Beating Burnout at Work

Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience

Paula Davis

• Publisher: Wharton School Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781613631119
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Cultura del lugar de trabajo

A first-of-its-kind, science-backed toolkit takes a holistic approach to burnout prevention by helping individuals, teams, and leaders build resilience and thrive at work. Burnout has become one of the most talked about workplace topics, and its impact is far-reaching. The 24/7 pace of work, constant demands, and scant resources can easily put busy professionals on a path to burnout, a cycle that has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Burnout affects the health and well-being of the entire organization, yet most attempts to help focus on quick-fix strategies aimed at individuals. Something is missing.In Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being and Resilience, Paula Davis, founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute, provides a new framework to help organizations prevent employee burnout.Davis's research-driven, fast-reading, and actionable book is the first of its kind to explore a new solution to the burnout problem at work: a comprehensive approach focused on building the resilience of teams of all sizes. Davis argues that teams, and their leaders, are uniquely positioned to create the type of cultures that are needed to prevent burnout.In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis shares stories from her work coaching, teaching, and training leaders and teams of all sizes, and she explores: How she navigated her own burnout as a lawyer, and how that led her to study burnout and launch a business with the aim of helping organizations and their employees become more resilient; How teams and leaders can utilize simple, science-backed strategies to create cultures that promote resilience and well-being and reduce burnout; How the Mayo Clinic, one of the most renowned medical centers in the world, has developed a powerful model to reduce burnout in its organization; How organizations dealing with high-stress challenges, including the US Army, work to increase resilience in a systemic way; andHow the German company trivago is piloting a new approach to work amid COVID-19 in order to increase team connection and resilience.Solving the burnout puzzle requires a systemic approach. In Beating Burnout at Work, Davis offers an actionable method to help leaders create cultures of well-being and resilience in their organizations.

PART I

Understanding the Problem

Chapter 1

Stress and Work in the Twenty-First Century

The Burnout Epidemic

Meet Catherine.¹ I interviewed her several years ago in an ongoing effort to collect stories from busy professionals who were in the middle of burnout or had experienced it at some point in their careers. Catherine was in the same role for 12 years, working in a large hospital system. As is typical of most professionals I talk to, she wore many hats and served many people. She talked about how the competing demands and lack of communication on her team and within the organization as a whole made her job especially difficult. Her role eventually evolved into something more managerial: She was asked to spend more time focusing on strategy planning and people development, even though she was still asked to produce work associated with her prior job category.

Lack of communication, unclear expectations, the need to lead while still producing high-quality work, and stress generally took their toll. Although Catherine took pride early on in her career at reacting swiftly under pressure, now even the smallest stressors wore on her. She reported frequently clenching her fists, grinding her teeth, fatigue, and sleeplessness. Catherine scheduled a checkup with her primary care provider, thinking she had rheumatoid arthritis, but tests ruled it out.

Her doctor knew where she worked and told her that her symptoms were stress related. She told me she was at first offended, thinking she could “handle” whatever life threw at her. Then she broke down and cried.

Catherine’s burnout story is not unusual. I have coached, taught, and interviewed thousands of people about burnout prevention, and my goal with this chapter is to invite you inside the world of burnout. The more you know about its causes, the three dimensions, and key warning signs, the earlier you can assess for yourself whether what you’re experiencing is just stress or something more.

Working in a “VUCA World” Means Stress

VUCA is a military term that stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. Researchers and professionals are starting to use it in the workplace generally to describe the stress associated with work. Teams face frequent change, increased workload, fewer resources, and more demanding customers and clients. Organizations, even whole industries, are changing and being hit constantly with increased regulations, technology, and competition.

Organizationally, leaders are managing globalization and increased regulation as the pace of work increases. In early 2020 the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, introducing new and unknown stressors to the world of work. Busy professionals were thrust into balancing work and life demands in a new way by trying to work and homeschool kids at the same time. The 24/7 “always on” pace accelerated, boundaries blurred, and always being at home made it nearly impossible to fully detach from work. And the movement for racial equality revealed that underrepresented groups have exhausted themselves trying to fit into organizations that continue to undersupport them.

