Working Smarter

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting the results of key studies on work-life balance, stress management, and productivity.

THE RECENT decision by IBM, a leader in remote work and flexible schedules, to bring many of its teleworkers back into the office has left human resource experts, not to mention employees, scratching their heads. IBM joined companies such as Yahoo and Aetna, which have made the same move.

Why would a savvy organization like IBM want to roll back flexibility when countless studies have shown that it improves performance and job satisfaction and that the core need of everyone is more autonomy, not less? 

GROWING MORE FLEXIBLE

Flexibility is particularly important to a big chunk of the current workplace: millennials. Some 80% cite it at the top of their list of employer requirements. A recent Gallup study shows that telework is not going away; it’s booming. Some 43% of employees in the U.S. say they can work remotely at least part of the time. That’s a 4% increase since 2012.

Studies have shown that flexibility increases perceived work-life balance, which in turn reduces the stress of commuting, marital conflict, and money spent on childcare, opens up the pool of talent beyond the immediate geography of the company office, increases hours available to work and quality time to think without interruptions, allows employees to not burn up sick days while taking care of an ill child or aging parent (only 22% of sick days are used because the employee is sick), and boosts family time and productivity.

Some say that IBM’s recent lackluster revenue might be behind the call for employees to come back to the office. Others say that better collaboration requires more physical proximity. The strategy certainly didn’t work in the case of Yahoo.

NAVIGATING THE BREAK POINT

I thought it would be a good time to look at what the research actually says about flexibility—in particular one influential study using IBM employees as its subjects. It’s the first of an ongoing series on the Working Smarter blog here spotlighting key studies in the work-life balance, stress management, productivity, and engagement arenas. This particular study, “Finding an Extra Day a Week: The Positive Influence of Perceived Job Flexibility on Work and Family Life Balance” (Hill, Hawkins, Ferris, Weitzman 2001) examined the impact of flexible place and time on a cross-section of 6,451 IBM employees, and deserves more notice.

The study devised a clever gauge to measure the impact of flexible schedules on perceived work-family imbalance. They measured the number of work hours per week when employees experienced difficulty managing work and home responsibilities. They defined it as “the number of weekly paid work hours at which 50% of the sample responded they had a difficult time or very difficult time balancing the demands of their work and family life.” They called this the “break point.”

They also measured the weekly hours at which 25% of employees had trouble managing their work-life—the “balance point.” They did their calculations for each work group by setting work-family balance as equal to .50 or .25 and then measured those with and without “flexplace” and with and without flextime.

The researchers found, not surprisingly, that longer work hours corresponded to lower work-life balance, and flexibility was associated with higher perceived work-life balance. Only 28% of employees with flexplace and flextime had difficulty with work-life balance, compared to 46% of those with neither of those options. Twenty-nine percent of those with a choice of where they worked had trouble with work-family balance, while 40% of those without that option had work-family difficulty. The difference was larger for those with flextime. Just 29% of those with flextime had work-family problems, while 44% without it did.

Another interesting finding is that for hourly workers, who had the most rigid schedules, only 18% had work family difficulties if they had flexplace and flextime, compared to 42% without it. The biggest advantage was for parents with preschoolers. The work-family break point for women with small children was 43 work hours per week, but without flexplace and time, it was 32 hours a week.

FLEX SCHEDULES INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY

We have known for a long time that flexibility in hours and locales not only increases employee satisfaction, but it also results in more hours worked, i.e., increased productivity. The same was true in this study. As the authors stated, “Employees with perceived flexibility in the timing and location of work were able to work longer hours than those without perceived flexibility before experiencing a difficulty in balancing their work and family life.

“For example, the break point and balance point for those with perceived flexibility in the timing of work were 60 hours per week and 44 hours per week, respectively. The break point and balance point for those without perceived flexibility in the timing of work were 52 hours per week and 41 hours per week, respectively.”

They concluded that the business payoff of perceived flexibility in the timing of work is a big one. It allows an employee to work “an extra day of work” before work-life balance becomes difficult—60 hours with flextime, 52 hours without flextime.

The data is compelling. Remote work and flextime work, which is why more and more companies are opting to offer it. We know this makes sense intuitively. People who feel they have more control over their work schedules have more perceived control over their lives. It’s lack of control that drives stress and overwhelm and the “spillover effect”of strain on work-family, as it’s called in the research.

The study spells it out. “Perceived job flexibility, given a reasonable workweek, enables more employees to have work-life balance (personal and family benefit) and also enables employees to work longer hours before impacting work-family balance (business benefit).”

That sounds like a big win-win to me. Regardless of IBM’s decision and that of a few others, the trajectory is for more flexibility to keep talent on board, particularly among millennial staffs and management. The digital tools and collaborative software, from Slack to Base Camp, make it possible to maximize performance while allowing employees to feel more effective and self-responsible in the process.

If you would like details on our work-life balance employee training programs and how they can increase your team's performance and work-life survey scores, please click on the button below:

JOB BURNOUT is an accident. No one aspires to a state of exhaustion so complete you don't want to get out of bed. If we knew ahead of time that we were headed down this road, we could change course. But we don’t know that, because the chronic stress that drives burnout directs us down an unconscious track of mechanical momentum.

We don’t think about managing the demands that are pushing our buttons, we just keep reacting to them on autopilot on a route I call the burnout treadmill. Just keep going until the paramedics arrive. Unfortunately, they are arriving so we need a healthier approach to how we work and react to pressure, stress, and other people, and that means a conscious understanding of how we respond to burnout triggers and how certain personality traits and habits factor in to the equation. Stress management has to be as routine as brushing teeth.

