Reducing the Risk of Burnout in Business Services – Transcript

Tony DiRomualdo:

When we look at the high-risk group, 77% said that they experience high work volumes most of the time. Then another 74% indicated, “They feel there is too much work and too little time to get it done” – so lack of time for reflection and creative activities that 72% of that group said they were experiencing. And then next on the list was little or no downtime. And then finally, another 57% said that they were experiencing and feeling pressure to work harder and do more. What you see here is workloads that are overwhelming.

Announcer:

Welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast.” Week after week, you’ll hear from top experts on how to avoid obstacles, manage detours and celebrate milestones on the journey to world-class performance.

Amanda Newfield:

Hello and welcome to The Hackett Group’s “Business Excelleration Podcast.” I’m your host, Amanda Newfield, a senior director in our HR Advisory practice. And today we’ll be discussing our new research on how to reduce the risk of burnout among staff in business services roles, including HR, finance, procurement, IT, and global business services. I’m joined today by my colleague, Senior Research Director Anthony DiRomualdo. Welcome to the podcast, Tony.

Tony DiRomualdo:

Hey, Amanda, great to be here.

Amanda Newfield:

Fantastic. So Tony, why don’t you tell us a little bit about the rationale for doing this research on burnout risks in business services functions?

Tony DiRomualdo:

Sure. The topic of burnout and related well-being is something that we’ve been hearing a lot about, especially since the pandemic began and now with return to office and what not. But there hasn’t been a lot of research specifically in the area of business services. I mean, there’s a lot of research on the topic of burnout, but not as it applies to business services.

So we at Hackett have a special focus on business services functions like finance, HR, IT, procurement, supply chain and so on. And so we wanted to do a deeper dive in trying to understand what’s been going on with that group. And what we found is that they are especially at risk for burnout for several reasons.

First is these are often viewed as back-office functions, and so they’re treated as cost centers. And with that, they’re always under pressure to do more with less, and it’s often hard to make a business case for investment in this area. So they tend to have quite a bit of a workload.

And there’s also when we look, when COVID happened and the pandemic played out, business services functions, specifically HR, IT, procurement, and particular supply chain aspects of procurement, it became very clear how essential these functions are. I mean, they literally, literally kept the business operating in many industries. And so, there is a clear case for making investment in this area, but it’s been neglected and needs to be better understood and made more visible.

And so when we looked at this, we really wanted to try to understand what are some of the drivers in organizations of burnout because a lot of what we hear about – whether it’s in the press or even in a lot of the academic journals – certainly when we see out in the marketplace a lot of activity and solutions that focus on individuals, right? Better nutrition, sleep better, mindfulness applications, you name it – all these things to try to mitigate the effects of burnout.

And what we wanted to really understand is, OK, we recognize that individuals have a role to play, but what are some of the structural issues that are at the heart of many of the burnout risks? There’s not a lot of research on that, and that’s what we wanted to address in this research.

So, Amanda, that gives the rationale for why we did this research. I know your background – in addition to having many years’ experience in consulting, you’ve also worked quite a bit in your career in HR. From your perspective, what are some of the things you’ve seen in terms of the structural causes and contributors to burnout from your experience?

Amanda Newfield:

I think when I think about it, one of the No. 1, I think, causes from a burnout perspective on the business services side is just the ever-increasing load of work without really thinking about increases in people in order to be able to take on those new tasks, increases in budget, or even just thinking about how we manage work and how we prioritize work differently.

I know within the HR area, COVID really started to escalate the workload factor, but even before COVID that was always a continual thing. People were asking for HR to do more with less. HR is often seen as a cost center there to support those areas of the business that are truly helping the business to be successful in a lot of cases. And so, it all contributes to this. We have to do more. We have to wear many hats – be able to perform many different functions.

And I think our research just really tracks to what I’ve personally experienced – this picture of work overload – other factors that just really set the context for burnout risk, for sure.

Tony DiRomualdo:

Interesting perspective. So you’re validating what the rationale for the study and what we suspected as we got into this?

Amanda Newfield:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of cases we cross business-anticipated technology to really help us dig out of the hole that we had gotten from a workload perspective. In a lot of cases we have, but I think in some cases, we may have gotten ahead of what the technology was ready to do and may have started to cut in anticipation of where we thought we were going to get efficiencies from the technology, but the technology wasn’t mature enough. So now we’re kind of stuck in this place where we’re slowly taking on new capabilities in our technology in order to be able to close the gaps.

Now, I know that, Tony, we recently surveyed over 500 business services professionals about their work environments. What did we learn about the potential for burnouts from that research?

Tony DiRomualdo:

Yes, we learned a lot of very interesting facts. The core of what we asked about was we polled the participants and asked them to tell us how frequently they experienced 15 different specific stresses in their work environment, and we’ll get into what those were in a minute. But what, at a very high level, was quite interesting is what we found was 36% of the respondents were shown to experience four or more of the stresses most of the time, which we believe puts them at high risk of reaching a state of burnout.

