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One In Five Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout (2018)
- hyfgfh 7y agoThe other 4 are reading news on HN
- rolltiide 7y ago2 of which are correctly using the unlimited vacation policy because none of that matters after the company folds
- hamburglar1 7y ago2/5 work for a company they think is going to fold?
- bassman9000 7y agoManagers and HR leaders can help employees by dialing down the demands they’re placing on people – ensuring that employee goals are realistic and rebalancing the workloads of employees who, by virtue of being particularly skilled or productive, have been saddled with too much. They can also try to increase the resources available to employees; this includes not only material resources such as time and money, but intangible resources such as empathy and friendship in the workplace, and letting employees disengage from work when they’re not working. By avoiding emailing people after hours, setting a norm that evenings and weekends are work-free, and encouraging a regular lunch break in the middle of the day, leaders can make sure they’re sending a consistent message that balance matters. Key point. In my experience, the high-productivity, high-engagement becoming the new baseline, and then the organization requesting the 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer.
- wastedhours 7y ago> 120% of that, and repeat every six weeks, is the true killer. This is what I try to get through to people - if you consistently deliver at 100%, that becomes the baseline and you'll be expected to stretch ever further with little to no extra incentive or support. Throughout my career I've always held back some level of skill, efficiency, or drive that I can break out as and when required on very particular projects. In the end, it's better for the company as I'm less likely to flame out. Obviously a lot of companies still operate on visibility and presenteeism over outcomes where it makes it harder, but take the damn lunch break now or you'll never be taking it.
- bassman9000 7y agoI've only recently learnt to step on the breaks to avoid the baseline reset. It's heart breaking to know you're not tapping your whole potential. Before that, every task, every project done, was an invitation to take on the next issue, non stop. People get used to piggyback on that. Pareto distribution is real.
- lanrh1836 7y agoThat’s called a sociopath where I’m from...
- itronitron 7y agoI know what you mean, people that over-engage themselves to the point that they can't manage their own workload end up creating a toxic work environment and taking it out on their coworkers. In my experience when those people leave the organization morale and retention goes up for everyone else. The point at which someone becomes 'over-engaged' is highly individualized but based on my experience it is highly associated with people that are deliberately working their way up the management ladder.
- Kurtz79 7y agoA sociopath would be someone expecting OTHER people to work up to burnout, for his own sake.
- jaden 7y agoIt can be demoralizing to step back and ask yourself if what you do at work provides real value. And when you feel pressure to perform heroics to meet an arbitrary deadline, burnout is a real possibility. It's important make sure you're not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.
- rlabrecque 7y agoWhew, this hits close to home.
- Consultant32452 7y agoYears ago I sort of arbitrarily decided I'm willing to give 2 heroic week(end)s per year. Once I started putting up boundaries and enforcing them, I was suddenly seen as much more valuable. Promotions, more money. Human psychology is really weird.
- scottlocklin 7y agoIt's pretty straight forward: scarcity implies value. It works on all levels of human relationships. FWIIW the inverse is also true: after doubling my consulting rate a couple of times, I found I was treated much better.
- pmiller2 7y agoI’ve been there. Now, I’m working on something that is at least interesting, useful, and not fundamentally evil, while at the same time I rarely leave the office after about 6 and the deadlines are reasonable. The difference is night and day.
- CalRobert 7y ago"if what you do at work provides real value" My company makes things that are, I'd argue, a net good to the world (we help make stuff more secure) - but honestly I find myself struggling more and more to care about anything that isn't addressing the climate or democratic breakdown the world faces. Not rhetorical - genuine question: Does anyone else sit at their desk and think "but guys the ship is sinking, maybe we should worry about fixing the holes before we repaint the tennis court? guys? GUYS????" This is my problem really, not the company's, but I'm not sure what to do.
- duxup 7y agoIt is interesting how they talk about HR. In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk management for the company, everything / anything else tends to feel like just sort of HR resume fodder / token programs / company cheerleading.
