The Impact of Burnout on Employee Engagement with Dr John Chan
In this episode of We Are Human Leaders, Alexis speaks with Co-Researchers and Co-Authors of the Global Workplace Burnout Study, Dr John Chan and fellow Human Leaders Director Sally Clarke.
Dr Chan and Clarke have conducted the longitudinal study for the third time in 2022 and bring the latest insights from their most recent report with a focus on employee engagement to the conversation.
The report, published in November 2022 highlights the growing trend of Burnout globally, along with the critical acknowledgement that Burnout is a systemic and organisational problem, not an individual one.
This conversation explores the causes of Burnout within organisations, the key considerations for organisations to bring awareness to Burnout and proposes high-level considerations for addressing it.
To download a full copy of the Global Burnout Report 2022 visit www.wearehumanleaders.com
If Burnout is a concern for your organisation, reach out to Human Leaders for workshops and consultancy to address it at the root.
For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.
Episode Transcript:
Spk0 Sally Clarke Spk1 Dr John Chan Spk2 Alexis Zahner
[00:00:08] spk_0: Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast, I'm Sally Clarke and today my co-host Alexis Zahner and I are speaking with Dr John Chan about a key issue for leaders everywhere right now, Burnout prevention. In this conversation we go deep into some of the startling findings of the 2022 Global Burnout Study and practical tips we can use to shift the needle on burnout starting now, the cadence of this episode is a little different as Dr. Chan and I share an interest and expertise in this topic. We are both co authors of the 2022 global burnout study report which is available now. Dr. John Chan is the managing director at Infinite potential, a nonprofit think tank focused on workplace research, John is an industrial and organizational psychologist with more than 20 years of global experience designing people strategies that transform workplaces to empower individuals to realize their whole potential, john's career has taken him from Silicon Valley startups to new york stock Exchange and TsX 100 listed companies. He's also become a good friend of mine during our work together on burnout. This conversation is packed with insights for leaders at all levels about burnout. So let's delve in. Thanks so much for joining us today, john, it's great to have you with us that we are human leaders now, I know for a fact that you focused on burnout during your PhD and I understand that your perspective on the root causes of burnout has shifted since that time. So I love it if you could share with us a little bit, firstly how he came to be interested in studying burnout and also how that shift in perspective on its causes took place.
[00:01:46] spk_1: Yeah, thanks so much for inviting me today. I'm really excited to be here and really talk about this topic here. So, I've been interested in people and their behavior at a pretty early age. It sounds a bit we remember I was in my chemistry class and I was doing this experiment, and my teacher at the time said, you know, we've been doing this experiment for decades, we've gone through so many years of classes of this, and the results are always the same and exactly around the same time, you know, I was experiencing something with a couple friends of mine where they were making some pretty bad choices and I knew they knew better than making those choices. So why is that? You know, I didn't, and that's kind of stuck in my head like I needed to get to the bottom of why are people making decisions that they know better about? And so that kind of set me off on the path of psychology. So that was about Year eight or something like that. And so I've been on this journey ever since, and frankly, I don't think I'm any closer than known with the answer. And so through graduate school, I became really interested in Martin Seligman worked on positive psychology, so more specifically on learned helplessness. This learned helplessness is a term specifying that an organism, a person learning to accept and enduring unpleasant stimuli and I'm willing to avoid them even when they can, so they just kind of accept this bad stuff happening to them. And this idea that people can be conditioned to think that they have no control over the outcome of a situation that they're in, even when they actually do have the power to help themselves. That this was really interesting to me, and this is something that really tied me into actually being me with burnout. And when I was kind of starting to think about that positive sight, this was early days in the positive psychology field and I wanted to validate this theory. So I designed an experiment to see if those with higher rates of learned helplessness was more likely to burn out or not. I would not if I could identify those with learned helplessness, we can kind of select them out of high pressure jobs, so they don't burn out. So kind of helping both them and not get in that situation. And also for organizations to have healthier employees. So my thinking back then was that burnout was caused by the individual and sort of the individual's way of thinking. Now I graduated, I worked in talent management for a lot of global kind of organizations in more specifically in leadership identification and development. So working with some of the best