Burnout - When does work start feeling pointless? | DW Documentary

If you've ever

work

ed in an office, you'll know that it's often hard to concentrate and then there are the endless meetings. Did anyone mention a paperless office? If you want to make a decision, you will have to wait for a larger meeting to raise your issue. spirits, you will go to town halls and listen to motivational speakers and remember the time

when

you had one boss but now you have two, you had three, well many sound familiar, all these examples are taken from this, it's sabotage from the Second War World. manual distributed to resistance fighters in occupied Europe for the enemy War Machine we have somehow taken known methods of sabotage and disruption option and turned them into a normal day at the office, how did this happen if we

start

ed with ke is fine and 15-?

work

hour week is okay, so tell us, can you tell us a little bit about what Keen predicted and what the heck he went wrong about?

Yeah, well, Kees wrote his thing in the 1930s and he was trying to write something optimistic and imagine what the world would be like. like for the most part

when

people back then imagined what the world would be like, everyone thought that industrialization is miserable, but it will take us in a direction where technology will advance so much that we will all live lives. of leisure, we know that we will have robotic servants who will take care of us, we will have automation that will eliminate the monotony of agricultural work, factory work, eventually, also service work, that was in a way the goal of all this honorable work that the people were doing. in factories we would eventually get to the point where we wouldn't have to do it anymore globally, we are getting to the point where we could work 15 hours a week.

The question then is why this is not the case. So what's really happened is that we've created these jobs in the Administrative Office and they've gone from something like 25% of the employment that was in Kansas to something like 75%. We create supervisory jobs, managerial jobs, administrative jobs and millions and millions and millions of them around the world. world and one of the things that really struck me in a lot of the testimonials that people sent me about their jobs was how unhappy they were and how confused they were by the fact that they were unhappy, there's just always this shame about expressing how you feel. you feel at work the constant charade that you're putting on uh that you can never really be honest i mean of course you want to we all want to be honest about our manager or about our director or because but he's into that same charate so you just see the half of it um so we are we are in this surreality this this exhibition the play is based on the original sabotage manual but we have not stuck to the script, we have added many new scenes of our own and like any play, this one also has a cast of characters, the star of the show is a CEO who has a star salary that matches the CEO's main role which is giving the big monologue, we can accelerate our current momentum and gain stronger financial backing with which to have Most successful this speech is often rooted in fantasy and has very little to do with how the work will turn out.

We are now delivering the best products we have ever delivered, but paying them more

does

n't seem to improve. Better them, since they are too often the stars of spectacular failures. It continues to be an exciting time for our devices and services business. We are still here to win. Thank you very much, but the only cost that is never calculated is the human cost of everything. these failures of disruptive reorganizations and unexpressed unhappiness. I had finished my PhD in experimental social psychology, so I was trained to do research research in the lab and I got my job at the University of California Berkeley and I was thinking that maybe What I'll do is develop some new ideas about emotions about emotions. which I did lab research and how people understand their

feeling

s, how they deal with really strong emotional arousal or challenging and threatening things, and I thought well, why not?

I go out and talk to people who sometimes encounter this in their life and I

start

ed interviewing them and they got emotional doing this, some of them got angry while talking about things, some of them cried, some of them, I mean, this was So. And I'm thinking, hmm, maybe there's a story here, maybe there's more of a phenomenon, so I would ask people at the end of the interview things like when you talk about this with other people, do you have some kind of name for this? ? Is there a way to share this? I usually never talk about this with anyone.

I don't want anyone to know, but I don't have time right now because I'm right in the middle of two other coals, so I started. Looking at literature and trying to find concepts that seemed to capture what people were telling me and there was dehumanization in self-defense oh no, no, no, you know, it's like too much baggage, dehumanization, no, you know, you know, nice. That's okay, okay, what's with the indifferent worry? Well, you know, it's something like, but it's water and oil, I can't, right?, right?, you know? I didn't really, so I was still trying to figure out how to talk to people or what they were telling me and that's why I would do the next interviews at the end you know dehumanization self-defense worry indifferent exhaustion yeah that's exhaustion oh yeah the first physical um yeah total exhaustion but this was like an exhaustion that was totally new to me, um, but it was really intense, so intense that I could barely physically get out of bed.

