Employee burnout is when your workers lose both the motivation and the incentive to finish their work and achieve desired results. Today’s IT departments are particularly under pressure, being pulled by numerous stakeholders at any given time and meet pressing business demands. Employees need time to better rejuvenate, communicate and innovate, and the crux is on leaders to build an environment for workers to add more value. So in stepping back from our always-on culture, what are the warning signs of employee burnout that leaders should be aware of, what are the factors that place this pressure on their heads, and how can companies demonstrate they care for employees by putting an environment in place to prevent it?

Contributor

• • Frank Wander, Author, Former CIO, People Productive, LLC (Formerly The IT Excellence Institute)

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Transcript

Sanjog Aul [00:00:27]:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to CIO Talk Radio. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com, and as always, we invite you to join the discussion on Twitter, #CTR live, and look for this show as #leadership. Today’s topic is Addressing Employee Burnout In It, and our guest for today’s show is Frank Wander, who’s the author and former CIO and founder of People Productive LLC. Good morning, Frank. How are you?

Frank Wander [00:00:54]:

Hey, Joe. Good morning. Beautiful day today. How are you?

Sanjog Aul [00:00:58]:

Very good. Could not complain, and it is going out very well. This year has been a breeze. I do not even, I cannot even imagine this is almost turning into October.

Frank Wander [00:01:08]:

Oh my god. It’s another one of those classic conversations on where did the year go, time flies, and it gets faster every year.

Sanjog Aul [00:01:16]:

Definitely. Now coming to this topic, you see burnout was a term that was used a lot in management a few years back, but now the world has changed to even more on demand and this 24 by 7, type of an arrangement. Now new reports are suggesting that nearly 40% of Americans don’t use their paid vacation time, and, Sophie, we actually felt the burnout was something worth revisiting again today and assess what warning science leaders should be aware of and how we can work on changing our culture that seems to create that sense of burnout. So, when we look at this burnout, so earlier, we used to say if I have an eight hour day, and now I’m gonna work twelve hours, and I do that for a week. It seems like I have really, worked quite a bit, and, maybe I do it for a month, then it starts to take toll, and that’s what we used to start calling burnout. Now there is no eight hour day. It starts and it ends, and it is kinda blurry where your personal life is versus where your professional life is. So what we should be doing in order to set the stage and defining burnout in this new world?

Frank Wander [00:02:34]:

It’s interesting and I think you’re right on. The lines between work and home life have blurred completely. We are in a 24×7 world. People are always connected. They’re very busy in their personal lives and they’re very busy in their work life, and that results in basically burnout. Now let’s talk about it at a physiological level. People are humans, humans are the tools that we use to get the work done. Burnout is physiological and emotional and people could be suffering from one or both, and you add to that the fact that IT is actually brain based work. If we look at that, we find that brains typically are about 2% of total body weight, but they use 20% of our kind of resting energy level. So that’s the total amount of energy that people use up just sitting around. So if you think about it then, extended periods of intense mental activities like a project being behind absolutely begin to cause physiological burnout. We know that from some of the studies that have been done that people who are not particularly good at a particular task end up burning up even more glucose, which is the source of energy, and if you look at the destruction of the talent infrastructure over the last 10 years where people have been treated as parts more than ever. I sit here and say is it any wonder people are burning out. You have people under stress because they have low competence in their jobs. There’s also an emotional factor. We see that physiologically when people are under stress, cortisol is released in the blood and if you get that for a long period of time, people become what’s called stressed out, which is a form of burnout. So you get unrealistic deadlines, a lack of institutional knowledge, weak collaboration, disengagement, people incredibly busy at home. God, I mean there’s so many sources of burnout Sanjog Aul and we are in a world where a lot of people are burning out. I’m sorry to hear people aren’t taking vacation.

Sanjog Aul [00:04:23]:

So they are not taking vacation. It’s not that they don’t want to. Many of them are afraid that they will come back and there will not be a job, or some other thing which they might have unknowingly left incomplete would come and haunt them, and the rest of their, like, few weeks or months would be, again, more stressful, and it will more than offset the relaxation and rejuvenation they were able to obtain through this vacation. So perhaps we are way too anxious in terms of what’s gonna happen next, and at the same time, every moment of the day, we are thinking we’ve got these 20,000 things we need to get done, and it gets all blurry. So is it a matter of taking a step back, structuring everything, saying no to 20 things, and then we can say we will be able to get over? Or this is going to require some, godly effort, if you will?

