Companies should start annual reporting on burnout

September 10, 2023 7:46 AM

In the future, the most innovative companies will no longer report on just annual profits and losses, or greenhouse gas emissions. They will also publicly disclose general wellness markers. The last thing employees need right now is more tracking software. Yet, stress and burnout are different: Because of the stigma, people are hesitant to discuss early signs or worsening symptoms. Many employees might not even be aware of the initial indicators of burnout risk. That limits the extent to which employers can help. The employees’ worries around job security are valid; the solution is to focus on objective, nameless data capture. What executives need is anonymized group data on burnout risk: something that protects the individual’s privacy, but is also specific, measurable, and immediate. These real-time markers could, for example, be heart rate- or heart rate variability-related measures, which indicate stress at the workplace. Or they could be emotion-driven: conversational sentiment analysis tools that, with audio, can discern whether the general feeling in meetings is one of fear, defensiveness, happiness, or some other mode.
posted by folklore724 (51 comments total)

I’m sure this will in no way be used to harm disabled enployees. /s
posted by vim876 at 7:52 AM on September 10, 2023 [61 favorites]

Oh my god just let people take anonymous surveys that ask if you have the symptoms of burnout, have employees at risk of burnout, or have objections to various company policies (or specific implementations thereof) that are going to cause burnout, if you actually care about burnout and not selling this data for profit.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:13 AM on September 10, 2023 [23 favorites]

In the future, the most innovative companies will no longer report on just annual profits and losses, or greenhouse gas emissions. They will also publicly disclose general wellness markers.

Riiiiight.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:15 AM on September 10, 2023 [26 favorites]

Re anonymized data: I guess it's nice that people are talking about it. Nearly all the data collection that's been instituted recently - Amazon workers, policing, teachers, kids - has been used to target individuals rather than assess org health as a whole.

Even if one were to promise anonymity, at this point it might be too late. I would guess that most workers probably don't trust their employers to have both the sincerity and the competence to guarantee anonymity.
posted by splitpeasoup at 8:15 AM on September 10, 2023 [32 favorites]

Me, who spends much of their working day feeling jaded to the point of uselessness; no, thank you. I need a long vacation and some solutions to some long term stressors. Not a survey which at best will indicate that we might need more vacation days. And probably to stop drinking coffee or something.
posted by aesop at 8:18 AM on September 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

"Virtuous systems will not protect you from vicious participants"
posted by lalochezia at 8:26 AM on September 10, 2023 [39 favorites]

I don't have access to read the whole thing but...I can definitely imagine the "we force our employees to wear trackers" piece and I can definitely picture a "then we fire anyone who seems like they might use their health insurance more than average" piece but I'm having a hard time imagining the incentive to publicly report any of it
posted by potrzebie at 8:27 AM on September 10, 2023 [17 favorites]

aesop, as long as your employer can keep you working away, they'll give you exactly as many vacation days as are necessary so you stay feeling jaded to the point of uselessness.
posted by tigrrrlily at 8:27 AM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

just let people take anonymous surveys

The last time (many years ago) that I took the anonymous employee survey at work I said, among other things, that I felt somewhat underappreciated by my manager. A few days later a gift card with a nice note saying "thank you for all you do!" magically appeared on my desk. I have never participated in the anonymous survey since.
posted by Serene Empress Dork at 8:32 AM on September 10, 2023 [57 favorites]

Even if one were to promise anonymity, at this point it might be too late. I would guess that most workers probably don't trust their employers to have both the sincerity and the competence to guarantee anonymity.

Or the integrity to guarantee that someone in a management chain wouldn't find some way to abuse the data.
posted by Dr. Twist at 8:35 AM on September 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

.... heart rate- or heart rate variability-related measures ... conversational sentiment analysis ...

This is some real Big Brother shit. I keep my HR data hidden from my Strava buddies, no way in hell would I give that up to an employer. And "conversational sentiment analysis" means, like, recording all employee conversations. Was this written by a CEO or something?

A CEO explains why he believes that in the future, the most innovative companies will no longer report on just annual profits.

Oh! Yeah, it was. HARD PASS.
posted by grumpybear69 at 8:40 AM on September 10, 2023 [19 favorites]

Useless exercise unless they - THEY - plan on making corporate changes to ameliorate the burnout.

