New Citi CEO Jane Fraser clearly has her finger on the pulse of her workers’ energies. In a memo to staff last month, she slapped a ban on company Zoom calls on Fridays, saying that the measure was necessary to protect a workforce that has weathered a year in the shadow of COVID-19.
She explained: “After listening to colleagues around the world, it became apparent that we need to combat the ‘Zoom fatigue’ that many of us feel.”
Crucially, she added: “We are a global company that operates across time zones, but when our work regularly spills over into nights, very early mornings and weekends, it can prevent us from recharging fully, and that isn’t good for you nor, ultimately, for Citi.”
In those last few words, Fraser conveys an understanding of a critical point: that burnout is not just a threat to individual employees – it is also a source of potentially damaging business risks.
“The first risk is rapidly declining business performance,” says executive coach Dr Michael Drayton, author of the recently published Anti-burnout: How to Create a Psychologically Safe and High-performance Organisation.
“I focus on the business aspects of burnout because it’s something that whole businesses need to address,” he explains. “About 95% of the material out there on this subject is self-help. But that strikes me as completely wrong, because it’s placing the onus entirely on individuals – almost like victim blaming. And burnout isn’t a problem for individuals to resolve. It’s a problem for businesses.”
In Drayton’s view, one of the biggest casualties of burnout is the innovative reflex – whether for hatching bold, new products or services, or improving how a business is run. “I do a lot of work in the creative industries,” he says, “and the struggle is to get people to just stop, gaze out of the window and think. That’s when a lot of the good, big ideas come along. And that’s what the likes of Google and Elon Musk are so good at – going back to first principles.”
“Burnt-out staff will typically be absent for prolonged periods of time,” says Cara de Lange – coach with Hero Wellbeing and author of Softer Success: Prevent Burnout, Find Balance, Re-define Your Success. “If you’ve lost that person from the workforce, then someone else will have to pick up their tasks – which automatically puts pressure on other employees. So, there’s knock-on effect.”
Further tremors can emerge from even the hushed murmurs about burnout cases in the ebb and flow of staff gossip. “Terms such as ‘stress’ and ‘burnout’ are highly contagious,” says de Lange, “so leaders must be keenly attuned to which words and phrases are spreading within their organisations.”
She explains: “It’s all about the mindset: burnout is sometimes worn as a badge of honour, in terms of how hard people want to show they’ve been working and how many hours they’ve been clocking up.
“But if you have one person who’s under a lot of pressure and overtly stressed, and they take a turn for chronic stress and then burnout, other people on the team will end up talking about that. So, burnout eventually becomes a kind of buzzword. Even though not everyone will understand the full scope of the symptoms – which tend to culminate in a complete inability to function.”
As such, de Lange notes: “If one person gets signed off work, then their colleagues, who may also be feeling tired and stressed, could end up saying, ‘Well, I must be burnt out, too, right?’ That can bring down morale in a team and, finally, an entire company.”
In their treatment of burnout, Drayton and de Lange both observe the globally recognised characteristics of the syndrome, as enshrined in the International Disease Classification (ICD-11) document from the World Health Organization (WHO). Only included in ICD-11 as recently as 2019, those telltale signs are:
1. feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
2. increased mental distance, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and
3. reduced professional efficacy.
Drayton argues that only conscious, thorough culture change can turn the tide – a view he formed through his experience of working with a particularly troubled client 20 years ago. “He was a partner in a professional services firm,” Drayton explains, “and he was in a terrible state: stressed, anxious, depressed – putting away three bottles of wine a night and having panic attacks at just the thought of going back into work.”
Drayton wasn’t surprised. “The firm’s work practices were awful. But it’s important to say that the senior partners weren’t bad people. They weren’t malicious. They weren’t bullies. They’d just drifted into bad habits – working 12 hours a day and trying to construct complex reports with phones ringing and emails pinging.”
He notes: “At the time, I was reading the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker, which is about the World War I poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon, who were treated for shell-shock at Craiglockhart War Hospital. The dilemma being that, sure, the hospital could get these people better – but it would only end up sending them back into the same, old trenches.
“Now, while my client’s predicament was obviously not as extreme, the novel really made me think. Of course, he could go on sick leave for a while – but in the end, he’d still have to go back into that toxic workplace, and in three months’ time he’d be back to square one. So, he asked me, ‘Could you come and work with us as a group of partners and help us do things differently?’ And I did.”
That group work, Drayton says, paid dividends. “As soon as they started working more efficiently – having breaks, finishing on time, switching off distractions and engaging more deeply with their work – their productivity and performance went through the roof. They were doing more in seven hours than they’d been doing in 12. And they weren’t making as many mistakes.”
COVID-19 has only magnified the need to put burnout out of its misery. “The pandemic has brought us a huge, situational stress over which we have no control,” de Lange notes. “Even if you’re lucky enough to be sailing through this era and performing well in your job, there are still undercurrents of worry – for example, ‘Am I protected? Is my family protected? What can I do, or not do, within the current restrictions?’”
She explains: “Those types of worries are affecting our brains by causing increased fatigue. So, in addition to any tiredness we may be experiencing from all the extra screen time we’re logging, there’s an extra layer of fatigue hanging over us. And if it’s neglected and stirs into our other stresses, that could tip over into burnout.”
In de Lange’s assessment, two types of burnout have become particularly virulent in the past year. “The first is parental burnout, where working parents are not just busy at their jobs, but wading through piles of homeschooling, too. As a result, even the smallest task can feel extremely hard. The second is actual ‘pandemic burnout’ caused by overactive thinking around multiple aspects of the crisis. In the latter case, we typically urge our clients to take ‘pandemic-free days’, where they detach themselves from the news agenda and think about things that bring them joy.”
With all these issues in mind, Drayton recommends three steps for every business leader to take to keep burnout from festering at their organisations:
1. Set an example “This goes back to what I said about changing the culture in my client’s professional services firm. if you’re a leader in a pressured organisation, you have to put your own house in order and manage yourself first, as a light for others to follow. If you're working 12 hours a day and not thinking clearly, then you're not going to be in a position to influence the culture or actions of hundreds, or even thousands, of staff.”
2. Define expectations “Set clear boundaries around people’s behaviours, focusing on how – and when – work is carried out in the organisation. This should be done in an almost paternalistic way, as we have seen from Citi’s CEO. As that message has come straight from the bank’s chief executive, it provides clear permission for workers to hold off a bit. Fundamentally, businesses are reflections of their senior leadership teams.”
3. Accentuate gratitude “Very simply, remember to say thank you: ‘I really appreciate that – it’s a great piece of work.’ Leaders tend to forget this – not because they're mean, but because they're often too busy themselves, and overwhelmed. So, introducing a culture of appreciation will help to boost staff morale at times when workloads are challenging.”
All those measures, Drayton notes, will go some way towards forestalling the business risks associated with burnout. A big plus for people – and great news for financial management, too. As de Lange points out, at its most extreme, “burnout can ultimately lead to loss of investment; it costs companies billions of pounds per year to deal with the impacts of this issue – money they would all prefer to dedicate elsewhere.”
Matt Packer is a freelance business, finance and leadership journalist