in this job is if they're working to the point where they risk having a life or relationships or eating or sleeping. You know, these are the sort of that legacy and that's been pervasive and that's what's probably the hardest thing to change because it's so ingrained. And I think the reason why we haven't really had to fix it before because it hasn't been a bottom line issue. Now attrition is a bottom line issue. So there's more organizations that are having to declare it because there's. People are saying, I'm going to resign. We've faced our own mortality for 20 months. We've as a, as humankind as the global workforce has changed our intentions and because we're demanding it and we're willing to leave our jobs and our careers entirely, uh, it changes uh, the expectation. And again it is a lot to do with the fact that people, organizations are losing a lot of money from the amount of attrition they're seeing right now.

Speaker C: So I'd like to start continuing to dig into then what kinds of responses leaders and organizations can begin to deploy to make progress on this. I think one of the challenges, at least what was going through my head and uh, a challenge that I certainly felt as a leader of teams personally, is in many ways it feels burnout feels like a very individualized challenge. And yet what I would love to have, uh, is some sort of big scaled lever I can pull to really move the dial on the issue. And I'd love to just. No, first off, is that first premise true or not, that this feels very individualized? We've been talking about those causes of burnout, the workloads and lack of control and relationships and fairness and so on. But you also talk about personality types, those who are more introverted, perfectionism, these kinds of things that perhaps make certain individuals more prone to burnout in those conditions than others. So maybe you could just help me and others understand a little bit about just how individualized is this or not as you look at the nature of the problem?

Speaker A: Well, I think what we're seeing now is that there is a level of unsustainability for the workforce that is being felt across all different sectors and roles. And individuals right now. So there is a universality of it that we're experiencing right now that does demonstrate that it is nuanced but that everyone can be hit by it. And I think that that's important. But what you're saying is absolutely right. And I talk about this in the book and I think I try to really declare that this is not something that is uh, going to be solved with some sort of silver bullet solution. All of a sudden we can institute some sort of technology and that's going to fix everything and we'll be able to solve for burnout. It's a lot of responsibility actually on the direct manager. And you know, why I suggest different ways to organize teams. Even size of teams makes a difference. You know, certain types of personalities that go into certain roles that go into certain industries. I mean we see that uh, the difference between those folks in marketing could be very different than your developer group inside your organization. I mean it's so it can be like stratospheric, the difference between different groups. And that's why we have to create very um, small goals within smaller teams where the direct manager plays the role. A lot of that can be done just by through data, small data, you know, big data. I think we need to measure, we need to see, you know and in my research that we did when we put out that 20 questions, uh, the survey that there was three questions in it that were qualitative so we were able to get back, you know, feedback and piece people's words and the themes that we saw were really a huge part of that was just what people were feeling. And so large organizations can first measure, you know, get a sense of what people are feeling and get quantitative feedback, you know, to find out just how people are feeling. You know, we included the areas of Work Life Scale and the Maslock Burnout Inventory scale. So you can get a pretty good assessment. Yes, that'll help. But then direct managers need to be sort of making sure and in this time of virtual work, if you have a team of 25 trying to get one on ones is near impossible with that many people in this current workload for leaders. But that's why this weekly check in as a team is so important. And you know, we need to reduce zoom burnout and video burnout and all the other meeting fatigue and the over collaboration, over looping. Yes, but we also need to check in and have non work related questions and be asking people things like how are you having them name a high and a low. This simple tactic so that you can learn what is motivating a person week to week and what is uh, demotivating causing stress for people every week and then again weekly asking in that meeting, what can we do for each other to make next week a bit easier? These are the simple ways, you know, that managers can have more control over the data that they're gathering and that it's just coming from what people are feeling in their own words. And then the goal of the manager is to be sort of a professional eavesdropper. I say, um, actually Martha Bird, who's the um, chief anthropologist for adp, came up with that strategy and she really thinks that we should be more curious and act as anthropologists and find out what's going on in the background of people's lives so that we can actually address it. That makes us be able to attack that personalized, nuanced, um, people that have perfectionism or neuroticism or those traits that lead to burnout. We can decide, discover that as the direct manager and then lead accordingly and prevent burnout accordingly. But we can't get that. If we're trying to be programmatic and broad in our approach. It has to be very small, agile, um, nuanced and sort of repetitive, uh, being able to change on the spot if things aren't working and actively listening before we're going to really make changes.