What we have in our org are slews of programs thrown at us that each individual would have to devote our limited free time or money resources to fit in to our lives. I despise it - “sure, we know we cause stress in your ability to take care of yourselves and your families - you need to be more mindful. eat better. get more cardio. improve your sleep. be more grateful. We’ve outsourced our stress management to YOU… but, no, we will not give you more time off / better pay / flexible or part time hours to actually relieve those stressors. Tho any markers of burnout that show up at work will be part of your annual review.”
posted by Silvery Fish at 8:48 AM on September 10, 2023 [29 favorites]

In the future, the most innovative companies will no longer report on just annual profits and losses, or greenhouse gas emissions. They will also publicly disclose general wellness markers.

Narrator: No, they will not.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 9:11 AM on September 10, 2023 [14 favorites]

None of this is going to work until corporate leadership has incentives other than shareholder value. Until worker satisfaction, environmental responsibility, community service, et al are rewarded at the highest levels, in a tangible way, it's nothing but PR.
posted by panglos at 9:14 AM on September 10, 2023 [28 favorites]

None of this is going to work until corporate leadership has incentives other than shareholder value.

This is it.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:31 AM on September 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

You want to combat burnout? Track how employees are using their leave for signs that they are not adequately using it - things like hours surrendered at the end of the year, blocks of leave late in the year, and such - and then hold management accountable when that happens.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:33 AM on September 10, 2023 [13 favorites]

Burnout is on the rise: Employees are recovering from the pandemic, while also navigating an often-exhausting new world of hybrid work. The Great Resignation may have come to an end, but the Great Burnout is looming ever larger: Workers all over the world are unprecedentedly stressed.

Early on in the pandemic, lots and lots of organizations scrambled to make it feasible for employees to work from home; the alternative was offices having to shut down because they turned into plague sites.

As the pandemic wore on, lots and lots of organizations found that once remote work had had a few months to settle in as the new normal, their workforces were actually more productive when working from home than they had been before that was an option. One of the really big factors here is the inherent reduction in micromanagement: turns out, if you give people more autonomy they work better and feel better about their work. Who'd have thought?

But the ruling classes have now decided that the pandemic is over, and it's time for everybody to come back to the office whether that actually makes any sense or it doesn't, and it frequently doesn't. One of the things that makes "hybrid work" so exhausting for so many people is that so much of it is driven by a completely arbitrary attendance requirement, imposed as iron policy from above, that makes no sense if you're trying to understand how it could possibly benefit either the businesses or their employees.

Because of course it doesn't benefit the businesses or their employees. It benefits the fragile egos in the C suite by propping up their own mistaken view of their centrality to the success of the enterprise and restoring their customary opportunities to run petty power trips.

Don't it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? It's going to take decades for most people to fall resignedly back into the pre-pandemic workplace stupor.
posted by flabdablet at 9:38 AM on September 10, 2023 [33 favorites]

Oh, and every fucking thing either freezing or flooding or being on fire isn't fucking helping either.
posted by flabdablet at 9:39 AM on September 10, 2023 [12 favorites]

An erection sensor for top executives with a real-time chart you can check online and on CNN would be nice. I'd like to know how many sex-obsessed men are in leadership, so it'd be useful data when looking for a job. It would be anonymous, obviously.

Also: I heard Nissan has developed the technology to track drivers having sex, so this would be good to see some stats on executive business trips and retreats. Are they working for their money, or are they just fucking around? The stockholders would like to know! Be innovative!

Oh, would that data be too personal?
posted by UN at 9:54 AM on September 10, 2023 [22 favorites]

We have government regulatory agencies that were created to monitor and prevent workplace injuries. These could and should be fully staffed, and their scopes should expand as technologies, workplace practices, and cultural understandings of illness and disability expand and change. The role for companies in this process should be paying taxes to fund these agencies, and complying with their reporting requirements and their rules.

Regulatory agencies exist as a response to powerful shop floor organizing - sit down strikes and walk-outs and sabotage. Government regulation was created (in part) as a tool to reduce the worst offenses of employers in order to maintain 'labor peace'. So a role of us workers can be to create collective pressure on our employers to make work less punishing - to force them to stop burning us out. If we create a big enough crisis, the employer responds by backing down, and/or the government responds by better regulating the industry.
posted by latkes at 10:15 AM on September 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

We’ve outsourced our stress management to YOU… but, no, we will not give you more time off / better pay / flexible or part time hours to actually relieve those stressors.

This, 100x. In my experience, companies "discuss burnout" by sending me fatuous articles about self-care while understaffing continues to run rampant, leaving employees overworked and without enough time to read those useless articles.

