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This week, Ryan and Heather discuss the different types of burnout and how work styles, tech, and leadership impact employee wellbeing.
In the Digital Workspace Works podcast;
We will cover the ever-strengthened digital workspace. Together and with the help of experts we will unpack this broad term - Digital Workspace.
The ecosystem that blends people, process and technology so that work can get done.
We will focus on the various moving disjointed pieces which need to work together in harmony to enable the user with seamless and highly effective end user experience.
Ryan Purvis 0:00
Hello, and welcome to the digital workspace works Podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host supported by producer Heather Bicknell. In the series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field story from the frontlines. The problems they're facing, how they solve them. The areas they're focused on from technology, people and processes to the approaches they took, that'll help you to get to grips with the digital workspace inner workings.
So I did a presentation yesterday, and I'm not sure if I can actually say the event. So I was gonna say I did one yesterday, on burnout. It was quite interesting what came out of that. It was all to a bunch of CIO CTOs, head of the head of it, etc. And we covered well, you know, why why sort of presentation was to level centered so you know, what is burnout and then there's those three categories, or three types of burnout. There's frenetic, which is the one that we mostly feel, which is the multitude of things you got to do. And, and that being always pressing, then is you know what, let me actually get it up. Cuz I'm that my brain is fried today. I always find when I do a presentation at the next day I'm exhausted, is bore out, which is when you're under underworked and under challenge, which I've never had in my life, I suppose a lot of them are under real Korea. But then is worn out, which is a second way which is when you ground on behavior demands that persist over time. And I was saying in my speech, I mean, so this week has been just like frenetic and worn out too many things to do too much stuff happening at home, my wife we think is a COVID. So she's been down for a couple days, my daughter's had some issues. So it's fine when workers busy, because you can just be busy with work. But when you're when your other stuff kicks in, then it's that's that's the frenetic and then the worn out piece. The other thing that I found interesting in the research that I did, is that the burnout ratio, or the writer or the percentage of people affected rose through the pandemic, which is unexpected, but it rose by 10%, which is quite a big amount, if you consider that as an as an increasing value. And two thirds of the respondents to the survey that I looked at, they felt that the pandemic actually made burnout worse, whereas 30% felt it got better. But the interesting thing of all of that was that 86% said that mundane tasks were the biggest issue for them. And that took about a third of their work week to end got in the way of doing their jobs. And I'm thinking about things like filling in timesheets, and you know, doing a weekly report or something like that, there's really no one reads those sorts of things. That's all you know, back to the old days plug in the old days when enabled in the factories where they tried to pull these management procedures in place and how those affect people's time and these are the sorts of things that you know people want but people want us to have a purpose and do things they want that brings out a passion to do mundane boring things that have no value in accounting counteracts that completely
Heather Bicknell 3:43
Yeah well that's interesting those those three types of burnout I hadn't heard of broken down that way before so it was said frenetic bore out and
out I think a blur out like the the kid in the class who's too far ahead and their teacher isn't giving them more advanced work to do so they act out. So that makes me think of Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Purvis 4:17
Though you're you're really driven person and you're told to go and become a coffee maker. You know, like, like not a lot of not a barista until someone like a tea like a tea person is you simply make tea instead some coffee with two sugars and milk you know, which which is an insulting role for someone with aptitude and skills. Nothing wrong with the tea maker. But if you if you are overqualified or or not not good for that kind of work, and you should be doing something a bit more. To your skill set, then yeah, that could boy you're completely
Heather Bicknell 4:57
sure. Yeah. depends on what what your, what you've decided your life priorities are, and then whether or not Yeah, that, you know, you want to use your more of your brain at work or your physical skill set. Or if you want work to just be a very kind of something, you know, that gives you a paycheck. And then you, you know, I'm just thinking a lot of like artists, for example, who might be baristas, but and for some people, that is their art. But anyway, back.
Ryan Purvis 5:41
I mean, on the point, I mean, if you're, if you're a barista would see that as an asset, a proper one, it's like being being a simile or something like that. Give it to passionate that I could see me in a very fulfilling job, that case might be stressful in the sense that you work long hours in order to earn reasonable money, because most of those will be hourly wage jobs. But our problem with those for a period of time, but I'm saying if you're a 50 year old person who hasn't done anything else, but be that role, hour, personally be concerned with myself if I was in that position.
