Are You Indavertently Creating a Burnout Culture?
Are You Incentivizing Burnout in Your Workplace?
Research by the O.C. Tanner Institute found that a reduction in giving and receiving recognition in the workplace leads to increased odds of burnout by 45% and 48%, respectively. Moreover, when there is no consistent recognition strategy in place, the odds of burnout increases by 29%.
So, clearly appreciation and recognition helps, but an even more important consideration is to ask, “Are you inadvertently incentivizing burnout?”
Is your culture promoting, encouraging, and even rewarding a culture of busyness? Is it more important to look busy than actually produce results? Are you rewarding hours worked instead of results? Are you encouraging a dog-eat-dingo, take no prisoners, survival of the busiest approach where employees feel they have to give 110% to get ahead or just be recognized? Do employees feel like they have to be on 24/7, burn the midnight candle, or sacrifice weekends and even holidays?
This is why you have to take a culture-wide approach to banishing workplace burnout. (For more on this topic, read Banishing Burnout at Work: Why You Can’t Leave it Up the Employees.)
The Research on Burnout is Clear
The research around this is clear. Burnout is more likely to happen when employees don’t disengage and recharge their batteries properly during their off hours. Numerous studies, including the Framingham Heart Study, revealed that men who didn’t take a vacation for several years were 30 percent more likely to have heart attacks compared to men who took time off. Other studies show a correlation with an increase in strokes.
This is why some organizations require employees take their vacation time, minimize the use of overtime, and offer their employees sabbaticals.
Be aware of the obstacles preventing people from taking the time off they need to take – in a guilt-free manner! A 2023 survey from the Pew Research Center found that 46 percent of employees in the U.S. don’t take all their paid time off, often due to fear of falling behind at work or because of concerns about how it reflects on their work ethic compared to coworkers who they view as their competition.
To ease the stress associated with being away on vacation the Daimler corporation has created an optional “Mail on Holiday” program. If you send an email to someone who is on vacation, you’ll get a response notifying you of an alternative person to contact and a warning that your message will be deleted, so if you truly need to reach that person you’ll need to wait until after they are back from vacation. This prevents the vacationing employee from returning to a deluge of emails and is just one small, but important initiative towards helping employees take a stress-free vacation.
To Mitigate Burnout Measure the Right Things
Mitigating burnout comes down to your workplace values and truly is about measuring the right things. Are you putting growth and profits above the health and well being of your employees? Are there subtle signals or even overt incentives that promote a “take-no-prisoners” mindset?
I love this example as a reminder of the importance of measuring what matters. When the American soccer superstar Brandi Chastain was a child, her grandfather would give her $1.00 for every goal she made, but $1.50 for every assist she made as a way of encouraging her to develop her soccer skills as a true team player. A great lesson on the importance of measuring and incentivizing the right thing!
So, what would recognizing and rewarding your employees look like if, instead of rewarding just hard work, you actually rewarded employees for their resiliency practices? What if you gave shoutouts to employees who modeled excellent work/life balance?
Are Your Employees Hustling for Self Worth?
The goodr sunglasses company demonstrates their value around creating a sustainable, healthy workplace extremely well. They take a chill approach when it comes to managing employee burnout with their initiative, “Chill is the new busy.”
They believe that how you talk about being busy matters. They actively discourage people from working more than 40 hours in a week and they reward chill, not busy. They let their employees know that they expect them to have a life outside of work and to not sacrifice their personal lives and health for the sake of their work.
To help prevent burnout they use an “Overwhelm Status” system of red, yellow, or green at their weekly meeting updates, where people can identify where they are in both their personal and work lives. A green indicates all is good, a yellow means you might need support or a plan to get on track, and red means you’re in the overwhelm zone.
They’ve identified three primary causes that lead to employees feeling over-extended, or as they call it, in the zone of “Red Reckoning:”
- 20% of the time it’s due to communication issues (people not speaking up about deadlines or simply not saying, “no”);
- 20% of the time it’s due to a lack of efficiency;
- 60% of the time they believe it’s due to something they call “hustling for self-worth.”
Hustling for self-worth is about over-extending yourself because it feeds your ego or because you feel the need to justify your position and value. This is a topic you definitely need to have with yourself, your leadership team, and your entire organization if you are serious about banishing burnout in your workplace!
Michael Kerr is a Canadian Hall of Fame speaker who is recognized as one of Canada’s most inspiring, dynamic, and thought-provoking keynote speakers and trainers on workplace culture, workplace culture leadership, and humor in the workplace. He is the author of 9 books, including Small Moments, Big Outcomes: How Leaders Create Cultures That Fuel Extraordinary Results, The Jerk-Free Workplace: How You Can Take the Lead to Create a Happier, More Inspiring Workplace, The Humor Advantage: Why Some Businesses Are Laughing all the Way to the Bank.
