30.12.2024 | News, SAVALnews
If a supervisor burns out, it affects the activities of the entire team. According to a study, the risk for employees working in supervisory and managerial positions to develop burnout at work has increased. An excessive amount of work is the most common reason for burnout.
One simple question made a managing director burst into tears during their appointment with Sari Ridell. Are you living a life that feels true to who you are? The question made the family father realise that his work had been taking too much time away from his family and other areas of his life.
As a coach for management teams, supervisors and work communities, and a solution-oriented work supervisor, Ridell meets with supervisors and managerial personnel who are suffering from or at risk of burnout in their working life.
Burnout is a devious disorder that develops surreptitiously. Therefore, Ridell encourages her customers to regularly stop and take a moment for introspection. ‘Have a serious discussion with yourself, say, once a month or once a quarter. Ask yourself how you are doing. It’s an important measure to prevent exhaustion from taking hold.’
An internal value assessment may protect against burnout. ‘Think about the people who are important to you and how much you give to them. If you have important people in your life other than your colleagues, such as a life partner, children, grandchildren or friends, you should also be giving the best of yourself to them as well. Otherwise, you may miss out on the things that enrich and nurture your life’, says Ridell.
The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health’s research team recently found that the likelihood of burnout has increased especially among those working in supervisory and managerial positions. The number has tripled compared to the situation before the pandemic.
‘That's a significant change. Prior to the pandemic, 3% of those working in managerial positions had the highest risk of burnout, now the figure is 9%’, says Janne Kaltiainen, Specialist Researcher at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health (FIOH).
Research participants were asked about four key symptoms of burnout: chronic work fatigue, cynicism, reduced cognitive function and decreased emotional management. Responses were scored and the risk of burnout was assessed on the basis of the overall score. Altogether 1,567 respondents took part in the study before the pandemic and 1,242 between summer 2023 and summer 2024.
‘We can see a general increase in work demands across the entire working population. Supervisors, in particular, are burdened by an excessive amount of work. The most recent research material was collected last summer. According to that material, 42% of supervisors felt they had too much work to do. About a third of employees felt this way.’
Sari Ridell says that many supervisors have noticed that some employees will share nearly everything about their private lives. Sometimes this is the only way for an employee to get attention within a busy daily work environment. Then there are some who take sick leave for a couple of weeks without any indication of the reason.
Employees’ private life issues are increasing the burden on supervisors and managerial personnel. ‘There has been a paradigm shift in leadership, since humane management has taken a key role in discourse for a couple of years. Now, however, we seem to be pushing extremes. We need to be closer to each other, but how do we do that while keeping the topics of discussion work-related in the workplace, so as to prevent our private lives from burdening the working environment. It takes a bit of finesse to make sure that workplaces do not become places for therapy’, says Ridell.
She has noted an increasing trend of emotional emphasis within working life contexts. ‘Too often, work community issues are turned into matters for personal therapy. Problems in working life are not solved through individual therapy. In particular, matters related to co-operation should be dealt with primarily within the work community and, for example, through work supervision. Life and adulthood inherently include difficult times and not all pain can be comforted away.’
In the midst of burnout, hope and the meaningfulness of work are lost. ‘These are replaced by hopelessness and ruthlessness towards oneself. In the role of a supervisor, burnout can also be indicated by a lack of interest in employees’ affairs’, says Ridell.
In people who are overburdened, their pace often peaks just before they crash. ‘It’s very typical for a person to be even more ruthless with themselves prior to things coming to a standstill. The individual then feels terrible guilt and shame and worries who will do their work.’ The sense of hopelessness makes it seem like there is no recovering once burnout has occurred.
Ridell’s job involves work supervision with a focus on the need to stop and consider one’s own work, its significance, the co-operation involved and the balance between work and other areas of life. ‘With many of my work supervision clients, I have to talk for almost six months about the signs of overload before they truly admit and internalise the truth of their situation.’
When a person suffering from burnout is finally ready to admit the state of exhaustion to themselves, they have taken the first steps towards recovery. Then the process of gathering strength, even slowly, can begin.
Ridell recalls how, in the old days, a canary bird was taken into the coal mine, and if it fell or ceased its singing, this signalled to miners that oxygen was running out. ‘A person suffering from burnout at work is like the canary. They have been exhausted by an impossible task and demonstrate that things cannot continue like this or else more workers will suffer a similar fate.’
