If You’re Burning Out, Carve a New Path

As leaders looks for new ways to improve workplace well-being while reducing stress and burnout, a relatively new concept has emerged: job crafting, a strategy that gives employees the chance to design their roles for a more meaningful experience of work. Scientists have found that monotonous work can negatively impact mental health, cause us major stress, and lead to burnout. The chronically bored are at higher risk for drug addiction, alcoholism, and compulsive gambling. In her paper, “Neuroscience Reveals That Boredom Hurts,” Dr. Judy Willis, a neurologist and former classroom teacher, claims that when we’re bored, our judgment, goal-directed planning, risk assessment, focus, and control over our emotions all suffer. And a Korn Ferry poll of nearly 5,000 professionals claims that the top reason people look for a new job is boredom. Meaning and Mental Health at Work Monotony, lack of flow, and a lack of autonomy have all been shown to increase stress and burnout in the workplace. Dr. Richard Thackray, from the Washington D.C. Office of Aviation Medicine, wanted to understand the dangers for pilots if there was too much automation and boredom in their roles. In his paper, “The Stress of Boredom and Monotony”, he concedes that workplace monotony has already been shown to adversely impact morale, performance, and quality of work. However, his laboratory and field studies show that the combination of tasks that feel monotonous and lack meaning with deadline-driven roles and fast-paced work environments is a recipe for burnout. Dr. Shahram Heshmat, an associate professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Springfield, claims workplace monotony can be caused by: Experiences that are repetitive and predictable, especially when we lack interest in the details of our tasks. A lack of “flow” — a term coined by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi in 1975, defined as a state of total immersion in a task that is challenging, yet closely matched to one’s abilities, often referred to as “being in the zone.” Tasks that are too easy lack meaning and become tedious. Work experiences that stop feeling novel. Novel experiences pump chemicals like dopamine into our brains, which is strongly linked to motivation and reward-seeking. At work, it helps us meet deadlines, reach goals, and enjoy the work that we do every day. Conversely, once the brain identifies an experience as familiar, it stops seeking rewards and loses its potential to motivate. Novelty is so important to well-being that researchers claim that it’s a predictor of longevity. The belief that we lack agency or autonomy (the ability to make choices about how we work, what we work on, with whom we work, etc.). Autonomy in the workplace refers to how much personal freedom employees have to make decisions. This can range from schedule setting, to how goals are met, to what type of work we do from one day to the next. Higher levels of autonomy tend to result in an increase in job satisfaction while lower levels of autonomy increase stress and can lead to burnout. The above research clearly indicates that a lack of meaning in our work, limited agency over how we achieve our goals, and insufficient novelty in the tasks we engage in every day can have serious negative impacts on our mental and physical health. Job crafting may be exactly what leaders need as an antidote to these workplace stressors. Replacing Boredom with Meaning The reality is, most employees are required to carry out similar or identical tasks every day. It’s challenging to avoid repetitive work, even when we enjoy what we do. In general, humans are attracted to repetition. Studies show that about 40% of our daily activities are performed each day in almost the same situations. Subconscious behaviors allow our conscious brain to be more mindful and feel more psychologically safe. The trade-off for the comfort of routine can mean a less enjoyable experience when we engage in these tasks. Insight Center The Era of Job Crafting Sponsored by Upwork Design the work you want. So, what if we could make small tweaks to how we perform those actions, or change the way we perceive these tasks, so they stop feeling monotonous and instead feel novel and purposeful? This is the magic of job crafting. It transforms parts of our work that once felt meaningless into something that feels valued. In 2001, Jane Dutton, professor emerita of business administration and psychology at University of Michigan, and Amy Wrzesniewski, professor of management at Yale, conceptualized the idea of job crafting. They define it as a means of describing the ways in which employees utilize opportunities to customize their jobs by actively changing their tasks and interactions with others at work. The main idea is that we can stay in the same role, getting more meaning out of our jobs simply by changing what we do and the purpose behind it. Imagine you are a secretary at a public school. You can either think of your job as someone who writes late slips and calls