Heather Bicknell 6:18
Yeah, when I I was just thinking that, you know, regardless of role, if you're in the same role for too long without getting any new challenge, without any change without a promotion without getting new challenges without something changing. It's kind of inevitable that you would hit the hit the bore out type of burnout. So what else? What, what was the so it was a kind of discussion format after you presented is that kind of what it was?
Ryan Purvis 7:00
Yes. Yes, it was a town hall, I did Tim Willits level set, which is what I was caught, it told me. So the presentation now. And then we had a breakout with three questions, which I can't remember what those were. But in essence, you know, we talked about each question for 10 minutes. And then there was a summary piece, and then just a general chat. And it was very interesting. I mean, it covers a lot of things that we've covered in our conversations around being a digital nomad, working from home, hybrid working, those sorts of things. They one of the questions that I posed during my presentation is did work in hybrid help or hinder burnout. And when you take into account people that have been forced, during the pandemic, to work from home, they're obviously additional things added to the lifestyle within werkstoff that they didn't have before, you know, additional caring responsibilities, homeschooling, caring for parents or relatives, you know, during the pandemic, obviously, people that were furloughed in the UK or in other countries lost their jobs. So someone else had to help them survive if the government couldn't help them. You know, great, you know, greater stress and anxiety from the unknown. Not having the tools, the digital tools to do their jobs, you know, imagine you can get tossed at home on the Friday and you start work on Monday, but you don't have a laptop or a desktop at home to do your job to job requires those things. And then the other thing was, was around newly remote workers to look busy. And I think that came up in lots of conversations even before yesterday's session, people that are unproven having to now prove themselves, or a new Joiner. First job doesn't know what the work culture or life is, and doesn't even know where to start from from day one. So how do you factor those people in and give them that sense of what they need to do?
Heather Bicknell 8:54
And he said, these were CIOs. How did they do CIOs? Maybe you can speak to us from everything I can do is burnout. How much is how much burnout is the responsibility of the CIO versus, you know, the HR department versus the CEO kind of where? Where do you see the CIOs ownership of the burnout conversation?
Ryan Purvis 9:24
Well, yeah, so we didn't actually we should ask that question, but that's a really good question. So it came up in many ways. One, and I'll talk to other conversations on this. One is the CIO or the CTO, whatever whoever whoever own technology technology leader has two roles. One role is obviously being a leader for their own team and teams. And the other role is working with business colleagues. And in the in the first instance, it's like any leadership, you know, you need to go to people you need to make sure that be taken care of. And you need to be aware of of people on the a downward trend to help bring them up one way or another. When it comes to the other role of connecting with the with the other business partners are in partnership, you know, HR is very good at and I'm speaking very generally I'm very good at policies and procedures, and that sort of thing, protecting the organization from HR issues. But they're not very good at the implementation of technologies for those things, for example. So running a pulse survey might be something that they would ask technology to do for them, if they didn't have the tool already, what to bring it to for them. So what's what I understood back to, you know, sort of March 2020, is there was a much closer relationship between technology and HR. In some respects, a lot of those policies and procedures were challenged because they actually couldn't be implemented as a check in balance policy. And I can't give you an example because I don't have one. But But I would think something like, if you look at remote working, there's a push in some companies to have you in the office three days a week. But have you in office three days a week might mean that you are coming all the way into the office to sit on the phone all day long. And you're now using a different desk each day, because you're hot desking. And each time you come in, you're wasting precious time, sitting up your machine, and getting organized to just do calls all day, because there's actually no collaboration in the office. But there will be an HR policy that's been implemented, but the technology hasn't backed it up. Now, if it stayed at home, you would have saved the time of setup, you will also probably have better setup at home if you've got the means. And as I'll explain it to someone yesterday, you know, my office at home is much superior to what I ever have in an office environment, because I've paid for it myself and I bought things I wanted. If I benefited if a company wanted to provide that for me, they have to provide for everyone. And that becomes cost prohibitive. So we look at it like that there's an HR policy to get you in. But now it's up to technology to make sure you stay and if that's the expectation of what you should get has gone up. Now, you know, before you were allowed to work from home, you kind of accepted which you were given a corporate standard. But now you can have your own standard. So you're like, well, if I've got these things at home, I've got two screens, got my standing desk, etc. If I've got all that I must have the office for me to go to the office, but don't have that, then I'm already going to take my laptop to work with me, I'm going to go there to meet people, I'm not gonna be on phone calls all day, because I'm doing face to face stuff. And that's, I mean, I set a time to cheat because I would never leave my laptop at home. But I probably see myself going into the office and not worrying about being productive, technically that in a day, I would see it as me going to the office to collaborate with people. And I'd use the train trip in and out to do emails and, you know, write the example whenever it came out in conversation.
