Jon: 00:05
This is episode number 622 with Professor Christina Maslach, author of The Burnout Challenge.
00:19
Welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. Today’s guest is Professor Christina Maslach, the world leading expert on occupational burnout, the causes and fixes of which will be our solitary focus in today’s episode. Christina has been a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley since 1971, that’s over 51 years. Her new book, The Burnout Challenge, will be out in a couple of weeks on November 15th. She holds a PhD in psychology from Stanford and a BA in social relations from Harvard. All right, let’s get straight to it.
00:55
Professor Maslach, welcome to the Super Data Science Podcast. It’s exciting to have you here. So you are a psychology professor emerita at UC Berkeley, you’re an award-winning co-creator of the Maslach Burnout Inventory, and you’re co-author of a new book, The Burnout Challenge, which is coming out on November 15th on Harvard University Press.
01:16
We’re excited for that release. I’ve skimmed an early release of the book to prepare for this interview, and I loved it. One of the things that I learned is that 44% of workers worldwide, according to a poll by Gallup, indicated stress in their roles, while engagement is simultaneously at an all-time low. So we’ve got all-time high stress, all-time low engagement. It seems like that could be related to the pandemic, but whatever the reasons, and you might be able to fill us in more, we’ve got record levels of burnout happening amongst employees. So tell us, what exactly is burnout?
Christina: 01:53
Ah, okay, so burnout is not actually something new that came along with the pandemic. It’s been around for a while, and it’s an experience that people can have in response to chronic workplace stressors that haven’t been successfully managed. Two points I just want to emphasize there, chronic stressors, we don’t recover as well from things that are chronic as opposed to occasional, acute. Chronic means high frequency, it’s there all the time, most of the time, and you never really recover, relax, get back, start all over again. But there’s an optimistic note in that, which is what the World Health Organization has said about not having been successfully managed, it could be, it could be better managed. So it’s not like you’re stuck and necessarily nothing else can occur. But burnout, it gets used to mean a lot of different things, but job burnout, as we in the World Health Organization have talked about it, includes three components of that experience.
03:00
One is the basic stress response of exhaustion, but it goes beyond that to include increased cynicism, mental distance from one’s job, kind of, ”Take this job and shove it. Why am I here? These people don’t know what they’re doing, da, da, da, da.” And it is for me, more the hallmark of burnout, because when you get to that point of having that cynicism and negativity about the job, you are trying to do the bare minimum rather than your very best, so quality of the work is going downhill.
03:36
And the third component is you’re not just negative about the job, you’re beginning to be negative about yourself, ”What is going wrong with me? Why can’t I take this? Maybe I made a mistake, I shouldn’t be here.” All of these things. In professions like healthcare, where almost perfectionism is something you’ve been trained to do, you’re less than perfect, and all this stuff. So it’s those three things, the exhaustion, the cynicism, and the professional ineffectiveness. And those all together are what we have been able to identify as the burnout experience that people can have.
Jon: 04:17
That does sound like the burnout experience, well defined. Stress response of exhaustion, cynicism about your job and cynicism about yourself. So what causes burnout? I understand from your book that the factors tend to be related not to the person themselves, or even the job, so it’s an interaction term if you will. If you think about a regression model, it’s not a main effect of a person, or a main effect of their job, it’s an interaction term. It’s a mismatch between the person and their role, and my understanding is that you’ve identified six of these mismatches between workers and their jobs that cause burnout.
Christina: 04:56
Right, okay. And so again, it’s the causes in some sense, or the sources of this, are really those chronic job stressors that have not been well managed. And what we have been able to identify in the research so far is that there are at least six areas in which those chronic stressors are reflecting a mismatch, as you say, between the person and the job. And so the interaction term, yes, indeed, that’s really what we’re looking for there. These six mismatches are organized, I think, or we’ve been able to put them into three basic dimensions. Some have to do with one’s capability to do the job. Some have to do with the social environment, the context in which you’re carrying out that work. And some of it, which is usually what people don’t think about, it has to do with some amoral, a moral dimension about what it is you’re doing.
