Over Christmas, I found myself reflecting on the rising level of burnout across the developed world.
What are we getting wrong at work?
Sarah O’Connor at the FT wrote a great piece last month about rising stress and mental health issues at work. The article included a graph I found particularly thought-provoking:
That a two-fold increase in reported stress over less than 10 years. Most respectable statisticians will tell you that’s not an accidental phenomenon. Something is causing it.
And this isn’t a ‘snowflake’ generation thing either. The issues span multiple working generations.
So, what’s changed?
Our technology hangover
In work today, emails are pervasive and instant messaging is everywhere. Most importantly, it’s carried with you everywhere you go, on your smartphone.
If you look at the FT graph, there is an upward trajectory in burnout and mental illness starting around 2011-2013 onwards.
What changed around then?
Check out this graph on US smartphone ownership from Zippia:
Then compare smartphone ownership with other devices per the Pew Research Center:
The correlation between smartphones and reported burnout is pretty strong. While just correlative, it certainly warrants further thought.
The issue with smartphones is that they help us communicate faster, iterate better and produce more output volume than ever before.
But rather than recognise this as both a positive AND a negative development, we have kept going for a decade as if nothing has changed.
And the data shows it is catching up with us.
Military mindset
With this in mind, I couldn’t help but wonder how the military deal with their frontline workload without EVERY soldier breaking down.
In search of this answer, I turned straight to Ben Williams.
Ben is the founder and CEO of LoopIn, a team management and staff retention tool, and the author of Commando Mindset. He is an ex-Royal Marine Commando.
In a LinkedIn post in December, Ben told the world that he rarely felt burnt out as a Royal Marine, but in the business world he’s experienced it multiple times.
Surely you are now thinking the same thing I did. Why the hell was a Royal Marine in Afghanisation not burning out, when staff working 40 hours a week on a computer are?
There were several reasons for it, but one key element stood out to me. In every military with frontline operations, they have well-established ops cycles that include pre-defined, scheduled, collective rest.
That got me thinking.
The solution?
The problem in the modern working world is that we don’t get the chance to rest our brains.
Even on vacation, away from emails, colleagues can grab us on WhatsApp. And there is a phone app for almost every major productivity application.
If we need to, our phones contain everything we need to stay up to date with work. People don’t typically leave their phones at home for holiday.
This means we are always one step away from work, even if we are on holiday. It wasn’t like that 15 years ago, let alone 30 years ago.
One part of the solution is clear to me. Businesses need to start giving teams ‘off-days’ together every now and then.
Off-days
For years, teams have had day-long offsites, where strategy is discussed and team bonding happens. Businesses don’t go under form these days.
A similar approach should be adopted with off-days, where everyone in the team (or company) is mandated to take a day off together.
The difference between an off-day and holiday is that teams are off at the same time. The velocity and volume of communication slows down, and the chances that people are disturbed decreases.
By doing this, team members have the mental space to properly relax. Off-days should happen perhaps 3 times a year.
Of course, if urgent work has to be done, then so be it. Like a traditional offsite, people sometimes have to work instead of attend. The same would apply to an off-day.
And like Christmas Day – one of the rare occasions in the Western World where no sane human will disturb you with work – off-days can form micro-moments of calm in our permanent modern onslaught of communication.
That’s my two cents.
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