BRAKE FOR BURNOUT

To prevent auto crashes, we moderate speed and make sure the brakes are working. To keep the accident of burnout at bay, we have act preventitively too, by putting the brakes on uncontested stress and perfectionism, and what researchers call self-undermining, from bad coping habits to lack of communication 

Most of the people I work with in my coaching practice suffer from burnout. They come to me after a long period of extreme work hours, workloads beyond their capacity, and high chronic stress from demands that have overwhelmed their coping systems, touching off anxiety, cynicism, and fear about what the future holds.

They are not slackers; in fact, they are the opposite. They have worked so hard that they have gone beyond what’s healthy or needed to be productive in their work. They may think they are the only one who can get the job done right and don't delegate. Often, they associate endurance, quantity of hours on the job, with performance, when in the knowledge economy, it’s all about how fresh the chief productivity tool—attention—is. I meet them when the exhaustion, drop in performance, and medical issues tell them they can’t go on anymore like this. 

Burnout is what happens when chronically high demands meet low to no resources or support. The final stage of chronic stress, burnout is a condition of accumulation, unresolved stress that piles up day after day for months and years until it drains all coping resources—emotional, physical, and mental. It’s easy to get caught up in because chronic stress floods the body with adrenaline that masks the physiological impacts and makes us think we’re handling it, at least for a while—until we’re not. 

We're left in a state of chronic exhaustion, futility, and feeling a lack of personal accomplishment. Not only do you not have energy to do the job or live your life with joy, but you also feel like there’s no point to doing either. Cynicism and emotional distancing, withdrawal, and a host of medical issues follow.

CONTEST THE STRESS

Studies show a high incidence of depression, anxiety, and alcohol dependence in burnout cases (Ahola, 2007). Burnout is also a factor in cardiovascular disease, diabetes (Melamed, Shirom, 2006), gastro-intestinal problems, and stroke.

On the performance side, burnout triggers higher absenteeism and turnover (Maslach 2001), and presenteeism. The body’s at the office but not much else. It takes longer to get tasks done because of low energy and attention levels, so productivity is reduced.

There are situational factors that trigger burnout—the structure of the work, unrealistic deadlines, excess workload, and insufficient reward or support—but also individual causes rooted in personality traits and our own responses (or lack of them) to demands. The key to not fall prey to reflex burnout triggers is to be aware of the daily issues that drive stress, and resolve, dispute, communicate, and adjust them so they don’t push your buttons.

We all have a job we have to do. Nothing we can do about that. But how we do our tasks is something we can change. When we make adjustments to how we do our tasks and how we respond to others, we turn off the engines of burnou, which thrive on lack of control. When we make little and big changes, delegate, ask for help, control devices, and find ways to feel more autonomous, we eliminate the festering root of burnout—helplessness.

Research shows that when we exercise acts of choice and flexibility, we satisfy one of our core needs, autonomy, an antidote to burnout (which thrives on futility and lack of agency). One study (Bakker, Demerouti, Euwema, 2005) found that employees who communicate often with supervisors, get regular feedback (something you can ask for), have social support, and feel more autonomy as a result can have high demands but not get burned out.

DO EXTRAVERTS GET BURNED OUT?

The key to managing the stress that drives burnout is increasing control over demands and the thoughts and self-talk that undermine us. That’s where we gain autonomy and make work-life less difficult. But we have to set boundaries, which are a success tool, studies show (Nash, Stevenson, 2004). We can’t be doing two hours of work email at home. We can’t reflexively do 12-hour days without asking what’s wrong with workflow, delegating, or time management. 

And we have to speak up. We have to let others know the situation is untenable. One of my clients told her boss that though she loved her job, the toll of burnout on her and her family was no longer something she could accept. Something had to change. The boss agreed and removed a person driving high stress from contact with her and gave her a month off with pay to regather her crashed resources.

Proaction is the way out of burnout. Keeping everything inside is the way to keep burnout going. This client is an introvert, but she was able to step up and communicate her needs. Studies show, by the way, that extraversion is negatively associated with burnout. So if extraverts tend to have less burnout than introverts, that is instructive data. People more inclined to talk about challenges and ask for adjustments feel more control over events, and that control reduces the helplessness of silence.

EXHAUSTION LEADS TO MORE EXHAUSTION

In a fascinating study, Arnold Bakker and Patricia Costa examined the individual side of burnout. They found that, “Employees with higher levels of daily exhaustion show self-undermining behavior…Chronically burned-out employees are less able to manage their own emotions, and more likely to encounter conflicts at work. These self-undermining behaviors all contribute to higher daily job demands.”

Bakker and Costa found too that high levels of daily exhaustion resulted in mistakes that had to be done over, which pushes schedules back, creates more time urgency, and more pressure in an ever-repeating cycle.

Researchers have found the best antidote to burnout is something every employer wants: employee engagement. People who feel they are valued and participants in the way the work is done don’t get burnout out. Burnout scholar Christina Maslach has reported that the key dimensions of burnout—exhaustion, cynicism, and lack of professional efficacy—are the polar opposite of engagement's main domains: vigor, dedication, and absroption. 

The autonomy support framework created by the University of Rochester’s Edward Deci and Richard Ryan is an ideal antidote to burnout. It brings more teamwork, satisfaction, and something else critical for anyone to do something that’s hard—the right kind of motivation, intrinsic motivation. When we work, not for the external payoff, but for internal goals such as service, challenge, excellence, or craft, we satisfy our core needs of autonomy, competence, and connection with others and don’t go down the track to isolation, alienation, and catastrophic thoughts that lead to burnout.

Attention, then, is our exit off the burnout treadmill. The more attention we have on how we work, the fewer emotional reactions and mechanical momentum that can self-undermine us. There is nothing more important to pay attention to than your health, so let’s all make sure we jump on the triggers that set us off and not give stress a pass or buy the bravado that we can “take it.” Or one day, you get taken by burnout.