Is It Even Possible to End Burnout?

With reports of long hours, chronic stress and exhaustion rising among sections of the workforce, it might be time to reframe the burnout narrative. Plus, what drives women-to-women conflict in the workplace.

Can we eradicate burnout?

While burnout has long been a widespread workplace phenomenon, rates spiked during the pandemic. Amid lockdowns, caring responsibilities and a public-health emergency, global data shows more workers reported feeling chronic stress and exhaustion: according to a March 2021 study of 1,500 US workers by hiring platform Indeed 67% of respondents believed burnout had increased during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Yet, three years on, there are few signs burnout is abating. In the new world of work, large swaths of the workforce still say they’re burnt out. Rates continue to climb: in a February 2023 survey of 10,243 global workers by US think-tank Future Forum, 42% reported burnout, its highest figure since May 2021.

In theory, flexible working arrangements would mean increased work-life balance, productivity and well-being for employees. Conversations around burnout have increased, and companies seem to be more willing to offer employees perks such as gym memberships and home-office expenses that, intuitively, should help mitigate stressors driving burnout.

But despite these factors, reports of burnout are still on the rise – and the phenomenon can no longer be solely associated with the pandemic. Its prevalence suggests it's here to stay for the long term, even with companies making adjustments in the workplace. Given this, experts say it may be the case that employers and workers need to instead focus on managing burnout, rather than aim to eliminate it entirely.

Read more from Alex Christian on the pursuit to ending burnout for good.?

The bias that drives ‘catty’ workplace conflict

In discussions about what helps women succeed in the workplace, experts often talk about the importance of female role models. Although there’s plenty of data showing that female mentorship can be advantageous for women, there’s just as much anecdotal evidence indicating that having a female boss hinders a woman’s chances to be happy, successful and supported at work.

And it’s the latter narrative that has prevailed in the popular imagination. There’s no comprehensive proof senior women are less helpful – or more harmful – to junior women, compared with senior men to junior men. Yet plenty of women have experienced other women making their lives hard at work, even driving them to quit.

It may not be that women are infighting more, however – instead, for a number of reasons, conflicts among female employees and their women bosses often draw most of the workplace attention. In the 1970s, academics even coined a term for the phenomenon: the ‘queen bee syndrome’ – the idea that high-ranking female employees jostling for a rare seat at the table creates a hostile work environment for female subordinates.

But the thinking behind that theory has increasingly fallen out of favour, as experts have established that the high-profiling of these woman-to-woman conflicts is about more than just individual women being mean, territorial or ‘catty’, as they’re sometimes described. Instead, they’re manifestations of gendered norms that still shape the workplace today – and may hold back other women from reaching their full professional potential.

Read more from Josie Cox on why women’s workplace conflict seems so notable.

Why layoffs hit workers of colour so hard

Underrepresentation, fewer pathways to success and a lack of institutional support: these are some of the setbacks people of colour have experienced, and continue to experience, in nearly all industries.

It’s only within the past few years that many workplaces, including large tech firms, have opened up about the lack of diversity in their workforces, following decades of non-diverse hiring practices. Most recently, companies have invested billions in diversity and inclusion initiatives to improve these long-standing inequities and increase representation of marginalised workers. Data shows the most significant of these investments, particularly in tech, came in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement.

In many cases, these initiatives showed promising results; for example, before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in late 2022, the company received positive press for hiring more black employees: in US locations, the numbers went from 6.9% to 9.4%. The same year, the US-based telecommunications conglomerate Cisco documented a 120% increase in black vice presidents, beating diversity targets they’d originally set for 2023.

However, these diversity efforts – along with workplace representation for people of colour overall – may be stalling out amid global layoffs. An analysis of publicly available data for 2022 conducted by workforce-intelligence firm Revelio Labs shows that black and Latino workers represented 7.42% and 11.49% respectively of the tech layoffs in 2022, even though they make up only 6.05% and 9.96% of the industry, respectively. In May 2022, Netflix laid off 150 workers, 26.6% of whom were identified by Protocol as workers from underrepresented backgrounds.

While these numbers are useful for tracking the impact of layoffs on diversity in some companies, there is not enough publicly available data to confirm employees of colour have been laid off in higher numbers than their white counterparts, overall. However, hiring patterns and layoff policies, as well as data on diminishing budgets for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) resources, show many marginalised workers are feeling the impact of of corporate cuts.

Read more from Benish Shah on the layoffs situation for workers of colour.

We’ll have more next week. Visit BBC Worklife?and?BBC Business for the latest.

–Meredith Turits, Editor, BBC Worklife