What it comes down to is, all of the things that need to happen to truly eliminate burnout cost money and very likely hurt the bottom line. So of course that'll never happen.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2023 [17 favorites]

Burnout is a management problem - people do not burn out, they _are burned out_ - and exposing management failures is something most companies won't do in the absence of regulatory requirements to do so.
posted by mhoye at 10:55 AM on September 10, 2023 [22 favorites]

Just another proposal for another bureaucratic hurdle rather than actually listening to employees and giving them good pay, time off, and better working conditions. For the cost of this monitoring they could just give their workers all of those basic benefits that are the heart of most worker stress and labor disputes.
posted by fontgoddess at 10:58 AM on September 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

Years ago I worked at United Health Group, and one of our employee surveys had questions about corporate citizenship--stuff like "Do you think we give back to the community enough?". Naturally, I read it as "Do I think the executives raping everyone for premiums while adding little to no value should at least spend more on no-strings-attached charity?"

The solution to the negative responses the execs received to that section of the survey was to create a lot of Saturday volunteer activities.

They also used the negative feedback in other sections to shit on low- and mid-level managers, who were generally not the problem.

As a department, we agreed that we would never do the survey again.
posted by Ickster at 11:01 AM on September 10, 2023 [10 favorites]

This would sound a lot better if I didn’t already think they were using low turnover data to justify return to office policies that nobody wants. What do you suppose they will do when HR thinks burnout rates are too low?
posted by pwnguin at 11:02 AM on September 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

Also -- if you're a "leader" and you have no fucking idea how the people in your organization are doing without a generic survey, you're a shitty leader.
posted by Ickster at 11:04 AM on September 10, 2023 [15 favorites]

It's as if the Maintenance Phase podcast hasn't spent much of its time analyzing and debunking the wellness-industrial complex.
posted by Halloween Jack at 11:24 AM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Creepy hypnosis voice: There is no burnout in Ba Sing Se
posted by Jacen at 11:57 AM on September 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

My current employer, a large European conglomerate, does a "pulse" survey every month where you get to rate your mood from 1-10. The number is heavily scrutinized with a lot of navel gazing and now the C-level management has a target number in their yearly goals (e.g "marketing pulse should be 7.5 or higher"). So their compensation hinges on it now!

Of course, people swing their numbers wildly and how anyone even thinks it's a statistically stable number is beyond me.

And "conversational sentiment analysis" means, like, recording all employee conversations. Was this written by a CEO or something?

If you comb enough Microsoft documentation, it's all over their cloud software. Right now they're offering it for Azure/Dynamics customers, as in "know when your clients are starting to get pissed off".

But you can be damned sure it will eventually be a plugin you can buy for your company's Outlook and Teams backend. You think that the live captioning feature they introduced in Teams Video Chat was just for convenience? Oh, did we mention that MS also owns LinkedIn? Hope you're not chatting with recruiters behind our backs now...
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:59 AM on September 10, 2023 [8 favorites]

I know it's not isolated to healthcare, but as a healthcare worker, if I get more goddamn free* cookie** in the breakroom as a "reward" for me and all my colleagues' hard work (esp since start of the Pando), I will burn it all down

*or discounted yoga classes for A WEEK
**also applicable: donut/one month of Headspace/pizza
posted by Kitteh at 12:12 PM on September 10, 2023 [14 favorites]

*or discounted yoga classes for A WEEK
**also applicable: donut/one month of Headspace/pizza

The egg bar is coveted as fuck.
posted by Ickster at 12:37 PM on September 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

nooooooooooooo

no
no
no

noooooooooo
posted by praemunire at 12:47 PM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I kind of dream of a future where this company store model is discarded and health and work are kept as separate as church and state should be.
posted by Selena777 at 1:07 PM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

I get more goddamn free* cookie**
*or discounted yoga classes for A WEEK
**also applicable: donut/one month of Headspace/pizza

So... no Waffle Parties?
posted by pwnguin at 1:12 PM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

Psycho/sociopaths are basically fearless and imperturbable until the consequences of their actions are right on top of them, and they will be (even more) heavily favored for advancement by any such system — which will probably be seen as a point in its favor when upper management realizes it.
posted by jamjam at 1:28 PM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

"None of this is going to work until corporate leadership has incentives other than shareholder value." I mean, that's a dodge. They don't really mean those shareholders, they mean themselves. (For the nth time, any responsibilities to shareholder value are not obliged except in a sale. There is no such duty otherwise.)
posted by Lesser Shrew at 2:33 PM on September 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

