Your team is burnt out — and it’s costing you
You have ambitious goals, but the competition seemingly never sleeps. So you set stretch goals and deadlines you know you probably can’t hit. You deliver a set of features you don’t currently have the people to support. You work 60, 70 hours a week, which encourages your workers to put in long hours, too. Soon, everyone’s behind. Now, you’ve missed your delivery deadlines. You have increasingly frequent production bugs or outages. You ship emergency patches, which seem to introduce their own bugs. You’re falling behind fast, but if you stop now, you’re done for, right?
It’s easy to mistake the feeling of stress or anxiety for productivity. And yet, stress is an early warning sign that you’re wasting energy. Even worse, stress can have a negative impact on productivity, even when you feel the most passionate about your work.
A term for this kind of stress was coined in 2003 by Vallerand et al. in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Obsessive Passion.
[Obsessive Passion] results from a controlled internalization of the activity into one’s identity. …[A]lthough individuals like the activity, they feel compelled to engage in it because of … internal contingencies that come to control them. They cannot help but to engage in the passionate activity. The passion must run its course as it controls the person. Because activity engagement is out of the person’s control, it eventually takes disproportionate space in the person’s identity and causes conflict with other activities in the person’s life.
“Internal contingencies” arise from feelings of social acceptance or self-esteem, or an uncontrollable excitement from the work. Such feelings are challenging, because they can feel good when things are going well, but their dark side carries a heavy cost.
Further contingencies may be added if you feel the work you’re doing has a positive impact on the world. In Substantial’s 12 years and hundreds of projects launched, we’ve seen many “social good”-focused companies struggle with work-life balance in the face of a life-saving mission. When you’re working to improve the world, you may feel that people may be suffering, or even dying, because you went home to your family instead of putting in 60 hour weeks.
One such anecdote is related by UC Berkeley psychologist Christina Maslach:
Mark is exhausted. As a committed environmental activist, he logs hundreds of pro bono hours every year organizing rallies, circulating petitions, raising funds, lobbying legislators, and campaigning for like-minded politicians. And that’s not even his day job; Mark is also pursuing a full-time career to pay the bills.
“I’m feeling totally overwhelmed by the immensity of the problems we face,” he says, “but I keep pushing myself. […] When you’re an activist, you’re never working hard enough.” Lately, though, Mark’s passion has been increasingly tainted with bitterness. “I sometimes look at the stuff I have to do and I get angry,” he says.
Some amount of stress is probably unavoidable in most workplaces, but when it becomes so common that it’s used as a positive indicator of passion (as in the case of Mark, above) — instead of a negative indicator of trouble — it can enter a chronic state. Chronic stress leads to bad decisions, which lead to worse results, which lead to more work — a downward spiral of dysfunction that can quickly lead to burnout.
So how can we still get work done without normalizing constant stress? The answer: Harmonious Passion. According to Vallerand et al.:
[Harmonious Passion] results from an autonomous internalization of the activity into the person’s identity. [This] occurs when individuals have freely accepted the activity as important for them without any contingencies attached to it… Individuals are not compelled to do the activity but rather they freely choose to do so. With this type of passion, the activity occupies a significant but not overpowering space in the person’s identity and is in harmony with other aspects of the person’s life.
Research points to the ideal outcome of harmonious passion, the elusive state of peak productivity known as Flow:
A deeply involving flow experience is said to occur when an individual has an impression of control, when the concentration is completely on the task at hand, and when the experience becomes autotelic, that is, the activity becomes worth doing for its own sake… Flow experiences have been associated with positive emotions, high self-esteem, higher commitment and achievement, and with happiness and general well-being.
But, they caution:
…Flow can be an important factor protecting workers from experiencing burnout symptoms as long as they hold a predominantly harmonious passion for their work.
The goal of a high-performing team is clear: To get the most out of your team in both the short and long-term, the conditions must be created to enable flow. That means:
First, identify barriers to Harmonious Passion. The central theme to Harmonious Passion is autonomy of the worker: the feeling that each individual is showing up to do their job of their own free will, and thus each person has control over how they contribute to the team’s collective effort.