It’s no wonder, then, why burnout rates are high. Some recent research shows the breadth of the problem (and these statistics are pre-COVID-19):

• Up to 50% of physicians are experiencing burnout.²

• 96% of senior leaders report feeling burned out to some degree; one-third describe their burnout as extreme.³

• A workplace app for technology professionals includes a question about burnout: “Are you currently suffering from job burnout?” More than 57% of respondents said yes.⁴

• A survey of teachers found that 87% of respondents said the demands of their job are at least sometimes interfering with their family life. More than half reported that they don’t have enough autonomy to do their job effectively, and only 14% said they felt respected by their administration. Both of these factors drive burnout.⁵

• In finance, 60% to 65% of bankers age 25 to 44 reported some level of burnout.⁶

• The Special Victim’s Counsel in the US Air Force reported a burnout rate of 50%.⁷

• In one of the only empirical studies to measure burnout rates among lawyers, results showed that more than one-third of the lawyers scored above the 75th percentile on the burnout measure.⁸

Chronic stress is linked to higher rates of errors, safety issues, lack of concentration, lack of focus, and working memory problems, among other things. For many professionals, these are critical tools, and rates of errors and safety issues impact numerous industries where precision is critical.⁹

Physicians with burnout are twice as likely to be involved in patient safety incidents, twice as likely to have low patient satisfaction scores (the cynicism dimension of burnout alone more than quadrupled the odds of low patient-reported satisfaction), and twice as likely to exhibit low professionalism (e.g., low-quality communication and lack of empathy).¹⁰ In another study, each one point increase in a surgeon’s exhaustion and cynicism scores resulted in a 5% to 11% higher likelihood of reporting a medical error in the past three months.¹¹ That last finding underscores the fact that small shifts in burnout rates can dramatically impact others’ health and safety.

One legal malpractice insurance carrier reported that the percentage of claims that had lawyer-related mistakes associated with them jumped from about 15% of total claims in 2012 to 63% of total claims in 2017.¹² As a result, claims attorneys at this insurance carrier interviewed their member general counsels to investigate the root causes of the increase. These were the most frequent responses received: the increased pace, the “always on,” 24/7 nature of the practice, the increased complexity and specialization of practice areas, and the decrease in mentoring and personal interaction.

What Is Burnout?

The World Health Organization (WHO) updated its definition of burnout as a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: (1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; (2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and (3) reduced professional efficacy. Burnout refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life.”¹³ The last sentence is an important one. The word “burnout” is often used synonymously with “stress” and therefore is applied generally and to a broad range of stressors. But, for our purposes, burnout is specifically a work-related issue.

The three big dimensions, or symptoms, of burnout are embedded within the WHO’s definition, and it’s important to distinguish them. Burnout is more than feeling tired because you’re working on a big project or because you’re in middle of your busy season (e.g., accountants during tax time). The dimensions of burnout are experienced chronically—more often than not over a period of time:¹⁴

• Exhaustion: This happens when you are physically and emotionally drained. Eventually, chronic exhaustion leads people to disconnect or distance themselves emotionally and cognitively from their work, likely as a way to cope with the overload.

• Cynicism: Everyone, from colleagues to clients to patients, starts to bother you. You start to distance yourself from these people by actively ignoring the qualities that make them unique and engaging, and the result is less empathy.

• Inefficacy: This is the “why bother, who cares” mentality that appears as you struggle to identify important resources and as it becomes more difficult to feel a sense of accomplishment and impact in your work.

These three symptoms of burnout can be measured, and my work with teams often starts there. The Maslach Burnout Inventory—General Survey—is the gold standard burnout measurement tool that measures each of the three symptoms.¹⁵ It’s important for me to understand the ways in which team members are feeling the effects of burnout and the impact burnout rates have on the team as a whole. Here is what I discovered after assessing burnout on a 19-person ophthalmology team at a children’s hospital: Nine team members scored in the high category for exhaustion, and eight scored in the high category of cynicism. This team reported the highest scores in these categories that I have seen to date; some of the respondents had “perfect” scores. In this case, “perfect” isn’t good; it means they answered “every day” (the highest score of six) to every question asking about how often they felt exhausted and cynical. Interestingly, eight te...