I live on the first floor. I couldn't, I literally couldn't climb the stairs. I had to hold on halfway or even stop twice and catch. My breath was just I felt like, like a 90-year-old man in very bad shape, well, I thought it was the flu and at one point my GP I went to my GP and he actually did say it. in front of me he said this is the flu you have, you have all the symptoms of exhaustion and yes, period, you know, I remember very well going back to work, uh after, I think it was a good five months of being away, yes, and I went .

I went back to work, took the train, walked to the office and I really remember very well what happened to me, it was really like I was confused, uh, confused, angry, disoriented, actually, what really came to mind was like , Where the hell? I missed? Do you know my way out? I mean, how did I continue on this damn road to where I am now? But I should have done it. I missed my exit. That's what came to mind. I lost the damn exit I wanted. Become an engineer because my grandfather was an engineer and I thought I wanted to be effective and efficient, so always having that super high bar of perfectionism to show that you are successful is worth it and being stubborn just isn't even an option that your body says.

The waiting time was exhausting, but then you really fall into this new world, it's almost like a new reality, my entire being and my compass, which I was actually navigating in my life. I realized that the compass is wrong because otherwise it wouldn't do it. I haven't been here and you feel like a yes, like a failure because you are one of those people who fell through the doors into the abyss of exhaustion and that's up to you whether you think it's just you or You know very few people, a difference, then the focus goes off automatically.

So what's my problem? Why am I not strong enough? Why am I not capable enough? So what we saw from the beginning was a phenomenon that is known as pluralistic ignorance and what it means is that you feel that something is wrong, not only that you are exhausted and have a lot to do, but that you are changing jobs very little, not You're doing a good job and you know it and you feel bad. about you, well you're not going to go chat to someone at Coffee about how I feel, no, what you're going to do is put a smile on your face, I'm fine, I can. handle this, I can do it right and just move on and hope no one notices.

What you don't know is that there are many other people around you who are doing exactly the same thing, so your social perception is that everyone is smiling happily doing Well, I'm the only one who has a problem when in reality the reality is behind those masks, behind that smiling face, there are many other people who think: "My God, I'm the only one who is on top of the problem of not being able to." to say what you really feel, half the time you don't understand what anyone is saying, so if you think about your average compliance with the social contract, you will sit there and talk nonsense and I will sit there silently and not listen.

You and check my emails while talking nonsense, how we can power intelligent transformation and accelerate adoption, connect and enable new experiences, make the move to enable the application to gain true knowledge, how to speak the language of management, so I play a character. named Charles Crone, he got swept up in the kind of new age mysticism that swept the west coast during the '60s and '70s. Cron hires him at Pacific Bell and his job is to come in and participate in what they call a project of transformational change. Workshop participants engage in an exercise designed to broaden perception and increase sensory information, and Cron's role was actually to reprogram the employees by introducing them to his own personal philosophy, drawn from a Russian mystic named George GV, devotees of grief. he often participated in mystical dances, recited mystical poetry, etc., and the members of the board of directors of Pacific Bell were particularly interested in this, uh, and they thought that their employees should also learn a little about it now, if you look back on that language, now it sounded outrageous and strange at the time, but now that's part of everyday language, people need a justification for what they're doing, they need a language that, um,

does

these empty tasks that people have in companies, it gives them a certain substance or apparent substance, so there is the exhaustion, what would you say if you had to reduce it to just one part?