Speaker C: And maybe just probing in a little bit more then on things that you have seen those managers leaders do that have been helpful. You said a few of those in your last set of comments. But there are a number of examples of different leaders and organizations that you document in the book. And some of your other work would just be curious if you were to almost do a here's some good places to start type of advice to listeners. What would be two or three of those sorts of examples that you have seen real leaders find effective as they try to address um, burnout in their teams?

Speaker A: There's so many examples and again, like I said, um, it's a whole host of tactical tiny solutions that make up the broader strategy. And that's maybe the problem for some people. But there's also hopefulness in that because it's extremely operational, it makes it easy to operationalize across the organization. One of the things that I've been saying is have your as a manager sit down with your team and talk about guidelines around right to disconnect. There's laws now in countries that are making it so that employees can sue their employers for the ability to disconnect. We really shouldn't need a law that, that makes us have proper guidelines. So sit with our team, create guidelines on what that everyone feels that should look like, um, and then stick to them. We also as leaders need to model behavior. Uh, we need to model the behavior of uh, being better connect, committing to intentionally solving for burnout, which means you don't continue to say to people to do these things that are good for them and not, not behave in the same way. You know, do as I say, not as I do is never going to work. That's going to continue to, um, exacerbate burnout in our organizations. We also need to have really good analysis of where people are in their workload. Um, leaders, it's so important for us to be able to know what people are working on, how often people are getting asked to work on urgent needs that you might not be aware of, uh, and how often those urgent sees come from various stakeholders that you're not aware of. A lot of us now have been in this state of working in a pandemic and we still act like it's an emergency, but by definition emergencies are unexpected. It's not unexpected anymore. So a pause and say, hey, like my team, go and spend the next two weeks individually documenting what you're working on. How in each day, you know, how many times did an urgent need come in that you had to put off your priority needs for to address. And then now you're working into your evenings. Who are your number one stakeholders when you have an urgent stakeholder? How do you level, how do you like, prioritize them? Who's number one, who's number two, who's number three? Is it the client? And really get focused in on documenting what that looks like over the course of the couple weeks. Also look at where are there areas where you could maybe need more technical training? Is there a place where this resource, you know, you lost a resource and so now that's trickling into your workload. All these things need to be documented. And then managers need to sit down with their employees and actually look, uh, at this, assess it. Are you on the same page with your employee about what they're working on? Do you agree with how they categorize their urgent needs and what they should be pushing off to handle those things and you can see exactly where they're coming from. Um, you can provide them more training and you can create an advocacy plan for a resource if budget doesn't allow for it yet. So these are the things when we look at this and you know, I've Run this intervention in lots of organizations and we find that it really does reduce, um, inefficiencies, which reduces workload by up to 22. I mean, when we're looking at the fact that we're working 30% more to hit those same pre Covid goals, that 22% margin is pretty significant. And it really is just aligning on priorities and managing those urgent needs that come in. And that's uh, one of the things that I say, like first measure first get a litmus test, provide some anonymous way of getting feedback, but then address the biggest cause, burnout right now, which is overwork. And if you can reduce that and take some spinning plates off of, of your team, you can then work on some of those other things.

Speaker C: You said that these solutions can't be programmatic. There isn't a silver bullet. There's not one big lever that is going to make this issue go away. It feels like there's a lot that means that this has to be addressed between direct managers and their employees. Based on the situation in front of us, that appears to put a lot of burdens on those direct managers. And towards the end of your book, you talk a lot about how do we ensure that in their efforts to solve a burnout problem, they create a burnout problem for them, for themselves. So I guess, uh, maybe a couple parts of that question is how do organizations best support those direct managers then if they really are the linchpin of the solution, and then how do those managers help themselves to ensure that the responsibility that they bear isn't the thing that in and of itself creates a burnout problem for them?