When a supervisor or manager becomes fatigued, this greatly affects the possibilities of the entire team to function properly.
When a supervisor is burnt out, information that is dependent on them may not reach the employees, thus hindering their work. In other words, the employees don’t have the information that is essential for the performance of their work.
The supervisor may lose track of who is doing what work and how the work would be best managed. ‘The amount of work may become unevenly distributed among employees if the supervisor’s attentiveness and memory have begun to weaken,’ says Janne Kaltiainen of the FIOH.
Janne Kaltiainen in the picture
‘From research, it has been shown that if one person starts to have symptoms, it can spread to the rest of the group. This increases the risk of burnout for others as well.’ If, for example, the fair distribution of work begins to falter due to the burnout of the supervisor, the employees who have been tasked with an unreasonable workload will subsequently be at risk of burnout.
The project ‘Engagement and social connections in multi-location work’, carried out by the FIOH, studied the way in which hybrid work affects how employees evaluate management personnel. ‘The more work was done remotely, the less the management was perceived as a promoter of community’, says Kaltiainen.
Participants in the research project were asked if their supervisors help them to feel a sense of belonging and community: who we are, what are our values and attitudes, and whether our boss organises events that bring us together. ‘The more work that was done remotely, the less employees felt that their boss was fostering a sense of community. Technology-mediated activities are not as effective for this purpose. The question arises as to whether technology-mediated interactions remain too formal and topic-driven’, Kaltiainen ponders.
What is the solution – is it better to refocus on core rather than fragmented tasks?
If the supervisor or manager has too much work, Janne Kaltiainen suggests considering whether the supervisors’ work might be organised differently. The reorganisation process should start with a clarification of the supervisor’s job description, their core tasks and those areas that should be prioritised. Next, one should consider whether there are any support functions that have been transferred to the supervisor despite the fact that these functions are not relevant to their core tasks. Kaltiainen encourages people to consider whether, in the longer term, it would be more effective not to utilise working time on extraneous support tasks that would be more appropriate for and smoothly handled by someone other than the supervisor or manager.
It is also useful to consider whether the number of employees overseen by each supervisor is optimal. Would there be justification to hire more employees?
According to Sari Ridell, there are very few workplaces that have created good practices for dismantling the stigma associated with burnout and addressing the lack of interest to deal with obvious problems. She encourages discussions on issues related to coping and resilience.
‘It’s worth drafting personal guidelines.’ The idea is to review, through discussion, each person’s way of reacting to an exhausting pace of work. Guidelines begin to take shape when you take a look at how the symptoms of overload are visible in different employees. One acknowledges, perhaps, that they become quiet. Another withdraws from social situations. And yet another comes generally irritable. ‘The supervisor should write these down. The next step is to discuss how each one wishes the situation to be handled or what to say if signs of overload begin to appear.’ This provides an opportunity for employees to give permission to intervene should such a situation arise.
Ridell has suggested the use of personal guideline discussions to teams that have already realised the financial benefits of proactive prevention of burnout.
‘Of course, each person is primarily responsible for their own well-being at work. Many people often deny their own signs of burnout and do not give themselves permission to stop, even though the rest of the work community has already noticed the situation.’
Community, fair treatment and perceived competence protect one against burnout
Supervisors’ risk of burnout at work has increased more rapidly (3% → 9%) than that of employees, whose risk of exhaustion is typically higher than that of supervisors. Since the pandemic, the risk of exhaustion among employees has increased more moderately (7% → 11%) than among supervisors.
According to a FIOH study, supervisors are feeling a weaker sense of optimism at work compared to the time before the pandemic. However, the well-being at work experienced by supervisors is still better than that of employees. Supervisors have a good level of motivation, enthusiasm and work engagement, less boredom at work, and their self-assessed level of work ability is better.
The difference in the risk of burnout for employees and supervisors is not a new phenomenon. ‘It is common for supervisors to express a higher level of well-being at work. They feel competent, successful in their work, they experience more fair treatment, a higher sense of community, more opportunities to learn and a higher than average enthusiasm for work. They also have a greater ability to make decisions regarding work-related matters. Many positive things protect them, but the excessive amount of work is the weak side’, lists Janne Kaltiainen, Specialist Researcher at the FIOH.
Text: Iida Ylinen Photos: Jani Laukkanen: Janne Kaltiainen ja Noora Slotte (Studio P.S.V.): Sari Ridell. The article has been published on ASIA membership magazine 04/2024.
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