A few topics, what for you guys, what would you name as the key, the key drivers of your uh, yeah, I think it's been like they come out like mild symptoms, but mostly like I'm

feeling

really strong. I think it was March of this year. where I found myself unable to do everyday things or run errands or talk to people, where I felt overwhelmed by doing that, like waking up, brushing my son, sitting at the table, that was the hardest. do in the morning and that was the most prominent symptom for me, recognizing that I have a problem.

It's embarrassing to admit it, but I actually sometimes felt like it would be easier if I got hit by a car in the morning. on the way to work because that would solve the problem of not having to go there, that was how deep I was in my own misery, I just felt so anxious and it seemed impossible to even go to work sometimes because I knew what was waiting for me and I felt that if someone or something outside of me solved the problem then I wouldn't have to think about it, but since these are things I only realized later, I totally rejected the idea.

I wasn't exhausted, I just felt like I was invincible. I can't feel exhausted. This can't happen to me again, so it was a little hard for me to start realizing, admitting, accepting and processing. It was a really long, very long process. Me when they talk about

burnout

, if that's all, then why change the name? Why just call it what it is? What is

burnout

with burnout? We're talking about more than that. The exhaustion response is what we think. stress response chronic everyday stressors burnout is a sign it's a warning sign it's a warning if you start to see problems with burnout it's telling you no who's burning out is telling you why in the 19th century we had this invention of a new professional class of people who were managers, those managers often had engineering backgrounds, so they were pretty good at fine-tuning machinery.

Then they began to see people as cogs that they could potentially sharpen and make more efficient. Approximately in the late 1970s, a corporation. The company was no longer treated as an entity with people in it. The purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value. Companies began to say how much human capital we have and began to treat its employment as a kind of balance sheet that they could measure. they get by like they have no history like they have no family like they don't have any attachments to place it's not even just a cog in the machine it's a blinking digital line on a balance sheet somewhere that can be easily erased with the push of a button The key to burnout is in the engineering, I mean, rocket boosters burn out, you know, ball bearings burn out, so it's no surprise that whenThey started Silicon Valley startups called them burnout shops and they advertised themselves as burnout shops because that's how life is going to be.

I like it, but it was meant to be for a limited time, it was meant to be a two to four or five year sprint. Max is now the model for a marathon. This is the way we do business all the time for years. The human body can't run a marathon in A Sprint Pace, most people come to work eager to make a difference and it starts with the most basic clear expectations, so when people come to work they need to know what that is. its function and all too often in organizations now people don't know what it is.

The great challenges of leadership is bringing teams together by creating a common purpose how that mission or purpose comes to life it is the manager it is the manager who helps the employee see how that work connects to that broader picture many times we place people in management positions for a couple of reasons, we ask managers how you got to your job a position I was in the organization for a long time two I was very successful as an individual contributor before I was a manager, neither of those two things correlate with being an effective manager .

The motivation is that I want to be a manager because I will probably get paid more. I will feel like I have reached a higher level in the organization. Those are two human nature motivations that are hard to get people out of unless you have a path where someone can see that they have a position of high esteem, maybe even get paid more than managers for being a exceptional individual contributor. They may not think of people as individuals. They don't even care that much about them as individuals, so they think almost entirely about the job itself, not how that person can develop over time, so what it does is deteriorate the team culture, but it's also not good for the team. manager, but that is the system or the right of passage that has worked, that has happened within organizations, if you are going to ask me what the root cause of all this is, that would be one of them, here is the financial logic: make someone a manager just because they are good at doing a certain job and pay them more so that they no longer do that job and instead do a job they are not qualified to do, with the result that the productivity of everyone else in the team decreases, except you.

They still have to pay their salaries, meanwhile, the new manager has to prove to his boss that he is still getting results, so he hires a management consultant to try to fix the problem. He produces an interesting report, but half the time he doesn't change anything, but he still pays the consultant. Well, I mean, I don't know how many managers I've had, but I've had a lot and I think there's only two, so maybe you know that 10% might have had a personal conversation that made a complete difference in how I. I was actually doing my job.