- ThePadawan 7y agoI think there is a difference between HR as a function and as a department. E. g. my current employer has a HR department that conaists of a HR division that does typical classical HR tasks, and People Development, who actually do meaningful stuff to bolster retention etc.
- duxup 7y agoI wonder if the mishmash of internal HR responsibilities sort of water down / naturally degrade focus on various things that maybe don't get as much attention such as thoughtful people development.
- gtirloni 7y agoThis meme gets repeated on HN quite frequently but a good HR department can help a lot with engagement across the company. Sure, they can't solve specific team problems but if they work as a channel for employees to be heard and upper management trusts them, they can be a positive force.
- chillwaves 7y agoThe interests of HR are opposed to the interest of the worker 9 times out of 10. There is no way to reconcile this fact.
- MegaButts 7y agoI wrote a long rant but deleted it because it was so personal. But I cannot agree more that HR is not on your side.
- readhn 7y agoi'd argue that more often than not "the highly engaged and at risk of burn out" person is full of illusions while the other 4 have been around the block and dont give a %rap anymore.
- gtirloni 7y agoThat's clearly a false dichotomy.
- segmondy 7y agoI often see folks say that schools should teach finance management from a young age. Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management. It's just a basic life skill, keeping things in balance. Extremeness in an area can often be disastrous, it might also come with high reward, but very few people know how to be highly engaged and yet sort of keep other parts of their life balanced.
- gizmo686 7y agoDon't they? School is one of the more difficult environments for time management: students have half a dozen (or more) different bosses, all of whom reguarly impose hard deadlines, and have a tendency of imposing major deadlines at a simmilar time to each other. The social environment is probably one of the most diverse that many people will see in their entire lifetimes (not nessasarily along racial lines), with some of the most difficult to deal with people (children) many will face in their lifetime. Granted, schools often take a trial by fire approach to these lessons (I should know, I burned out during highschool), but I don't see how you can get through school without learning them.
- civicsquid 7y agoI don't think school teaches time management. Sure, there are plenty of people who learn time management due to the constraints of school, but I don't think they are the majority. The people in my major usually either put all of their effort into something, or they put nothing into it. Only extremes. Personally, I burned out in high school then again in college. I went 100% in everything related to academics and did exceptionally well, and yet I never realized until the end of college that the only reason I was so successful is because I sacrificed everything to be good at one thing. I'm still figuring out how to get that balance down and having some sort of more formal education in that area would have been beneficial for me.
- afarrell 7y agoThere is a difference between teaching some skill and imposing stress on people who lack that skill. To illustrate this, Think about the difference between giving an 8-year-old swimming lessons and tossing an 8-year-old off the side of a boat.
- mberning 7y agoI take their point, but there is always going to be somebody that is hungry to make an impact and reap the rewards. It even sounds crazy to think of my job in the context of “how can I sustain this for years/decades”. The whole point of hustling is to level up and do something hopefully more interesting or at the least more lucrative. Most workaholics that I have known were perfectly aware of what they were doing and burnout was not even a factor worth considering.
- lettergram 7y agoExactly the market my startup is targeting: https://metacortex.me/ https://metacortex.me/ Turns out “burn out” (turnover) is by far the largest single cost to employers. It adds huge overhead per employee and dramatically reduces a companies profitability if they can’t keep a low turnover.
- brok3nmachine 7y agoI think experience plays a role. From my own experience; what I considered high demand 10 years ago is now low demand. Such as resolving a production incident at 10am. In my past I would switch jobs every couple years. Not due to the stress, but because I was alarmed at how the intensity of work was decreasing at a company. I equated that with slow professional growth. Now I'm finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm mindset. Several of my colleagues don't seem calm at all. Yet the majority of us have more control over burnout and "work chaos" than we are lead to believe.