parents when their children are absent, or, you can see yourself as an essential liaison between families, student, and school staff. You create the right environment for students to thrive by ensuring their safety, and managing communication for them so they are supported at home. Job crafting gives you the space to go beyond the job description and shape a meaning for the work you do. Managers shouldn’t expect that repetitive tasks will no longer get accomplished — but these types of tasks don’t define the role. The Benefits of Job Crafting to Avoid Burnout As an author, my role is in a constant state of job crafting. When I’m writing, I get into a complete state of flow. Sounds stop permeating. The external world ceases to exist. On the flip side, research can feel tedious. For every 10 academic journals I read, I may get one significant piece of data that may or may not remain in the piece. It’s like I’m mining for gold. Since I care deeply about evidence-based writing, this process is necessary. It is also a significant part of an author’s daily work experience; definitely “part of the job.” I realized that if I wanted to enjoy the flow I feel while writing, I needed to change how I perceive the task of researching. I started by jotting down a short list of why evidence-based writing is so important to me. First, it backs up opinions with facts. Second, it relies on experts who have a deeper knowledge of the subject matter at hand than most. Finally, it provides us all with novel information that provokes new thinking. This list kickstarted an “ideas bucket” for me, and every cool fact or interesting data-point or thought-provoking case study would find its way there. These ideas have helped me exponentially as future stories came into view. They push me to learn new things and experience all the thrilling chemistry that comes with novel experiences in the brain. It also increases my energy, reduces monotony, and prevents me from burning out. Dutton, Wrzesniewksi, and Gelaye Debebe, associate professor of organizational sciences at George Washington University, co-authored the paper, “Being Valued and Devalued at Work: A Social Valuing Perspective” where they analyze the impact of job crafting as it relates to meaning and perception of role value. The study examined cleaners at a prestigious university hospital known for its high-tech medicine. Although the cleaners in the study were more or less doing the same job, each one described their experience uniquely. The subjects were broken out into two groups — those who enjoyed their jobs, and those who did not. The group that didn’t enjoy their roles described their jobs as if they were reading a job description — required tasks only. They also described their work as requiring low skill and said that people didn’t notice them. Cleaners who enjoyed their work included details like interacting with patients and visitors in their job descriptions, and believed their work was of high value. They also referred to themselves as “ambassadors and healers,” and would seek out assignments to support that self-title — such as spending more time with patients who seemed lonely, or regularly changing the pictures on the walls where patients were comatose to make the room feel nicer, so it might just help them revive. In a discussion with Shankar Vedantam, on NPR’s You 2.0., Amy Wrzesniewksi further elaborated on her interviews with the cleaners. She shared that the employees who enjoyed their jobs also behaved with empathy towards the patients, as if they were family. In one scenario, Wrzesniewksi describes how cleaning staff would put themselves in the physical place of a patient by looking up towards the ceiling “to see if there were things that were up there that we might not notice, but would bother the patients if they had to look at them all day long.” Purpose-driven roles are some of the most vulnerable to burnout and therefore require us to be mindful that we don’t take job crafting too far. By adding new dimensions to our roles, we may increase passion, but we also run the risk of carrying an increased workload and suffering from exhaustion. Leadership should be reminded that autonomy and meaning are valuable to employees and tend to produce higher levels of engagement and happiness at work. However, managers still need to check in and remain accountable to how their employees are keeping those two forces in balance, so they don’t end up getting burned out. For organizations looking to retain their top talent, it’s important to understand that boredom is kryptonite for high-performers and inspiration-seeking millennials. Leaders would benefit from giving employees the autonomy to increase purpose and meaning in their roles and reduce the repetitive tasks that fuel chronic stress and burnout. Not only does this prevent the potential for burnout; it increases productivity, engagement, and retention. Best of all, job crafting can give us all a reason to look up.

If You’re Burning Out, Carve a New Path

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