Why are organisations continually burning people out?

According to the World Health Organisation, burnout is characterised by emotional exhaustion, increasing mental distance from one’s job, negativity and cynicism in the workplace, reducing professional efficacy.

And burnout rates are increasing with one survey reporting that 72% of people often feel used up at the end of the day, an increase of 12% in the last 2 years.

On this week’s episode we not only look at why some organisations are allowing this to happen, we look at the effects of burnout and what can be done to change it.

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Join us as we reveal strategies to close the gap and craft a workplace where values are not just spoken, but lived and breathed, paving the way for a more authentic and engaging organisational culture.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Workplace Burnout
• 14:05 Creating a Culture of Wellbeing
• 24:16 Preventing Workplace Burnout Through Action

Transcript

Colin: 0:02

Welcome to the Inside Out Culture Podcast, where we look at insides of working culture and provide ideas, insights and actions for you to take on the outside. I'm Colin Ellis.

Cath: 0:12

And I'm Cath Bishop, and in each episode we'll examine a different question or a different organization, and we'll use case studies, research and our own insights and experiences to help you change the way things get done in your world.

Colin: 0:27

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please like, subscribe and, of course, let us know what you think. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Inside Out Culture Podcast. It's really exciting for Cath and I because we're actually in the same space. We're in a studio in Soho in London.

Cath: 0:51

So it is a real culture shock for us. I think, yeah, normally we're recording literally continents apart, oceans apart, so it's usually about 6.30am for you and 9.30pm for me. So we're in the same time zone, in the same place, a few feet apart. So, yeah, it's great. And today we're talking about burnout. Yeah, big topic, burnout. And actually we were both saying, when we were doing some research for this conversation, how prolific the literature is around burnout. It's being written about absolutely everywhere Harvard Business Review, mckinsey Research, every organization, psychology magazines, you name it everyone is talking about it. People talk about an epidemic of burnout, and so what we wanted to do is to, as always, go a little under the surface. What's going on? How might we think about this topic? How might we sort of break it down in some different ways and also give you some helpful pointers to be thinking about your workplaces? So let's start off, colin, thinking about how would you situate this topic? What are maybe the key signs of burnout? Should we start there?

Colin: 1:50

Yeah, it's probably a good place to start is how do you know if you're burned out or just really really tired Burnout? So I did some research on what the key signs of burnout are. The first one is exhaustion. Exhaustion is a word that we use a lot, but exhaustion is when you feel physically and emotionally drained even after a good night's sleep. You know that feeling when you get up in the morning and there's just nothing left in the tank where you feel you have to force yourself just to even get in the shower. And I know myself, I've suffered from burnout just getting into the showers and effort. So that's the first sign.

Colin: 2:24

Second is a lack of motivation. So you really lose interest in your work and in your personal life. You're constantly having to tell yourself to come on, you can do this. Things that you used to be excited about you're just no longer excited about. The third thing and I noticed this in myself particularly is I suddenly become skeptical or cynical, so quite negative. That's a real key sign of burnout for me is that's just not who I am as an individual. All of a sudden I'm thinking negatively about stuff and you start to withdraw and people are asking you are you okay.

Colin: 2:59

Fundamentally, you know you're okay and you probably say you're okay. You know you're okay and you probably say you're okay, but it doesn't feel right. The fourth one is irritability, which just the little things that just start to really irk you and really bug you and you feel that feeling of fear, anger and hostility. And then the last one is health issues. And this is the big one, particularly for sustained burnout, is it can really manifest itself physically Headaches, migraines, stomach issues, irritable bowel syndrome is always linked to burnout. Muscle tension, you feel like you need a massage every single day, changes in appetite and obviously a lack of sleep. So they're just some of the signs. And the other thing that I read, Cath, when I was doing the research, is what medical professionals say is it takes six weeks of rest to really overcome extreme burnout, which is why we probably struggle with it. Who can take six weeks off you?

Cath: 3:59

know. Yeah, the whole concept of that feels both beautiful and frightening. So it's one of those things that we are seeing so much more and there are a whole load of reasons why. So it can be partly, as you can tell from those signs that you read out, it can be partly things in our own minds. So the way we're driving ourselves, the way we are focusing, the goals we're giving ourselves, but there's also lots of social factors.