Speaker A: I love this question because it's a, it's one that I get quite frequently and is there was this one interview that I did within Hewlett Packard and there was mention of a senior level, like a high level senior executive that she was a mom of, you know, three and she was managing it on her own. And you know, they were using social collaboration across the org to talk about, just about what they were all feeling as parents and as parents that were trying to juggle the demands of what was going on in the pandemic as well as their jobs at senior levels. And there was a lot of people that came in to have the conversation to say, yeah, I'm really feeling this as a leader, I have this responsibility to my team, but I'm also dealing with the exact same stressors that they are. And, and it was, uh, it's really impacted those sandwiched, you know, groups, those executives, they're in this sort of middle zone. And that's where again, why it has to be an ecosystem problem solved, where we need organizational structure, we need guidelines, we need built in policies so that leaders can then be permitted, you know, to model the self care that they're trying to get their employees to engage in. If it's just like a couple direct managers that are really, you know, really uh, advocating for it, but then the whole organization and culture in general is not supporting it, then is that's going to fail, so they can't be responsible for it. So at that point, what I want to be able to do for managers is empower them to find ways to mitigate it on their own without necessarily having to have those changes yet in place. Um, because that can make you feel at least I can control the controllables. And that's really all we can ask for right now is a starting off point because it is going to take a long time to see real change and we can control the controllables. And that's where direct managers have that capacity is. You know, the reason why I want to give them those tactics is, okay, I can't solve for everything. And maybe I'm in an industry that's going to have a culture or legacy of overwork for decades still or it's never going to change. But I have some small ways that I can help and I think that's really what's most important. Now a lot of us are going to feel overwhelmed by solving burnout because a lot of it is just macro issues that even societal changes need to happen before we can change it. And we haven't solved for the global pandemic yet, which is a major external stressor that no manager can solve for, you know, on their own. So it's really just narrowing it down to say, what can I do within my small team in a way that makes small changes so I can provide quick wins to them. And then I also can do what I can to be as best as I can be for myself so I can be more helpful, you know, and more productive and effective as a leader. And if we kind of look at it in that way, like it doesn't need to be, we change everything all at once. It's about, you know, tiny, uh, moments and milestones and wins. And then over time looking at it, you know, and looking back and saying, okay, I feel a bit better now. I feel like I've gotten out of the throes of that chaos and that's when we'll really Be able to reflect, I think, as leaders, and say, okay, I'm glad I made those changes now.

Speaker C: And maybe just as one last question, I appreciate all the time you've taken to give us these thoughts. Been just a really interesting conversation, given what you just said. We have to just start, and maybe it's going to take some time to see the effects, but we can start. We need to start. If I were just to say, as a final question, what would success then look like for you? Go ahead. Three years, five years? And what would you want to see that would be indicative of the kinds of progress you think we need to make against this issue?

Speaker A: I'd love to see that we can talk more openly about burnout at work. And we can speak up, uh, and say, I'm feeling burned out and people will take it seriously and it won't be stigmatized. And that we can not feel shame around that feeling. And that people will understand and there'll be programs and support systems in place for people to just be able to access it, um, in a way that doesn't make it feel like it has to be covert or they have to just deal with it on their own and feel like it's their own problem to solve. I'd like it to just be that there's an openness to the conversation and that it's moving in that right direction. I know change takes a long time. We talked about, you know, getting safety, you know, tools and, uh, laws in place for those people that were dying on the job. I mean, that was a century of that happening before we actually got any sort of rules in place. And they were bare minimum at the time. But now what we see is pretty robust and how we protect our workers on the job. And so we are kind of in. Kind of in a ground zero right now. We're in sort of the elevator, floor one. Uh, so I'd like to see us at least making some incremental changes in the next three years with a plan that's showing that we're on a track to make real change in the next 50.

Speaker C: Super. Well, once again, clearly a big and important issue, one that you have felt, that I feel, I think all leaders are feeling, particularly in this environment. So thank you again for sharing your thoughts with us at the Talent Angle. Really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Thank you so much, Peter. It was a really enjoyable conversation. Great questions. Thank you.

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