and brightest people out there to help develop them into c suite positions and you know, I worked a lot of individuals and there's this trend that kept happening where after working with some of these individuals for the last few years, you know, I would come in and be like, hey, great news, this role has come up and you know, that's what we've been working towards and we've got a position open for you to go into this much more senior role. And I started getting these responses like, hey, that's great, but I'm not going to take the job actually, I'm going to quit because I feel really burnt out and you know, one or two of them, I'm like, you know, that's not sure what happened, maybe it went off kind of thing, but then it kept happening and these are some of the best and brightest people out that I've ever worked with. And so, you know, thanks making that back to my initial thinking where maybe there was something about this person that's why they are experiencing burnout. I know that wasn't true in these individuals because doing very well, they are really good in terms of all of the work stuff. So what was happening with that, and that's where my mind really started to shift on what actually are the causes for, and so
[00:05:28] spk_2: that's really fascinating for me, John, because it sounds like, so to me it sounds like you started with this concept of learned helplessness being a sort of having some kind of causation to burn out and then you noticed that these people who were actually really high achievers were also experiencing burnout, which tells me that it's happening at both ends of the achievement spectrum if you will. So I know that you Reese co authored the global burnout study for a third year in a row. What were the key findings? What do you know now about burnout? That you didn't know then what surprised you from this research?
[00:06:02] spk_1: We really wanted to do a longitudinal study to see how things are tracking. We know the concept of burnout is not new. We've been studying this for probably 50 years or so, but when COVID, and we there was a major change change in the way that people were working and the entire globe was going through the same situation, which is quite rare that the entire world is going through the same situation. I thought that was a really good time to kind of see, hey, let's just pick this back up. Also, I had a lot of extra time because I was kind of locked in our house to see how the world was kind of reacting to this. And after three years, we have been seeing some trends that are just continuing to, You know, year after year, we're seeing the same trend. So the first thing is the rate of burnout in the three years, the rates of burnout are continuing to climb. So for the last three years, you know, in 2020, when we first started this study for our participants, around 29% of the participants was feeling burned out and that climbed to about 35% last year. And this year the latest findings that we have from 2020 to burnout studies at 38%. So another significant climb in the rate of burnout that's happening.
[00:07:14] spk_2: Yeah, absolutely, john. And just before we go any further into the findings here, I think something that would be really helpful for our listeners and certainly I know the first time that I had sally explained this to me for those listening. Don't know. Sally is also a co author on the global burnout study with john, which is really exciting to have her so close to this mission as well. Something that I learned is burnout actually is as simple as I think people think, I think many of us use this word or overuse this word and so they might pose this question to you if you wouldn't mind. Could you just for a moment help us understand what the dimensions of burnout are before we sort of move a little bit more into those deeper findings.
[00:07:54] spk_0: Absolute. Like so this is also one of the reasons that we do sometimes see some studies reporting burnout rates as high as 70 or 80%. And that's because they're often just directly asking people Do you feel burned out and honestly, I think in the last few years, most of us have felt some level of pretty intense stress, but the World Health Organization defined burnout in 2019 as being a syndrome that is caused by chronic workplace stress. So really placing it in the work and the occupational environment and the three dimensions that we use to measure burnout, our exhaustion, cynicism and reduced professional efficacy. So exhaustion really, I think we all can pretty much immediately imagine what that is that's really completely being physically, mentally and emotionally exhausted cynicism speaks to a sense of withdrawal from your job and even from your life more broadly, so starting to become more cynical, more distanced from your work and losing that sense of engagement. And the reduced professional efficacy is really expressed in just not being able to do or produce what you once could as fast. So particularly for those who are high achievers that can be really quite confronting for our identity when we finally have this realization that we are trying to churn out what we were, but we're just not able to do it at the same rate and that can be quite a confronting experience for people to go through and burn out.
[00:09:14] spk_2: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that personal frustration almost exacerbates the exhaustion and exacerbates those other issues to an extent, doesn't it?