Cath: 4:22

So in the environment around us, of course, the overload we get from technology, from our phones being on the whole time and piling our brains with tons of information, there's a sense of demands from companies wanting to speed up work and putting pressure, and there's a short-termism, trends that push us in that direction. There's a sense of perhaps some of our organizations not caring about us as people but really just seeing us as machines churning stuff out. That starts to again leave us in a space of why am I doing all this work and I'm working ever harder? And there's an isolation and that's something that I think we all experience in different ways. During the pandemic, that really showed us how a lack of connection to others can leave us, you know, bewildered, burnt, feeling, quickly, you know, at a loss. So there were lots of things changing both in the way we all think and live in modern society and there are lots of things in the environment around us that are leading us in this direction. So it's quite hard to find a pathway through all of those.

Cath: 5:22

What would you say in your? You mentioned there your own experiences of burnout. What were the things that led to that for you?

Colin: 5:29

I think some of it was choice, Cath, is I overworked, I felt like I had to be doing things and unfortunately, I have one of those personalities where I feel like I have to always be on the go. If my wife listens to this podcast, she'll be like, oh yeah, he's that guy. We'll always have to be doing, always have to be writing, always have to be researching. But actually in my you know, when I was an employee, the need for almost to make sure that I was conforming to the culture that existed, one of back-to-back meetings where I had no time for my job and I was then choosing to work in the evening and at weekend, and I think one of the ways that I coped with that is then to say well, I don't have to conform to those things.

Colin: 6:16

And that was almost a light bulb moment for me in the kind of around about 2008. It feels like a long time ago, 16 years ago now, but for me that's when it changed, because all of a sudden I'm like feels like a long time ago, 16 years ago now, but for me that's when it changed, because all of a sudden I'm like oh, wait a minute, I don't have to conform to some of these things, and I think that's a trap that many people find themselves in is that they conform to cultural norms because they feel a sense of rejection. They feel that you know it'll be seen as they're not part of the team. Maybe there's an expectation from managers, and I still do think that some organizations place undue, put undue influence on people to conform to ridiculous cultural norms, particularly around you know, kind of the time that they spend doing things and there's never a time for a break, which is probably something that you've seen as well in the sporting world, Cath.

Cath: 7:04

Yeah, hugely. And I think I mean in one way, sport shows us that you can't have performance without recovery. It's such a crucial part of life, the sort of human cycle and the human ability to achieve, and so I always think you wouldn't cut recovery typically although some sports environments do get pretty close to that at times and the desperation to get the next result. But this principle of recovery is one that we've lost in life in work. Who talks about when are we going to recover as a team and how are we going to recover in order to do even better in the next project? So I think that concept is one that we need to re-educate ourselves about. Remember, plan involve. It is part of how we can function at our best and certainly if we want to sustain the work that we do. It was interesting. The World Health Organization has added it into its international classification of diseases and says that chronic workplace stress it's about chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. So it is very much something that we need to think about for ourselves, but we also can't take it out of that context of how we're being managed, and I'm just not sure that line managers necessarily see things through this lens. Always, we tend to focus on the tasks, so my job is to make sure my team delivers X number of tasks and hits X number of objectives, rather than actually my job is to make sure that my team are healthy, that they're able to work, that they are recovering in order to complete the next set of objectives and the set of objectives after than that, rather than, oh my God, we've just got to get through this month's objectives. So I think there's a huge piece around needing to reshape what we think good line management is about and how we might train line managers I actually hate that word, line managers, but anyway it's the one we still use. I mean as if we're managing lines, we're the people in all this.

Cath: 8:51

You know that indicates there's a lack of humanization of our environments and that's very much been part of the increase in burnout. I think and you know, coming back to that sports piece, for me when I experienced it was when I was just being turned into a rowing machine. I couldn't be human, I couldn't be have an off day, because you can't have an off day on the Olympics. You're not allowed to have an off day. So you're not allowed to say when you're not feeling great when you need a bit of help, when you're struggling, you're also kind of you know, in the first part of my career as an Olympic athlete then there was this focus on more and more.

