How to avoid burnout

In 2018 — long before his legal issues with Twitter — responding to a Wall Street journal article describing Tesla’s long working hours culture, Elon Musk tweeted:

“There are easier places to work, but nobody ever changed the world on a 40-hour week.”

When probed about his own working practices, Musk reportedly claimed to put in a staggering-80-hours per week of work. But not everyone is Elon Musk, and his rhetoric, which champions relentless and punishing work schedules, is damaging to the average person — who may not share the resilience and ruthless determination it takes to become to planet’s wealthiest person. For most mere mortals, working like that would be a one-way ticket to burnout. And if recent studies on the subject are to be believed, burnout is on the rise; steadily over the last decade and even more sharply during and since the pandemic.

This is not surprising. There’s nothing like trying to do your job from your kitchen table to make you feel perennially tethered to your endless task list and hyper-sensitive to the incessant ping of email and instant messenger notifications. But the pandemic isn’t entirely to blame either — there is something inherent in the way we work now that makes burnout the norm, rather than the exception, for many workers. So what is it about our working culture that makes burnout so endemic and what can we do about it?

Burnout is defined by the Mayo Clinic as a “special type of work related stress — a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment or personal identity.”

It is characterised by exhaustion, a lack of motivation, inability to concentrate, substance use / abuse, and although not a medical condition as such, it often presents with physical symptoms. People who are burned out will sometimes complain of headaches, stomach problems and difficulty sleeping. But what truly defines burnout — and distinguishes it from other types of stress — is a sense of disillusionment with one’s work. Dramatic as it may sound, prolonged burnout can result in serious and chronic health complications. Indeed, the Japanese term for burnout, ‘karoshi,’ literally translates to ‘death by overwork.’

Some believe that the steady rise in burnout rates can be attributed not only to the way we work, but the demands that modern life places on us, particularly on younger people. In her book, ‘Can’t Even: How Millennials became the Burnout Generation,’ Anne Helen Peterson argues that burnout is a distinctly millennial malaise. She argues that the age of the internet, coupled with the demise of economic security for younger people, has caused a mass existential crisis of sorts, where we are all working harder but increasingly wondering ‘what is the point?’ Even as an elder millennial, I have never known a workplace where being a slave to your emails wasn’t the norm. When I was a trainee solicitor in a large law firm, I used to be intrigued by my older colleagues’ stories from those halcyon days of exchanging letters by ordinary post. How gloriously slow-paced and civil it must have been to go to the toilet and not worry about what awaited you in your inbox when you returned.

The pandemic exacerbated this phenomenon — for all generations — by taking knowledge workers out of their workplaces and forcing them to communicate with colleagues solely by digital means. I, for one, developed a distinct anxiety about being contactable during the lockdowns, constantly monitoring the various media by which I communicated — phones (yes plural), email and instant messenger — to demonstrate my presence in a new world of work where ‘presence’ was being rapidly redefined. Those who had to continue to physically go to work were often front-line workers, whose increased workloads and increased risk of catching covid resulted in pronounced emotional and physical strain. Since the pandemic, new terms, such as the ‘great resignation,’ and ‘quiet quitting’ have crept into the lexicon; both seen as phenomena attributable to widespread burnout and an increasing appetite for a reformed and more perhaps more humane workplace.

But, unfortunately, burnout is often seen as a problem to be addressed at the level of the person who is burned out. Organisations routinely offer mindfulness courses, free counselling and other ‘well-being’ oriented perks as a means of tackling burnout. But these initiatives — albeit well-intentioned — treat only the symptoms and not the cause. It is only in the more extreme cases that burned out employees will take leave or ultimately resign. But there will be many more who carry on invisibly burned out; physically present but disengaged and disillusioned. And this presents an unquantifiable commercial risk for organisations — with yet unknown ramifications into the future. So, what can they do about it? These are my thoughts on how to avoid burnout….

· Rethinking productivity — A few years ago, the idea of a four-day working week was nascent, but it has gathered significant traction since the pandemic. Our 9–5, five day working week is very much a relic of the industrial revolution, where most work involved physical production / output. In today’s knowledge economy, where productivity is less tangible, the concept of working hours is less meaningful — contemporary thinkers, such as Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, argue the working week could be reduced to 15 hours! And yet, a lot of management time is still wasted on monitoring ‘face-time,’ even though being ‘present’ (whether physically or digitally) provides no indication of productivity. That and, research demonstrates that knowledge work can’t be measured in terms of hours worked. Our brains are not machines. I once read that we are not capable of more than approx. 4.5 hours of deep work per day and that ideally, we shouldn’t spend more than 1.5 hours at a time on work that requires a lot of concentration. Avoiding burnout requires a collective acknowledgement of our physiological limitations when it comes to work.

