BURNOUT IN TECH: A SIGN TO WORK ON THE ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN

Tech leadership, you can and should view burnout as a powerful warning sign that the organization needs to work on meaningful systematic change.

Engineers and Tech professionals are being asked to do "more with less" and the speed and scale of what they create is larger than ever. At the end of 2022, Tech Industry layoffs are accelerating. And mass resignations are building up as a rejection of leadership style that prioritize the purpose and technology at the expense of employee mental health. Global studies have shown two in five IT professionals are at high risk of burnout, and in IT security, it’s more than half.

On the individual level, inability to manage chronic stress and burnout has negative impact on the employee mental and physical well-being, and can lead to a range of physical health problems. On the organizational level, burnout is sabotaging talents retention. Burnout have measurable effects on the team's performance and lead to Increased financial costs associated with poor mental health at work.

With employee burnout at all-time highs, it is estimated that nine in ten organizations around the world offer some form of wellness program to help employee tackle mental health, burnout and stress.

While investing in resilience training resources and workshops give employees the necessary tools to better handle everyday stressors and replenish, they don’t fully address the root causes of burnout. That’s why the companies are seeing weaker improvements in burnout and employee mental health and well-being than they would expect, given their investments.

Burnout is not an employee problem. It is a symptom resulting from chronic workplace stress that require understanding root problems, organizational stressors, and organizational interventions. According to Gallup research (2021), the top five reasons for burnout are: unfair treatment at work, unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity, lack of communication and support from their manager and unreasonable time pressure. Similarly, Dr. Christina Maslach from University of California, Berkeley has uncovered six major drivers of burnout in the organization’s work setting: unsustainable workload, lack of control, insufficient rewards for effort, lack of supportive community, lack of fairness, mismatched values and skills. She is comparing the drivers of burnout to pebbles in one's shoe. If they aren’t removed, they will cause a problem.

Burnout is an organizational problem. It should be addressed on the organizational system level. The responsibility for managing it has shifted away from the employees towards employers’ leadership.

Gartner measure of workforce health has three components (Top 5 Priorities for HR Leaders in 2022): healthy employees (focus on individuals), healthy relationships (focus on teams) and healthy work environment (focus on organization design, processes).  While investing in resilience training resources and workshops are mainly addressing the first one, the companies are missing the opportunities to work on organization design, a whole system component.

Managing burnout on the organizational system level require leadership and systems perspective.  By understanding the symptoms and root causes, you can shift your focus from treating patches (people’s burnout) to propelling applicable and conscious organizational design and embed wellness into company culture.  Taking a systemic approach means rethinking organizational systems, processes, and incentives to redesign work, job expectations, and team environments.

Many tech companies are not employing a systemic approach to address burnout.  Why not? Among reasons frequently citing are complexity, clarity, commitment, leadership confidence, time on project and higher cost.

Long-term outcomes are healthy and supportive ecosystem that prioritizes people over processes and healthy employees that embrace conscious leadership and growth mindset.

What makes whole systems approach to burnout manageable and successful long-term?

While whole system’s initiatives require leadership team aligned on vision and goals to prevent and banish employee burnout, strong systemic and people centered framework is equally important. One of approaches, that we found very powerful is XCHANGE 5I framework, uniquely designed five stage process for brainstorming, problem solving and approaching change. This process allows groups to effectively tap into the collective wisdom and accelerate ideas into actions and outcomes!

We are ambassador of using this approach to facilitate a systemic approach to burnout in tech. Using XCHANGE 5I, the leadership team work through five stages (Initiate, Identify, Imagine, Innovate, Implement) to:

• Connect and align around the importance and vision of managing employee burnout at the organizational and individual level.
• Brainstorm as a team and uncover specific organizational dynamic - stressors causing employee stress, such as trust deficit, poor communication, underdeveloped soft leadership skills, role ambiguity, judging based on cultural stereotypes and conflicting norms for decision-making.
• Identify top stressors and brainstorm strategic opportunities to manage and eliminate these stressors at individual, as well as organizational level.
• Design solutions and action plan, informed by every voice in the team for top strategic opportunities.

This process is designed to help the leadership team to leverage all the diverse strengths available and accelerate ideas into actions to banish employee burnout and promote well-being on the organization level.