Three Myths That Make Managers Push Staff to the Edge of Burnout

Reporting this column over the years, I’ve heard nearly every excuse from managers for employee overwork and burnout.

"If somebody is working too hard, he needs to get some help," one manager told me, hinting darkly at some sort of mass mental illness. Others, a group I think of as the Great Martyrs, shrug and sigh that they’d like their people to have a life, but the demands of serving clients or customers just won’t allow it.

Such excuses blind managers to the burnout, failure to focus, loss of creativity and work-life chaos that result when overwork hits counterproductive levels.

Now, a few employers are putting the brakes on overwork through work redesign projects, which I wrote about last week. In the process, they’re debunking some myths.

Myth One: When a client says jump, the only answer is "How high?"

I’ve heard this rationale from countless lawyers, accountants and consultants, who accept it even when it takes an intolerable personal toll or drives them to quit, leaving the client hanging.

Now, a few professional firms are taking steps to integrate personal concerns into the work lives of employees. Deloitte & Touche is implementing a policy on some projects that curbs their consultants’ travel time. Instead of spending five days a week at a client’s offices, consultants spend three nights and four days, fly home and work a fifth day in their home cities.

That means "you can plan your life and be home for a real weekend," says Malva Rabinowitz, a Deloitte managing director. Most clients "recognize it’s a good thing" When, they see the policy in action.

Some clients are tougher than others, and Deloitte was particularly worried about one big multinational client’s response. The team members waited a couple of months, until the project was running smoothly, then nervously brought up the policy.

To their surprise, the client loved it. It turned out that the employees from the client’s regional offices were exhausted, too, by traveling to meet Deloitte’s team at their home office all week long. By breaking the collective silence about the personal price everyone was paying, "we became heroes," Ms. Rabinowitz says.

Similarly, Ernst & Young is involving clients on some consulting projects in setting up a "team calendar" that integrates team members’ work and personal commitments, says Bob Forbes, an Ernst partner. While client needs still come first, the calendar puts people’s off-the-job lives on the radar screen.

Myth Two: Reining in employees’ workloads will turn them into slackers.

Many bosses blanch at the idea of curbing overload, fearful that output will plunge. But braking burnout can allow people to produce more and better work.

Ernst & Young has a committee monitoring accountants’ workloads at its San Jose, Calif., office. It helps burnout candidates shift clients or schedule vacations.

Jeff Celvello, a senior manager, says that unless a manager intervenes, some people won’t admit to burning out, "and the only time you find out about it is in an exit interview. And that’s way too late."

Ernst says its policies are raising its retention rates. Tyler Purvis, a senior accountant in San Jose, says that at one point he had so many big clients, he would soon have hit the wall. Instead, he asked for help adjusting his workload and found the monitoring committee already discussing the problem.

By avoiding burnout, he kept high levels of client service. His fiancee is happier, too, he says because he is more able to make personal appointments and stick to them.

Similarly, Hewlett-Packard found, at a $1.3 billion Midwestern sales division, that providing people with backups so they could take uninterrupted vacations sharply boosted morale. Despite an increase in time off, the group’s sales haven’t changed, continuing to lead other, similar regions, says Jerry Cashman, Hewlett’s work-life manager.

Myth Three: If an employee is working himself into the ground it’s his own fault.

This common rationale for work, though sometimes true, can mask some shared inefficiencies. At the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington nonprofit group, researchers Deb Kolb and Deborah Merrill-Sands found in a study that a "crisis mentality" was driving many scientists and support staffers to work "incredibly long hours." But managers assumed employees wanted to work long hours or were managing time poorly. People’s time wasn’t consciously valued.

A deeper look showed a shift in the focus of the institute’s mission driven by its funding organizations, had given rise to many time-eating activities, say the researchers, who are affiliated with the Center for Gender in Organizations at Simmons College Graduate School of Management in Boston. Employees were expected to form more internal teams and alliances with other policy research groups. Meetings and phone calls were eating up the day, pushing important research writing work into "off hours."

As the researchers raised questions and employees became aware of inefficient patterns, the workplace routine changed, Dr. Kolb says. Employees began reserving part of the day for core tasks and cutting back on meetings. Long seen as the failing of the individual, "the time bind is organizational" in many cases, Dr. Kolb says.

This article appeared in the March 17, 1999 Wall Street Journal