Employee Burnouts and Toxic Employment Relationships
At a time when we see multiple reports of employee burn-out and extreme cases of toxic work cultures, our purpose statement of ‘enabling productive and happier workplaces’ becomes more relevant than ever. While the advancements in humankinds understanding of theories and concepts of motivation and performance clearly tells us that organizations cannot expect superior performance from employees who are stressed and over-loaded, there are organizations that irresponsibly allow their managers to push for erroneous approach of putting more workload and tight timelines hoping to extract ‘more’ out of employees!
With the recent tragic episodes of young professionals dying of overwork across Asian countries, including at some of the big firms in India, it is clear that organizations, even those many swore by as professional multinationals are also getting it wrong.
The real issue is that of ‘Performance’ being mistaken for (1) extended hours of work, (2) weekends work, (3) a false sense of ‘urgency’ and meeting of deadlines, (4) not so clearly defined expectation of ‘quality’; (5) Furthermore, post covid, the boundary of office timings and personal timings have almost fallen; (6) The reach of technology invading personal space (7) coupled with the fear of job-loss given the higher supply to demand ratio in these developing countries makes for a devastating recipe creating toxic over-stressed workplaces. In fact, we should no longer call these toxic workplaces, but instead toxic employment relationships. It is wrong to assume its impact is limited to the workplace. The toxicity created gets in the psyche of the individual and that’s the reason we have the tragic issues of suicide, death due to over-work, ill-health and even PTSD as is being claimed by so many employees across industries in the recent past.
While many indicate this to be a symptom prominent amongst young professionals, (probably, as they are keen to prove themselves in the industry at the start of their careers), the truth is that toxic work-culture impacts employees at all levels of the organization (except probably those who are at the top of pyramid or at the giving end of it.)
Solution:
Instead of planning for managing ‘post-trauma’ issues such as having employee-wellbeing counsellors or mentors to give employees, the shoulder once the harm is done, the need is to get the concepts of ‘performance’ versus ‘not-really-performance’ right at the organizations top-tier and in ensuring that this ‘clarity’ percolates down through-out the organization. The idea is to have happier employees and not first stress-out the employees and then provide psychological support!
Our advice to clients is similar to what we practice in our firm – absolute performance and excellence orientation while at work for the 8 hours, 5 days week, but no reason for employees to be working additional hours or over weekends if the performance at workplace is managed well.
This requires well thought through process/es and associated systems implemented to manage it and more importantly a desire for the leadership to hold those managers accountable who expect (or influence or force) their team members to work extra hours every day or over the weekends. While there could be business exigencies that require extra work at times, those should be far and few.
Need of a Multi-Pronged Approach:
Organizations need to adopt a multi-pronged wholistic approach to address this critical issue. We have put the following seven (7) as fundamentally important items – 1) Top Managements will, 2) defined processes, 3) aligned systems for the defined processes, 4) a well-defined set of HR policies, 5) that monitors, reports and highlights any such work-place practice aberrations on an ongoing basis. 6) make this aspect a part of the performance management system (PMS) of the managers such as having a well-balanced (weighted factor) around the way they manage their teams including the aspect of nurturing a healthy and motivating employment-relationship. 7) As the organization grows in size, a ‘purposed’, i.e., with a thought through purpose, a role such as that of ‘Employment Relationship Wellbeing Manager’ needs to be incorporated in the company which is mandated with the responsibility of driving a healthy workplace and employment relationship.
Our experience in building strong performance management processes for client organization, especially, post the covid years, shows us that the aspect of work-life balance, employee burnout and outdated performance management systems, if not addressed well and in time, can be a derailing factor for organizations of all size – irrespective of all the other great initiatives they undertake.
