The Social Dilemma

I have an amazing network of colleagues and like-minded professionals on Linkedin. One of those fantastic humans recently sent me the The Leaders Lab 2023 Research Report Highlights by Michelle McQuaid ( Dr. Michelle McQuaid (MAPP) )

https://www.michellemcquaid.com/theleaderslab/2023research/

I know you are all busy people, so let me summarise some of the key findings for you:

• The survey conducted in May 2023 included 1,003 randomly selected Australian workers, including leaders and team members, to assess their psychosocial safety, wellbeing, and performance levels.
• The study is a continuation of the Leaders Lab Workplace Survey, first conducted in December 2019, and has been assessing the safety, wellbeing, and performance of 1,000+ workers annually.
• Uncomfortable Truth #1: 63.6% of workers reported feeling burned out for some time, leading to emotional, social, and physical exhaustion.
• Uncomfortable Truth #2: Only 10.2% of burned-out workers felt safe to speak up about their challenges at work, highlighting the importance of psychological safety.
• Uncomfortable Truth #3: The perception of workplaces as "Caring & Safe" has significantly declined from 49.4% in 2022 to 20.7% in 2023, impacting wellbeing, psychological safety, engagement, and performance.
• Uncomfortable Truth #4: Approximately 68.8% of leaders reported feeling burned out, compared to 54.4% of team members, with 90.9% of these leaders having felt this way for an extended period. One in five leaders intended to quit their jobs in the next six months, indicating potential "leader churn" with significant risks and costs for organizations.

There is a lot here to unpack. For the purposes of this short newsletter staying within the “bite sized” chunks and not turning into a dissertation I want to hone in on Uncomfortable Truth #1: 63% of workers feel burnt out leading to emotional, social and physical exhaustion.

It’s a rather large number. Shocking, some might say. I mean we all acknowledge there have been challenges, especially the last few years, but wow, that’s really a train that is getting away from us…?

Why are so many of us feeling burnt out??

In any workplace the answer is no doubt multi-pronged and much of the research points to the best explanation lying in a Biopsychosocial model. First coined by George Engel in 1977 the model refers to:

• Bio (physiological pathology)
• Psycho (thoughts emotions and behaviours such as psychological distress, fear/avoidance beliefs, current coping methods and attribution)
• Social (socio-economical, socio-environmental, and cultural factors such as?work issues, family circumstances and benefits/economics)

The Social Dilemma

For me the social part of the model is key in the current workplace burnout stats. Working with organisations big (huge) and small, they are all saying the same thing

“Brad, we haven’t cracked the Hybrid working model yet….”

I have heard this so many times that I now assume if any business leader or wellbeing team claim to have a perfect hybrid working model in place, I straight assume they are either lying to me or lying to themselves!

One of the pieces to this puzzle is social isolation and loneliness. As we become more entangled in our online world and devices, we become disconnected from human interaction. No doubt there are advantages logistically and financially to hybrid work and WFH, but social isolation is leading to an increase in loneliness. It’s may sound like a small downside among multiple positives, but lets not forget:

?“Humans are neurologically hardwired for connection and social interaction”

I had a chat with a business leader recently who was at a loss on this exact topic. They told me they had recognised their staff were feeling increasingly disconnected, lonely and socially isolated. My first response was one of support! Amazing that they are psychologically minded enough in their culture to flag this. But the next bit shocked me. They went about rolling out a few in person fun events and team building days….. but most staff didn’t attend….

What more can they do? I have a few ideas, but it’s a complicated question and nuanced depending on each organisations circumstances.

What we can all agree on? As the world of Tech, AI and hybrid working marches on, step one is helping our staff with the tools to establish a sustainable tech diet. Step two? Connection.

Want to know more? Ask me. Hey, you could even pick up the phone and call me! Pretend it's 1992 again.

Brad