Cath: 9:27

More is good If you can do an extra exercise in the gym, if you can do some more here, then of course that, you know, gets to a point where you're then cutting into your recovery, where you're then cutting into your recovery, where you're actually pushing your body constantly and not enabling it to get stronger each time. And also there was a culture where there was very little joy. You were only as valuable as your results. And so then I kind of found myself, after a really poor performance in the Sydney Olympics, just feeling really destroyed, burnt out from the experience of four years of trying to train harder all the time and actually not even being able to deliver my best performance at the end of it.

Cath: 10:04

So yeah, I think about it quite a lot on a personal level and in terms of how to help organizations that have got into sort of such a cycle of being trapped into asking for more, more, more all the time. What's the sort of work that? What are the sort of recommendations that you make when you're talking to organisations. What are the things that you try and help people with, colin on this?

Colin: 10:27

Well, you, touched on it, Cath is middle managers really are the difference. You know the OCS had a global culture report in 2023. They found that a vibrant culture reduces burnout by 66%, increases tenure by 63% and increases job satisfaction by 28%. All of these things and a big part of that is actually being able to be your best, most productive self in the office. Middle managers really create the foundation for that, and so we need to teach them not only how to build great culture, but also how to make sure that everyone isn't feeling completely spent Even halfway through the day.

Colin: 11:04

The global leadership forecast last year burnout rates are increasing 72% of people who were surveyed felt used up by the end of the day. That's almost three quarters of employees and that's an increase of 12% in just three years. But only 15% of leaders feel prepared to prevent employee burnout, which goes back to that. You know really teaching managers. You know certainly for me, the programs that I run and talk very much about the importance of making sure that people have time in their day to do their work and have time in their day to stop and have a break. But most corporate organizations their day to do their work and have time in their day to stop and have a break.

Colin: 11:38

But most corporate organizations, their response to burnout is to implement wellbeing programs, not to address the root cause right, and so the wellbeing programs. You know. Companies around the world spend, you know, over $60 billion on wellbeing programs. It's expected to be about $95 billion by 2026. And yet what Oxford University found is none of that. None of those interventions had a significant impact at all on well-being, sense of belonging, job satisfaction, nor did they improve the culture. The most effective way to improve how people feel and burnout is to actually reduce the stress, rather than implement new ways to help people cope with the stress. It's crazy.

Cath: 12:30

Yeah, this is a sort of initiativitis that then comes in oh, let's fix it. Let's not look at any of the causes. The root causes of burnout will just bring a little fix, a sort of temporary, shallow, superficial thing that we do. And I saw a lovely phrase, actually when I was reading some articles that said you can't yoga your way out of burnout, which I thought was a great phrase. And it sums it up yes, we all do yoga on Thursday lunchtimes and therefore everything will be okay. I mean, how ridiculous is that? Because it actually really undermines the culture, it's really not valuing your people and it's not understanding how our bodies work, how our minds work, how our emotions work, and ultimately, that will affect your performance, if not this week, the week after, the week after, after that.

Cath: 13:16

And then you're into a whole world of pain, of retention issues, of people going off sick, the number of times now I find it's quite a regular thing when I'm working with the team oh so and so's not here because they're they're off on stress, and, of course, again, when you add that together and there are lots of research papers that have added all of those costs of burnout you see, well, somehow it's cost you more than you thought you were gaining by hitting this month's targets.

Cath: 13:43

So there's a short-termism that stops us seeing the long-term damage here, and so for me, a huge part of this is getting much more long-term strategies for looking after your people, and they must be prioritized over short-term gains, because the cost is so high and even I'm not even thinking that long-term, I'm thinking over a year, over two years the costs are so high if you don't look after people this week. So there's some things that are coming back to some of the themes we've talked before about having much stronger listening cultures, having that psychological safety where people can say I'm struggling with something. Those become really core to enabling us to shift into a different place on this.

Colin: 14:20

Those social supports are crucial. There's some research by Hammer and what they found was that kind of prolonged wellbeing really relies on three factors. The first you know one of them is social supports is creating that environment where people can say, hey, listen, I need help. Where you feel able to do that in a way where people don't judge you. Some people listen to the podcast like, oh, I probably feel I could tell my teammates that, but they'll probably then talk behind my back and say, gee, what's wrong with Colin? He needs to get his head in the game, those classic phrases.