- js8 7y agoI think the burnout happens when you care too much and can't take it emotionally (when, inevitably, you meet some people who care less). So obviously, people who are "disengaged" are not at risk of burnout - they are managing it. The point is, it can happen at any objective level of environmental stress. It can also happen at any level of actual performance. The engagement relative to people you interact with is the thing it depends on, I think.
- lanrh1836 7y agoHmm in my experience burnout has little to do with how much your peers care about their work relative to you? For me it seems to happen because we feel that we must be emotionally invested in our work, and the toll of being 100% emotionally invested in something that is more likely than not devoid of meaning creates a “burnout” reaction.
- js8 7y agoI don't think it's necessarily peers, it might be any humans that we interact with as a part of our work - our bosses, our clients, etc.
- lanrh1836 7y agoMy point was more that I disagree that burnout is caused in part by the fact that you perceive other people caring less about work than you do. If anything, the reason why burnout seems to be more frequent is because too many people care too much about their work, which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work, which goes back to my theory that people ultimately burnout because they’ve been pressured to put their whole selves into their work when for many their work is actually devoid of much meaning.
- js8 7y agoMaybe you're talking about a different phenomenon. > which creates pressure on others to join in on appearing like they care and emotionally invest in their work I don't see this pressure coming from people who care. I mean, they want others to care, but they certainly don't want them to be pretending it. So if anything, this pressure comes from within you, and then it also can be considered an issue of emotional control, but it is a different issue than caring too much about your work. In other words, it seems like there are problems on both ends of the spectrum. I care more than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's my explanation of burnout). I care less than average person in the group => potentially an emotional problem for me (that's your explanation of burnout).
- scarejunba 7y agoOoh I actually hit this early on in my career. I cared a lot about stuff to the extent that I'd give up going to shows to do work. Well, that was _entirely wrong_. Nobody wanted that of me. I learnt then that giving that much of a shit only mattered if I were building something for myself. So, for the things I care about, I'll give that much of a damn, but for someone else, they're not getting that. The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners themselves. That's so foolish. Why? They don't want that from you.
- sbhn 7y agoIn this case you need a highly motivated situational captain on your floor, always on the ball, first in, last out, always pointing and delegating, and rewarding only the highest of achievers. Situational Captain, every organisation needs one.
- mothsonasloth 7y ago..and for each burned out one there is another X to take their place, for the good of the company.
- GordonS 7y agoAround 10 years ago, I felt like I was burning out. I was travelling a lot (sometimes 20+ hour trips involving 3 planes, always in bloody economy...) and working stupid hours. A few things have changed since, and I'm no longer anywhere near burnout. I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4/5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc. Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process. Work-wise, it's the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don't seem to be any less productive, so my employer is actually getting a pretty good deal TBH. And I get a 3-day weekend, which means more time for family, me, and side projects. I can understand why employers are apprehensive about remote work and 4-day weeks, but I really think they need to modernise here - a lot of them still seem to be stuck in the mindset of prioritising "bums on seats" from 9-5, rather than productivity and happy employees.
- taurath 7y agoI think you can take the average knowledge worker employees 5 day week and make it 4 days and they’ll get as much done. If you get the same amount of slack on a 4 day than on a 5 day it’s quite a bit more noticeable. My current co does half days for summer Fridays. The amount that gets released doesn’t change. The amount of incidents over the weekend goes down also.
- subhobroto 7y agoWe did this at an ex-employer. It started with what they called "Summer Wednesdays" - during the Summer, the company would sponsor an outing to the beautiful beach nearby every Wednesday at lunch. Then you could come back to office or work from home. Soon, people started to go to the beach earlier and work from there unless there was a client meeting onsite. One team member (she was in sales) even did her client meeting at the beach. Team morale drastically changed. Since they would be at the beach, they wanted to have some fun while at the beach - so they shifted the work they got done to the 4 other days. No more boring meetings - only those meetings everyone really wanted to be on happened. Everyone else was busy working. Teamwork went up because they wanted to be at the beach on Wednesday and have fun instead of coming back to work later. The performance metrics were so phenomenal next month that management had an informal meeting with the team that basically allowed people to work 4 days a week. Those who agreed had to sign an addendum to their employment contract that they had taken up the offer for people to work from where-ever they wanted one day a week without needing to come to the office. I did not like this opacity so when I queried I was told that investors won't sanction this in any shape or form and this would be the only way to pull it off.