Can I ask a quick question? It's something everyone has mentioned here. You know, you talk about childhood expectations about work life. Do you remember a specific case of that clash between expectations and reality? I was thinking about this. um yeah, like I mentioned before, I'm the older sister in the family and I have a little sister, she's two years younger than me and we're very different, she's the wild spirit and the one who's been searching for herself. all his life while I've been the most rational one in IR maybe and the one who gets good grades and likes to do what society expects him to do and that's why I said before that there I felt like I was there .

It was this train for me, so I get on the train and then there's the school where you get good results, you do well, you don't bother the teachers, then of course I'll go to UNI, it's law school or medicine or whatever, be the good girl. maybe the point is that I felt like I was something and then I was sort of smothered to be like something else, something less something smaller and that's why I developed the feeling that I'm not good enough and I am. there's something wrong with me, like there's something fundamentally deeply wrong with me as a human being and maybe that's something that I've been trying to fix through these different accomplishments in life like going to that going to UNI getting those results because I felt like that's my responsibility as Vanessa as the person that I am, as the person that's supposed to do these things.

One of the things that has fascinated me over the years is education, it is almost designed to destroy the natural. The curiosity that we have when we are children, somehow you know that when you are in primary education they beat it out of you, they are destroying that Natural Curiosity and then, when you go to higher education, they give it back halfway and you never get it back . to where you were when you were five, but you know that maybe you'll get a little bit of that, enough to be able to function as an intellectual. Many of the rituals and structures of primary education are designed to prepare people for factory work, which is why they ring the bells. and you have to get up and you have to move from room to room, there is no particular reason why you should move from room to room.

The interesting question to me is why do they keep doing that, because not many kids go to school. We are going to work more in factories. My conclusion is that they are preparing us for a life that is not going to make much sense. They are teaching us not to ask questions about things that any intelligent person who would not have been in. Someone so qualified would like, but why? Why do we fill out this form if we don't receive money anyway? Why do we write this report if no one is going to read it? All of these things that anyone in a job should really ask themselves but know as a condition of their employment that they shouldn't if a man shows up in a white coat or acts like he has authority faster than Nokia has done before just follow the lead. game Children first realize that they are separate from the world around them when you realize that they can have predictable effects and you have this scenario where let's say a child moves his arms and moves a pencil, there is a pencil there and He rolls across the table and realizes what's happening, moves his hand again and rolls some more.

This is cool, oh my gosh, you know I am, I'm an entity that can have effects on things and that's the moment you realize that you were a person and there's a world and they're not the same and when it's taken away That, people just collapse, their sense of self is destroyed, really the very basis of what makes us human or feel human, it occurs to me that we need to reevaluate what we consider valuable at work because we have done it if we've We have come to a situation where millions and millions of people around the world come to work every day saying that there is no social value in what I do, that it makes no sense, that there is a clash between what the market dictates, what What our economic system identifies as valuable and what people really feel in their hearts as valuable there is a disjunction people feel that there is something terribly wrong they have some kind of notion that real work satisfies people's needs wants it they take it it tries to promote something in humans that we want to promote so when you walk into a company, they make you feel blessed working for them, they choose you to work for them and you are not the one who applies for the job, but they pick you up out of nowhere and choose you to Be the blessed one who works for them, so you will have to feel that your life is the life of the company, so you no longer have an identity, but you are the company, this is the lucky one, are you going to get married? what's happening? about that in Italy we say like when you have the test bottle and you open it if the top ends with you you will really get married something like that yeah this is crazy in 3 years I have been attending three reorganizations where people have been losing their jobs, people have been crying, they've been working for 20 years or more, so in the back of my head I always had that thing that you are giving your best to this company, but remember that one day they will call you. and you say you have to pack your things in a week.

