“Burn, burn brightly until it goes out”, or What is fraught with emotional burnout of your employees

How I wanted to figure out what is cheaper - to fire a burnt-out employee, “cure” or try to prevent burnout altogether, and what came of it.

Now a small introduction, where this topic was born from.

I almost forgot how to write. First there is no time; then it seems that everything you can/want to write about is obvious, and then you hear a story from a colleague from a well-known company who says that on Friday at 10 pm their CEO, in all seriousness, clarifies: “I was here in the development department 5 minutes ago. Why is it still only 10 pm, and there is no one in the office already?

Comrade General, I have to upset you in advance - I have extremely bad news for you, dude.

So let's get started. I have divided this mini-article into 5 parts:

1. Terminology. It is very important to understand the exact definitions of a particular characteristic, because often many of these terms are used completely incorrectly.
2. About developers. I have been working in IT almost all my life (with the exception of a year in logistics in my first year at the university), so I reacted to a friend’s remark about the development department. And that is why we will talk about programmers, managers, etc. - people who form these same departments.
3. About professional burnout. But this will be applicable to everyone outside the IT world.
4. About motivation and involvement. But this will be applicable in other areas of life (besides work)
5. Conclusions. A part that you can read right away, skipping the previous five, and immediately go to apply in your team. But if you suddenly want to refresh yourself with an evidence base or interesting facts, then it is better to leave it all the same in the end.

Part 1. Terminology

Efficiency - getting maximum results at minimum cost.

Performance - the ratio of the actual result (measurable indicator - the so-called "performance criterion") to the planned one.

Concept "productivity" comes from the word "product". As you know, a product (thing, object, project, service) is created by a person in the process of activity. And a person who creates a valuable and useful product with high productivity can be called productive.

Professional burnout - full or partial loss of efficiency in the workplace due to increasing emotional, and then physical exhaustion.

Part 2. About developers

Considering that we do not work in a state structure, we do not have the concept of a normalized working day from 9:00 to 17:00. Looking at my guys, who arrive on average around 10:00-11:00 and leave after 18:00-19:00, and look quite good at the same time, I can conclude that they are in trouble with their work schedule. Undoubtedly, there are situations in which there is an urgent need to fix something or quickly complete the unfinished, but this is not-re-gulyar-but.

And now, attention.

4-5 hours is the pure efficiency time of the average developer. This is fine.

At this place, you don’t need to grab your head and lament how little it is, but what is it, the working day is at least 8 hours, you have to work, etc. and so on.

First, who is meant by the "average developer"? A programmer who writes excellent (not always, but often, haha) working code, closes sprints, goes to rallies, drinks coffee, dine (or not), smokes with the boys (or not), here is a list of small joys that an ordinary person allows himself for a day.

Secondly, programmers think differently than other people. This does not mean that they are necessarily smarter, more logical and rational than others, but there are differences. Not so long ago, scientists began to study the work of the brain of programmers and came to some interesting conclusions.

A person thinking about source code has five different areas of the brain active, mainly responsible for language processing, attention, logical and associative thinking, and memory. FIVE. Of course, further research is required in this area, but it is difficult to find an activity that requires more brain power and constant learning than programming.

Plus the first to the second, we get that 4-5 hours a day is NORMAL.

There is a good time tracker for developers - WakaTime. This is not an advertisement now, it's just that before this article I was never interested in such things, what was shown first, then I liked it, lol.

WakaTime presents detailed statistics on what the developer was doing on a particular day or week - what projects he worked on, what languages ​​he used, what files he made changes to.

In general, with the permission of a very good version developer:

• his team leader
• head of the domain in which it works
• Forbes
• clients with which it integrates APIs
• his mom and me

I publish his two-week statistics on writing code and working with it. As we can see, on average, about the same 4-5 hours a day in its pure form.

Again, sometimes there are days or weeks when the number of hours increases. This is also normal, provided that it is not a permanent story. Let's go further.

Part 3. About professional burnout

“Occupational burnout syndrome is included in the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases”

It seems that we are approaching an era of careful concern for the psychological state of people - this is very good. The World Health Organization plans to start developing evidence-based guidelines for mental health in the workplace. But while they plan...

Let's go back to August 2019, in which directors ask why it is at midnight that employees are not in the office.