[00:09:23] spk_0: Absolutely. And I think particularly when we're quite attached to what we're doing, when we've spent a lot of our lives getting high grades and achieving in our studies and then in our career, it can be a very confronting and almost sort of existential feeling of, who am I, if I can't do what I once could and what will it take? Whether that's more coffee, whether that's less sleep, whether that's ignoring healthy coping mechanisms that I have had to be able to try to keep achieving until ultimately, for some people, we do reach a state of burnout.
[00:09:54] spk_1: So
[00:09:55] spk_2: it sounds to me then, and, you know, johN based on your journey in this research as well, that burnout isn't something that's caused by the individual, Is that right? It's not something that individuals bring upon themselves.
[00:10:08] spk_1: Yeah, that's right. Just from my, my personal journey on this and also lots and lots of decades of studies on burnout and its causes. What they've found is that the symptoms of burnout is caused by the organizational structures and the cultures that the person is working in. So that's why, you know, no matter how good a person or, you know, in terms of resilience by all of those things when they're put into these really high pressured environments, toxic work cultures, they're going to, no matter what the situation is.
[00:10:41] spk_2: Okay. So going back into some of these key findings, then, the trend has been that burnouts increasing over the last three years, right? We know that now what other findings have come out of this study, john what were some of the key takeaways that organizations really need to be paying attention to at this point,
[00:10:56] spk_1: there's a really interesting insight that we found this year study where we looked at, you know, this question about the hybrid work environment, but I think this is something most organizations are struggling with. How do we do this right? You know, we, I think that the door is open and the horses left on bringing everybody back to the office for five days a week, that's not gonna happen anymore. But also at the same time, we're not going to just not come back to the office. So what is the right balance? How do we make that happen? And so a lot of organizations are trialing different things, but I think some organizations are struggling with what is the right balance and we wanted to kind of have a piece of input into that conversation. And so within this year study, we asked our participants where do they work the majority of their time, whether it's at home, do they split time between the office and home or did they work within the workplace? The majority of time? And really interesting insight that we found was that those who are more likely and experiencing burnout actually work the majority of the time at home rather? And those who are in the office actually had the lowest rates of burnout and what we've been finding there as well is that when people are in the office at least 50% of the time, they indicated that they are getting more support from the organization. So simply by being there at the organization, they feel like you know, they're sort of getting the benefits of being together with other people within the organization. And the support that creates versus those who are working over 80% of the time at home indicate they're really low rates of organizational support. I just wanna say these are correlations and organizations, so there might be other stuff going on. But I mean, that's the trend for this data is showing that there are some things that will need to kind of talk about in terms of burnout. I will, we talked about that environment
[00:12:48] spk_0: and I think if I can just draw from that as well. Another of our findings was that there's a real shift in demographic in terms of age group this year, to the 18 to 24 age group actually being that has shown the highest rate of burnout and that has jumped significantly in the last 12 months. And so we're looking at people who are possibly fresh graduates have come in at entry level positions, actually showing the highest rate of burnout at the moment. And I think this connects to that hybrid work piece because these are potentially people who were hired in a remote environment who shifted from university studies, for example, straight into a, into a corporate environment and have never seen their office until perhaps the last few months. So their experience probably, you know, they're not seeing humans in person. They maybe have never met some of their colleagues means that that makes a lot of sense to me that they're not feeling a strong level of organizational support and potentially very quickly running into the exhaustion, cynicism and even reduced efficacy that we're seeing and burn out very early in their careers.
[00:13:48] spk_2: Yeah, that is fascinating. And I'll reflect on my graduate days that I had so much support from the project team around me, I had direct access to my managing director at the time and I couldn't imagine having, you know, finished university gone into a corporate marketing career, which is what I did and done that from a home office and sort of not have that support. And I think, you know, what's fascinating about the hybrid work argument is it's such a convoluted argument. There is no easy black or white that office or at home is better. I think what this speaks to is the need for organizations to really look at all of the factors and all of the systems and all the processes that need to change and adjust to actually make sure that employees can transition to flexible work and still have everything they need to thrive in that and sally I know that part of this burnout research that you're most passionate about and most fascinated by is the psychological safety peace and can you help us sort of unpack that a little bit cell and perhaps maybe explain some of that data to us and also some of the implications around burnout for psychological safety in workplaces.