Frank Wander [00:05:17]:

Well, let’s just take a look at the word anxious. People are anxious about the future. There was a study by Rutgers done, came out in August showing people are more anxious about the future than ever, and it doesn’t really relate to only work. People are worried about where things are going in the economy and whatnot. So there are a lot of overarching considerations. People need to take vacation, they need to recharge, work doesn’t really end and when you come back, you catch up and quite frankly, I always manage to fit in vacation. I used to try to take 2 weeks, I couldn’t always do it, but it’s great for a recharge and you know what, when you take it and you look back 6 months later, the fact of the matter is nothing really changed, right. You got everything done, it all worked out. So people need to take that time, they need to recharge, they need to let go and that will only make them more effective because staying at work in a burnt out mode is nothing could nothing could be less productive than that.

Sanjog Aul [00:06:17]:

So let’s take a step back because this definition of taking a 2 weeks vacation was when we had the older style of working where at least we have dedicated work hours. Now we are saying 24 by 7. At the same time, legally, no employer can tell us that we have to work 24 by 7, but the fact that we have a device with us, we end up getting sucked into that mode. So then it could also be where we do not look for that coveted 2 weeks vacation time. Instead, take whatever relaxation we can get during that 24 by 7 hamstring type of cycle and at least get better at what we do versus thinking there will be a time when I will take 2 weeks vacation and life will be good?

Frank Wander [00:07:03]:

Yes. Trying to fit in a break during a 24×7 cycle is in no ways comparable if you add them up to having an extended period of being out of the office and decompressing and basically recharging your body. The fact of the matter is you can’t always take a 2 week vacation. I could I did turnaround transformations across divisions, across companies and the fact remains when you start in a place, you’re really very busy, you’ve got to get things running, but once you get things running well, you’ve got to encourage people to take that time out of the office. If you can’t get things running well enough that people could take vacation and cover for one another, and by the way, like you said, you’re always connected. There’s always questions coming in and things and that’s okay, but people have to respect the fact you should be on vacation and call you only when it’s necessary and that comes down to what is the culture you’ve built, how does the place run, how does it work.

Sanjog Aul [00:08:01]:

When we look at the kind of productivity that we are expecting, what do you think is the change now that we have given people devices and work from anywhere? Now that’s a perk on one hand, but a curse for others, where we say you can work from anywhere and then we want productivity, and while the person is being productive, we also want that engagement, and we cannot we can perhaps push people to become productive, but we cannot push people to be engaged in what they are doing. How is the equation changing in today’s day and age?

Frank Wander [00:08:34]:

Well, there’s two questions or maybe even three there. One is engagement. One is remote worker engagement and the productivity of remote workers. You know, another one is the overarching culture that people are working in. Let’s take them all. People who tend to work remotely can be very, very productive because they’re not interrupted and we go through all the studies that really show how these periods of time when people can focus are very productive, well proven. At the same time, those people tend to feel disengaged from the organization because workers don’t know how to really manage or leaders don’t know how to manage remote worker engagement, right. So they leave people out of sight, out of mind and they’re going to have to build processes to keep them engaged. They’ve also got to make sure that those people are in the office, meeting people, building relationships, having face to face conversations with people because nothing ultimately builds and cements their relationship to the organization like actually being part of it having those relationships and working with people really one on one. So I think it’s a balance. They’ve got a balance, the need to engage with them when they’re remote, they need to bring them into the office, and if somebody doesn’t like what they do, they’re not going to be engaged no matter what you do. They may like the people they work with, but they’re not going to be engaged in the job if they’re really not a good fit for their assignments. So all of this comes into play and people who are not a good fit for a role tend to be very stressed out because they’re working much, much harder than someone who has the competency and the aptitude to do it would be.

Sanjog Aul [00:10:09]:

Who should be responsible for this outcome of somebody being burned out? Should it be the person who is taking on more they can handle or they are working in the role that they handle or we should just make that responsibility of the people who are managing them or leading them?

Frank Wander [00:10:29]:

I think it’s a joint responsibility. Employees have to take responsibility for themselves, number one. If they’re in a job where they’re disengaged and they’re burnt out because of it, they’re really going to have to take a look in the mirror. Nobody is going to find what you’re good at in life and put you in the right career. They’re going to really have to think about it. If they happen to be in an environment that is not a good cultural fit for them, well, maybe they can move elsewhere in the company or leave the company. At any rate, it is up to them, but if you have an organization where people are burnt out, in general, it’s not about individuals, but about the culture, the pace of work and really the projects that are being done, I think the leadership’s got to actually get heavily involved. If they’ve planned out all the work they’re going to do and they haven’t engaged the people in the planning process, so everybody’s over committed on January 1 for the entire year, that really is a huge leadership issue, right? They’ve got to engage their people in the planning and make sure that what they’re doing is aggressive, but certainly can be accomplished. If they’ve got cultures that are incredibly unproductive and it’s causing people to be burned down and disengaged, well guess what, they’ve got to fix the culture. Culture comes from tone at the top and the values and ultimately the behaviors of management that get modeled by everybody else. These are the things that have to be fixed. The people are burnt out because they don’t feel that they’re appreciated in any way, shape or form. Well, management’s got to show they care and nurture the people, and these are all human factors. These are human needs. These are not just kind of nice things to do. These are actually human needs that people have. You can look at Maslow, you can look at all the studies. The fact of the matter is people treat workers as parts. These are professionals. You need to build competency. You need to be build aptitudes. You need to filter out the people who don’t fit so you can build these high performing, high aptitude teams over time, which makes work much easier for everyone.

