MC78 Helping Employees Avoid Burnout from Challenging Tasks

Step into the Management Café with your hosts Tim Burgess and Pilar Orti. 

This conversation was inspired by an article Pilar read in Organizational Dynamics: "How managers can help employees navigate tough decisions without burning out by Andrew Molinsky and Laura Noval. They describe a specific type of burnout, that which arises from having to continuously perform challenging tasks. This is different from the burnout that comes from chronic overwork or being under prolonged stress.

And it requires different solutions. An employee might have a low overall workload, might be exercising and getting enough sleep and ticking all the boxes for managing "overwork burnout". Yet these if they are required to perform challenging tasks beyond their capacity to cope... they will burn out. So how can we support employees in this situation? The article's authors propose several ways organisations can help employees prepare, carry out and recover from challenging tasks.

Managers play a key role in guiding employees through difficult work. Firstly in recognising that a particular task is a "necessary evil" and will take a toll on the person who performs it. Then by acknowledging this impact to the employee and supporting them. This can reduce the emotional burden on the employee and help them avoid burnout.

01:45 mins The article talks about the type of burnout that comes when the employee is required to do things that are particularly challenging. The authors call these tasks "necessary evils". To quote directly from the article "Burnout happens when an employee continuously performs tasks that cause emotional, material or physical harm to another person (also known as 'necessary evils'). Disciplining others or delivering bad news are examples of necessary evils. It requires an employee to be focused and self-controlled, which at times can cause significant stress and impaired task performance."

4:20 One of the examples of a "necessary evil" task comes from an employee in a drug recovery programme who is required to remove someone from the programme because they violated the rules. This is a tough decision but, in a way, it is the right thing to do. It's easy to see how performing this task would take it's toll on the employee, particularly if the task must be done regularly or without support.

5:00 Pilar shares a story of someone working at an educational institution where their role requires them to tell students that they need to pay for an additional service. And the students can have a big, emotional reaction. If the employee has to deal with this situation repeatedly, it will lead to burnout.

6:30 With this type of burnout you might not have a large overall volume of work, you might be getting enough sleep and doing all the right things. But too much of the necessary evils still leads to burnout.

7:00 The article lists two types of challenging tasks. A competence challenge is a task which is technically challenging - requiring the employee to work at or beyond their capability. A character challenge conflicts with their sense of who they are as a person. Tim would add a third element of capacity. An employee might be able to have one challenging conversation each day, but not have the capacity to do ten of those conversations. And Pilar adds another dimension of expectation: sometimes we can get overloaded even when the volume is not that high, but our expectations turn it into overwhelm.

8:15 It can be good to go into a competency or capacity challenge as long as it isn't for a sustained period. Tim shares a story about challenging work at Shield GEO. They asked a simple question at the end of each day to a team that was under stress:

"Could you do another day like this tomorrow?"

Asking this simple question was much less intrusive than a time and motion study. People's answers helped identify what tasks were causing overload - but they also helped people understand that they weren't in a constant state of stress. The hard days didn't happen forever.

10:30 Pilar likes the question "could you do another day tomorrow like you had today?". It helps the manager see how sustainable people's work is and gives the employee an opp