[00:14:59] spk_0: Yeah, absolutely. Like so I think for me, you know, we focused a lot on those what you mentioned just now, these organizational courses like how we work, the number of meetings we have, the way we structure our work and the tools that we use to facilitate interactive collaborative work environments. I think we can't just focus exclusively on that because we are seeing from the data that a sense of organizational support is really crucial for people to avoid burnout. There's a high negative correlation between organizational support and burnout and there's also a high negative correlation between psychological safety and all three dimensions of burnout. So while it's really important for us to sort of re evaluate the structures of how we work as you mentioned, like how can we really make work as the day to day gritty tasks that we have to do as simplified as easy as transparent as possible. But how can we also ensure that the way that we treat each other as human beings in the workplace is with dignity with respect and creating and fostering that sense of trust and connection and engage so that people irrespective of their locations are actually feeling supported by their organization and we describe it in this term of organizational support and I think it's really important to remember in this context that organizations are people. So this is about how we as people as leaders treat ourselves and each other. And that's a really important component of a burnout prevention strategy as well. So systems and structures, Yes. And how are we actually behaving towards one another and each other in the workplace as well, both have enormous consequences for burnout prevention.
[00:16:34] spk_2: And you spoke to this piece of employee engagement and I'd love to ask you john around that as well, I know that this was a piece of what you studied in the study this year. Were there any surprising findings or correlations between employee engagement and the incidences of burnout
[00:16:50] spk_1: in the study? There was a really strong correlation between the rates of engagement and burnout or negative correlation. So as engagement levels rise, the levels of burnout does decrease. I want to add a caveat today because there's, we do know about the dark side of engagement where people become too engaged within their organization. That's actually a reason why they burn out. You know, you see this a lot when sort of non profit organizations or charities where people really buy into and are engaged with the values that they have their organization. A lot of it is about helping people and they are just so bought into that they actually burned themselves out. So there's sort of this curve linear kind of relationship with that. But I think for most organizations, they are, there's quite a strong focus on engagement. And I think that that's a really good thing as they are focusing on being.
[00:17:44] spk_2: That's a fascinating connection there, john because I think then that does tie a little bit into that personal piece, isn't it? And almost that moral obligation or that connection to how important your role is. Can actually perhaps for individuals and I'm speculating here cause them to sort of not put the appropriate boundaries in place between their work and sort of life integration as well.
[00:18:06] spk_1: What we've heard from these individuals in these organizations. And also you get a lot from this doctors as well. You know, if they don't do so much work, they almost suffer a moral injury of themselves when they know that if they stayed another hour or they could help another person of something and by not doing that, they sometimes feel, oh, I'm just being selfish and and not doing an extra hour of work to help somebody when it's actually quite detrimental to that person. But having said that, you know, we talk a lot about the role of the organization and leaders in preventing burnout. This is a perfect example of how leaders do need to step in to make sure that their people aren't burning out. and even for all of the right reasons that they want to keep working, that, you know, they do need to stop them from doing that.
[00:18:54] spk_2: Yeah, so, and I mean these statistics seem pretty undeniable here, john and you've spoken to these very purpose driven organizations, you know, people who are out there and not for profits really helping people in in what I'm sure they feel very passionate about. So it doesn't feel necessarily like the purpose or meaning piece missing here. So you know, why are we seeing more profound action from leaders to be preventative around burnout?