- tomohawk 7y agoAssuming the work you're doing is worth while, burnout and stress are due to having (or perceiving to have) responsibility but insufficient power or authority to actually meet it. Working hard does not lead to burnout. Working hard but being unable to achieve expected results does. Taking time off rarely helps, because that impossible to meet responsibility is still hanging over you. Classic example is school teachers in US public schools. They have enormous responsibility with the children, but rarely have power or authority. Instead, they are essentially drones in a big machine.
- dawidw 7y ago> They have enormous responsibility with the children Could you elaborate on that? I always thought that there are rules and procedures for everything so the teachers are fine and covered.
- Leherenn 7y agoNot the OP, but I think that's exactly what he meant. They have the responsibility to educate the future generations and yet have barely any leeway about how to do it.
- kjsbfkjbf 7y agoEspecially in the US, teachers often have to assume a parental role and take care of children beyond the scope of their "job". The alternative is to watch children you see every day spiral down a bad path.
- agumonkey 7y agothere's a list of jobs like education - medical care - firefighting The people are in it for some deep care for the task and will endure shit levels. They think it's more important than anything else and cons' don't alter this.
- abledon 7y agomost of the day firefighters get to sit around home base and lift weights / exercise.... definitely nice to have a paid gym membership while at work to fight burnout
- scottlocklin 7y agoWhenever I read one of these HBR things on "optimal employee engagement" I feel like I'm reading some modern version of an ancient roman treatise on the care and feeding of agricultural slaves. Everyone who reads this and is trying to optimize their personal employee engagement should reconsider their life choices.
- touristtam 7y agoYou have to remember we are talking about Human Resources here. Human are just another component of the business process no more, no less. In that sense it makes sense the point of view shown in the article is making you uneasy.
- chadcmulligan 7y agoIn my experience, if you can produce results, there is little restraint from modern management to exploit you to the max, there is no concern about burnout, or anything, its a daily battle to reign in demands no matter how much you produce. From what I can understand it is taught at business school to exploit resources, you must look after yourself and push back, surprisingly hard, again in my experience. I find it abhorrent. It was the .com era when things changed, when the sharks realised the computers own the world, before that it was a bunch of happy engineers making stuff. Even worse many managers seem to be control freaks who can't measure results, and instead insist on micromanaging everything, looking over your shoulder, continually asking for feedback, and "checking in" to see how things are going. I've said for many years I produce results in spite of managers "helping". Software development is fairly easy I find, it does take time to produce results though, and because no one can see whats going on managers behave the way they do, there's a huge lack of trust on both sides. End of rant. P.S. I find it easiest to behave like plumbers, they know you need them to clean up your shit, and they have to pay you, so just do what you have to to survive. I remember one guy I hired years ago to do some plumbing at a place I was renovating, kept saying he was busy, yada, yada, went up to the shops he was wandering around having an Ice cream. Medical specialists are another great example I find, they have people making outrageous demands on them, literally life and death, they make sure that people can't find them outside office hours, they are very good at looking after themselves, as they should be.
- 7y ago
- dalore 7y agoThat site was really hard to read. Small and narrow fonts with a strange font face.
- draw_down 7y agoUse reader mode
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoSo many comments are speaking about burnout as a result of lack of managing emotional investment in work. This blows my mind because I’ve never seen or heard of burnout manifesting this way in real life, not a single time. Burnout happens to you and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive burns employees out not employees “letting themselves” become burned out. Turning it around and acting like it’s intrinsic to the employee is harmful victim blaming. It’s like blaming someone with symptoms of clinical depression for not “managing their emotions.” I feel very discouraged by this because I don’t think we’ll make progress helping people heal from and avoid burnout unless we recognize that it is caused by the wider sociological issues of toxic management & executive behavior.