Heather Bicknell 13:13
Yeah, that's all. Well, interesting, it also makes me think the thing that I've heard people complain about in the office versus home is actually Wi Fi, funnily enough, their home Wi Fi being better than the office Wi Fi, which really matters when you are not doing like the in person collaboration piece. As much, and you are spending all day on calls, that's when we really feel the connectivity piece.
Ryan Purvis 13:43
I remember working for organization where we had 40 people for eight desks. And there was all these collaboration spaces. So what would happen is we all get in because we all have, you know, people to see and things to do and all of us would be there. But there wasn't enough space. So those eight desks would be allocated to the so called office workers. People in that would need a dedicated desk. And then we would go and use all the collaboration spaces, but then that would irritate other people, because they'd be like, well, I can't go to the coffee shop that said, because this team has taken over all the coffee tables. And then you've got that problem of Wi Fi and people doing calls in the local coffee shop. And Okay, fair enough. We did a lot of face to face meetings. So they were meeting rooms and stuff for us. But it was really a mess. And I don't know what the answer is. I do think it's a case of letting people be adults and figure it out. But I also think it's a case of you can't you can't let them figure it out without some sort of parameters to say, you know, you need to do some face to face time in the office. If you need an office. You know, is there a point if you live in another city and there's an office to commute every week to go to that office? I mean, we got a guy in New York. He goes into Boston, maybe Three weeks, four weeks, which is fine. It's doable. it's manageable. It's planned.
Heather Bicknell 15:05
Yeah. And what happened was, sorry, what have we not touched on? In terms of whether or not conversation as it relates to tech? Yeah. Well, I'll
Ryan Purvis 15:15
tell you some of the things that came up in the conversation. So I mean, obviously went to my usual things about meetings being shorter and less of them and using technology asynchronously, which, which really resonated with a lot of people. The surveys, collected feedback does work, but it's more about in person stuff. There's also a lot of a lot of them are talking about how having this fixed in office time, two, three days a week, was hurting their recruitment. Activities, people were going for jobs, which were flexible. There's also there was also some discussion around sending care packages home, you know, sending equipment to people. So they're decent coupler home, and they're actually working out better than bringing them in to the office, good headphones, good microphone, good speaker phones, microphone, whatever, whatever you want to call them to go with, with a standing desk, maybe not a full standing desk, but a budget towards the standing desk. So if you had a pending comment to pay for mine, but let's service 200 pounds towards a 600 pound standing desk, you could buy your desk, or you could buy the selling this, it's up to you. So there's a couple of those sort of things that came up, which I thought was quite nice. And then the other piece, which I mentioned was the technology piece of having a better experience in the office, but also an expectation that every meeting room that you went into, had the capability to do a call. Whereas in the old world, it was almost the case of some meeting rooms would have at some meetings wouldn't have that because you deal with more of a collaborative environment, the expectation is you might have people go into an office to sit around a boardroom table to talk about something and ask someone who's not there, because people are now geo located far away. So we didn't talk a lot about how people that once they realize that they can work remotely, we're saying well, can I go back to my home country and work from there. But the tax implications are that comes in the time zone comes in all those things, but because they're good performers, to keep them and also to not lose the skills because to rehire the skills in this market of tough the cup, the company had to make the make the offer, or make it work. Or even more open to make it work, which I don't think is a bad thing. I think that's a good a good sign.
Heather Bicknell 17:36
Yeah, no, I agree. I think the piece around the making sure that meeting rooms are well set up to do calls can't be underestimated. Because the That, to me is still one of the worst parts of the hybrid experience is having some people on, you know, in an office together, some people on the screen, and if there are audio issues, or you know, one side can hear each other, but it's because the connection is poor, all of those things, just a really, really make the discrepancy between the office and the remote set. Very obvious. And you can kind of cut either group off from the conversation, depending on Are there more people on the remote call? Are there more people on the office call? So, yeah, I think that's really not going to go away. So one of the more key things to get right in terms of preparing the office for things like back to Office planning, or just optimizing it so people don't feel as you know, it's incredibly frustrating, right to have a just fine meaning experience at home. And then to go in and have this hybrid meeting experience that is a poor experience. And you came in talk to your colleagues just because of technology?