I was in a relationship for a few years so we lived together and of course we decided to start a family together and then we couldn't buy a house together because of our income because it was too low. I was one of the two who had a better contract. I had a better income, so I felt like if I failed at this job we wouldn't buy a house, so we wouldn't start a family, it would be all mine. It was guilt so I was very stressed at home. He was doing extra work at home, so he wasn't really there for the couple to live together at the time.

What happened to me is that I worked too hard to the point that I destroyed my private life. life i got really frustrated because i thought i worked hard for over 10 years i want to settle down i want to have kids i want to do these kinds of things and i can't corporations are a great example of the emperor has no clothes it's all about promise it's It's about what we're going to do in the future, they're constantly going through these processes of change, reorganizing, restructuring, downsizing, right-sizing, you fire people, you hire people, you change signals, but at the end of the day , in reality it changes very little. we know that a lot of people lose with all of us a lot of people who lose their jobs it often becomes extremely stressful for the people who stay often those things are done not necessarily because it is necessary um they are finished because the CEO has to prove it something is happening to Those who do not put pressure are the financial analysts who set the price or make a recommendation of what they believe the price of a share should be, in reality nothing changes in the performance of the company, but the price of the share goes up because I have said what correct for the financial markets, but that also means that because the CEO is often rewarded based on stock options or stock price, his salary increases, one of the most pernicious things about our current economic system is that the more your work benefits others in an obvious and immediate sense, the more your work has a clear and undeniable beneficial effect on other human beings, the less likely you will be paid for it.

If you look at the charts, we're basically staying almost completely stable, while productivity continues to rise precipitously. The big question is what happened to those additional profits. The story we tell ourselves and this time it is not entirely false is that everything was injected into Finance. Basically these profits went to the rich, only 1% of the population and they are basically gambling. I've been running my whole life to study and get a job in a company so I can have a good life going and buying an amazing house, you know, and then I want to be single and travel for a long time and then I want to have kids and settle down and It's just a big dream, it's just an illusion, so to give up so much of my private life and not achieve the results I expected was just mind-blowing, my brain stopped.

Working, I can tell you that this is the feeling I have now as if something broke inside my brain and I couldn't imagine how that happened. It was incredible. The original sabotage manual was written for a world where most working people operated a machine, but we. We have been just as effective at sabotaging work in our world where most work depends not on a machine but on the brain power of humans. The authors of the original manual would have been surprised at how effective our sabotage has been on only 20% of the workforce. They are committed to their work, those who lead them are rarely qualified for the job and fewer benefits of the work go to those who do it, they continue, why are we creating our society by creating an environment where people do really good work? ? do beneficial work and have them do it in a way that rips them apart and you know they're going, so how to realize that the environment and the environment that people function in really you know as much as possible how they function.

We designed it to make people truly grow and prosper. We have long known everything about ergonomics that we have to design furniture and tools that adapt to the human body. You may not like the way the human body is designed, but that's how it is. It works I guess I'm talking more about ergonomics in terms of the social psychological, what motivates people, this is the strange thing for me and this is the conundrum for me personally because I love the work that I do right now and In fact, for For the first time in 20 years I'm doing something that really matters to me.

I feel like I'm making a difference. I'm working in a meaningful industry and, um, but I'm still experiencing symptoms of burnout, so how? Have I reached this stage yet? What went wrong? Do you know what I may have done wrong or why I have panic attacks? Is it because I have you and I could have the same job and there? There's something out there that drives you crazy and I'm fine, what's been donediscovered in a lot of research done by a lot of people is that at least six areas where that type of work balances or imbalances fit or misfit occurs that can be addictive if it exists if it's a good fit Greater commitment to work if it's not a good fit risk of burnout becomes a bigger problem the workload was always huge and there are no long-term projects for which it is always like this yesterday that need to be fulfilled, so what everyone thinks about is the workload and that is The one that probably relates most clearly to burnout issues and basically the imbalance there or the misalignment is that the demands are really high and the resources to manage those demands are low you don't have enough time you don't have the right information you don't have the tools to manage those demands.

