Burnout warning! It’s career stage dependent

With most OECD countries facing tight labor markets and the search for meaning in work becoming ever more important to a wide range of employees, new insights into better, more tailored management of work are vital.

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of a number of crises to have gripped developed economies in recent years. Other crises include Brexit, the war in Ukraine, migration from the emerging to developing world, the energy crisis and climate change.

In this era of permacrisis, understanding how people experience and adapt to disruption has the potential to offer new insights to enable HR to more effectively support the workforce.

The pandemic has been widely reported to impact negatively on the mental health of whole populations,­­­­­­ particularly younger people. In contrast, we focused our research on people’s work experiences.

We investigated the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic disruption on employees at different career stages early in the pandemic.

We wanted to understand how people used their work resources such as job autonomy and perceived organizational support to manage this significant work disruption and how the disruption impacted on their wellbeing over time.

The demographics of stress

Our research focused on people at five career stages – from early on when they were finding themselves vocationally to pre-retirement when there was less emphasis on career advancement.

We surveyed workers in 30 different countries to find differences in how these career groups reacted to the continued pandemic-related disruptions of 2020 and adjusted over time.

Work and personal lives underwent enormous disruption during the pandemic. People working from home experienced increased loneliness and a range of mental health issues.

Under normal circumstances, the younger generations of workers need additional support from their managers and that was exacerbated during the pandemic, when we saw that relative newcomers to the workforce did not cope as well under the pressures of remote working.

Burnout in younger workers due to disengagement

Burnout is usually characterized as comprising two dimensions: exhaustion and disengagement.

In early studies, scholars argued that exhaustion precedes disengagement, that is, first people become physically worn out before they mentally distance themselves from their work. Some more recent research suggests that the two aspects of burnout can occur in any order. Our study adds further weight to this more recent perspective.

People can become disengaged without first being exhausted. People may also become exhausted and disengaged simultaneously.

Our pandemic research revealed that workers in the first two career stages – early and developing – were more likely to disengage during the pandemic. This could manifest as the employee showing a lack of interest in their job and becoming cynical about work as a way of coping.

The consequences for employers of this finding are serious in a tight labor market. If younger workers become disengaged, they are more prone to quit.

Ensuring their experience of work is positive and meaningful will likely remain a challenge in the face of ongoing crises.

Exhaustion caused burnout in later career stages

In contrast, mid-career workers – categorized as those settled in a career and building on those foundations – were prone to exhaustion during the pandemic. In some cases, this was because of juggling other responsibilities, such as home schooling due to school closures or caring for elderly relatives.

Becoming both over-tired and disengaged could have contributed to a national trend in which highly skilled employees in the over-50s were leaving their professions before retirement.

This group is in danger of leaving work prematurely as part of what is sometimes referred to as the great resignation or engaging in what has become widely known as ‘quiet quitting‘.

They have been reassessing their lives, particularly during the pandemic, and, while they may not leave work completely, they may change career, move out of the city, or work fewer hours, resulting in organizations losing a wealth of experience.

Addressing ‘quiet quitting’ with ‘quiet firing’ or ‘quiet constraint’ – both forms of organizational punishment rather than organizational support – may not produce the required results especially in the face of a tight labor market.

Support was not always positively received

Getting organizational support right to mitigate against burnout and enhance engagement may be harder than previously supposed. We found that there appeared to be a shift in attitudes around organizational support, which had traditionally been viewed as positive.

During the pandemic, there was often a lot of organizational support that, over time, people could find interfering and tiring, such as having a large number of online meetings, which sometimes took people away from their work and led to lots of screen time.

When organizations get support right, it is perceived by employees as a resource that is helpful to manage work and support wellbeing. Instead, it might have felt like more of a significant additional demand placed on people during the pandemic.

As many workplaces continue with at least some virtual working, we need a better understanding of what organizational support should consist of as we navigate other new and ongoing crises. More of the same sort of support we provided in pre-pandemic times does not seem to be the answer to mitigating burnout over time.

Solutions need to tackle the root cause

HR can implement new initiatives and reinforce existing ones to support the wellbeing of employees to achieve, despite the crises.

Early career employees are concerned with making connections in their chosen field to support progression and in feeling like they really belong in their workplace without which they may become disengaged.

To achieve these ends, these younger members of the workforce need adequate networking and social resources, the latter with both their manager and their peers, to build the necessary structural and relational social capital in a hybrid environment.

Examples include providing purposeful mentoring opportunities, promoting authentic horizontal partnerships, and emphasizing the job autonomy and job control already embedded in their roles with the latter offering possibilities for customization by the individual worker.

Those in mid- and later- career stages may benefit from an increase in job autonomy through self-directed work opportunities to forestall disengagement. These more experienced employees may also reap rewards through specialized training in boundary management and tailored flexible working initiatives to minimize the possibility of exhaustion taking hold.

The next steps for HR, whatever solutions are ultimately implemented, should be undertaken with close consultation of employees­­­­ at different career stages.

Based on original research by Audra I Mockaitis of Maynooth University, Ireland, Christina L Butler of Kingston University, UK, and Adegboyega Ojo of Carleton University, Canada, published in the Journal of Vocational Behaviour: COVID-19 Pandemic Disruptions to Working Lives: A Multi-level Examination of Impacts across Career Stages.

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