Colin: 14:50

The second one is, for me, which is the most important one is decreasing the demands of work, and one of the phrases that I use all of the time is that if you want to do more, you need to do less, which sounds counterintuitive.

Colin: 15:04

But what you know, again, what the research has proven, what science proves, is that actually if we focus on fewer things, they get done faster, to a higher quality, than if we have 20 things on our plates.

Colin: 15:15

You know people get into these really bad habits of writing task lists, daily task lists, with 15 things on them and immediately they feel this sense of I haven't done enough, I'm not getting through my task list, and I'm a big fan of creating a master task list but then only have the tasks on your list for your day. You know that. Focus on, well, what do I have time to do? And then the third thing that Hammer found was really giving you know, kind of empowering employees to say who do you need to be with, where do you need to be, what's the environment that you need right now in order to do your best work. And then, when we have that choice, it's up to us as humans not to fall into bad habits, which also plays a part into burnout. You know, once you've got that, I'd say this is what I need to do, this is what I need to get done, I'm going to focus on that and then away we go.

Cath: 16:04

Yeah, and of course, part of those bad habits is not being able to switch off, and you mentioned it there and I'm guilty as well. I've been quite an obsessive personality who always wants to read another book and write another article, and I've always got these things swelling around my head and there is then no switch off point. I have lost the habit of switching off, which would help me to recover, and I think that's something that you can get away with it. There's almost a bravado of I never switch off and that is so damaging for any of us as individuals, but also as teams, as workplaces, for us to have that sort of oh yeah, you can always catch me, I'll always respond really quickly and actually, over time, we're decreasing our capacity.

Cath: 16:42

So I love that message of less is more and it reminds me of some of the brilliant work that I think is really starting to come into the mainstream, more from Cal Newport, who's written some great books around digital minimalism, the concept of deep work, and his latest one is called Slow Productivity.

Cath: 17:01

So he's leaning into challenging all of the myths that we have that you've got to go faster and harder and do more all the time and, as you say, the way to do much higher quality work is to do less things much better. So that means you're paring back your to-do list. You're also thinking about when you do things. So first thing in the morning, when you're off and freshest and have got the biggest capacity for thinking, then you don't sit at your inbox for an hour, which will just drain you and then leave you in a sort of short-term headspace of pinging things back and forth. You actually sit down and do kind of something where you make much more meaningful progress. And I think that people are looking towards how the hell do we get out of what we're doing and what does good now look for? And I think he offers lots of tips, although they feel really challenging to the way. Now we've set our organizations up.

Colin: 17:56

Yeah, there's the three books that I read that changed the way that it changed my relationship with technology. So I read the 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, which has got some really great stuff in there. I read Stolen Focus by Johan Hari, and I read, but then kind of slightly. And there was a Christmas book, you know, one of those big, thick books. I read the Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff, which talked about how technology companies are using the information that we provide them with for all manner of just nefarious activity. So anyway, those three books really changed my relationship with the thing in my pocket. And it's funny.

Colin: 18:46

I was on the tube this morning and I would say at least 80% of the people were just staring at the back. There was one guy reading a book. I was like love that I haven't seen that so long. But we've lost that ability almost to just switch off, to stop. You know, one guy was watching just Instagram and I watched him just scrolling like scroll, like scroll. He wasn't even reading what was there. You know, it's clearly one of those little bad habits that we've got and that thing is then just becomes a distraction for the thing that you actually need to do yeah, and the thing you probably want to do more, because it often leaves you feeling really dissatisfied again.

Cath: 19:26

It's really sort of chewing our brains up doing this sort of thing. And, yeah, reading is a really lovely way of switching off and slowing down your brain, but actually slowing it down in order to be able to think more deeply, more impactfully, and particularly if we're in roles where we need to collaborate, so we need to relate to others, connect, think, take on board other perspectives, feed them into our own, and where we need to be innovating, thinking differently, then an overloaded brain cannot think in a fresh way, and then that means we're just creating, we're actually limiting performance. We're creating workplaces where we just churn out what we've always done and what you see then is the performance levels actually start to crater. Of course, disengagement quickly drops off and, again, gallup surveys show us continually the decreasing levels of engagement in the company.