- boronine 7y agoWho is victim blaming? We talk about emotional investment because it’s something that is actually under your control to change, unlike your manager or “wider sociological issues”
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoExactly. Trying to turn it around like the issue is due to the agency (hence blaming) the victim, when really it’s not down to that person’s agency at all, rather something they are subjected to through no choice of their own. Your comment in fact is one of the worst forms of victim blaming, and you may not be aware that you’re even doing it: justifying victim blaming as though it is some sort of justified focus on “what you can do” when the problem should not be made to be about that or justified as such.
- codingstuffs 7y agoI believe it. Currently the rest of my team and I are close to burnout. Our boss is a workaholic who is controlling and rare to give any praise. The company is financially successful, but the average employee only lasts 1-2 years. For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I'm trying to make it to the end of the year and then take a break to refocus. Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work environment and a sense of ownership at their job.
- vbuwivbiu 7y agoyou don't realize it until it's already happening
- agumonkey 7y agodepends, what do healed burnout patient think ? can they sense things coming earlier ? attuned from experience ?
- seaborn63 7y agoI've definitely burned out before. Working crazy hours for low pay in hopes of showing my worth and earning more. It kept it up for a few years but eventually broke pretty hard. I have to say though I am pretty thankful for all of that. It allowed me to reevaluate what was important to me and really think about what I wanted to do. I ended up switching industries all together and I finally don't hate life any more.
- reallydontask 7y agoI had a job running a tech department on a small company. It was my first management job and I wanted to make a success out it. The company was pretty dysfunctional and I took it upon myself to pretty much do everything, so much so that I was working 12 hour days (This is work time, minus breaks, measured with an app) so my day would start at ~ 06:30 and finish ~ 21:00. I have never been quite so miserable in my life and I was making so many mistakes that it was unreal. I also picked up a very bad habit of doing things quickly and 90% there as that was better than not doing them at all and to do them properly would take too long. It's been close to a year now and I still find myself falling in the turn things around quickly and sacrifice quality trap, even when there is no rush at all for it. I hope I get rid of this bad habit soon
- davidscolgan 7y agoI'm a freelancer and realized yesterday that I haven't had a real vacation in 8 years, but also that every one of my clients would probably say yes definitely if I told them I needed a week off. And they did, and I'm taking off next week and I have never been so excited in my life.
- roland35 7y agoGood for you make sure to make it a more common occurrence!
- brightball 7y agoHad a very similar experience when I shut down my contracting business. https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to-brightball-for-hire https://www.brightball.com/articles/what-exactly-happened-to...
- systemtest 7y agoI'm a freelancer and I usually take a couple months off between contracts. It's awesome because there is nothing on your mind when you are between contracts. It's also why I prefer freelancing over being an employee.
- rb808 7y agoWhat do you do for healthcare?
- davidscolgan 7y agoI just do a PPO plan on the health insurance marketplace in the US. I pay about $500 as a single person nonsmoker 30 year old male. It's been fine so far.
- rb808 7y agoEuropeans are like damn I haven't had a week off since March, I should organize one!
- triplee 7y agoHappy Friday. Eat Arby's.
- geodel 7y agoSo it just seem like Pareto principle example. 20% of employees making 80% of effort. I don't know if it is fixable. All I think is folks in that 20% will keep changing when Companies/HR/Employees make noise about this. One reason is because 'highly engaged employees' may not be highly productive employees. Just yesterday at my workplace one dev spent whole day to set up Eclipse workspace for a basic Microservice project. It was about 10 min job. Now that person claims to be junior developer not a total novice and I see no reason to doubt that. But setting up similar projects has been explained and demoed in great detail at least couple times in last few weeks. Still anytime something changes he can spend days to do most trivial things. I would think this person would simply burnout if task is given with a end date. It doesn't matter how generous is the deadline.