You don't know there is no way that can be done since what is the point and it is an endless process, it never ends, it just never ends, you finish with one task and tomorrow you have many more because they need to expand to other countries, the second it's control and that's really the extent to which you have some choice, some discretion, some autonomy. some way to decide what is the best way to do the job given how it is today, unlike you, you have no discretion, you have no choice, you have to do this and what we found is that it's not that much of a workload, But he does have a heavy workload and has high control. no problem, it's when you have a lot of work and there is no control, it's like sisipushing the rock up and suddenly at the end of the day it comes back when there is not enough reward, which means that no matter what you do, how successful you are, how good you are at meeting deadlines and getting things done in something, good feedback doesn't come. the reward is not just about the salary or the benefits, I mean, I don't want to discount that, but I mean, that's not usually the most important thing, the most important thing is the social recognition, the gratitude that someone noticed you, you really know, oh my god.

You really got us out of a bind for what you did and oh, thank you so much, and you know we couldn't have done it without you. Little things like that. I thought, God, I'm going to have the logo in my eyes soon and I'll be walking around like a zombie, yeah, because it was like you know and you have to live and breathe our values ​​and you need to be an agent of change and you need to do this and you need to do that and the community is really the social environment that you, the people that you come into contact with on a regular basis, okay, we have a flexible schedule, yes, we have a flexible work schedule, you know, but every day a 10:00 a.m. m. we have a meeting.

So how can I be as flexible as you give me? Can I work from uh 12: to 9: no? I mean, when it works well when there is social support. Mutual social support. You know, we help each other if something is not clear. to clarify, uh, when there is trust, when there is a kind of mutual respect and, you know, the notion of reciprocity, when all that works well, honestly, it's like money in the bank, although I give you the message, listen guys, this is too much for me and i got exhausted because of this, they don't care they just like to hide the problem and keep doing what they have to do when people feel like they are working in a place that is unfair and treats people unfair way.

It will raise the level of that Sky High cynicism and if there is a conflict of values ​​it is even worse, we must take into account how human beings are and how they function, what motivates them, what makes them do great things, what they need to do. recharge and reboot and you know, have a life for generations, people thought they were working too hard, so one day we will create a world where people don't have to work so hard, where robots will do the hard, unpleasant work, the work repetitive and stupid thing that no one really wants to do now that we live under a system, a capitalist market system that is supposed to be efficient, can allocate resources in a way that ensures maximum production and profitability, maybe thinks it makes people unhappy , but it ultimately creates the greater good by being the most efficient system anyone can imagine, I mean any efficient system you think should be able to reallocate resources in such a way that we work less and everyone has enough to eat, if we can't to do that, something terrible is wrong, I mean.

We have an incredibly ridiculous system. I think we should change the way we think about the economy. Let's not talk anymore about production and consumption. Most of the work isn't actually making things, it's not changing them, even you know, transforming them into something. otherwise it's trying to keep it the same, you know you have to take care of things or they'll fall apart and then they tell us, well you know we're going to create robots that will get rid of all our jobs, this is a big problem. well, you can't let people have too much free time, they will be depressed, they will just sit and watch TV all day, they won't be able to decide what to do with it.

People themselves want to contribute to the world and make the world better for the people around them, and if left to their own devices they are more likely to do something useful than if they don't, how do we know we won't? to have a world full of annoying strays or, you know, bad poets, horrible musicians, you know, crazy scientists with Hollow Earth theories or trying to create perpetual motion devices, all we need is one of those bad musicians be it Miles Davis or John Lenon. or one of those crazy scientists to be Einstein and you know you practically got your investment back when it's hot in the day done I walk for a long break in the ring I'm coming back to where I belong where I belong days G for me oh I'm going home when this hot day is over, I will see your face, they will bring not for the sorrows, in a warm embrace, hot and tight, the days shine high above, high above, look at your face, can we rest when it is all over, can you rest?