· Rethinking down-time — Richard Branson’s Virgin transport companies introduced a new annual leave policy some years ago, whereby employees were entitled to unlimited days off. While this idea might seem bonkers, it was not without logic; if employees had a certain amount of work to do and they got it done, they were free to take as much time off as they pleased. Radical as that sounds, it was merely an acknowledgement that adults should be able to regulate and manage their own time in work. There are a lot of arguments to counter this sort of policy — chief amongst them the assertion that some people need boundaries (with which I agree), but it does acknowledge the need to incentivise down-time. Humans are not robots and so, we cannot work relentlessly without time to rest and reflect; both of which are vital to innovation, creativity and professional development. Sustained periods of overwork, without time to recharge, are a key risk factor for burnout. Companies are misguided if they think they’re getting more bang for their buck with overworked employees. It’s not a sustainable long-term strategy, as is evidenced by the high turnover rates in professional services firms where employees are subject to punishing billable hours targets. Ensuring employees take annual leave and don’t put in too much overtime; a radically simple solution to a complex problem?

· Rethinking healthy work environments — Peterson argues that one of the reasons millennials are so burned out is because the monotony once associated with physical labour has crept into knowledge work too, such is our obsession with automation and improving systems. I recently completed a calculation on paper — despite having inputted all the data into an excel spreadsheet — just to assure myself I could still perform primary school level maths. The sense of satisfaction I gleaned from completing it accurately surprised me. Finding ways to re-engage our workforce — and particularly our younger workforce — is the challenge of our time. This requires, at the very least, some basic human interaction and recognising that the lifeblood of any organisation is its people. I fear that all of the things we assume have made our lives easier — software to manage our tasks, apps to order coffee and book a desk, the technology that enabled us all to work from home — are a feature of post-progress; that is, they might offer convenience but they come with a cost. That cost is the fact that they distance us further and further from the main activity we evolved to engage in — social interaction. And as we move into a post-pandemic, hybrid working world, we would do well to remember that there is still a need for office life; for water-cooler discussions, team-building days, gossiping with co-workers over coffee and drinks and cultivating relationships that ultimately lead to enhanced engagement, an enhanced connection to the workplace and to work itself.

· Rethinking engagement — The global consultancy group Gallup defines employee engagement as “the involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” Citing its data collected from organisations across the world, Gallup reports overall employee engagement to be as low as 15%. Considering the nexus between disengagement and burnout, the case for finding ways to re-engage workers in their work is urgent. Some will argue that the debate around engagement is overstated and that it is the inflated expectations of work afflicting younger generations that drives this disengagement. In defence of younger people, it is a lot more difficult these days to be happy with your ‘decent job’ when your everyday thoughts are dominated by the precarity of housing supply, rising living costs and the looming prospect of climate breakdown. But I will say that realising the extent of my own disengagement in a previous career led me to make significant changes that transformed my work and life to a profound degree. I have also found that really small — and simple — adjustments can make employees feel more engaged; regular team meetings, one to ones, asking people for their views (and really listening to them), finding ways to give staff more autonomy and ownership over their work, taking on board ideas and regular team building and development activities. All these things make a difference and should not be dismissed by companies as time wasting or frivolous.

Following a long period of sustained hard work in early 2022, I found myself telling people I was a little ‘burned out.’ In truth, I was just tired and my affliction was nothing three weeks in the sun and lots of sleep couldn’t fix. I wasn’t working like Elon Musk, but I was probably on the edge of the burnout spectrum. Had I not taken a beat, I could well have continued on as I had been; sleep deprived, anxious, failing to eat properly or take care of myself. Working like this, together with the pace of modern life — which itself often feels like being stuck on a merry-go-round of pointless administrative tasks — make for a toxic combination. But many people live like this, and so it really is no surprise that so many people are burned out.

Workplaces need to do their part to counter this collective sense of ‘meh’ we’re all feeling; the sense that pervades modern life. The sense of meh that I felt when I recently went to cancel my Netflix subscription but couldn’t remember the password. It’s what Peterson describes as that feeling of ‘can’t even….’ And it’s no surprise that this feeling extends to our careers; the ones we worked long and hard to cultivate but now find ourselves bored, disengaged but too jaded by all of it to make a change.

We need to re-design the workplace to create better conditions, conditions in which workers are not inclined to get burned out in the first place. This means prioritising engagement, downtime, healthy work culture and taking an altogether more modern approach to thinking about and measuring productivity. If we can put these principles first, I believe we can revolutionise the workplace and that it doesn’t all have to feel so exhausting. The way I feel about cancelling Netflix; which I will probably just keep. After all, winter is coming….and I’m exhausted.