In order for employees to feel good, sleep well, and spend time comfortably at work, you need to take care of this. If the system includes overtime, a tense situation in the team, etc., it usually ends with burnout.

So. Symptoms of burnout (we write down, remember, catch in the conversations and behavior of colleagues, sound the alarm):

• growing indifference to their duties and what is happening at work
• growth of negativism in relation both to work in general and to colleagues
• feeling of own professional failure, dissatisfaction with work
• increased levels of cynicism and irritability

What affects the above states of an employee? Going around the sharp corners of the fragile individuality of each individual, basically everything revolves around these four points:

• there are no clear transparent goals in the work
• a lot of work vs little rest
• overstrain due to the number of tasks, the toxic environment in the company, etc.
• lack of adequate remuneration for their work

The guys from My Circle not so long ago did a study that showed that more than 50% of IT specialists have experience of professional burnout, and half of them have gone through this experience 2 or more times.

For the employer, such burnout of employees has quite serious consequences: up to 20% of employees are regularly in a similar state, only 25% of burnouts remain in their previous place of work. This means that a fairly large part of the employees work extremely inefficiently and interfere with others.

Here, finally, the story got to the topic of what is cheaper - to fire a burnt-out employee, to cure, or to try to prevent burnout altogether.

If you have not done this yet due to lack of interest in this topic or other circumstances, I recommend the following.

1. Go to your HR and ask them to calculate how much it costs to search - hire - exit each employee
2. Add to this the monthly expenses of the company for his salary, taxes, rent of the premises in which his workplace is located, tea/coffee/snacks that he drinks/eats every day, medical insurance, etc.
3. Add the time of employees from the team to which the person goes, spent on introducing him to the course of the project
4. Add the probability (in financial terms) that the employee will not pass the probationary period
5. Take into account the fact that within six months after his departure, the employee is not fully effective

You will get a very impressive figure that you should always keep in mind before the final decision to fire an employee. Hiring each new person and their further adaptation will cost much more than the steps to treat burnout or its beginning symptoms in current employees.

What is the risk of employees getting into such a situation?

A sick leave with a diagnosis of "emotional burnout" can be taken from January 1, 2022, if changes are made to Russian legislation. There are still two years before this date, and there are already a lot of burnout people.

The most annoying thing is that of those who went through the experience of severe burnout, only 25% kept their previous job. Think about it, out of 100% of people who burn out at work, 75% leave the company.

Why is it necessary to take preventive measures to prevent burnout?

The problems of professional burnout for each individual employee are not limited to inefficient work and subsequent dismissal. If someone burns out nearby, this also affects the overall efficiency of the guys in the department, and even in the company as a whole. Half of those surveyed said they had experienced professional burnout among colleagues. One in three noted that the burnout of a colleague interfered with their work.

In addition to a decrease in productivity, which will clearly affect the quality and quantity of tasks performed by an employee, he will start to get sick. Our body is so arranged that a long stay in a stressful situation begins to affect physical well-being - the so-called psychosomatics. The organism tries to weaken the condition that is difficult for it, and one of the options for liberation is a physical illness. The solution to such a problem does not fit into the banal "stop being nervous - and everything will pass."

Historically, the category of stress includes classic psychosomatic diseases (“holy seven” - “holy seven”): bronchial asthma, ulcerative colitis, essential hypertension, neurodermatitis, rheumatoid arthritis, gastric ulcer and duodenal ulcer. Currently, these diseases also include psychosomatic thyrotoxicosis, type 2 diabetes mellitus, obesity, and somatoform behavioral disorders.

The latter are frequent companions in everyday life: a feeling of incomplete inhalation, stiffness of the chest during breathing, stabbing pains and pressure in the heart, palpitations, sweating of the palms and trembling in the body, non-localized migratory pain in the abdomen, etc.

All of the above are serious health problems that can progress to even more serious illnesses.

Do you want to be responsible for the fact that your employees, being under constant stress at work, begin to constantly and seriously get sick? I think not.

