Posted on 03/12/2021 6:17:42 PM PST by anthropocene_x
Six elements of work cause burnout, Maslach says. The first is pure workload—having way too much to do. One reason people feel burned out right now is that they have been working longer hours during the pandemic. In addition to an overstretching of staff and resources, burnout “could also include a cutthroat, bottom-line, results-oriented culture,” Mandy O’Neill, a management professor at George Mason University, said on Harvard Business Review’s Women at Work podcast.
The second factor is how much control or autonomy someone has over their work. As the Stanford organizational-behavior professor Jeffrey Pfeffer writes in his book Dying for a Paycheck, “If through their actions people cannot predictably and significantly affect what happens to them, they are going to stop trying. Why expend effort when the results of that effort are uncontrollable, rendering the effort fruitless?”
The third factor is a lack of recognition or reward for your work. One Philadelphia high-school teacher told the organizational psychologist Adam Grant that her burnout was like being on “a hamster wheel. You’re kind of, like, doing a lot and trying really hard, but is it really changing anything?”
The fourth factor has to do with whether your workplace is more like a community or a viper pit. You can probably guess which one leads to burnout. The fifth relates to whether policies and practices are administered fairly. Does the boss play favorites? Finally, work that doesn’t create meaning or value for workers can lead to burnout. It’s one thing to spend 60 hours a week working to free an innocent person from prison; it’s quite another to spend them trying to collect someone’s medical debt.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
The Atlantic?
The Atlantic is filled with muck, sewage and dead fish.
It’s also the name of an ocean.
Only a new boss(place of employment) can cure your burnout
Feh!
Layoffs, benefits reduced, no increase in pay. Doing the jobs/roles of people several job grades higher with no raise. Increased offshore staffing.
Sometimes it is better to get cut loose and get the severance package than to stay on a floundering team to be overworked and undercompensated with no chance of advancement.
And the boss is gonna make it all better? He hasn’t after 6 years’ time.
Far be it for me to contradict The Atlantic, but only You are likely to actually do anything about your burnout; even that is actually pretty unlikely. Your boss has more incentive to replace you.
Is it the job, or is it how you do the job? Odds are that it’s the latter.
Would you end up treating another job (that you can actually get) the same way? I’m sure all of us guys think that Bikini Inspector for high six figures per year would be okay. That is not the real world.
Are you taking care of yourself? Eating right? Exercising? Sleeping? Pursuing other interests/hobbies? There is time. Really.
Burnout seems to be a form of depression. Doing the little things goes a long way. The little things are what make up life. People tend to feel trapped because they are seeing nothing but the enormity of the forest. Take the trees on one at a time. You can eat an elephant if you take it one bite at a time.
If you feel like you can’t get out of bed in the morning, try wiggling your toes. That can lead to moving your feet. Your legs might come next. Next thing you know, you can stand. Feelings come and go of their accord. Can you control and/or contract your muscles? If so, you can move and do.
1) Boss, you gave me too much work!
2) Boss, give me more autonomy to do things the way I want to do them
3) Boss, you don’t give me enough praise
4) Boss, this is a hostile work environment
Any one of the above is grounds for firing, imo. I didn’t bother to read the other two.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
There’s a number that can cure my burnout.
That number is 4-4-2.
That’s right.
Oldsmobile.
Burnout, baby, burnout.
There are a lot of really bad bosses.
Retired now, but in my long career I probably had ten or so bosses.
Five were excellent, and my morale was sky high.
A couple were ok, and my morale was still good.
But—three of them were total stinkers. In two cases I quit as soon as possible and found another job. In the third case I lobbied for a transfer away from the bad boss and eventually made it happen.
How do you know when you have a bad boss? They kiss the rear ends of their bosses and treat you like dirt—easy to spot....
“How do you know when you have a bad boss?”
Sadly, it’s one of those things that is usually really obvious in hindsight, but really tough to tell at the time. I’ve had some real doozies in my time for bosses and business partners. It was never evident at the beginning. Ugh.
My fear is that my current boss (probably the best I have had) is experiencing some burnout. I know that the bad stuff typically runs downhill. Ugh. Not much I can do.
I understand this.
It’s been the situation for most of my career.
When you reach adulthood, from your remaining time you’ll spend 1/3 of your life in bed/asleep, roughly 1/3 (at least weekdays) at your job until retirement (if you can even afford to do so) and 1/3 “for yourself” to spend commuting, getting ready for work, obligations to keep the house and yard up and running, and raise a family or spend it with friends and relatives or studying, reading, or other pursuits.