There is no such duty otherwise

It's perhaps the single-most intentionally misunderstood concept in all of business. I mean, shit, for pseudo-proof just look at bankruptcies -- where do shareholders appear? At the absolute ass-end of the line, because "maximizing shareholder value" is mendacious bullshit 99% of the time, and should generally be understood to mean "maximizing executive (and their cronies!) pay" instead.
posted by aramaic at 3:04 PM on September 10, 2023 [6 favorites]

I have told my manager explicitly in written words that I was burning out on a project and a listing of the structural and resource reasons for it and … it was ignored and I eventually quit. So the idea that somehow the bosses will want to monitor for it and like do something is laughable. Unions or government regulation maybe they could do something. But corporations on their own would only use such systems to discriminate and surveil, especially disabled folks and anyone who doesn’t conform to the personality styles of the bosses.
posted by R343L at 4:04 PM on September 10, 2023 [7 favorites]

So the idea that somehow the bosses will want to monitor for it and like do something is laughable

Anyone suspected of suffering from burnout will be required to attend 20 hours a week of corporate mindfulness seminars on top of their regular workload.
posted by Blue Jello Elf at 4:33 PM on September 10, 2023 [18 favorites]

heart rate- or heart rate variability-related measures

Also handy for tracking whether your employees are in deep vs. REM sleep.
posted by credulous at 4:36 PM on September 10, 2023

Also handy for tracking whether your employees are in deep vs. REM sleep.

Decades ago, I worked at a small EDA firm (I am judging you by whether you know what I mean by EDA); after about two months I learned how to sleep while sitting up. The real trick is to figure out how to situate your body AND THEN hold a sheaf of papers in your hand.

...if you fall too far into serious slumber, you'll drop the papers, and that'll wake you up. As long as you surf the edge of sleep you'll hold the papers securely and look like someone who's spending time deeply thinking about the work output of their fellows (or, possibly, whether the parasitic resistors you're looking at are sufficient to be put into the model).
posted by aramaic at 5:34 PM on September 10, 2023 [4 favorites]

We have legal requirements in the UK to monitor and protect staff from stress and mental ill health, the same as for physical injuries.

It's a fucking joke. Couple of years ago, after a bout of covid, I ended up having two further respiratory illnessess for a few day each; chesty cough, extreme fatigue etc. With that and covid, it meant I took a grand total of 9 days sick leave that year, which triggered an HR 'discussion'. Basically 'oh, we want to help get to the bottom of this to improve your attendance at work'. Despite having worked there for 20 years, and virtually no sick leave the previous few years. And lots of probing questions about my stress level, and a requirement that any further time off would also prompt an HR meeting. With of course, the implied threat that entailed. Like catching a debilitating virus from my kids (who also were sick a few days before I was) is a fucking choice. It sent my stress levels even higher, which were already rediculous because of our staffing shortage and falling real pay. Nobody I know trusts HR to actually have their back, because everyone has some story about how HR chose to protect senior management instead of the staff.

So even when modern HR are required to mouth the platitudes about how they care for your welfare, they really don't - they just want you to be a machine that doesn't break down, ever, and doing anything about it - like say, not calling you repeatedly with emergencies when you're on holiday, or paying you a living wage, or hiring enough staff to actually do the work instead of just parcelling it out to the suckers remaining when someone quits is not something that's going to happen.

Oh look, I have an email about how to look after my mental health by doing a bunch of stuff in my own time that I already have too little of because of the goddamn impossible workload. (yes, I have thought about quitting, but I have little faith it's any better anywhere else from the horror stories from fellow IT people.)
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 5:49 PM on September 10, 2023 [18 favorites]

Oh, would that data be too personal?

The world would be a lot better if execs had to strap on a plethysmography rig before showing up to work. Fewer execs, for one.
posted by aramaic at 6:01 PM on September 10, 2023

Is your workplace 'wellness washing'? Here's how to tell

“Day to day, a huge part of people’s wellness at work comes from autonomy, clarity and empowerment,” adds mental health expert, Mark Butler. “This can often be a bigger issue than excessive work. Many employees find that if they can’t get clarification on what’s required of them, or they’re being micromanaged, this has a big impact on their wellbeing.”

posted by audi alteram partem at 7:25 PM on September 10, 2023 [3 favorites]

Also handy for tracking whether your employees are in deep vs. REM sleep.

Executive sleep habits should absolutely be tracked, especially the many CEOs who competitively boast about their lack of sleep ("5 hours a day here!" / "That's nothing, I do 4 hours!" / "3 hours and I take a jog at 5am, assholes!"). Show me the data. If it turns out you're taking hours of naps throughout the day, like everyone I've met who brags about their short sleeping hours, I will absolutely continue to not invest in your company.