[00:19:20] spk_1: Yeah, that's a great question. So I think in my opinion, burnout is a very complicated issue, especially when it comes to the solutions for the libyan burnout. So there's no silver bullets or any easy way to resolve this issue. So a lot of leaders have never actually had to deal with this issue During the past, you know, in the past when somebody felt burned out. I think a lot of times the manager will simply tell them to open the kind of stuff and you know, that's pretty much the solution to the burnout back in the days and to actually complicate things even further, there's a lot of noise out there about burnout, especially in the solutions as well right now. I think it's estimated that the wellness industry is around 1.5 Million dollars with an annual growth of 5-10%. So there's a lot of stuff out there. There's a countless apps out there that says they're able to help people with their burnout or their well being and just a number of things. So you know, we're faced with the really difficult situations. Most managers don't really know how to deal with some of these re causes and if they do, they quickly realize how difficult and complicated these causes are to fix. And then you know, and at the same time there's all these shiny toys that you can get to say that, hey, you're doing something for your people. So you know, the whole mix of that people are doing things and all of the good intentions of leaders out there but they might not be doing the right kind of fix is now being a psychologist. I can't help but be a little bit deeper on why people do or don't do certain things. So what I've seen are some, you know, some psychological barriers that might be holding People back from making real progress. So I'll just quickly mention three. The first is interpersonal risk all of us, even our most senior leaders, we're all human and being the first to kind of call for major change and really rock the boat, which is what you need to kind of fix for now. You know that are that that's something that's quite uncomfortable and unrewarding for people and sometimes that might be quite career limiting. You know, and you don't want to be that person causing all those problems there. So there's a lot of hesitation in people taking that interpersonal risk of raising their hand and facing these problems. The second one is calling the descendants. So that is when sort of basically what your brain is thinking is different than what you're doing. And in those cases a lot of these leaders who are senior positions today had also gone through some really a tough journey on the way up. So if they were to make things easier for you know, the next group coming up, there's a lot of kind of business on why did I work all those hours, why did I lose my friends and family or didn't get the time to spend with them to get to this role when somebody else can are doing that, but still having all of those, you know family friends time, so there's a lot of distance in there that they just can't and that's when we hear a lot of, well that's what I had to do as the reason for inaction. And the last one I just mentioned is just the fear of being blamed. But we have this thing with if somebody is trying to solve a complicated issue and it doesn't solve it 100% they might get blamed. Well this person try to solve it and obviously it didn't work, so we're never gonna do anything about it again. So that that feeling of being blamed as well. So, you know, a combination of that, there is more uh some of this in action that will have to Yeah,
[00:22:49] spk_2: I think there's so much to unpack there, john bit. I mean I've had so firstly to the first point around this interpersonal risk, interestingly, I had a conversation just last year with a leader in a health organization and I mentioned to her, look, there's this research around burnout. My co director does this fantastic workshops, really helping you dig into some of the reasons why. And she said to me, we can't use the word burnout here because if we say burnout, then we have to actually address that the way that we structure our organization has to change and we don't have the time for that. So I just wanted to point to that because I think there is, you know, I feel for leaders in those positions, particularly middle management, where they've got to deal with directives coming down onto them and also manage the staff, you know, at the grassroots really sort of, I guess copying the outcomes of that. And the next thing I wanted to dive into and I feel I can't move past this without asking sally about this question and this is the cognitive dissonance piece and they're are without a doubt certain industries where this idea of almost like these rite of passage punishments if you will are part of it, you know, Unfortunately we see it in medicine, we had a conversation with an incredible doctor earlier this year who spoke about the mental health incidences as a doctor and that right of passions there now sally you're a former finance lawyer. Can you tell us a little bit about what it was like going into the law industry, you've obviously x experience burnout on a personal level yourself, was this a sort of process, this kind of rite of passage, you have to earn your place in this industry, Was that something that you experience and do you believe that that contributed to your personal burnout?
