The burnout challenge: Have you mentally checked out?

The question for these leaders is, are you valuing availability and presence over performance and quality?

Our experience of work matters

How we spend our days at work—what we work on, where we work, who we work with, how we work, and recently when we work—is our experience of work. The accumulation of these experiences makes up a working life. Growing research and anecdotal evidence show that our experience of work is not positive. Our capacity is being stretched beyond reasonable limits as work demands test how much we are willing to give.

For business leaders, reduced commitment and the withdrawal of discretionary effort limit business growth and innovation opportunities. The ‘great resignation’ and ‘quiet quitting’ have caught the most attention in the media, but more recently, the behaviour has become recognised for what it is burnout. People are mentally checking out of work.

The disengaging workforce

Major disruptions continue to upend our work and lives, leaving many frustrated and lost. We have become exhausted from persistent uncertainty about the future, increasing workplace demands, and reduced resources.

Cumulative stress is common for people experiencing heavy workloads in organisations where communication is poor, and people feel powerless to change the situation. In response, as self-protection, people disconnect from their colleagues and organisations and reduce their levels of engagement with work. Quiet quitting is a response to work overload.

It is well-established that positive workplace behaviours such as cooperation and collaboration are more evident when people are engaged in their jobs, and there is a strong sense of fairness in the workplace. Positively motivated employees also demonstrate spontaneous behaviours where they willingly put in extra effort to contribute to a positive team climate for group problem-solving, innovation, and creativity. The cost of burnout to organisational performance is in the effort and contribution that people withhold.

The evidence is growing

The Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) report Dynamic capabilities: How Australian firms can survive and thrive in uncertain times found solid and consistent anecdotal evidence about burnout and a need for more bandwidth among businesses of all sizes post-COVID-19.

Similarly, recent research in the United States on business-to-business sellers in the technology industry reported that 89% report feeling burned out, and 54% are actively job-seeking. Notably, 67% believe their leadership is overly optimistic and disconnected from the reality sellers operate. This disconnect between the workplace experiences of leaders and employees is an important finding.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2023 Report reports that Australia and New Zealand had the second-highest regional percentage of daily stress and the highest percentage of employees who say now is a good time to find a job. Sixty-seven per cent reported that they were not engaged at work, and 43% were actively looking for a different job than the one they have now.

The labour market is tightening, and retention, while always important, is front of mind for all leaders today. Quiet quitting describes employees who have mentally checked out from work, but increasing levels of burnout in the workplace suggest individual resilience is being undermined.

When 67% of survey respondents described themselves as ‘not engaged’, it is highly likely that performance and productivity are down and people are actively looking for a better workplace.

The short steps from engaged to calibrated commitment to burnout to cynicism

For employees trying to match their effort at work to what they get in return in an increasingly unbalanced system, it has been argued that quiet quitting should be replaced with calibrated contributing.

Calibrated contribution reflects people’s attempts to rebalance the implicit psychological contract between employers and employees.

The psychological contract describes the implicit relationship between employers and employees that influences how people behave daily. It is often implicitly bound into an organisation’s Employee Value Proposition (EVP but, in practice, it is built on the everyday interactions and statements of employers and employees and how the other perceives and interprets them.

Calibrated contributing is an employee’s fair, reasonable choice to do the work they are paid for rather than go above and beyond unrewarded. Employees withdraw the discretionary effort that all organisations rely on for innovation and high performance. For the individual, it is a response to excessive work demands that mitigates burnout.

The 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index reported that 62% of Australian workers reported being burned out at work, compared to the global average of 48% of employees. Burnout is characterised by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from the job, and reduced professional effectiveness. Essentially, burnout is chronic workplace stress that needs to be effectively managed.

The step from burnout to workplace cynicism is short. For cynical employees, the psychological contract has been breached. They have strong negative feelings toward the organisation and tend to act on them. For instance, cynical employees are more likely to engage in insider threat behaviours.

The workplace experiences that lead to calibrated contributing, the experience of burnout, or cynical behaviours reduce workplace performance and productivity but also increase reputational risk in a tight labour market.

Are you valuing availability and presence over performance and quality?

Some leaders take a head-in-the-sand approach to the changing workplace. For example, global banking CEOs from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Google lead the charge against working from home. Leaders who think this way will also discount the negative impact of calibrated contributing, burnout, and workplace cynicism on individual, team, and organisational performance.

The question for these leaders is, are you valuing availability and presence over performance and quality?