Data does not lie. Unless it's sleeping.
posted by UN at 10:50 PM on September 10, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm in burnout recovery and am absolutely cynical about this. Right now, the current state of burnout awareness on the employer side is "sorry, you're doing stress wrong". It's individual, not institutional (as far as the employer is concerned). Until burnout is a) viewed as a very real mental illness (not just a phenomenon), and b) the thing that is creating this illness takes ownership of that (the employer), then all the data in the world isn't going to make a lick of difference.
posted by eekernohan at 6:19 AM on September 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

About a decade ago I worked for an all-remote company that had hit the 40-50 employee point, where everyone's used to informal mechanisms but the scale means lots of stuff starts falling through the cracks. I started prototyping a tool that would allow everybody to do a quick, low-friction "mood check" in IRC. Happy/Stressed/Sad/Tired face kind of stuff, nothing complicated. The idea was to make it easier to understand the overall mood and even start to correlate it with things like project-related stressors.

Banging out a quick first pass was easy, at which point folks started brainstorming stuff like sentiment analysis of the chat streams, or even emails, to gather better data even when people weren't explicitly "checking in." At which point it became obvious that there isn't really a way to build a system like this that isn't an engine of abuse — all you can really do is trust that the people who hold the data don't abuse it. To the company's credit, I talked about these objections, said it was a fundamental problem we didn't have the time or internal expertise to figure out a solution for, and we all stopped working on the project and just invested in building an actual HR department, which was less exciting for devs but much better for the company.

The solutions proposed in the article are even more invasive monitoring of employees leavened with good intentions. It's disheartening to see that the Best Ideas ten years after we hit that problem still amount to: "biomonitoring but BY GOOD LEADERS"
posted by verb at 10:43 AM on September 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

Shareholder value may not be legally mandated, but it is very much the stick used to beat us with in my experience working for a large US corporation since the 90s.
posted by soelo at 11:39 AM on September 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

Burnout is YOUR problem, bitch! Go meditate for a while or quit, that's all we got for you. Oh, excuse me, lots of "wellness" emails, because I get those to go meditate or whatever with the diet or Walker Tracker.

I've also stopped filling out "anonymous" surveys. Once I found out "oh, we sent all of your responses to your supervisors but anonymously" (and we have small teams, so it's pretty to figure out that I'm the only whiny unhappy one), forget it.

I've been burned out for so long--about ten years now--that I should be a scientific study all by myself. Everything here is super goddamned stressful and upsetting and it's panic and fires every day, and that's just the overall office climate/job and not just my own personal fucking hell of not being what anyone wants out of me. I'd also like to note that if I'm out of the office for more than 1-2 days it's not worth the amount of cleanup one has to do most of the time. I have like 3.5 months of vacation time and I just piddle out 2 days a month because it's too hard not to be here.

I felt pretty damn good the last few days and then I had to go back to work again today and remember, "oh yeah, I'm total shit again." It's like undergoing the gom jabbar test. I do plenty of things to rest and entertain and distract myself outside of work, but there's nothing that can be done about the fact that I work in a stress pit and can't find anywhere else to go and for 40 hours a week I've got the gom jabbar going on.
posted by jenfullmoon at 4:58 PM on September 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Until burnout is a) viewed as a very real mental illness (not just a phenomenon), and b) the thing that is creating this illness takes ownership of that (the employer), then all the data in the world isn't going to make a lick of difference.

A) won't make a lick of difference: illness can be blamed on individuals, after all, and anyone with any sort of disability knows that employers will absolutely just fire you and be done with it if they think you might cost them more resources or money.

B) is the important thing. And I think it's worth noting that burnout isn't a mental illness so much as a mental injury: the genesis of it is external, not internal, which is why high rates of burnout should be viewed as if they were high rates of any other type of work-induced injury.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the solution is to loop OSHA into this problem, too, and then give it more teeth. That's going to take a lot of agitating and political will to accomplish, though.
posted by sciatrix at 7:46 AM on September 12, 2023 [7 favorites]

B) is the important thing. And I think it's worth noting that burnout isn't a mental illness so much as a mental injury: the genesis of it is external, not internal, which is why high rates of burnout should be viewed as if they were high rates of any other type of work-induced injury.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the solution is to loop OSHA into this problem, too, and then give it more teeth. That's going to take a lot of agitating and political will to accomplish, though.

You know what? I hadn't thought if this quite this way before. And I agree. Thank you for this!
posted by eekernohan at 11:18 AM on September 13, 2023 [5 favorites]