[00:24:20] spk_0: Yeah, great question. And I'm really, I think it's a really important one because I think there's while law and finance industry certainly I think particularly prominent in having these kind of rites of passages, I think there's actually quite a lot of people who a lot of fields in which there is this sense of you just have to do a hard slog. You have to, it is expected of you that you will sacrifice all other aspects of your life for the first sort of 10 to 15 years of your career, I think particularly in areas such as law and again, I'm just speaking from my personal experience, but because there is that sort of par partnership track, so if you want to progress in your legal career, there is a lot of, it's a very competitive environment, that competitive environment is heightened by the partners, they really kind of in my experience with like leverage that to extract more from employees because that's just this is the path that you take and if you're not, if you can't cut it, That's on you. So I really do get that sense of, I think that would be very difficult transition in some ways for the legal industry to go through because everyone who is at that senior level has had to make all kinds of sacrifices. And I think then shifting to an environment in which people are actually allowed to breathe and have healthy, balanced lives, perhaps working 40 hours a week as opposed to the 60 or 70 that we often see certainly in those kind of top firms that's going to be quite a difficult I think a challenge transition, it will take some real courage on the part of those leaders to put aside their own interests to understand. I guess first that cognitive dissidence that they're experiencing, which jOHn spoke to and to have the courage and I think and the compassion to say that happened to me, but that doesn't mean it needs to happen to the next generation.
[00:25:59] spk_2: It is an interesting thing, isn't it? When in my view, the reason we do this work is so that the next generation don't have to have the experiences that we've had. That's what I hope for the world. But it is interesting how some of us cling to this, I need to earn something and that you earn your place and that comes from this I guess societal construct of what productivity and what works really looks like and we can spend all day unpacking that, so we'll save that for another conversation, but john I'd like to go back to you here and just hear your thoughts, you know, what do you really feel at this point? It's going to take to end burnout for good.
[00:26:33] spk_1: That's a big question. The big question is definitely not going to be one thing that's going to fix everything. And also I think burnout, it's a little bit tricky burnout I think will adapt, you know, as we kind of fix a couple of things here and there, it will adapt to something else as well. So we always have to keep at the thinking of ways to kind of solve this issue. But I think at the heart of that there's I think two things I would say like the first thing is really the idea that we need to express, you know, and kind of look at individuals within organizations as people, so that not just a resource that you can use and that you can make you work and you can account so every person resource I have, this is how much I can build from them, like we really need to start seeing and caring for people as individuals and as people and really show them that their well being and that their person really matters and that it matters over the work that they're doing and this is something that I think will be a major shift in organizations, especially in corporate, where that is just not how things work and you know, make the organization really needs to make it clear that those individuals that are working there really matters and the value of work, I think the bigger kind of scope of things is that we're going to need a momentum to really shift the dial on this and get people to pay attention to how the importance of libyan anything burnout and all of the societal good that they will do, so not just good for the individual and not even just good for the organization, but for society when you, you have people who are energized when people are, you know, getting invigorated at work rather than like getting burnt out and just all drained at work, there will be more that you can get out of them and they will produce and they will do better for society. So we gotta get that collective momentum going and I think that's the way that we're going to be able to kind of really tackle burnout.
[00:28:33] spk_0: I love that, john and if I can just also jump in Alexis an ad, I think two boys at those points, a really key component is listening to what people are asking for. And I'd actually love if john, if you could explain one of the questions that we asked in the study this year around what's keeping people with their current employer and what they're looking for from if they were potentially the shift. Because this is such a topical aspect of the work environment at the moment. And I think that the findings are quite revealing and I think it's so important for leaders to be listening to what people are actually asking for. Can you walk us through those?
[00:29:04] spk_1: Yeah, sure. So this year we really wanted to understand what's keeping people especially to see if there's a difference between those who are burnt out and those who are not in why they're staying or why they're going to another organization. So in terms of why they're staying at their organization, the sort of top reason people have stated that they are saying is that it's all for flexible working arrangements. That is the number one reason people are saying. And we know from research from job boards and job sites that flexibility is the number one search word for within these job boards. So that is a really important thing to kind of keep and retain people. Now when it comes to attraction. This is a very interesting piece of finding that we have. So across the board, no matter what age group, but you know, all of the demographics, age, gender, what role you're in the number one attraction factor for people they're looking for increased compensation. So pay and benefits. But this is quite contrary to just years of study on why people leave generally pay. You know, it might make it a top five, but generally not the main reason why people will leave and go to another organization generally, you know, I'm going, I'm leaving my bad manager for a better leader or you know, things like that. Pay is generally not. But this year across the board, increase compensation is the top one. And I think there are some intersectionality is with what's going on globally with, you know, increase inflation and also stagnant wages for the last few years that yeah, this actually overrides some of the other things that people are looking for.
