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Beating Burnout in the Workplace
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 11, 2022
BY K N OW L E D G E @ W H A R TO N
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BUYING A BED?
Teams can be key in the battle against chronic stress and
exhaustion. Author Paula Davis shares ways these minicultures
can create an environment that helps employees feel safe, builds
resilience and promotes well-being
B
urnout has become one of the most talked about workplace
topics, and its impact is far-reaching. The 24/7 pace of work and
scant resources often put busy professionals on a path to
burnout, a cycle that has only accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Burnout affects the health and wellbeing of the entire company, yet most attempts to help focus on quick-fix
strategies aimed at individuals.
In “Beating Burnout at Work: Why Teams Hold the Secret to Well-Being
and Resilience,” Paula Davis, founder of the Stress & Resilience Institute,
explores 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.
Brett LoGiurato, senior editor for Wharton School Press, sat down with
Davis to talk about her book, her own burnout story, and how to start on
the path to resilience and thriving.
An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Brett LoGiurato: Congratulations on the publication of your book, “Beating
Burnout at Work.” I wanted to first ask, what made you want to write it?
Paula Davis: I wanted to write it ever since I burned out during what
became the last year of my law practice. I wanted to help busy
professionals recognize the warning signs and not go down the same path
that I did.
LoGiurato: A big part of the book is your own experience with burnout as a
lawyer as you just discussed, but I was wondering if you could take us
through that burnout a bit more and how it helped inspire you to help
others manage stress and resilience.
Davis: Yes. There were three big warning signs that I missed when I was
going through this process. The first one was that I was chronically
physically and emotionally exhausted. No matter what I did on the
weekends to try and recover, nothing seemed to work. I absolutely hated
Sunday nights, because I would stare at the clock on the wall thinking, if I
could just freeze time I won’t have to go into work and become more
exhausted this week, because I’m not even recovered from last week and
:
the week before. That was a big one.
“
Teams are really little minisystems. They’re little minicultures
that exist within the larger workplace organization, and
they’re much more malleable.
The second big warning sign that I missed was that I was chronically
cynical. People just started to really bug me, and that’s not my usual
personality. I noticed that, outwardly, I was very professional in all of my
dealings with my clients, but inwardly there was a lot of eye-rolling going
on. I would think to myself, “Do we really have to talk about this issue? Can’t
you solve this on your own?”
Lastly, I started to notice that I was becoming more ineffective. Not in my
ability to be a good lawyer, but really starting to lose my confidence in
terms of seeing a path forward for myself in the profession. That led to a
lot of, “Why am I doing this? Am I really making an impact?” With my
clients, it was: “You’re not going to listen to my advice, so why bother?”
What’s interesting is that once I finally got out of my law practice and
started to research burnout, those three warning signs that I missed are
actually the three main symptoms of burnout. As soon as I realized that, I
understood more about what was going on. Then I really felt called to help
others not have to go through the same process. My burnout lasted almost
a year, and it progressed to a really bad place. I was getting panic attacks
on almost a daily basis, and I was in the emergency room twice because I
had stomach aches from the stress that were so bad that I couldn’t
actually stand up.
I realized at that point that some big changes had to happen. I don’t want
:
people to get anywhere near that point. I want to be able to help people
understand a little bit more about what burnout is and give them some
tools to help. And I also want to start talking to leaders and organizations
so that we can look at what cultural factors at work are causing this
problem.
LoGiurato: What you just talked about brings up the unique method you
have for dealing with burnout at work, starting with the culture and teams.
Why do you think it’s so important to focus on teams as the key antidote?
Davis: What was interesting to me when I first started down this path was
that I placed a lot of blame on myself. I thought to myself, “Wow, I must
have missed some sort of stress management strategy.” There was
something about my wiring or something must have been missing within
my personality that caused me to burn out. I started looking at the issue
through very much an individual lens.
