Days seem to blend together. Afternoons suddenly turn to nights. Weekdays and weekends become interchangeable. Our concept of time has been completely disrupted, making it simpler than ever to work (or think about work) nonstop.
Many of us are struggling to balance the responsibilities of work and child care while dealing with the stress of a pandemic, record unemployment, and job uncertainty. Before the pandemic, the distinction between work and non-work was hazy. Now when our workplace is our bedroom, kitchen, or living room, the lines of distinction have simply disappeared leading to work burnout.
The Mayo Clinic highlights work burnout as ‘a special type of work-related stress — a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity.’ The World Health Organization (WHO), which described burnout as an “occupational phenomenon”, points to these symptoms:
- Lack of energy or exhaustion.
- Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job.
- Reduced professional efficacy.
If you believe burnout just refers to being fatigued from your job, you’re mistaken. High blood pressure, anxiety, heart disease, depression, obesity, a weaker immune system, cognitive decline, and even Alzheimer’s disease are all known to be caused by burnout.
Some of the main causes are:
- Lack of social connection: Our work environment and community also satisfies our want for connection. Working from home limits our capacity to interact successfully with our co-workers as people rather than pixels on a screen.
- Lack of trust between the workforce: It’s easy to create trust in the workplace through informal contacts. In virtual environments, this trust structure does not emerge naturally. There is a reason why virtual teams who eventually meet face to face in the office work together much better. On the other hand, groups that switch from in-person to virtual settings inevitably lose the sense of shared bonding and trust.
- Dissolving boundaries between work hours and home hours: The alarm goes off, and we get out of bed to check our email. We spend our lunch break on a conference call and then work late into the evening on a report. Our laptops have evolved into an extension of ourselves, constantly close at hand. All of this online time at home equals additional hours in the office.
Commutes, weekend plans, and Monday morning chat used to help us compartmentalise our workweek, but our present scenario has rendered such routines obsolete. We’ve let our personal time submerge under office emails and texts, being available on every delivered text. Other factors can be lack of supportive and creative work environment, lack of workplace inspiration, loss of informal mentoring by senior colleagues and lack of accountability.
However, burnout doesn’t need to be an unavoidable consequence of working from home. The first step is to strike a balance in your home office. Start by establishing office hours, turning off alerts, and triggering an out-of-office response outside of present time frames. At the end of the day, you must set your own limits and commit to sticking to them. When you need to concentrate on your most critical tasks, go offline. Reduce the amount of time you spend multitasking. Due to the frequent shifting between conflicting demands on your attention and focus, multitasking can cause weariness. Try restarting your work ritual, like the brisk walk you take of the office in between meetings, like half an hour you listen to your music on your way back home.
Organisations like Google and Deloitte are taking initiatives to help their employees fight WFH burnout. In May 2020, in an internal email addressing how the company will slowly begin reopening, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai asked Google employees to take a day off on May 22 to address work-from-home related burnout.
A number of employees are unwilling to avail leave, even when they are burnt out, since they are worried of how it would reflect on them in a turbulent job market. To tackle this, Deloitte India launched a ‘shared leave bank’ which allows professionals to donate their vacation time to others in need. “Anyone who has used up all of their vacation time and is facing a medical emergency can use leave from our leave bank.”
In order to adapt and flourish in our new environment, firms must first realise the reality about the factors that lead to WFH burnout. Otherwise, using an office-style culture to accomplish virtual work is like to pushing a square peg into a round hole, which would continue leading to burnout for many people.
Arya has been a part of the Content & Research Team at Hrnxt.com. She is a keen observer of economic developments, emerging businesses, people in business and keeps a tab on latest happenings in the business environment.