People get divorced. People break up friendships. But even in abusive work relationships, they make excuses why they won’t leave. It’s one third of your life. Why suffer?
—”Why suffer?”
Not to worry!
Almost everybody knows it is impossible to work your employees to death.
Never happen.
They always pass out first.
Layoffs will continue until morale improves
I work for Walmart (at least until I can find something better). Last year top management came out with what they called “Great Work Place”. The idea was that by moving employees from department to department as needed they could get all the work done with less people. Unsurprisingly, the result was that all the departments are fighting for employees, the workers are burning out, the work’s not getting done and the stores look terrible.
A financially wise employers always takes out insurance on staff. Certainly it happens on Hollywood productions.
A few years back it was revealed that one of those big box stores was looking at breaking up the work schedule of full-timers so they’d come in early for the “morning rush”, go home afterwards, return for the “lunch rush”, then go home and return in the evening (for the “after-work crowd”) - the whole time racking up 8 hours or so of paid work. The outcry sank the idea, but variations such as you describe will always be available. If it provides cross-training, that is fine; if it is just getting fast-paced work from workers for their full shifts, it will fall apart (even the foreign scabs can’t keep up).
Businesses are simply trying to match the employees’ schedules to the demand perfectly (while maintaining the minimum number of staff on payroll), but human nature makes that impossible; customers’ timing isn’t a perfect science.
—”Certainly it happens on Hollywood productions”
A friend was building a new house, he’s a PE and likes to do the mechanical and electrical work.
His wife complained he was burning the midnight oil.
I told her not to worry... and if he passed out just splash some water on this face and let him have a five-minute break.
I think she is still angry about that comment?
I've found in the private sector this philosophy is often approached in a perverted, more cavalier, "Anybody can be replaced." This is often communicated in a way that is demeaning. And while true, I've found that many employers who throw this out there, do so without considering what are often the grotesquely astronomical costs of actually replacing somebody, particularly key individuals. Some employers, particularly those that are out of touch, may look very hard at numbers, but not the unquantifiable factors a particular employee may bring, including their ability to work selflessly as part of a team (which often dilutes their, personal numbers), the relationships an individual cultivates with clients, etc.
I recently had a good conversation with a friend who is an accountant and business consultant about this exact topic. He likened it to being a helicopter pilot. You step into the cockpit of a helicopter and you have a vast array of lights, switches, dials and gauges. A good pilot looks at all of them holistically and works to keep them all in balance and in to proper ranges simultaneously. Then, above and beyond all that, the pilot also maintains awareness of everything outside the cockpit, avoiding hazards, reacting to external conditions and navigating the aircraft to where you actually want to go. My friend said way too many of his clients he consult, identify four or five, "key performance indicators" (KPIs) and try to manage exclusively by those. He likens this to putting black tape over the helicopter windscreen, and all the lights and gauges except for those identified as the "key" four or five and trying to keep the helicopter flying by those alone.
Reminds me of a crappy technical support job I had. During the interview process got the CEO and VP I answererd to, they areed to prioritize technical support directly according to expected revenue.
One day the CEO gets a call from one of his long standing but very low volume customers unhappy with the level of priority he was getting from tech support.
From that day forward the new standard was pure second-guessing bullshiite — we were held accountable for any unhappy customer who chose to bypass the chain of command. Totally arbitrary, Just one of many examples.
I did get a form of revenge one day. I had checked out 6 power control units to do a statistical analysis. 5 out of 6 of the damned things were failing on the bench, out of the box.
I tried to explain they failed out of the box. CEO, VP aint listening.
The RMA technician refused to allow them back into inventory. It appeared to be my duty to fix an out-of-box failure without resources to do so.
6 weeks later I did a Midnight Requisition Run, broke into the Inventory Room, and replaced my 6 devices with 6 new ones and tried to reintroduce them back into inventory.
The RMA technician tests them. 2 of them fail — I had not even touched them, they were straight from inventory. One more Midnight Requisition Society run, and 2 more units replaced.
A couple of months later there’s a rash of failing units. Not my problem. The My recommendation was to test every unit beforehand, and of course the RMA Tech and his COO boss refused. Before long there were 20 failed units in RMA. Again, not my problem.
Eventually that whole line of products was discontinued, the COO was fired , and the RMA Tech was testing every single unit as it went out. 33% failure rate out of the box.
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