Ryan Purvis 19:15
Oh, well, exactly. And I look at it, I wouldn't say you could ever do can't be one or the other, or the sale or any other moment of it ever working in the office in a day. Some days, you may have to go into the office because you got a couple face to face things. And you have to do that call with other people, which may be one of those experiences. And I think that those will happen. But that's the point is the technology has to get to a point or at least the offering in the office has to get to a point that those things are just that pain is reduced as much as possible. And I think it's possible. I don't think it's I don't think we need new technology. I just think we need you know as a business. They need to just put that investment in if they're taught if they want people in the office if they don't if they don't want People in the office, and they're going to use them as collaboration centers where you're not doing calls from them that that's also fine. But then it's got to be clear can't be ambiguous.
Heather Bicknell 20:12
Well, I guess on the B survey component of the question, did you get to kind of what to do when you get that survey feedback? Back?
Ryan Purvis 20:27
Well, I mean, I think the biggest, the biggest thing that came out of that is you got to listen to the feedback. Now, that's not to say that you just take everything in and you use everything that comes in. But you've got to make it clear that you've heard the feedback. So if the feedback is the coffee's really terrible in the coffee shop, and one person says that you're probably not complaining about it. But if you're getting maybe 10 20% 30% of your working forces come that saying it's a problem, then you have to do something, or at least communicate that you're going to look at new vendors, or whatever it is. So it's just, it's just a case of being heard and feedback loops and all the rest of it. And again, it comes back to if the coffee is bad. And that's what people like, I remember when I was a pilot who we used to work at, and we work. And I love that because we had a barista downstairs and was part of the deal. And you walk in and be a long line and you walk past you'd wave you'd order your coffee come back an hour later and be really iffy. And it was good coffee. And when we moved to another building, we didn't have the coffee shop, it used to pass me off was such a silly thing. But I used to enjoy that because I used to walk back up to the waiver case to walk in pavement pay for a cup of coffee, because it was just a good cup of coffee. And I had this routine where I go get the coffee at we work and I guess since is like these benches against the wall against the windows, you can sit there have a cup of coffee and have my my pad open or whatever I was using. And I'd catch up on the emails that I had that morning, I just picked my coffee before I get to the office and get bombarded by whatever's going on. And it would just ease me into the day. And when when I realized when we move to the other offices, I didn't have that. You'd have to go upstairs, three offices, a coffee machine. And by the time you did that, you'd been thought you know, you've been thumped by 10 things. So you didn't really feel like you'd used in the day it was like straight into another and it would always put you on the backfoot. So I can see how that little things like that make a big difference. But I think it's you know, as I say, just listening, putting in place a plan to either address it or not address it and communicate and we're not going to dress it because the coffee vendors, we will think you are 70% of organizations. It's fine. And you know, people could use it as a silly example.
Heather Bicknell 22:37
Yeah, nice. That's a good, good way to, to look at it. To make sure that feedback that you communicate, the feedback was heard whether or not it gets actioned on based on business priorities. And
Ryan Purvis 22:52
so we want to be realistic that not every bit of feedback will be taken an action. And that's just a maturity thing. But you also shouldn't not give feedback. You know, because you think, Oh, no one's gonna do any Well, I think I think that's important thing, because, you know, many voices will bring change, but one voice won't, you know. So if someone said only one person's problem, it'll fall away. But if many people sustained the problem, then people get will get attention at some point. Might be years after you left, but that's That doesn't matter.
Heather Bicknell 23:26
Yeah, sure.
Ryan Purvis 23:29
Cool. I need to run but it was good catching up with you. socialladder. Thank you for listening today's episode. Hey, the big news producer, editor. Thank you, Heather. For your hard work on this episode. Please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes or the Google Play Store. Follow us on Twitter at the DW W podcast. The show notes and transcripts will be available on the website www dot digital workspace that works. Please also visit our website www dot digital workspace that works and subscribe to our newsletter. And lastly, if you found this episode useful, please share with your friends or colleagues.
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