Burnout Is About Your Workplace, Not Your People

Interesting read. I'm an emotionally unstable person, and perfectly aware of that. I've found my tools and mechanisms to handle that. But when COVID hit our company and my team and I had to cope with the changes in culture and environment, I could see the gradual increase of dissatisfaction, reduction of emotional energy, and stress that spread out to every single team member. Some could cope (by slacking 80% of their time), some couldn't, because they had to wear the slackers on their shoulders.

However, I was sure it wasn't just me who suffered. I could feel it hitting the others too, and we even openly talked about it. The job was still interesting, got more challenging and our impact on the health of the company grew. It felt nice, at least to me.

It wasn't big things that made us unhappy, but rather the small stuff. Annoyances, such as missing/stolen computer mice in the office, dirty floors or stale coffee beans in the machines.

The analogy with the 'pebbles' hit me hard.

_Maslach has affectionately named this feeling “pebbles.” She describes them as the tiny, incremental, irritating, and painful stuff at work that can wear you down._

Despite practing stoicism and being a general easy going and chill dude the same thing happened to me. Due to a toxic workplace, I got very close to a burnout.

I tried changing myself for months at an end, started doing more exercise, built up a bigger social circle and started dating. In the end it worked because it gave me a bigger social circle to share my crazy work stories with and to validate that it really wasn't me but that things were unfair and very stressful. I raised my frustrations and issues with my manager several times but nothing changed, if an organization doesn't want to change at some point it becomes a burnout factory.

Being part of a company that got acquired by one of the big consulting/outsourcing/body leasing corporations I can attest to this. I really related to the pebbles metaphor.

So many things, so many processes changed in minor or major ways that it starts to show in me.

When I started in the agency, we had a team that booked our trips. We filled an email template, CCed our manager and booking was done. We could state preferences for hotels, window seats or aisle and so on. At the end of the trip we had to do minor book keeping stuff - mostly just signing the pre-made itinerary (lost for the correct term here).

Nowadays we need to book everything ourselves. We can either have a company offered CC (impacts our personal credit score) that most of the days isn't accepted in German hotels and taxis and stuff. Or pay everything ourselves up front and get reimbursed later on basically handing out interest free credit to our employer.

We need to take care not to go into overdraft and if we are reimbursed correctly. And the web based tool for reimbursement is a pita.

Just one example. Booking a meeting room now comes with a price tag and I need approval from project management for it.

Something broke in the latest Mac OS update and my Mac based colleagues were disconnected by the EPM due to not being compliant. They all had to use self service support tools that take about 15 to 30 minutes to create an issue.

As all this is booked on client time the company never loses money on these inefficient systems and there is no need to change.

Promotion now hinges mostly on how extroverted your manager is and how unrelenting they are in yearly promotion talks. If they relent against their peers fighting for their underlings you loose any chance of being promoted as you will end up on the lower rungs of the laddering process never to be eligible for a slot. The number of slots is decided in corporate headquarters far removed from the actual work being done on the ground.

I actually would love to know how military manages this, as it strikes me a quite similar situation.

All these (and a lot other pebbles) accumulat.

On the other hand my salary increased massively as corporate policies dictated to have minimums for experience and many people were payed below these. Also a lot of female colleagues profited from corporate efforts to calculate and close potential gender pay gaps.

So a lot of "big things" changed for the better. While oh so many small things went south.

toxic culture is setup and enforced by toxic people.