So, finding No. 1, and it was quite, I think, significant is you’ve got more than a third that are in a state of high risk when it comes to burnout. Then we identified another 35% that said they experienced one to three of these stresses most of the time. And from our perspective, that puts them in what we’d say is a moderate risk of burnout category.

And some burnout risk does loom for those moderates to a high extent. When we look overall the moderate and the high burnout risk, that represents 71% of business services professionals. So there’s a lot of stress in these jobs, and a majority are at least at a moderate – if not high – risk for burnout.

Amanda Newfield:

That’s pretty impressive. What are we seeing as the most common drivers for that burnout risk experienced by business services professionals?

Tony DiRomualdo:

Well, you touched on one, and that is, and this topped the list – high work volumes. When we look at the high-risk group, for example, 77% said that they experienced high work volumes most of the time. So that was top of the list. Then another 74% indicated, “They feel there is too much work and too little time to get it done,” and that they experienced that most of the time.

So those were the top two. And then there were a couple others that were cited by a significant number of the high-risk group. The first was a lack of time for reflection and creative activities that 72% of that group said they were experiencing most of the time. And then next on the list was little or no downtime, which 64% said they experienced most of the time. And then finally, another 57% said that they were experiencing and feeling pressure to work harder and do more most of the time.

So what you see here is – I think – all of those to some degree or directly reflect workloads that are in some cases overwhelming. And on top of this, 53% said that they have a combination of work responsibilities and coaching others. And that indicates we’ve got a lot of overworked first-line managers who often have to pick up the slack caused by just too much work and maybe not enough people to do that work. Those are the top of the list stressors that we identified for the high-risk group.

Amanda, why don’t you speak to what we learned about some of the effects that this kind of environment has on business services professionals, particularly those who are experiencing these kinds of stresses most of the time?

Amanda Newfield:

Yeah, absolutely. And quite frankly, the effects they’re mostly negative. When you think about from a work productivity standpoint, a majority of the high burnout risk group is putting in more time and completing more work each day than even they did 12 months ago, which is astounding. I mean, some of that can be attributed to things like remote work or there’s less interruptions during the day, but there’s still that kind of factor of doing more and definitely productivity doing more.

But some have even said that their engagement ­– about 36% – and desire to stay with their employees or their employers has increased. So we know from other research that these types of extreme jobs can be addictive, and I could speak to that personally. It’s very easy to become addicted to doing because you feel like the act of doing and the act of some type of productivity is value-added productivity. But in a lot of cases, it’s not.

And so, these individuals, they are basically demonstrating behaviors like classic workaholics. But are they delivering value-added work that’s actually moving the needle for the organizations? They may actually not be.

We also saw that 32% experienced some type of decrease in engagement and 38% say they were less willing than 12 months ago to remain with their current employers. So the thought of being more tied to the employer or not it’s almost like an abusive relationship in some cases. Do I stay with the devil that I know or do I go out and seek the devil that I may not know where I continue to be in this situation – where I continue to be overloaded? And how do I even judge that?

As far as expectations for the future, I think this group’s really kind of painting a depressing picture. Many – almost 45% – don’t expect their situation to get any better. In fact, 38% expect it to get worse. So we certainly are in a challenging time when we think about the effects and what that’s doing for our workforce from both just a front-line employee perspective, but even from a leadership perspective. How does that play down and play out for the employees that our leaders are supporting?

Tony DiRomualdo:

So this high workload, high-pressure environment that many business services professionals are experiencing is really having some negative consequences on individuals and on the talent situation. I’m just curious, we’ve been hearing a lot about return to office and hybrid work and companies cracking down and wanting to bring people back in the office more often and so on. Does the research shed any light on how that impacts well-being?

Amanda Newfield:

Well, where we asked respondents how working remotely versus in an office setting has affected their sense of well-being, we definitely received a lot of positive input from that. Across all three groups, regardless of where they were at from a burnout risk-level perspective, about 78% to 81% said working remotely positively impacted their well-being.

And when you think about it, that makes sense. Because regardless of where you’re at from a burnout perspective, working in the office has less perception around flexibility during the day and the environment is more conducive for focus. And you’re avoiding time spent commuting and other efforts that you’re doing throughout the day when you’re in the office. So that makes sense.

But working in an office does have some positive effects, particularly for the high burnout risk group – about 33% and 36% for the medium burnout risk group. I think what you’re seeing there is just really these groups are highly challenged with managing their time without those natural interruptions that they had throughout the day. So being able to do stuff that can help them, not necessarily be mindful, but be able to replicate some of those natural breaks that they receive throughout the day is impacting their burnout risk.

So far, we’ve spent all of our time talking about the problem. So what did we learn from respondents about what they would most like their employers to do that would help alleviate some of these stresses and help them avoid burnout?

Tony DiRomualdo:

Yeah, that’s certainly a great question and one that we explicitly focused on in the research. And it was interesting that many of the recommendations that were made by respondents were related to improving how work gets done in the work environment rather than increased wellness and well-being benefits, like time off, or well-being support, like health family benefits or wellness apps or gym memberships, whatever.