As I dug into the research and as I continued to talk to more and more
people who had experienced burnout, I started to understand that it’s
really a systemic issue. Yes, there are ways that individuals can get better
at managing their stress and that can move the needle a little bit, but it’s
more of a complex issue that also involves how you interact with your
leaders and the style of leadership that leaders in your organization bring.
Also, on an organizational level, different factors are going on that can
make burnout more likely.
Where can we focus in this workplace continuum to help move the needle
forward? That’s how I identify teams. Teams are really little minisystems.
:
They’re little minicultures that exist within the larger workplace
organization, and they’re much more malleable. There are a lot of tools and
techniques that I can teach leaders and teams and individuals who make
up teams to help them create the kind of culture that really either prevents
or slows down burnout.
That made me really excited to start digging into that intersection, and
realizing that it was really an untapped area of review when it came to
burnout. With Covid-19 happening, we’re all working from home, and so I
think the future of work is going to be some version of a blended virtual
and physical-space work environment. Teams are going to be critical to
helping organizations manage all of the complexity that’s going to be
happening at work going forward.
LoGiurato: I want to talk about your Primed model for team success. Can
you quickly walk us through each component of that model and explain
why it’s so important in the fight against burnout?
Davis: The Primed model is the result of looking at dozens of research
studies. If we’re going to talk about helping teams build the positive
cultures that they need to slow down burnout, what are the ingredients
that they really have to focus on in order to make that happen?
Primed is the acronym that I created from reviewing that research. The P
is psychological safety and psychological needs. The P is the foundation of
building resilient and thriving teams. Teams have to be able to develop
trust, so that’s the psychological safety — trust at the team level.
Psychological needs are autonomy, belonging and competence. We all
:
need to feel as though we have some sort of say or control over our day
and over our work. We need to feel like we are part of a team or part of a
group that matters to us, that we feel like we belong, and that we feel like
we’re supported.
Competence is just simply feeling like we’re progressing toward goals that
are important to us and that we feel like we are becoming successful and
the type of professional that we want to be. There’s just loads of research
that shows when you have these two components present, you see more
motivation: higher levels of well-being, higher levels of resilience, lower
levels of attrition, higher morale and a whole host of outcomes that are
important to whether burnout happens.
The R in the Primed model is relationships. It is hard to get to a sense of
resilience and engagement and well-being if you don’t have good
relationships and a good support network.
The I is about impact. Do you feel like you are making an impact in your
work? Do you feel like you’re influencing the greater good or the world
around you? And do you derive a sense of meaning and satisfaction from
your work?
The M is about mental strength, or mindset. This is often very much an
overlooked factor when it comes to creating high-performing and resilient
teams in these positive cultures. How are we thinking about obstacles and
stressors and challenges and change? There are a lot of great techniques
to help us increase our individual and collective mental strength.
The E is about energy. This is how you deal with stress within the team. Do
:
you talk about stress? Do you create a sense of positive energy? I know
when I talk to teams, this is one of the biggest areas of concern. We’re
oftentimes so busy with our own work that we don’t pay attention to or
recognize signs of overload with our team members. We have to start
paying attention to that.
The D is one of my favorites. This is design. This is the area where, if you
as a team realize, “Wow, there are some tweaks we need to make or there
are some changes that we want to make within the culture of our team.
We can actually do that.” Collectively, this model really paints a wonderful
picture and a pathway — multiple pathways — to help teams build these
positive cultures and resilience.
“
When we are thanked, it’s not just about gratitude; we feel
really supported. It actually helps to build psychological
safety.
LoGiurato: One of my favorite concepts from the book is what you called
TNTs, or tiny noticeable things. Can you explain the concept and how they
help prevent burnout?
Davis: I loved the acronym TNT — tiny noticeable things. One of the things
that I realized early on if I was going to be talking to leaders or teams or
anybody within an organization, I had to make the techniques and the tools
user-friendly.
