It had been a typical day, or at least that’s what it seemed like. The morning began with a jolt at 3am, the usual hour when sleep reluctantly gave way to a mind buzzing with reflections on yesterday’s dealings and apprehensions about the day ahead. This was the time reserved for mentally reworking all those persistent problems — those gnawing issues that never seemed to get resolved amid the relentless grind of “fixing” things.
After some futile attempts to lull the mind back to sleep, there was a surreptitious glance at social media — an act of momentary guilt before the alarm abruptly shattered the brief respite, signalling that an hour of rest had passed. The intention to exercise lingered unfulfilled, pushed to tomorrow yet again.
The morning at home followed a mechanical routine intertwined with clandestine work texts sent in between. The drive to the office was no different, punctuated by two quick phone calls, setting the tone for the flurry of activity ahead.
Arriving at work, the atmosphere was ablaze with cheery greetings and contagious enthusiasm, quickly drowned out as the first of the day’s many meetings kicked off. The calendar was crammed, leaving one to ponder if even bathroom breaks required scheduling. There was a recurring wish for better preparation, a futile endeavour in the ceaseless whirlwind of tasks.
Hours bled into each other — emails dispatched, reports scrutinised, calls dialled, colleagues engaged — all in pursuit of that elusive sense of accomplishment. When the journey home began, three more calls were neatly tucked into the day’s dwindling minutes.
The evening at home was a familiar ritual, interlaced with lingering thoughts about the day’s proceedings. Despite the whirlwind of busyness and the apparent productivity, a sense of dissatisfaction loomed. What was achieved? Did today’s endeavours amount to more than just crossing items off a list?
As the night deepened, the mind circled back to the core questions: why the lingering unease? Why is there reluctance to face another day in this routine? Was there substance buried beneath the surface of incessant activity, or was it merely a veneer of progress? The day’s pursuit of fixing things seemed to beg a deeper question — was there something that truly needed fixing within?
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Constant activity and excessive busyness have become the measures of a productive and successful career. The Productivity Commission reports that while Australians are working more hours, the output of all that effort failed to keep pace. This resulted in national labour productivity falling 3.7% in 2022-23.
Productivity measures, nationally and organisationally, are, at best, crude. Innovation, workforce capability, and quality are better measures of business performance. In light of events over the past 12 months in the private and public sectors, a strong argument could be made for adding integrity.
The dark side of increased working hours without improvements in outputs is the strong and persistent evidence of workforce burnout. Burnout has been consistently shown to reduce capacity through absence and withdrawn commitment. It significantly affects the performance of governments and businesses seeking to improve workforce innovation and productivity.
Undeterred by findings that remote and hybrid working improve workforce productivity and well-being, senior executives continue pushing for a return to office-based work where productivity can be seen and heard as busy fingers clipping across keyboards. That said, there are reports that the return to the office push has stalled, and others have reported that new and lavish incentives are being trialled to entice the workforce back.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been offered as the saviour of worker wellbeing by lightening the heavy workloads. However, this is a solution to a shallow understanding of burnout.
The problem
“If we just stopped talking about burnout, it wouldn’t be a problem,” says one senior executive to his colleague. True story.
There is a sense that burnout is a form of contagious hysteria. The more we talk about it, the more it’s a problem. Sitting just below the surface of that view is the thought that people are not supposed to enjoy work anyway. As a matter of principle, we should accept that work will take from us, and we need to harden up and make our peace with that.
But people do enjoy work. It is an integral part of our lives, and when work is enjoyable, we tend to perform better — we produce more of a higher quality.
Productivity measures slavishly recorded and reported reduce people’s work experience to the drudgery of clock-punching. For example, the obsessiveness with billability and utilisation as productivity measures in large professional service firms has led to dysfunctional cultures, integrity breaches, and negative impacts on people.
Time spent has become the measure of performance rather than innovation, quality and social good, which are sprinkled through the aspirational statements of most public and private sector organisations.
The truth
Workforce productivity occasionally enters the national conversation. For example, ‘leaners’ and ‘lifters’ split the workforce into two simplistic categories. Leaners’ idleness was an evil to be stamped out, while lifters only rested to be better prepared for the next day’s work.
Yet idle time is a source of creative thinking so craved by organisations.
Many of the best ideas are had in the shower. Freed from the day-to-day, our minds roam, the task-centred brain disengages and the subconscious has the space to make connections, allowing new ideas to bubble to our awareness.
Similarly, those advocating a full-time return to the office lament the loss of the ‘water-cooler’ conversations that are the genesis of creative collaboration. It is unlikely that, before the pandemic, those now advocating for the return to office would have seen these conversations as ‘productive’.
This fluid and undirected thinking, often associated with creativity, innovation, and insight, is quickly crowded out by a day filled with activities, tasks, and meetings. We need quiet moments to listen to our thoughts or interactions with others that are open and engaging rather than defined by the need to beat back the nearest crocodile.
The work
Today, the most significant leadership deficiency is the reluctance to redesign work. The pandemic melted every excuse for not re-organising work. AI is adding new arguments. Flexibility, autonomy, and augmentation are the new principles of work design.
Burnout is a state of physical and mental exhaustion caused by work. It leads to the extinction of motivation and commitment to the job and organisation. Workforce shortages in critical occupations, for example in health professions, are often less about a lack of skilled people and more about burnout experienced in their day-to-day work.
The hidden cause of burnout is often a loss of autonomy (the choice in how work is done), respect (the breaking of the psychological contract about what is fair and reasonable), and agency (the inability to influence the circumstances of the work to improve the situation). The loss of autonomy, respect, and agency leads to feelings of helplessness.
Redesigning work to integrate new technology, remove obstacles to efficient performance, challenge historical practices, increase personal autonomy, and invest in upskilling to improve capability are the most effective ways to reduce burnout and simultaneously increase opportunities for innovation and creativity.
The discontents
The pandemic broke what we had come to believe the axioms of work. Most importantly, many people reconceived their relationship with how work is done. This continues to play out in workplaces nationwide and has been given a kick-along by technologies like AI.
Attempts to return to the past are met with reluctance. Persisting along this path quickly leads to discontentment. In a time of widespread skill shortages and freedom from location, workforce mobility increases. These decisions are not necessarily based, as they once were, on advancement but instead on work-life integration and opportunity.
When work no longer works, people move to where the work works for them.
The cost
Productivity focuses on efficiency, but more efficiency is never enough.
How we lead and manage organisations is as much a technology as AI, yet less attention is paid to management innovation. How work is designed, arranged, and organised — how it flows — is critical to the innovation and creativity needed in the workplace. Relentlessly organising for efficiency delivers marginal performance returns and damages the future sustainability of our organisations. Workforce burnout is a symptom of failed organisational design that will worsen if the underlying cause is not addressed.
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