05:57
People think of capability first, so I’ll start there, although it’s not always the most important. But in terms of capability of doing the job, there are two things. One is workload and one is control. The workload mismatch means that the demands are very high, but the resources to meet those demands are pretty low, or insufficient. You have high demands, but not enough time, not enough people, not enough information, equipment, or whatever it is you need to get that done well in a timely way. We’re talking about, in a better match, what you’re aiming for is a sustainable workload of manageable demands and sufficient resources.
06:41
Now, when it comes to control, people always think of workload, but often when they’re talking about a problem with workload, they’re talking about control and having a lack of control. You have little or no say, choice, discretion, autonomy, about how you do the job to add a little something to course correct, because there’s a problem that’s emerged, that kind of thing. Often when people are talking about the workload, they’re talking about both of these, they’re talking about an ”uncontrollable workload, lots of work, and there’s little I can do about it and do it better, or find some other ways of handling it.” These areas are not independent, they can overlap, you can have multiple, and I’ll give some examples a little later. Anyway, so that’s the capability.
07:34
The social dimension. One of those has to do with reward, which is really about getting positive feedback when you do something well, you do a good job. And the positive feedback could involve salary benefits, but the research has been showing that a lot more of it has to do with social recognition. People let you know, ”Oh wow, you really saved us with that client. That was a… Thank you so much.” Or pat on the back, or maybe, ”You could help me do a little bit better to warm up the patient to be able to talk about his problems.” Or something. It’s a lot more about that recognition and the sense that you may get new opportunities because you’ve done something well. Many burned out people in professions, when I ask them about ”what’s a good day?” They say, ”Nothing bad happened.” That’s not as good as it gets. It’s the absence of really any kind of positive feedback when it’s well deserved.
08:42
The other social dimension is the community. And we talk about the workplace community. That means who are your colleagues, your bosses, the people you supervise, your customers, clients, patients? Whose paths do you cross on a regular basis? And when there’s a mismatch there, it means that there’s a real breakdown of communal norms, people talk about it as socially toxic culture. There’s ongoing negative experiences, there’s instability, there’s people throwing each other under the bus, there’s rudeness, there’s harassment, there’s all of these things. And people are saying, ”I love doing my work, but I can’t stand being in this group of people.”
09:30
So a better match here is more supportive civil relationships among everybody in ways in which you disagree, you can figure out how do we get on the same page, as how we’re going to move forward, work this out, support each other. People who experience burnout often say, ”I’m surrounded by people and I feel alone, because I don’t know who I could possibly talk to, get advice from.” If you show any, quote, unquote, ”weakness”, you’re less than a hundred percent, people say, ”Oh well you’re not so good.” There’s that absence of a more collegiality and an ability when things go right, when things go wrong, whatever, you’ve got other people that you could turn to, and you’re there for them if they need a shoulder to cry on, or whatever it is in that kind of case. So those are the first four.
10:25
The last two are what I call the moral dimension. And one of them is fairness, that whatever the policies, the procedures, the practices, they are fairly applied, equitably, across the board. There’s not cheating going on and lying and that sort of thing. Here you want to look for a match where there’s a commitment to being honest and even-handed in decisions or actions that are taken. The cynicism will, I guarantee you, go sky high when you have unfairness and people feel that they’re being treated unfairly.
11:06
And then finally, the other one, the sixth one, is values. And this is really where people are finding themselves working in a situation where the mismatch involves ethical conflicts, moral dilemmas that you have to deal with, and these can be huge. We’ve seen this a lot in healthcare. They talk about moral injury because the job in a sense forces you to do things that you think are either wrong, or incredibly difficult. You have to tell people that they cannot come in and see their dying parent or relative, because of COVID exposure. So there’s just… Or people, and again, this is a healthcare example, but saying that they, after a while, can’t stand to work in a situation where it’s, ”I’m only there to bring in money, not to really help patients. That’s why I went into medicine. This job is just… No, I can’t, I’m selling my soul and I can’t do this.” So clear values, a meaningful work. Value often means that you’re proud of what you’ve done. You feel good about a contribution you’ve made and this kind of thing.