These are small strategies that individuals, leaders and teams can deploy
that really lead to big downstream outcomes when it comes to building
:
well-being and positive cultures and resilience.
One very basic example is just saying “thank you” more. When we are
thanked, it’s not just about gratitude; we feel really supported. It actually
helps to build psychological safety in some of these other capacities in
ways that we might not think about. So, thinking in terms of these tiny
noticeable things can help frame for people that making these little
changes doesn’t have to be hard, and they’re really easy to do.
LoGiurato: You started writing this book in early 2020. The world has
changed quite a bit since. How has Covid-19 impacted people’s
experiences with burnout, and how will it affect things going forward?
Davis: It’s been quite a unique challenge and very interesting to be writing
a book about burnout in the middle of a pandemic. When I first started
writing the book, this was not on our radar, and I don’t think anyone saw
this happening. I think people really are experiencing not only a lot of
stress, but also there’s so much uncertainty and anxiety and ambiguity still
around the situation.
I have already seen, just anecdotally, elevated levels of exhaustion with
people. This chronic physical and emotional exhaustion is starting to set
in.
But I think we have to caution ourselves that there’s also a lot we don’t
know in terms of how this is going to manifest with burnout rates. In my
book, I include burnout rates for a whole host of different professions, but
they were all pre-Covid. So, we have that data going into the pandemic, but
I think we’re going to need some good research studies to empirically
support some of the anecdotal evidence that we see about increased
:
levels of burnout.
I can say pretty confidently, I don’t think burnout is going to be lower than
it was pre-pandemic. I think we’re definitely looking at the same rates, if
not higher levels. But we want to make sure that we collect data to support
that.
LoGiurato: There are tons of lessons and takeaways in the book, but if you
had to pick one lesson that you hope readers take away with them, what
would that be?
“
We’ve got to get better at looking out for each other,
especially in this virtual environment.
Davis: I think that the big message is the “aha” that I had as I was learning
about burnout — that burnout is a systemic issue. I know that so many
people put a lot of blame on themselves and feel like they can’t say
anything about it if they feel like they’re burning out at work, and that it is
definitely a systemwide problem with systemwide causes that needs
systemwide strategies —which is why I wanted to focus on teams being
these little minisystems within the bigger organizations.
Just recognizing that, yes, your individual wiring and personality traits and
things like that do play into the burnout equation, but it’s also a much
bigger issue from a leadership and organization standpoint. When we can
start to look at the problem in this holistic way, we can implement specific
strategies that will help.
LoGiurato: Finally, if someone is reading this and struggling with burnout,
:
what’s one thing you would tell them to do today?
Davis: The biggest thing would be to have them say something. Burnout
exists on a spectrum, on a continuum, so it depends on where you are on
the continuum or the spectrum. It could be just simply telling a significant
other or a friend that you’re feeling this sense of chronic stress and are
overwhelmed at work, talking to a mental health professional or your
health care provider … or talking to a trusted colleague or a leader at work.
We’ve got to get better at looking out for each other, especially in this
virtual environment. We’re all living in a very different way than we’re
designed to live as human beings, and it is hitting people differently
depending on their unique situations. Just taking five minutes to reach
out to a colleague or everyone on your team, to check in and say, “Hey, how
are you doing? This has nothing to do with business, I’m just really
interested in hearing how you’re doing.” And not doing that once every nine
months, but really making that a regular habit, I think is something that is
really, really important.
I give a specific strategy in the book to help folks craft that type of
conversation if they want to have it. I know I would have appreciated
somebody taking an interest back when I was burning out, just checking in
with me to see how I was doing.
Those conversations sometimes can maybe feel a little uncomfortable,
but I think just given the state of the world, we have to push through that
discomfort a little bit and put ourselves out there and have the
conversation. Because I think in this unique time it can have a really
:
profound effect on how somebody is dealing with the world right now. •
AUTHOR
Knowledge@Wharton
Republished with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and
business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
based in Philadelphia.
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