- jtanderson 7y ago> So it just seem like Pareto principle example. 20% of employees making 80% of effort. I don't know if it is fixable. All I think is folks in that 20% will keep changing when Companies/HR/Employees make noise about this. This actually sounds like it could make for a great system, in the sense that you still maintain the original quality and quantity of output, but you still get to avoid the burnout of that 20% completely, because after some time, it will be somebody else's "turn" to do more heavy-lifting. Obvious problems here are that 1) company/team structures in industry don't seem conducive to this, 2) skill levels are unequal, so to maintain the quality of the 20%, one would need to plan carefully to account for this -- but, it also seems like a good way to help lower skilled workers rise to meet higher standards -- and 3) hinted at before, this needs to be institutionalized in a tangible way, and that seems to require a difficult form of team member assessment/introspection that managers may not be capable of facilitating. Wrt point 2 above, I've heard from sources I trust (but would have to bug them for specific sources on this) the following phenomenon has been observed in education: when you remove top performing students from sections of a course -- say, to join an honors section of that course -- the non-honors version of that course has a void for high-performance students. Interestingly, this void is often filled by the mid-tier students who would have typically performed at B/C level, and now some of them will rise to perform at an A level. It would be fascinating to find observations of this in the industrial setting as well. If I find a source for this, I'll update my comment.
- newsgremlin 7y agoThe toil for me is feeling like your stuck in a rut pushing out release after release, this is more apparent in Agile when your working on a service, and not a product that will be released to the world with high hopes of groundbreaking success in your industry and then passed onto devops. While I know I am making a contribution, from a week to week perspective it's easy to be disconnected from all the real 'good' I do.
- drngdds 7y ago>Gallup’s shocking statistic that seven out of 10 U.S. employees report feeling unengaged You have to be wildly out-of-touch with society to be shocked by the fact that most people see their job as just a thing they have to do to make money.
- notTyler 7y agoI can't speak for everyone but I haven't worked anywhere I thought top level management wasn't making wildly misinformed decisions out of desire to save money or (seemingly) straight-up misunderstanding of their business. A lot harder to be engaged when that's the case.
- chadlavi 7y agoTBH in the tech industry I would expect this to be more than 20%
- bryan11 7y agoBurnout in IT can be like boiling a frog. One can get involved in larger and larger projects, then architecture, and then find themselves part of an on-call group that tries to keep production systems running. Pretty soon one is working excessive hours monitoring systems, driving projects, and also responding to production issues 24x7. If it happens gradually enough, working twelve hours a day and being called repeatedly during evenings and weekends can feel normal. The high cost on one's health, social life, and family life can be extreme and quite dangerous.
- flowersjeff 7y agoWe all here would agree with the 80/20 rule. Try explaining that to management and/or HR. It would seem to be beyond their abilities of comprehension. Sure they will provide lip service; however, the moment you try to have an authentic discussion (backed up with evidence mind you) around ways to assuage potential burn-out due to constant on-the-job heroics...good luck is all I can say. I have unfortunately come to realize that those that have perfected the art of looking busy and/or professional slackers seem to get a free pass. Frustrating indeed.
- pier25 7y agoI've had moments in my life where I was working 10+ hours per day, and was pretty productive, but those streaks didn't last more than a couple of weeks and then my energy plummeted. Also I was a freelancer so I was sprint-based and could stop for a couple of days or weeks quite frequently between projects. I quit freelancing about 4 years ago and have been working full time for a company. I've learned the hard way this is actually a marathon and making sprints is quite unhealthy. The pile of work on your desk never ends and the only healthy long term strategy is to chew at it slowly. I now have 5 hours of productive time at the most.
- JetezLeLogin 7y agoHoly crap, I need to email this link both to my old boss, and to my likely new boss with whom I'm negotiating salary right now!