“Burnout is what happens when you try to avoid being human for too long,” Zendesk says, quoting author and singer-songwriter Michael Gungor. And far too many people are apparently trying to avoid being human, according to the company, citing McKinsey data.
During the webinar “Beating Burnout & Boosting Resilience with Dr. Jacinta Jimenez” on Dec. 21, Jeannette Leong, VP of marketing at Zendesk and Dr. Jacinta Jimenez, author of the book Burnout Fix, a psychologist and leadership coach, discussed all things related to burnout.
The issue is one that not only employees, but also employers, ought to be aware of. After all, the consequences of burnout often lead to poor performance, decreased morale, and less creativity.
Viewers of the webinar learned: The burnout gap impacts women at a greater rate than men; the three components of burnout, how to recognize burnout in yourself and your team; job mismatches that tend to lead to burnout (and how to buffer against such mismatches); and the findings of Google’s Project Aristotle on how high-performing teams succeed.
Leong kicked off the webinar, saying: “It makes sense since the pandemic burnout has hit an all-time high.” She noted that McKinsey found that an average of one in four employees surveyed experienced symptoms of burnout. “That’s a lot. In fact, our survey showed that a burnout gap seems to exist when looking at gender. And it’s impacting women at a greater rate than men. And, get this, in [2022], 42 percent of women felt burnt out while productivity across corporate America was at an all-time high,” she said.
That, she noted, “adds to an already hectic workflow.” She added: “Recognizing burnout in yourself and in your team is really critical for your personal and professional success.” With that, she introduced Dr. Jimenez.
Looking at the findings of the on-site poll, the guest speaker said the issue is “very relevant to all of you and something that I’ve been thinking, reading, writing, and researching about for some time now.”
She grounded the presentation in an acronym, saying: This is VUCA. It’s used in a lot of academic and business circles to describe the world and all the work we’re living and operating in. So it stands for volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.” She added: “Those hard words kind of resonate and these are brought on by really exciting advances in technology.”
She explained: “We have hyper connectivity, increased globalization, artificial intelligence, machine learning. We’re also creating unprecedented amounts of information every day. There’s in-person, major work, remote work, and hybrid work. These are just like the tip of the iceberg of things that are happening in our world.”
Those are “really exciting advances that you can adapt to and [they start] with: How do you evolve?”
She went on to say: “We’re living and working in an uncertain world. And at a certain time in the world. And what that does, if left unchecked, is it slowly but surely taxes our psychological resources. Which can lead to poor performance, more mistakes on the job, less creativity, less innovation, and decreased morale: All things that are not going to allow us or our workplaces to thrive and be vibrant.”
That, she said, was going on even before the COVID-19 pandemic. “The World Health Organization went as far as to recognize it as an occupational phenomenon, describing it as a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.,” she noted.
Despite “all these consequences,” she said: “I think there’s a silver lining here. And that silver lining is that this increase in burnout has shined a spotlight on the importance of well-being and pro resilience mindset skills and behaviors in order to thrive in a new world of work.”