The Great Exhaustion - Part 2

HER NAME IS ELIZABETH. She is an achiever. A solid Enneagram Type 3. Degrees and professional certifications complement her strong work ethic. She cares deeply about the people she leads, the peers she works with, the clients she serves, and the family she cares for. Sure, optimizing her work and life has required trade-offs. Over the years, her work events have sometimes delayed dinner time or have required emails to be completed after an abbreviated bedtime story with the kids. Yet, this is the price one pays to achieve success or so she has rationalized. The 21st-century work-life balance of yin and yang can be elusive.

When the covid pandemic upended everyone’s normalcy, Elizabeth’s work-life dualism took a serious turn toward unsustainable disequilibrium. Zoom went from a little-known app on her work PC to a seemingly 24-hour state of being. Even her kids were forced to learn how to learn from a laptop. Some days she found herself sitting with children out of camera range but within arm’s length on either side of her. Monitoring their Zoom learning while simultaneously presenting to clients became an acquired skill. Some days her partner filled this role as they traded-off which of them had the luxury of a solo Zoom meeting.

Her firm was also impacted by the Covid pandemic. Demand for its products and services soared overnight. As demand climbed, so did the number of issues. Unable to satisfy all of this demand, her firm’s machine bureaucracy activated into hyperdrive. Surely the answers to these problems lay in more Zoom meetings, more reporting, more all-hands-on-deck meetings. The 9 am Zoom meeting now became a 6 am daily event. The 4 pm Zoom calls slipped to 7 pm. The prevailing wisdom: “Well, it’s just a phone call. You are at home anyway. How bad can it be? This is a corporate crisis for god’s sake.”

Someone on her team read an online post from the Harvard Business Review that 15-minute Zoom team meetings were effective. Then, instead of having two 30-minute Zoom meetings on her calendar per hour, she had four. Her manager thought more check-ins were needed. So, more calls were added to the calendar. Nothing like minute-by-minute updates when there is a global value chain crisis. Her manager decided more PowerPoint slides help in a crisis too.

Eventually, this new abnormal became unsustainable. Zoom fatigue became a reality rather than just a concept. The luxury of working from home morphed into a prison called living at work. She began to question not only how to deal with this current work-life overload but began to wonder why she had invested so much time in her work pre-Covid. She began to reconsider the opportunity costs of her work-life choices.

THE QUIT DATA. Elizabeth is not alone. Over 4.4 million people walked away from their jobs in September. This is the highest monthly total since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking quits in December 2000. Since then, an average of 2.69 million people has quit jobs each month.?

The number of quits in September is significant in two ways. First, since April 2020, the quit rate has increased by 110%. Secondly, the September data point is more than 3 standard deviations above the mean. Statistically, this is significant since a data point outside this range has only a 0.3% chance of occurring.

Another recent survey conducted by The Pew Research Center perhaps illuminates some reasons why. The survey asked respondents what gives them meaning in life. Since the previous survey in 2017, the number of respondents mentioning occupation and career declined 7%. Material well-being fell 11%.?

Can you relate to Elizabeth? Does she sound like someone you know? Perhaps even yourself?

Full disclosure: Elizabeth is not a real person, at least she is not one person. She is an amalgam I crafted from numerous conversations I have had with men and women during the past several months. Some have been new acquaintances in my coaching certification work, others are work colleagues, some are former co-workers, and yes, even myself. Several of these people who make up the mosaic of “Elizabeth” can already be counted in the Great Resignation. They have already quit. Others have taken a leave of absence from their jobs. Others are surreptitiously crafting their corporate escape akin to Clint Eastwood’s character in “Escape from Alcatraz”.?

All the people I have talked to have been impacted in some way by the post-pandemic organization disaggregation. Coupled with the increase in work hours, endless meetings, and boundaryless days all of which have resulted in unprecedented work-life imbalance. This worker exhaustion reminds me of the lyrics to the old Eagles song “Life in the Fast Lane”, in which the protagonist just wants "everything, all the time" to cease.

THE WHY. Decline typically occurs subtly overtime before its effects are recognized. Exhaustion or burnout increment so slowly one hardly notices the effect is building. Then, at some point, the body or mind is just overwhelmed. I posit this has what has been happening in the workforce in the Great Exhaustion. It is more than workers just tired of Zoom, bad work cultures, and poor managers. Workers are now rethinking work-life duality. As one executive who abruptly quit recently told Kara Miller of The Washington Post: “There is no reason to stay and fight the stupidity”.

WORK-LIFE. Each of us balances the dualism of the need to work to live – pay rent or mortgage, and the need to pay bills – and the need to live to work – a sense of belonging, community, and sense of purpose. This work-life dualism has an oil and water type of relationship: Both coexist but the immiscibility of the two is impossible to overcome. I contend the hyphen “-“ in the term work-life can be seen as one’s identity, a type of liminal space that is acknowledged but rarely acted upon. We attempt to manage “work-life” by attempting to balance both, but the discipline required to let the urgent crowd out the important is difficult. One’s boss is usually more interested in the work portion of the equation than the hyphen or the life element.

In Part 1 of this series, I reviewed how one’s work-life, in particular one's affections, is captured in an obituary, which is the ex-post description of the hyphen. Thinking now of how workers are dealing with the Great Exhaustion, I thought about the obituary and work-life of my father. He was the quintessential self-made man. He was born into the Great Depression in 1930. Work was a prized trait because one needed to work to live, namely, survive. At 19, my father badly injured his right hand in a farm machine. Ultimately, the damage was too great and the medical science too little, so his right hand was amputated above his wrist. He was very much like Elizabeth – a world-class achiever. My father quickly morphed from just working to live into living for his work. Over time he co-owned several businesses: a gas station, an automobile parts store, and a lawnmower repair shop. In 1964, he had sold off his interests and invested in one business that he grew, managed, and expanded until he liquidated it in 1988. He then retired. Living to work rapidly contracted. There were no deals to make. No staff to direct. No payroll to meet. No clients or trade shows to travel to.

Live-to-work was his identity. But suddenly, there was no work. His habits of work-life were hard for him to break. In retirement, he insisted on going to bed before 9 pm and up before 5 am. Yet, in his retirement life, he had nowhere to be, no one to see, nothing to do. His identity was lost. He died in 2005, succumbing to the heart disease that first appeared when he was 53, resulting in 6 by-pass grafts in the veins of his heart. That hyphen in his work life became an uncomfortable liminal space in 1988, which he never conquered. He never filled his post-work life with the passion that drove his live-to-work mentality.?

As “Elizabeth” and many others grapple with how to deal with the Great Resignation, I have begun to wonder, what is the antidote for the Great Exhaustion? In part 3 of this series, I will share both the antidote and my plan to apply this cure to my exhaustion.