Maslach has devoted her career to studying burnout. She has developed a list of six frequent “person-job mismatches” that cause friction leading to stress and burnout:
- workload (too much work, not enough resources)
- control (micromanagement, lack of influence, accountability without power)
- reward (not enough pay, acknowledgment, or satisfaction)
- community (isolation, conflict, disrespect)
- fairness (discrimination, favoritism)
- values (ethical conflicts, meaningless tasks)
These mismatches offer a good lens for evaluating where your organization or team might be at risk for burnout. Maslach even offers a worksheet for this exercise: give it a try!
Second, after you’ve identified these barriers, it’s time to eliminate them in order to allow flow to really kick in. For a technology company, that might mean:
- Canceling meetings without a clear goal
- Ensuring people entrusted with responsibilities are also empowered to make appropriate decisions and own the consequences
- Tackling technical and design debt to reduce the burden of legacy issues
- Mapping your value stream to identify sources of waste — and thus, friction that may cause stress for workers who find passion in delivering value
- Improving site stability so not as much time is spent fighting outages
- Streamlining the deploy process so more deploys can happen with less anxiety
At a higher level, it’s probably important to ask some big questions about your company, such as:
- Do we really practice our stated company values?
- Do we foster an environment of psychological safety? (Google has found this to be by far the most important factor in team effectiveness.)
- Do we support our workers with appropriate benefits (time off, family leave, physical and mental health care)?
- Do workers feel micromanaged and undermined, or does management listen to and support their workers?
- Do we empower all of our employees to take charge of their work, to identify areas of waste, to change their work assignment as desired, or to take ownership of their actions to live out the company’s mission in novel ways?
At Substantial, we’re no strangers to stress and burnout, but in our experience, they never have to be the norm. Rather than accepting stress as a normal side effect of work, we look out for it as an indication of dynamics that may be inhibiting the team from achieving its optimal flow. As a result of this dedication to continuous self-improvement, we have a 5 year average tenure.
Of course, it’s not realistic to expect all of these changes to happen overnight, but change starts with awareness. The process of improvement has no end, but it can start with a small step. And the reward awaiting a company with the courage to take on these issues is great:
High levels of flexible and conflict-free passion for one’s work will facilitate high flow experiences when performing work-related tasks. Subsequently, these experiences of flow at work appear to lead to fewer feelings of inefficacy, cynicism, and emotional exhaustion. In short, a harmonious passion seems to be a potential antidote to burnout through the higher levels of reported flow experiences it generates.
At Substantial, our method of achieving harmonious passion — and the everyday practice of minimizing Maslach’s barriers — is our approach to Agile software development. We put continuous improvement at the center of our process. We manage our workload using Lean/Kanban practices, removing bottlenecks and wastefulness in the process. We empower teams to self-organize according to the strengths and challenges unique to their situation. And we strive to maintain an environment of psychological safety where people are rewarded for raising concerns early on.
In particular, we’ve found the practice of the regular team retrospective to be fundamental to continuous improvement. The exact structure of the retrospective varies from team to team, but at its heart, the retrospective is about giving everyone a psychologically safe space to praise each other for a job well done, and also speak out about concerns they may have. The team then analyzes each problem, and potential resolutions are proposed. Thus, problems are not owned and solved solely by individuals, but by the team as a whole: nobody needs to suffer in silence, and nobody is punished for identifying problems, because every problem raised is an opportunity to improve the whole team. The team then determines appropriate actions to take, and goes forth to conquer their own obstacles.
We put a lot of value in our retrospectives — and in communication generally — because we believe that great products are built by empowered people. Empowering your workers — and really trusting them to take care of themselves and each other — shows respect, safety, and autonomy, which are the foundations for long-term organizational improvement. It unlocks creativity for being able to spot and fix problems early, so long hours aren’t so necessary. Most importantly, it keeps you on the path of continuous improvement, the virtuous cycle that keeps your business indefinitely sustainable and ready to face whatever challenges may come next.
Substantial often works with teams of all sizes to instill healthy software principles into your product teams to put into practice.
Do you need a partner who can provide end-to-end digital products that make a lasting impact? See what we can do for you. Find us at substantial.com or reach out directly at newbusiness@substantial.com