12:28
Those six basic areas can be found in all types of workplaces. But again, it has to be customized to what the work is about, and the organization, so what a physician is going to be facing on control will be very different than a teacher, or a tech worker, or somebody in a financial bank. You can just name all these things. And they can overlap as I mentioned, for example, there was one organization I worked with where the CEO was sure that, ”Oh, people are going to complain about workload and they’re going to complain about reward, because they don’t think they get paid enough, are working too hard.” It turned out those weren’t problems at all. What was the problem was fairness, that there were a lot of things going on that were not fair, and it was a shock to the senior leadership, but it was like, ”Okay, what?
13:25
And one of the things that, and we give this little example in the book, it turned out that there was a distinguished service award that everybody hated. ”How could it be? It’s a reward. Maybe, did we not give enough money for people who did something special?” And I said, ”No, it wasn’t reward, it was fairness.” Fairness was the wrong, people are getting it. The system is rigged to go to people who didn’t do anything to deserve something. So what’s going on here? And the six areas, I think the value that they carry with them, is they give you, first of all, six different perspectives on what might be going on. So you’re not always going to the same old, same old workload issue. It could be it’s a fairness issue. It could be it’s a team issue in terms of ”we don’t get on well and we can’t get our act together to do stuff.”
14:24
So getting you out of breaking set, if I can put it that way. It’s like you have on the airplane, the nearest exit actually might be behind you, and it’s breaking set so that you are looking and thinking about things in a different way. And that’s what the six areas give you. They are a more universal way of thinking about it. Managers can burn out, CEOs can burn out. The issues they may have in terms of reward, or community, or whatever, would be different, but it still gives everybody a way to talk to each other about ”what’s going on and where could we make some improvements.” And because it focuses on the relationship between people and the work, it has to be a bilateral kind of process, it can’t be unilateral, ”We’re going to do X and everybody will then be fine.” Not necessarily, if you haven’t figured out some good matches that everybody is willing to work on.
Jon: 15:26
Yes, so I think you’re starting there to talk about the core Cs.
Christina: 15:30
Yes.
Jon: 15:32
Let’s get to that in one second. So to quickly recap the six matches between workers and their jobs that cause burnout, you just went through them. We’ve got work overload number one. Number two is lack of control. Number three is insufficient rewards. Number four is a socially toxic workplace community. Number five is absence of fairness. And number six is values conflicts. So I guess somebody could experience burnout when just one of these mismatches is in place and the more of the mismatches in place, the more likely the burnout.
Christina: 15:59
The more likely. Yeah, you’re right.
Jon: 16:03
In terms of resolving these mismatches, my understanding is that, prior to speaking to you, prior to doing research for this episode, my thinking was always, ”A solution to burnout is people taking a bit more time to themselves.” This self care thing. But I learned through your book that things like self care and personal resilience… Some people are more resilient due to probably some genetic and environmental interaction effects than others. So things like that, self care and personal resilience, help cope with burnout, but they cannot prevent the underlying causes of burnout. They don’t deal with these mismatches. Those kinds of chronic workplace stressors that you’re describing, they aren’t going to go away, you’ll just tolerate them maybe a few months more, or that kind of thing. You did identify, through your research, three core Cs that lead to successful change processes, thereby reducing burnout, and it sounded to me just before I interrupted you.
Christina: 17:12
Yeah I was about to-
Jon: 17:14
Yeah. You were about to start talking about collaboration it sounded like. It’s this bilateral work between employees and management.
Christina: 17:21
Yeah. No, that’s true. And the thing right now is things tend to get framed in either-or. It’s either the job, or the person, or, ”The HR has to take care of it, not me.” All of that kind of thing. Rather than it actually needs all of that together and making changes. And again, the book lays out a whole bunch of processes of how do you identify more positive matches, how do you redesign the jobs, how do you plan this, et cetera. And what we have found, as you pointed out, is that in working with people and organizations around these kinds of issues, is we have found that there is at least these three important principles of how you go about this. It’s not so much what you’re doing, but how you’re doing it. We call it three Cs, because they all are three C words.
