One In Five Employees Is Highly Engaged and at Risk of Burnout (2018)

Around 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.<p>A few things have changed since, and I&#x27;m no longer anywhere near burnout.<p>I stopped travelling all the time, and I started working from home 4&#x2F;5 days - less time communiting meant more sleep, and it means I get to have breakfast and lunch with my family etc.<p>Then I moved to a 4-day working week a couple of years ago, taking a 20% pay cut in the process.<p>Work-wise, it&#x27;s the best thing I ever did! I spend less hours working, but somehow I don&#x27;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.<p>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 &quot;bums on seats&quot; from 9-5, rather than <i>productivity</i> and happy employees.

It 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.<p>It&#x27;s important make sure you&#x27;re not sacrificing your wellbeing for the benefit of the company. Your physical and mental health are far too important.

I&#x27;m a freelancer and realized yesterday that I haven&#x27;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&#x27;m taking off next week and I have never been so excited in my life.

I think the burnout happens when you care too much and can&#x27;t take it emotionally (when, inevitably, you meet some people who care less). So obviously, people who are &quot;disengaged&quot; are not at risk of burnout - they are managing it.<p>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.

I 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.<p>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.<p>Now I&#x27;m finding several opportunities for growth, but doing so with a calm mindset. Several of my colleagues don&#x27;t seem calm at all. Yet the majority of us have more control over burnout and &quot;work chaos&quot; than we are lead to believe.

&gt;Gallup’s shocking statistic that seven out of 10 U.S. employees report feeling unengaged<p>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.

Whenever I read one of these HBR things on &quot;optimal employee engagement&quot; I feel like I&#x27;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.

Assuming the work you&#x27;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.<p>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.

<i>Managers 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.</i><p>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.

I often see folks say that schools should teach finance management from a young age.<p>Well, they also ought to teach time management, emotion management, energy management, people management.<p>It&#x27;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.

I 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.<p>For some reason I thought I could stick it out, but I&#x27;m trying to make it to the end of the year and then take a break to refocus.<p>Money only gets you so far - at some point people need a supportive work environment and a sense of ownership at their job.

Burnout 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.<p>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&#x27;s health, social life, and family life can be extreme and quite dangerous.

I&#x27;ve had moments in my life where I was working 10+ hours per day, and was pretty productive, but those streaks didn&#x27;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.<p>I quit freelancing about 4 years ago and have been working full time for a company. I&#x27;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.

So it just seem like Pareto principle example. 20% of employees making 80% of effort. I don&#x27;t know if it is fixable. All I think is folks in that 20% will keep changing when Companies&#x2F;HR&#x2F;Employees make noise about this. One reason is because &#x27;highly engaged employees&#x27; may not be highly productive employees.<p>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&#x27;t matter how generous is the deadline.

I 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.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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

So 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.<p>Burnout <i>happens to you</i> and does not originate inside you. A manager or executive <i>burns employees out</i> not employees “letting themselves” become burned out.<p>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.”<p>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 &amp; executive behavior.

I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t hate life any more.

It is interesting how they talk about HR.<p>In my experience HR organizations are mostly there as a sort of risk management for the company, everything &#x2F; anything else tends to feel like just sort of HR resume fodder &#x2F; token programs &#x2F; company cheerleading.

Ooh I actually hit this early on in my career. I cared a lot about stuff to the extent that I&#x27;d give up going to shows to do work. Well, that was _entirely wrong_. Nobody wanted that of me.<p>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&#x27;ll give that much of a damn, but for someone else, they&#x27;re not getting that.<p>The mistake I made was that I invested more into that thing than the owners themselves. That&#x27;s so foolish. Why? They don&#x27;t want that from you.

We all here would agree with the 80&#x2F;20 rule. Try explaining that to management and&#x2F;or HR. It would seem to be beyond their abilities of comprehension.<p>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.<p>I have unfortunately come to realize that those that have perfected the art of looking busy and&#x2F;or professional slackers seem to get a free pass.<p>Frustrating indeed.

TBH in the tech industry I would expect this to be more than 20%

The 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&#x27;s easy to be disconnected from all the real &#x27;good&#x27; I do.

The other 4 are reading news on HN

That site was really hard to read. Small and narrow fonts with a strange font face.

you don&#x27;t realize it until it&#x27;s already happening

Holy crap, I need to email this link both to my old boss, and to my likely new boss with whom I&#x27;m negotiating salary right now!

..and for each burned out one there is another X to take their place, for the good of the company.

Exactly the market my startup is targeting: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metacortex.me&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;metacortex.me&#x2F;</a><p>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.

In 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.

Happy Friday. Eat Arby&#x27;s.

That’s called a sociopath where I’m from...

i&#x27;d argue that more often than not &quot;the highly engaged and at risk of burn out&quot; person is full of illusions while the other 4 have been around the block and dont give a %rap anymore.

I 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&#x2F;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.