It’s a refrain we hear all too often these days. “I’m too
busy.” It’s hard to find a person who doesn’t think she’s busy. Busyness seems
to have become an intrinsic feature of modern life. Unfortunately, it
frequently seems that it does not necessarily mean ‘happy’ or ‘fulfilled’ but
rather ‘frayed’ and ‘overloaded.’ And that can be a problem…
People nowadays have a lot going on in their lives, but we
imagine ourselves to be more efficient. With email, smartphones, laptops and WhatsApp,
you can be busy all the time. Working all the time, even when you’re not
supposed to. Answering an email while microwaving food. Watching television
while working on a spreadsheet. Answering a call from work while watching your
child play sport.
It all adds up, and eventually, we all end up at the same
place. Those who’ve experienced it, describe themselves as physically and
emotionally exhausted. They’re chronically tired, and get sick easily.
Suddenly, these patient, caring people become cynical and short-tempered,
usually with a healthy dose of paranoia to boot. They experience burn-out.
Those who experience burn-out are treated with derision.
“Oh, look like you couldn’t take it. Shape up, or ship out!” This sounds
similar to how those with depression were usually treated, being told to
“lighten up,” and there may be a reason for that. As it turns out, evidence
suggests that burn-out presents with the same symptoms you’d find in the
clinically depressed.
Burnout was first identified by Herbert Freudenberger in
1974, but it was Christina Maslach that built the first working model of
burnout with her Maslach Burnout Inventory. In it, she identified 6 problems
that can cause burnout: working too much, working in an unfair environment,
working without emotional support, working without agency or control, working
for values we don’t support and of course, working for insufficient reward,
reward being cash, prestige or recognition.
In effect, she identified that burnout occurs due to a
dissonance between effort, expectation and reward, and not necessarily stress,
as is often thought. It is quite often experienced by perfectionists – after
all, their expectations are of perfection, and when that success doesn’t
follow, they’ll redouble their efforts. And when reality doesn’t comply, the
result is a spectacular burnout.
The data backs her up. While we may associate a burnout as a
mid-life crisis scenario, in fact it seems that the young are often those who
experience it more often – the young are much more idealistic, with older
workers having more perspective concomitant with their greater experience.
Married people are also less prone to burnouts, as they have a better support
system at home. And as it turns out, having children further reduces the chance
of burnout – after all, it’s much easier to invest emotionally and physically
in your job if you have nothing to invest in at home. Still, the added time
pressure of managing a family and a career does affect an individual as well.
This comes back via our faster and more interconnected lives
as well – we feel as if we must be active and productive all the time. No one
likes spending energy and seeing little back, and thus the more we speed up,
the greater our frustrations become when we have to slow down. In 2005, Glenn
Wilson from King’s College at London university conducted a study comparing the
performance of individuals doing IQ tests with and without constant
interruptions, and found that interruptions via emails and phone calls caused
people to perform worse on the test than those doing it while on marijuana.
Still, it’s useless to try and examine the cause without
also examining the environment. While it can ultimately be the individual’s
responsibility for pushing themselves to the limit and experiencing burn-out,
it rarely happens in isolation. They would be much less likely to do so if they
did not think they were required to. Luckily more and more companies are seeing
the value of trying to get the best out of their employees, instead of the
most.
Here at Trustco, for example, almost half the company
usually has a Friday afternoon off. The Top 40 best performing employees have
the additional benefit of flexitime, allowing them some flexibility around
their schedules. The bonus and incentive structures allow all employees to
receive equity bonuses, giving every employee a measure of agency. Even the
open plan floor structure allows you to receive emotional support from
colleagues, should you not have any other. While this does not solve the
problem completely, it greatly alleviates it.
Burn-out, then, is a “crisis in self-efficacy,” as Michael
Leiter, a research fellow of Maslach, so eloquently stated. You feel like
you’re struggling way too much for too little reward. The Protestant work ethic
that seems embedded in our culture emphasises hard work, but we must be careful
not to fall afoul of the Hard Work fallacy. After all, not every outcome is
proportional to the effort put in. Failure is not always the result of not
putting in enough effort.
It’s good to dream big, I feel. But not to expect big. After
all, expecting big is often called entitlement. In Silicon Valley, the motto is
‘Fail Fast, Fail Often.’ But often, it’s “Fail Better, Fail Forward.” If your
expectations aren’t met by the effort you put in, maybe it’s not the amount of
effort that needs to change. Maybe you need to find something else to change.
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