Why Work Culture is to Blame For Our Burnout Crisis Not Technology

The nine-to-five workday has been replaced by the always-available workday driven by advancements in mobile technology and a work culture that demands higher productivity at the cost of burnout. During the pandemic, workers exchanged their commute time for more time spent working. In a Workplace Intelligence and Oracle global study, we found that over half of workers are working at least five hours more each week while remote and over a third are working at least ten additional hours. That time you spent driving, flying, or taking a train to work has been replaced by more work. While companies have benefitted from record levels of productivity, the side effect is a heightened mental health crisis.

To meet the growing demands of the remote workplace, companies have prioritized their technology investments. Two-thirds of workers said that Covid accelerated their willingness to invest in artificial intelligence (AI) tools. And, these tools have supported the economy even during the deepest part of the recession, allowing workers to keep their jobs because they could remain connected to them. Now, as the economy rebounds with a declining unemployment rate, leaders need to turn their focus to continue to invest in these tools, and a culture, that reduces a workweek that has been already stretched too far.

As I've said during many of my keynote speeches, technology has made us feel always on and when we're always on, we're never present. As evidence of our burnout culture, perpetuated by our reliance on technology, Harvard Business School found that workers spend at least eighty hours each week either working, monitoring work, or remaining accessible. But, the same technology that we use to orchestrate our work lives can give us hope for a more efficient, shorter workweek in the future.

The promise of technology is to reduce our workweeks

People want to work because jobs don't just give us a paycheck, but also dignity. I discovered this two years ago when I led a study in partnership with UKG (formerly Kronos). We asked workers, "if your pay remained constant, how many days would you desire to work per week?" and a mere four percent said "none". This result reinforces the importance of having a job and that those who are jobless would rather have a job than just collect unemployment during Covid. We also found that almost three-fourths of workers said that they desire to work fewer than five-day workweeks. At least an hour of each worker's day is wasted on tasks that aren't related to their job or administrative tasks that don't drive business value. Add that to wasteful meetings and continuous back-and-forth to emails.

Our work lives were not supposed to be this chaotic, where everyone is "busy" all of the time, unable to shutoff. Back in the 1930s, Economic John Maynard Keynes predicted that we would have a fifteen-hour workweek, giving people more time for leisure activities. But, now it's almost 2021 and we're buried and bombarded with more and more work than we can handle. Alibaba CEO Jack Ma believes that AI can help us achieve Keynes's vision, yet China promotes a 996 workweek (working from 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week). Still, the technology tools we use are already removing tasks from our job descriptions without us even realizing it and automation will continue to devour administrative work, thus freeing up time. But, if we continue to add work as we're freeing it up, then we are destined to be mice running in a wheel.

How technology is already delivering on its promise

While you may think that we are lightyears away from living in a world run by technology, think again. We are already using all of these tools without evening thinking about it. When I interviewed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson for the 5 Questions podcast, he said “AI has already improved our lives. Think of the things that computers are now doing that you’re not even questioning, whereas thirty years ago it would have been seen as sorcery. You have a thing that fits in your shirt pocket that tells you how to get to grandma’s house and when and where the traffic is getting heavy, it will suggest routes to avoid the traffic without the involvement of a human being. That’s AI.”

As someone who has a poor sense of direction, GPS technology has saved my life on multiple occasions, while my iPhone has helped me stay in touch with people across the world with ease. And, in the Oracle study, we found that over half of workers say that AI has shortened their workweeks, made them more productive, and allowed them to take longer vacations. Instead of eliminating full jobs, MIT professors say that it will eliminate tasks within jobs. These are mostly administrative tasks that we don't like doing anyway, like scheduling meetings, but wouldn't openly admit it.

Instead of replacing humans, technology has helped augment and supplement the workplace experience, providing a more refined product, faster. For instance, IBM has equipped professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology with "Jill Watson", an AI teaching assistant that answers student questions 24/7. Jill Watson is set to answer 40 percent of the ten thousand questions students ask each semester with a 97 percent accuracy rate. AI teaching assistants like Jill Watson won't replace professors because we have a 69 million teacher deficit worldwide. Instead, AI will allow professors to use their time saved to invest more in giving students individual attention while scaling their teachings.

Another example of the partnership between human and machine is the "DOM Pizza Checker", an AI system that Dominos implemented to have more consistent pizzas. It uses a ceiling-mounted camera and software to judge if each pizza is up to spec, analyzes the distribution of toppings and cheese spread, and then grades it. If the pizza passes the AI test, it gives the OK for delivery. If not, the pizza gets rejected and a new one is made. Instead of workers guessing if each pizza is up to standards, the AI collaborates with them to ensure it does. By removing the time spent checking each pizza, it frees up their time.

Corporate culture needs to change for workweeks to reduce

Even though technology has reduced our time spent working, our workplace culture continues to beat the drum to overwork. We are replacing the time we're saving by using tech tools with more and more work, preventing us from the utopia that Keynes predicted long ago. And much of this burnout culture is the result of the 2008 recession, which put pressure on companies to increase productivity with fewer (human) resources. The 2020 recession has continued to perpetuate and reinforce the pressure to work more hours at the cost of our health.

We need to change our work mantra from "do more with less" to "do less with more" if we want to stop our burnout crisis."

Working longer and harder has also become a badge of honor and saying "I'm busy" is now a form of social proof. CEOs are the stewards of workplace culture and their behavior is echoed through their companies. For instance, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is a champion of burnout culture, having said: "nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week". What he's actually communicating is that if you want to work for his company, prepare to have work creep into your personal life and remain there for the duration of employment. But, Elon is one of many leaders who is trying to extract every ounce of time and energy from workers without regard to their personal lives. In the UKG study, we found that over half the workforce feels pressured to work longer hours and pick up more shifts to grow their careers.

The good news is that there is a workplace wellness movement to combat burnout culture. The most notable is the 4-day workweek trials that began a few years ago. When asked how many days employees desire to work with their salary being constant, the most common response was four days. During Covid, Seattle startup Volt moved to a 4-day workweek, giving everyone Fridays off, which resulted in higher levels of employee job satisfaction and productivity. Knowing that remote work during Covid would result in employee burnout, social media company Buffer implemented a 4-day work week as well. Buffer's employees benefitted from more happiness, lower stress, and a higher sense of autonomy. Entire countries have realized that a 5-day workweek is unnecessary, and in many ways, harmful to their population. New Zealand Prime Minister, and one of the most notable and effective leaders during Covid, says that the 4-day workweek is a way to rebuild the economy because it helps employees address "persistent work/life balance issues".

Our future workweek and workplace

Even with the surge in technologies that have reduced our workdays, our workplace culture continues to fill up our free time with more work. We need to blame our work culture more than technology for our expanded workweek because culture drives much of our technology use. As much as 45 percent of all work activities can be automated with the technology we already have, saving us 18 out of every 40 hours worked and further proving that our culture is driving us to work more unnecessary hours. We need to let technology do its job so that we can bring health and humanity back to where we work and live.

While the great promise of technology is to reduce our workweeks, that benefit will only be realized if it coincides with a change in workplace culture.

Our culture pushes us to continue to work crazy hours even though it's not in our best interest to do so. When everyone is burned out, burnout becomes the norm and anything outside of that is deemed lazy. This stressful and exhausting workplace culture we're experiencing has to change and it starts at the top.

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