There are actually two scenarios here:

1. If you humanly do not feel sorry for the people who work for you, if you have a lot of time and money, then get ready to constantly invest in recruiting and adapting new employees to replace burnt ones (I do not recommend)
2. Learn to manage the process of burnout, and as a maximum, try not to allow it at all. This will save a lot of material and moral strength for the whole company (I recommend)

My suggestion on how to start treating employees:

1. Find out the cause of impending or ongoing burnout at trusting regular meetings 1-1
2. If the problem is in the “operational” activity →
   • give other tasks
   • transfer a person to another department
   • engage in something other than normal activities
3. If overtime is a problem → at least take a vacation of at least two weeks, as a maximum, strengthen the team of the person in which regular overtime occurs

For example, I had an amazing case of how we accidentally healed tired employees in an outsourcing company who had been working on the same project for 8 years. When we decided to invest in young people in order to raise good and right employees (for ourselves, ha ha), we launched a development course. The programmers, teachers and examiners for this course were just the guys from that eight-year project. The fire in the eyes, the thirst for activity, the proposals for new options for teaching the "younger" mind to the mind soon indicated that there was no trace of the symptoms of burnout.

Part 4. About motivation and involvement

An adult cannot be re-educated. However, it can be carefully directed in the right direction.

The involvement of a person directly depends on his faith in the company and its leaders. But this belief cannot be achieved if you do not assemble a team of like-minded people who share the values ​​of the company. People don't come to work to fit the tables. They don't like being looked at under a microscope. And the formal rating system for a certain type of activity, especially creative, unique, plays a negative, not a positive role. People stop working when they lose interest. Or they work “not the way they should”, if there was never any interest.

An unmotivated employee will not strive to do more and better.

There are several reasons for the lack of motivation:

• inadequate pay;
• uncomfortable atmosphere in the team;
• poor relationship with management;
• lack of career opportunities;
• the very nature of the work - the employee may be uninteresting, bored, or this work is generally “not his”.

Have you noticed that the reasons are in some places very similar to what I described in the part about burnout? Pam Pam.

A man who was pleasant enough to me in spirit by the name of Adizes, answering a question about how to motivate employees, said: “Take motivated employees and do not demotivate them.”

If the first one is easy enough to deal with if there are more or less intelligent HRs in the company, then the second one will have to work.

I love reading all sorts of studies on motivation. For example, there is the Gallup Institute, an American public opinion institute founded in 1935 that conducts regular public opinion polls on issues of domestic and foreign policy. Gallup enjoys international prestige as one of the most trusted sources of information.

If you had enough of his authority, then take the following information for reflection - in another study, it was found that the involvement and motivation of an employee by 70% depends on the actions of the management.

Here are a few rules for a boss who can and, most importantly, wants to increase productivity and motivation:

• take care of the balance of work and personal life of your employees. Man is not a robot, but even robots break down. Nothing drains a good employee like overwork
• follow the next very important rule - treat people the way they would like you to treat them.
• Remember that communication at work is a two-way process. It is very useful not only to express your dissatisfaction with a person, but also to build communication with him in such a way as to receive feedback about your management style and from him
• be straight forward. Managers who honestly talk about the plans and goals of the company, in the eyes of employees, acquire the image of a manager who respects his subordinates.

Part 5. Conclusions

Summarizing all of the above, I can say that no one is immune from the sudden loss of motivation of their employees or from the gradual onset of burnout. However, you can try to prevent this. Here are a few points that I suggest you pay attention to. This is not a panacea, but regular compliance with some rules will help you keep the situation with the emotional state of your employees under control.

1. Collecting feedback on the state of an employee at work is a must have. There are many tools for this at different levels of interactions - retrospectives after sprints, 1-1 team leads with the developer, etc.
2. Try to spread information about what is happening in your company as transparently as possible to all its employees. Transparency leads to a deeper understanding of what is happening, the trust of employees, increases loyalty to the company and confidence in the future.
3. Arrange periodically anonymous Q&A sessions with your employees. Announce the event with a link to anonymously fill out the form with any questions that concern colleagues, further answers to which you will publicly announce at the event. Remember that if someone is silent about a situation, this does not mean that he does not think about it. And also the fact that the burnout of one employee affects every third in the team, and quite predictably it will come out for one of them soon.
4. Burnout is cheaper to treat. Slightly less cheaper to avoid. It is quite expensive to fire a burnt-out person and look for a replacement in his place.

I wish everyone no overload, a good atmosphere in the teams and mutually pleasant cooperation 🙂

Source: habr.com