Cath: 20:15

So none of this is actually helping this desperate performance that we're chasing and we're ending up, sort of paradoxically, getting further away from performance, even though we're pushing all these bad habits and kind of overloaded working ways in terms of, because it's important for performance, there's a need to massively step back, and that requires leaders actually to give the space to help people do good work, deep work, meaningful work, and that's just something that isn't on their to-do list because they've got so many other things that they've got to get done. But if we're not having that role model from the top and given permission and proactively supported, then it's really tough for people in the middle of an organization to change those habits. So you know, people who are managers of teams, people who are leaders in organizations, it's really important. This is a huge responsibility. You have to help ensure that your colleagues don't get burnt out.

Colin: 21:13

Yeah, and we should probably kind of finish with what can employers do? And you're absolutely right, it's on leaders. Toby Lutker, who's the CEO of Shopify. He copped a bit of flack on Twitter in 2019 by basically saying, listen, I don't overwork, you know, at the end of the day, that's it. I'm done at 5.30. I am done. And he said there are only five creative hours in everybody's day and he was happy if only four of those were spent on Shopify activities. And you don't have to look at Shopify's number to say you know what. They might be onto something there.

Colin: 21:45

So I think, leaders, you have to really you have to demonstrate what good looks like. You have to address the root cause issues. Forget well, no, wait a minute. Don't forget wellbeing programmes. Make sure you've got some kind of things in place to help people, absolutely. But your employees will thank you more for less meetings in the corporate world. They'd thank you more for less emails. They'll thank you more for providing them with time to sit and think. But then, employees, you've got to use that time to sit and think you can. Employees, you've got to use that time to sit and think you can't. Just, you know, take your phone to the bathroom and scroll on your Instagram feed. So you know, yes, we want corporates and we want all kinds of organizations to really think about. What are those root causes of burnout? How do we address those? And then we want people to actively use their time better, such that they live happier, fulfilled lives. I would take that?

Cath: 22:39

Yeah, absolutely. And I want to give a shout out to Leanne Spencer, who's a colleague, who's become a friend, who went through a huge burnout crisis from working, I think, in advertising world and now for, yeah, probably the last 15 years or so has been very innovative in this space, written some books her last one on cadence all the time looking at deeper angles of how to support people in a much more holistic way. So, yes, it's thinking about physical activity, but also very much now going to workplaces and helping think about wellbeing, not just as something you do in a Friday lunchtime, but actually what does that wellbeing agenda look like? You know, threaded throughout the way we work. So I love her work and you can we'll give the link to her website there but it's, yeah, time for us to think about what we're going to leave you with in terms of what can you do, what to get curious about and what to uncover. So what's our do, what's our action takeaway?

Colin: 23:32

Well, for individuals listening to this, Cath. I think what we want them to do is take preventative action to prioritise your own health and wellbeing. You know, make sure you're getting plenty of sleep. You don't need your phone in your bedroom. Make sure good nutrition, exercise when you can, regardless of what your workload is. Try your best to have some good balance and plan your day, yeah be proactive and curious.

Cath: 23:56

have a think about why you, and perhaps your colleagues, aren't great at looking after yourselves. What's going on there in terms of your own habits, your own upbringing, your own values and the values of the workplace? So why aren't you looking after yourselves when you are your greatest asset and, lastly, uncover?

Colin: 24:16

Well, I think, if you're a senior leader in a business or if you're a manager, what are the root causes in the workplace of burnout, regardless of what you do Really take the time to understand what is creating this epidemic where we feel spent at the end of the working day, and I think that the things that you want to address are those root causes, because they're the things that then will change it moving forward Brilliant.

Cath: 24:41

So take preventative, proactive action to prioritise your health and wellbeing. Get curious about why you might not be looking after yourself and uncover the root causes of workplace stress in your environment. Great, great to be in the same place. Great conversation Thanks very much. Thanks, Cath. Thanks for listening to today's Inside Out Culture.

Colin: 25:05

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