And so, a few that were prominent across all of the groups, again, we categorized in the high risk, moderate risk and low risk of burnout, transforming and streamlining work processes and deploying improved tech and enabling tools. They were in the top three in terms of recommended improvements or recommended changes that would improve well-being and reduce the risk of burnout for all three groups.

And for the high-risk group, the second thing they ranked was instituting meeting free days, which was suggested by 62% of the group. So clearly there’s a lot of wasted time in their view in terms of meetings, and that was one of the prominent recommendations. They also picked first, 66%, transforming and streamlining the work processes. And 57% suggested that the organization increase the number of staff to perform the work, again, suggesting that there’s more work than there is people to get the work done.

And then, finally, after those recommendations, 53% indicated they wanted more flexible working arrangements. So flexible work is a factor that many pointed to. And what I just mentioned in terms of those specific recommendations, we heard pretty much the same thing from the medium burnout risk group, although they ranked them a little bit differently, but they were in their top five or six.

So I’d say taken together, what we’re seeing is that if companies are going to make any real headway in reducing burnout risk, they’ve got to significantly attack structural transformation of work and the work environment, and the supporting processes and tools that enable work to get done more effectively and more productively.

And we, of course, have been hearing a heck of a lot these days about these new AI tools like GenAI, for example, and we’ve been doing other research in that area, and it does have great promise, but it is early days. And so, we haven’t yet seen enough deployment of tools in HR. We hope to study this over the next six to 12 months to get a better sense of whether or not these tools can live up to what we see as the potential to really automate a lot of the work overload that we’ve been talking about, and whether or not that comes to fruition. And if it does, what impact that’s going to have on burnout risk going forward.

So, Amanda, we’ve been talking a lot about the topic of burnout, and we’re now getting, I think, to the end of some of our commentary. So I think it’s a good time to wrap up the discussion with a few recommendations from the research that we have for HR, functional, and business leaders for things they can do to create a work environment that is on the one hand consistently high performing, which we all need to be, but in an environment that doesn’t endanger the physical and mental well-being of staff. So what might you suggest from our research in terms of recommendations?

Amanda Newfield:

So, I have two that I would offer. First is organizations should really start to collect data that will allow them to assess the state of well-being within their organizations. Identifying and proactively monitoring key indicators of the physical and emotional state of employees will help organizations get ahead of issues that could impact their well-being.

And this is not just employee mood type of questions, but really starting to look at things like hours, work hours worked past a certain time or outside of core business hours, weekends, time spent between vacation time taken, but also really including measures around trust with their managers and their organizational leaders.

The ability to be able to raise concerns and satisfaction with benefits programs, engagement levels, turnover rates – are all things that can be leveraged to really measure the state of well-being in the organization and start to look at where there may be pockets of, A, overall transformation that could happen in order to care for well-being in the organization, or B, pretty targeted solutions that may need to be taken in specific areas of the organization.

Next is organizations really need to focus on making a business case for increasing well-being. It’s important. Measuring health- and productivity-related costs and metrics – such as absence, sick days, medical costs, use of employee assistance programs – those are all things that inversely come back and impact business and the business’ bottom line.

So being able to correlate the well-being metrics to these types of pieces of information and really truly showing the financial impacts on revenue and profit and cost are going to be important to get business’ attention.

Tony, what about you? What would you recommend HR business leaders do to reduce burnout risk?

Tony DiRomualdo:

Well, I’d say I have a couple actions – two specifically. First is to really try to address this workload and work overload situation that you were referencing earlier in the discussion, and that was prominent across all of this research, really recalibrating and understanding and recalibrating the workloads and expectations that we’re seeing in these functions.

And what that really requires is measuring and assessing how much work, the distribution of work, and how this matches up with the resources, and having more of a sense of how sustainable is this? Are we just pushing people beyond the capacity because again, we’re trying to keep down costs, trying to push up productivity and use our scarce resources as productively as possible?

But we see the impact of this when it becomes overwhelming to the things that you were pointing to – the impact on engagement, the impact on turnover and so on. There are real costs to that. And so, we’ve got to really understand how workloads work and are contributing to that. And do a better job of allocating work and matching work levels to capacity, whether it be at an individual level or at a team level. So that would be one thing.

I think the other thing is – and we heard this loud and clear from the participants – is really continue to make significant investments in work transformation, simplifying, streamlining, integrating and automating particularly the routine stuff aspects of work processes as much as possible.

And that requires also actively identifying and removing drivers of burnout from the work environment. And again, a lot of them have to do with the work itself and how it’s organized – broken processes, fragmented processes, those kinds of things that maybe are not so visible from the outside, but the people who were doing the work are acutely aware of them. And some senior-level attention and some investment in the right solutions often can go quite a long way in solving some of those things.

And then finally – I’d just add as a part of the work transformation – is building in a little bit more downtime for people so that they can spend time recharging or even engage in some of the more creative aspects of their work with which people find often energizing. So those are the things that I would recommend.

Amanda Newfield:

Excellent. And that’s about all the time we have left. Thanks Tony, so much for the fantastic and fascinating discussion today. Listeners, you can learn more about our HR benchmarking advisory and transformation offerings by visiting our website. Thanks for joining us today.

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