[00:30:41] spk_0: It's such an interesting finding and I think it really speaks to how in this sort of very challenging environment that we're all existing in as leaders as human beings to be quite
[00:30:54] spk_1: flexible
[00:30:55] spk_0: in also how we listen to what people are looking for and not just assuming
[00:30:59] spk_1: that
[00:31:00] spk_0: That thing's what goes this year is actually gonna be the same next year because I wouldn't be surprised if in 2023 our findings are substantially different again. And so just as a final kind of question, John, I would love to hear from you
[00:31:13] spk_1: selfishly
[00:31:14] spk_0: if you're going to give leaders who are listening one piece of advice
[00:31:18] spk_1: for a
[00:31:19] spk_0: step that they can take, you know, today tomorrow to take that first step towards preventing burnout in their team or in their organization. What would that step? Or maybe a couple of steps be
[00:31:29] spk_1: a couple of things. I would recommend. The first thing actually is what we just talked about, ensure your people are properly compensated, especially for those in more junior roles. You know, if they are having financial stressors that's going to override anything you're trying to do in the workplace, you know, they're not sure they're gonna be able to have enough to pay for rent or put food on the table. It doesn't matter what you're doing at work, that is going to be the number one stressor on their mind. Another thing I would suggest is really to have open and honest conversations about what the stressors are within the organization and more importantly be prepared to eradicate some of these outdated indicators on how we create value, right? Like so for example, the number of hours or days in the office or when a person is 100 hours a person is online. Traditionally, those might be ways we are evaluated for performance. Maybe be open to talk about new ways of evaluating what performance looks like because that's always been No, that's always a major stressor for people. I think the last one and I want to kind of touched on this a little bit and which is kind of review how reward is distributed. You know the way that it's always been done before. It's not working today and also within the hybrid work environment. How reward like bonuses and it's not just sort of pay. So for example the more interesting assignments, how does that gets distributed? Does it require me to be in the office so I can sit next to my manager? So when they get it, I'm the first person that they talk to and give those interesting assignments. Or is there better ways to organize how work is done? Yeah. I think those would be three top ones that I would recommend for leaders.
[00:33:16] spk_2: I think there's so much in that johN and thank you so much. So again to recap on that the first one is and it sounds pretty simple. Make sure your people are compensated enough to live the life they need to live in a very stressful modern world. The second one is evaluate what productivity means to your group and I love this one because I think you're so right for a long time you said your worth is X amount of dollars an hour and you're expected to do eight hours per day for a 40 hour week. Why if we can extract value from people in a more time productive and time efficient way. Why do we need to adhere to this structure? And the last one that I heard you say that jOHn which is the reward distribution and that this doesn't have to be a monetary thing, this could be reward in getting to work more exciting clients or in a more collaborative way or you know, getting to work on a project and be mentored by someone in the organization and looking at the other ways in which people are intrinsically motivated, you know, by growth by challenge and looking at how we can reward people through that. I think there's three really key things that every organization and every leader can walk away with and start reflecting on right away. And to that end, jOHn thank you so much for being with us on. We are human leaders today and thank you both, johN and sally for this incredible global burnout study that is about to be published for the world to both learn from and hopefully take away some really potent and important data around how we need to start shifting the way that we lead organizations. So thank you john and thank you sally for being with us here today. Thank
[00:34:50] spk_0: you. Thanks so much for joining us for our conversation with dr john chan Having been through a debilitating burnout myself. It's so important to shed light on meaningful ways we can prevent burnout from occurring. I especially love those three practical tips, jOHN shared my sense is that embodying human leadership is a powerful approach to preventing burnout. You can learn more about john and download the study at www dot infinite potential dot com dot au. And if you want to be part of the movement of leaders who envision a world where humans, business and society can thrive through work, join us at www. Dot We are human leaders dot com. See you next time.