On Burnout, Barry, Stay Interviews, and “Psychological Safety”

True story. About a month ago I was in the checkout line buying dog food when the woman behind me asked what kind of dog we had. “Bernadoodle” I said with a smile. Her face slid to an anguished look when she said, “A burnt doodle. How did that happen?”

It’s easy to wonder if worker burnout is an old concept that is suddenly in the media because we now have a name for it. More likely, though, it’s another outcome of our ever-shrinking labor force, and maybe too a symptom of the best workers working too hard to make up for the rest. Plus there are brazen employers who are posting jobs like this:

• Shopify wants a product manager who can “keep up with an unrelenting pace.”
• Software company Rilla tells applicants not to join unless they are eager to work 70 hours per week…in person.
• Solace, a healthcare company, tells job-seekers, “If you’re looking for work/life balance, this isn’t it.”[i]

What kind of a healthcare company is that?

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Further reading: What’s a Direct Route to Distinguishing Your Culture?

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Let’s Assume We’ve All Been There

Who among us hasn’t been fed up with our job, whether for a day or for so long that we abandon that job for another job? And re-reading the part above that young workers feel burnout more often reminds me of that four-letter word that is most associated with our massive baby boomer work group which is GRIT. That the baby boomer reputation is to show up on time and stay till the job is done, no facial expressions required. More than a few of us would say that succeeding generations are different.

Referencing a popular old movie, this is where Tom Hanks would whine that there’s no crying in baseball. But having said that, we’ve all wanted to raise a finger to our bosses or our jobs at least one time.

And the Best Recommended Solutions Are…

For employers, suggested solutions are to offer more time off, hold annual retreats, and offer an employee assistance program. And for our stressed-out employees it’s (1) seek support, (2) try a relaxing activity, (3) get some exercise, (4) get some sleep, and (5) practice mindfulness.[ii]

Ironically, employees who work for employers that offer unlimited time off tend to take fewer days off than a traditional PTO policy would offer, and those same employees lose out because their employers are never responsible for paying for unused vacation time.[iii] So these initially-appealing policies are a rip-off for most.

So There Is No Real Solution

Let’s suppose an employee…we’ll call her Teresa… leaves work after long days, goes home to prepare dinner, and then sits behind a closed door picking up her left-behind work while her family plays games or watches TV. And this happens at least three nights per week for a couple of months. An annual retreat won’t help, taking time off would likely deepen her guilt, and she’s unlikely to practice mindfulness. This is burnout at its worst, and whether she ultimately quits or freaks out in the office, she’s probably not performing her job well despite the hours she puts into it.

It Always Comes Back to the Supervisor-Employee Relationship

I’ve read five articles on how companies should manage employee burnout, and none of them said that employees should talk to their boss. This connects back to organizations designing what appears to be first-line leaders’ deliberate absence on solving turnover, on improving employee engagement, and now taking the lead to address employee burnout. Just as we think we can retain and engage employees with one-size-fits-all programs like pay, benefits, and ping pong tables, now we are turning to retreats and time off to address the most human of all emotions which is fear. Fear of failure, fear of being discovered as an imperfect employee, fear of failing to support our families, and the ultimate fear of losing our job.

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Further reading: Young Worker Safety Perceptions and Supervisor Trust

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Why “Psychological Safety” Is in Quotes

Being a big fan of the English language, I quiver when someone says “incentivize” when we already had the verb “incent”…or “more unique” when “unique” is not comparative, meaning it’s either one of a kind or it’s not. So “psychological safety” initially sounded to me like another invention of useless jargon to define something we already knew. But I was wrong.

McKinsey’s research defines psychological safety as feeling safe to take interpersonal risks, to speak up, to disagree openly, to surface concerns without fear of negative repercussions or pressure to sugarcoat bad news. They go on to say that psychological safety is both a driver of worker productivity and also that we have too little of it. McKinsey’s studies make clear that a psychological-safe environment improves retention, engagement, and more.^[iv]

So peeling back to our hard-worker Teresa who is frequently absent from her family’s lives, wouldn’t it make sense if she talked with her manager with hope of getting some work relief? Or at least being told that her job is safe, that her performance is above par, and that her manager is grateful for her efforts? And it’s likely, too, that her manager would reduce Teresa’s workload by eliminating some assignments, finding her some help, or helping her build additional skills so she can contribute the same or more with less stress?

This Is Another Reason Why Stay Interviews Work

I invented Stay Interviews with a top-selling book in 2012, inspired by an industrial psychology professor who sent me study after study that proved the number one reason employees stay or leave, or engage or disengage, is how much they trust their direct supervisor. Gallup data says the same. Stay Interviews’ purpose is that a manager will look each employee in the eye and ask why he stays, why he might leave, and what that manager can do to make things better. Stay Interviews’ accumulative benefit, though, is they crush down the door such that employees learn they can talk with their managers about important things that impact their work, that their manager’s door is always open, that they now have that psychological safety net when they need it.

Someone once told me there are only two kinds of meetings, did you do your work and here’s more work. Stay Interviews are a third kind of meeting, and a type of meeting that is long overdue.

Ready to Make Stay Interviews a Part of Your Retention Plan?

Email me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and let’s figure out how to implement Stay Interviews to start reducing turnover by 30% or more this year.

Dick Finnegan’s new book, Targeting Turnover: Making Managers Accountable to Win the Workforce Crisis, publishes this September. Pre-order your copy now to get ahead of the looming workforce retention challenge.

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[i] https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/job-listings-labor-market-373b4331?gaa_at=eafs&gaa_n=ASWzDAjxB0vrhY4rryJHdFuwvBFVUp8CL7AZb_86nj6s4z5eS1ZW36z8SsukhPUcSjU%3D&gaa_ts=68728ac6&gaa_sig=1gkSzV2vGMHIBdsVhpDQ3yTqMm_CBY3WV1eZT84R-AFBBLZC_I4L-E4htcsqZI7gKTo64IepGfpe8I8Zr7MA-A%3D%3D

[ii] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/adult-health/in-depth/burnout/art-20046642

[iii] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unlimited-vacation-bad-deal-companies-save-billions/

[iv] “What is psychological safety?” McKinsey & Company, July 17, 2023; https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/mckinsey-explainers/what-is-psychological-safety