18:16
So the first one, as you said, is collaborate. And this is such an important one, because even way before the pandemic, we were seeing a real shift in workplaces to what I was calling a climate of fear. You don’t dare speak up, you don’t dare say no, et cetera, that kind of thing. And it was all top-down and there was no input bottom-up, or sideways, or whatever from the people who actually had to live with whatever the change was, or that kind of thing. Collaborate really means asking everybody, the different teams, the different units, to be a part of making things better. They will have ideas about what could be improved. Chronic job stressors are often talked about as pebbles in your shoe. They’re always there. They always are just aggravating, annoying, uncomfortable, get in the way of things.
19:18
Sometimes they’re little stuff, they’re not necessarily big things, but they could make a difference in terms of getting rid of some of these chronic stressors. So people who are essentially on the floor doing X or Y, can point out where we have trouble, where we run into difficulty, what we don’t have and could have, or, ”Could we get rid of this process? Could we subtract some things if we’re going to add more to our plate?” That kind of thing, because if, quite honestly, if employees do not see the benefit of any proposed change, it’s not going to happen. There will be shadow systems, there will be other things going on because it’s, ”Are you kidding me?” But we’ve got to do it. So collaborate is a real important process here.
20:08
The second thing we’ve found is, and I think maybe even alluded to that earlier too, is to customize. In other words, there is not a one-size solution that fits all, ever. And even within a large organization, what’s going to happen for people in accounting as opposed to people in sales, as opposed to whatever it happens to be. Their particular issues and problems might not be the same, so you really have to say, ”Okay, here’s something that’s worked over there. How do you make it work for us? Does it? Or is it just superfluous little fluff stuff that makes us feel like, ‘Oh, we’re taking care of you’.” But no you’re not, ”You’re making us work harder.” So the customizing is important to make it ours, ”Here’s something that actually is going to help us.”
21:00
And then the third C is to commit. And commit means you keep sustaining the effort to achieve a better match between people and the work. It takes time. There’s always going to be little glitches at first. You’re going to stop doing what you knew, even if you didn’t like it, and get something better. But you need to course correct or figure out how to… But as long as you keep clear what it is that success will look like, ”If this is working well, we’ll be able to do the job this way and not have to deal with this stuff.” Then you keep going and saying, ”We’re going to get it right. We’re going to figure out how to get to the place that we’re more streamlined, we’re more effective, we’re not bothered by trivia.” Whatever the thing. So collaborate, customize, commit, are the three things that we’ve just found are necessary to make it, whatever they’re going to put into effect, make it sing.
Jon: 21:59
Nice. Crystal clear, Professor Maslach. So-
Christina: 22:01
Great.
Jon: 22:02
Yeah, you’ve elucidated for me at least, and probably many of our listeners, misunderstandings about what burnout is and what the causes are. And you’ve provided us with clear steps for developing change processes that allow burnout to be reduced in people’s roles. If people want to learn more, obviously your book, The Burnout Challenge, is out very soon on Harvard University Press November 15th. That is one option for people to learn more, but if people want to follow you generally, they want to follow your thoughts, do you have social media accounts that they can follow?
Christina: 22:41
Yes. I have to say I’m not always a fan of social media, because it has a negative side to it, in terms of people coming on and harassing you and it’s like, ”I don’t need to spend a lot of time with that.” But anyway.
Jon: 22:56
For sure.
Christina: 22:57
I am available on Twitter, and there is a website that we now have for the book, theburnoutchallenge.com, so you can find out a lot there. And I’m on LinkedIn, sorry, there’s another one there. In most of these, just use my name on that.
Jon: 23:21
Nice. Yeah, we’ll be sure to include your Twitter, your book website, and your LinkedIn URLs in the show notes. Professor Maslach, thank you so much for being on the Super Data Science Podcast. We really appreciate your deep insights into burnout. Thank you so much.
Christina: 23:37
Okay, thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.
Jon: 23:40
Okay, and that’s it for this episode on burnout. Until next time. Keep on rocking it out there folks. And I’m looking forward to enjoying another round of the Super Data Science Podcast with you very soon.
