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The cumulative effects of pandemic stress have led to a top-to-bottom reconsideration of how working people carry out their work and their relationships with their employers. Workers across the business are reevaluating all of the principal considerations of work — pay, benefits, development, well-being, values — to determine if the company and its implicit work contract meet their needs and future plans.
The mounting evidence shows that employers are falling short. Despite the focus on ‘making business more human’ in the years leading up to and during the pandemic, several trends are showing negative results as reported in a cascade of surveys and polls.
Layoffs and Stress
Most glaring is the self-harm companies have caused by layoffs precipitated by the ‘vibecession.’ The first-order impact of those headcount reductions led to increased workloads for the survivors, as well as increased worry about security and career development.
As the Conference Board notes, "Layoffs don’t increase financial performance or stock price of the company beyond one to two quarters. Instead, they often result in negative outcomes such as increased voluntary turnover; loss of skills, learning, productivity, and innovation; low employee morale; and brand reputational risks." Nevertheless, many leadership teams plan to continue layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, increasing stress and aggravating burnout as a result.
What Leaders Can Do: As the collective delusion about an imminent recession dissipates, leaders will have to sharpen their messaging about company plans and attempt to counter the possible damage they may have caused through layoffs or slowing hiring. For example, for those who were asked to take on additional work as others are let go, this would be a good time to raise their compensation or otherwise acknowledge their contributions.
Related Article: Why We Need to Foster Trust During Layoffs
Quiet Everything
Employees are pushing back on the expectation of working long hours for the organization, which has led to ‘quiet quitting’ and other efforts to moderate work-life balance. But as Qualtrics found, "demanding more from employees can actually push them to give less — or be less motivated to go above and beyond when necessary." Burnout is on the rise, in both managerial and direct contributor ranks.
What Leaders Can Do: Managers need to focus on employee well-being. Well-being should become a top three issue — some say number one — since the impact can be so significant. Of those who rate their work/life balance negatively, Qualtrics found only 29% have "the motivation to go above and beyond." Of course, concern for employee well-being should be a natural impulse, but leaders have to take direct and personalized action to make sure work/life balance is a priority.
Radical Flexibility
A persistent theme in EX surveys is the heightened need for flexibility, which is often treated as synonymous with where and when people choose to work. A conventional model of work flexibility would allow an individual to work Tuesdays and Wednesdays in the office from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. — a time dedicated to co-working with team members — and additional time from home on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays.
Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom’s ongoing Work From Home research has shown that the trendlines are converging between two and three days a week in the office. The recent news about Zoom calling workers back to the office was in fact a requirement for only two in-office days per week. Bloom's latest numbers demonstrate that those with the most liberal policies were hiring new workers at a faster pace:
Radical flexibility goes beyond that baseline and may include who people work with, and what projects they opt to work on. It may also blend in career path and skills development goals. However, as the adjective ‘radical’ signals, this might be a step too far for conservative firms. But Gartner and others suggest that this is where the smartest companies are headed. Counterintuitive perhaps, but giving greater autonomy to employees is likely to make them more aligned with the company.
What Leaders Can Do: Allowing people to work from home several days a week (if not all, in some cases) decreases their likelihood to quit. Many groups — women with young children, people of color, and senior individual contributors — are significantly more productive when given more flexibility. While success with hybrid work requires greater discipline in coordination and communication — particularly for middle managers — research suggests many employees value flexibility higher than incentives like a raise, or a promotion. The trick is getting it done well.
Processes and Systems
One trend of great importance is the linkage between burnout and the experience of bad business processes and inefficient systems. Qualtrics found both ends of well-being related to work processes. The number one factor in well-being was "work processes allow me to be productive as possible," and the top driver of burnout was "ineffective processes and systems."
Consider video meeting apps. During the pandemic we saw an explosion of similar apps, with quite different capabilities and controls, like Zoom, Webex, Google Hangouts and Microsoft Teams, to name only a few. An individual might have four different video meetings in one day with four different tools, some of which allow saving transcripts, some that don’t, and with incompatible ways to appear in the user’s calendar.
This scenario is annoying, at face value, but when coupled with the time frittered away switching between apps it pushed people into burnout. In a recent Asana survey, participants estimated that they would save 4.9 hours per week with improved processes. They also use 8.8 apps, on average, and at the director level that climbs to 10 apps.
The report looks back a year [emphasis mine]:
Compared to last year’s survey, knowledge workers are still spending about the same amount of time on “work about work,” the hours spent on duplicated work, unnecessary meetings, and juggling too many apps. Work about work takes up 58% of the workday, with skilled work taking up 33% and strategic work just 9%.
Gallup’s study on burnout found many factors contributed — led by toxic workplaces, a topic too large for this context — but unreasonable time pressure was among the five leading causes :
When employees say they often or always have enough time to do all of their work, they are 70% less likely to experience high burnout. Granted, there are some professions that will always have extreme time constraints — like paramedics or firefighters. Not surprisingly, people in these roles are at high risk for burnout. In other fields, however, time constraints are often imposed by people who do not know how long it takes to deliver quality work or great customer service.
Unreasonable deadlines and pressure can create a snowball effect — when employees miss one overly aggressive deadline, they fall behind on the next thing they are scheduled to do.
Burnout has been recognized by the World Health Organization as an “occupational phenomenon” that can influence physical and mental health. It defines it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
What Leaders Can Do: These are shocking numbers. I wonder how many company leaders know where their companies would fall in such a survey. They would be well-served to use surveys or workplace analytics to determine where workers’ time is going, and how they feel about it. Making sure that more of people’s time is allocated to deep and strategic work should become a top-tier strategic objective for the C-Suite. That entails simplifying, reducing and mothballing badly designed processes, as well as minimizing apps with a goal of reducing switching costs of transitioning from app to app. (Note: leaders should also look into the toxicity of their workplaces, even though I sidestepped that here.)
Senior leaders have a lot of challenges confronting their efforts to turn employee experience around. Considering the plans for continued cost-cutting and the impacts of layoffs, all the other factors impinging on employee experience become even more critical.
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Clearly, new tools and practices have to be adopted to streamline, decomplexify, and outright eliminate time- and energy-consuming inefficiencies. But other principles — like radical flexibility and quiet everything — may offset the negatives arising from senior leaders’ fears of an economic downturn, which is looking more like a soft landing than a recession.
Related Podcast: Christine Maslach on What Companies Can Do About Burnout
