Let’s face it: US workers are burned out.
Search from Aflac on stress levels of US-based workers found that more than 50% of respondents experienced burnout in 2023 and nearly 75% reported moderate stress levels at work.
But organizational psychologist and bestselling author Adam Grant, an expert on organizational mindsets and habits, says workplace leaders are to blame, not exhausted employees.
Adam Grant on stage during a panel at the 2022 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Summit (Brian Stukes/Getty Images)
“I think of burnout as a sense of emotional exhaustion that is persistent and disabling, meaning it’s not just a little incident, but it persists. It also interferes with your ability to function,” Grant said Entrepreneur at BetterUp’s Uplift conference last week. “It’s a structural and cultural problem if you have more than one person in burnout. That’s a challenge to address in your organization that leaders need to be accountable for.”
Related: 5 Ways Leaders Can Combat Burnout Culture
As the problem of burnout continues to plague employees and their employers, Grant, a Wharton professor, said the solution is to focus on what he calls the “ask, check, support” leadership method that can help employees to find meaning and motivation in their business. work and deal with burnout in the process.
Grant explains his strategy to us below using Return to Office Insights data researched by BetterUp Labs.
Request
Grant says leaders must first examine what demands are causing burnout.
“It has to do with overload, it means having too much work, having a job that doesn’t have clear expectations, you’re expected to be 24/7,” Grant says. “These types of demands are burdensome. We need to understand if there are pockets of people who are burning out with similar types of work – this to me is a sign that the demands are excessive.”
Reducing demands can mean anything from hiring more staff to delegating responsibilities, but the end goal should always be to make employee demands “more manageable.”
Check
But sometimes requests cannot be eliminated. For example, if you work at a startup and customers place orders from all over the world, eliminating hours may not work. Instead, Grant says companies can give employees more control over their day.
“What we can do is try to offer more choice and more freedom in how we handle those requests,” Grant explains. “We want to give people control over what they’re working on, when they’re doing it, who they’re doing it with, and how they’re doing it. And the general finding is that these sources of autonomy tend to make demands more manageable.”
Grant also said that today’s employees prefer to control their office hours and want to have a more flexible work environment. Offering this control to employees could be effective in mitigating burnout.
“There has been a lot of discussion about where we work as a form of flexibility. My interpretation of the evidence is that people want discretion about when they work more than where they work,” Grant explained. “So if you give people the flexibility to set their own hours, they’ll be very happy to come to the office if that’s a tug of war.”
Support
Grant says “support” means “giving people the tools they need to cope with demands” in the workplace and making mental health a priority.
“It’s also about building a culture where [employees] they feel they can be honest about their emotional well-being and seek help if they need it,” she said.
But telling employees that you prioritize mental health and making them feel comfortable talking about it are two different things, he says.
The most effective way to combat this problem, he says, is when a leader leads by example and is open about the need to take time off for mental health reasons and promotes open dialogue among employees when they are struggling.
“I think modeling makes it clear to people at all levels that it’s not just words, we’re not just saying you can take care of yourself, we’re actually demonstrating through our behavior that it’s acceptable and encouraged around here.” , says Grant. “It’s been frustrating to see a lot of companies say, okay, we have a burnout problem, we’ll give you mindfulness training or teach you stress management skills as if this isn’t a psychological problem.”