Sanjog Aul [00:12:20]:

When you look at individuals who are at a senior leadership position or at least manager position today, most of them would have their calendars filled with meetings or other initiatives that they are supposed to be intimately involved with back to back for 3 to 4 months to sometimes 6 months. Then comes the people who are essentially going to do the job are like a programmer in IT, etcetera. That person is allocated projects with timelines which are dictated to them versus asking them in many cases, many, many cases where the person says this is approximately the amount of time, and then you take that liberal estimate, also add 25% buffer, and then have contingency built in so that this person has a breather. So they are fully booked as well, and at any given time, everyone looks like the person has to be fully utilized, and if you don’t leave a breathing room, how is a person going to plan a vacation and or any time for rejuvenation? Because vacation would come, what, twice a year? Is that is that enough for someone to really be having their adrenaline not at a very, very high elevated level instead they could be at a stable state and work?

Frank Wander [00:13:39]:

Well, Sanjog Aul, I mean, once again, I think we have a series of different issues here. Number one, the planning process, people aren’t engaged in the planning process, so the plans aren’t really realistic commits everybody to really be on pretty much a galley ship for the entire course of the year. That’s not productive. That doesn’t really lead to good solutions. In fact, it leads to complete lack of innovation in a company. It’s a disaster for everybody involved quite frankly, because it really isn’t that the people are present and at their desk, it’s that they’re productive. That’s what this really comes down to. You need to have an incredibly highly productive organization. In productive organizations, people work very hard, but they’re engaged. They like what they do. When people engage and like what they do, they bring much more emotional energy to task. You have climates that are much more upbeat. The difficulty of the work begins to go down. People have open and honest conversations with one another in engaged organizations and get to the truth about what it takes to do stuff. People don’t commit other people to deadlines unless it’s absolutely necessary without actually giving them a say when people have a voice and they’ve committed to something, they have much more emotional energy that they bring to the task because it’s their commitment and they don’t want to lose the steam with the group. So you can have people be highly productive, companies can easily double the productivity of the workforce if they’ve never actually worked on the human factors. When people got into process and began to lean things out for the first time, they found great improvements. The same can be done with culture and productivity and the reality is when people are working that hard and they’re that stressed out, there is just a ton of stuff broken, not only their practices and processes, but the way they’re managing their talent.

Sanjog Aul [00:15:23]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners, we’ll be right back, and, Frank, let us challenge this word productive because this is coming from an industrial age where you’re supposed to pull out widgets and, make certain number and you would be measured on it. How about talk about effectiveness and being engaged? If that becomes the measure, then we are in a way inherently trusting an individual and getting a better quality product versus just the quantity. So please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back and explore.

Speaker 0 [00:16:00]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impact business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner.

Speaker 0 [00:16:30]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:17:02]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:17:47]:

Welcome back. So the context here is that we are, for the most part, looking at I mean, yeah, in industrial age, we would look at how many widgets somebody is making within a given hour. Now Correct. You are looking at people who are doing different types of job where intellectually they are being challenged and or stimulated or they’re using their brains. I’d rather have an engaged person who’s thinking deeper and overall be effective than just trying to find a measure of being productive? How do you see a programmer be measured in form of being productive?

Frank Wander [00:18:25]:

When you look at knowledge work, we see a completely different landscape from what existed in the industrial era. Certainly in industrial era they would look at the total widgets produced coming out of a factory, take the total cost, divide them and come up with really a productivity factor. When you look at the knowledge worker area or the information area that we’re in now, what you begin to see is that we are measuring outcomes of the organization. How many enhancements got done? How many small, medium and large projects? You can look at how many kind of ideas were generated for innovation that got adopted and accepted. You’ve got to get an outcome base, it’s organizational outcomes, you’ve got to get an outcome base measure and then you’ve got to take that and as you begin to really improve the culture and the productivity, you imply the human factors across the organization of leadership, engagement, collaboration, innovation, so forth. You will see an improvement in those metrics, Sanjog Aul. When we get to individual levels of productivity, there’s some very, very good studies that have been done over the years, and in fact, when you look at them, the one thing that seems to hold true is that the best programmers, the highest aptitude programmers are 10 times better than the average ones. We’ve all had them work for us over the years. They’re incredible. They’re no different than incredible athletes who are great at what they do or incredible filmmakers, writers anything. Those people are few and far between, but I do think over time you want to focus on getting some of that high aptitude talent into your organization because individual productivity matters and that comes down to really beginning to build competency, understanding who the most productive people are, getting them onto teams where you have high performing cultures. This is the future of work. There is no question about it, and we’re in the talent era. Most of the stuff is getting outsourced out of these companies at least the run part of the company leaving you with the grow part and the grow part talent is the tool, and that is where the battleground is coming. People are going to end up spending more on talent than they ever thought.

Sanjog Aul [00:20:39]:

If you were to pick the top problems related to how employees or workers or management included, are being treated or the expectations are being set, which are those top problems which are eventually leading to higher stress levels and burnout?

Frank Wander [00:20:55]:

Well, the biggest problem of all is that people are treated as parts. People aren’t parts. People have an actual underlying need to be appreciated. People are humans are social animals. They want to be part of the social group. They want to be accepted. The fact of the matter is that what you see in many corporations is people are treated as parts. Management doesn’t have their back. They don’t care about them. This leads to disengagement. Disengagement means I’m not emotionally connected to what I do. I’m not emotionally connected to the team. I’m not emotionally connected to the leaders of this organization and where they’re taking us. It’s really just that simple. Engagement is an industrial word and you mentioned industrial productivity. Engagement is an industrial word. We’re talking about humans and emotion and connections and relationships. That’s what really all of this comes down to until companies start driving and really using all of the science that we know about people and what makes them productive, we’re gonna continue to be stuck in an era where people are parts, companies are unproductive, individuals are stressed out, and, turnover is unacceptable.

Sanjog Aul [00:22:00]:

What are the signs if you were to look at an organization and or talk to the business leaders? What are the signs that they are treating other people who are working in that organization as parts?

Frank Wander [00:22:15]:

Well, it’s number one, they should be doing an absolutely confidential employee survey and getting the truth out of the organization. Now people don’t tell the truth unless they believe that what they’re saying is confidential. A lot of people don’t even trust the employee surveys because they don’t trust management, they know everything can be tracked or monitored. These are IT people. So you’ve got to be a leader who people trust. You’ve got to build that trust, you You’ve got to walk around and you’ll get the truth. I always got the truth from everybody. I would run focus groups with employees and customers, but I would manage by wandering around and I knew what the normal emotional state of the people was and I could see when they were stressed out and I would go in and ask them, and there’s a whole thing called toxic handlers, it was studied many times. If you go up to somebody who’s stressed out and you’re the leader because of your position in the organization, the fact that you noticed they’re struggling and you care about them improves their productivity for the whole day.

Sanjog Aul [00:23:13]:

Would you say somebody would wanna come and ask Frank that how dare you say that I do not care about my people? Because I do, but on the other hand, you see that culture prevails, and since Frank cannot be everywhere looking at people’s stresses, what are they missing? Where is this person, you know, putting a blind eye?

Frank Wander [00:23:33]:

Well, number one, you know culture is a set of shared behaviors and values and if you really care about the people and you care about building a culture around talent and professionals and you want it to be high performing then you’re going to have a set of shared beliefs and behaviors that spread down through the organization. So that whether you’re there or not, the culture you’ve built is there and people have embraced it and those people that are not a cultural fit, be they leaders, employees are not going to be part of the organization. So a culture of caring isn’t one individual. It’s a fabric. It’s all these people. It’s a social environment. It’s the way of doing business and you’ve got to care about and nurture talent. You have to. There’s no question. There’s a long time to competency on a lot of different tools and technologies we have and understanding these complex infrastructures. That’s a real investment in talent and if you get somebody who’s really high aptitude and you get a team that socially cohesive and working together with deep relationships and you get one where people have deep institutional knowledge, what an asset for the company. How could you ever say that’s a part? This is where you want to get. This is the end state. This is how you out compete and win, and when people know that you understand they are the pathway to competitive advantage and you care about them, it’s just inescapable. They’re going to respond to that in a very, very positive way because we know from all the research studies that people rise to meet your expectations. You can look at the Rosenthal book from 1967, Pygmalion in a Classroom. Perfect example.

Sanjog Aul [00:25:09]:

If you look at a family and say the leader of the family cares a whole lot about the well-being, but at the same time, they don’t say no to the outside world and the pressures of the outside world and let that seep through, then it will create stress for the family members even though this leader cared. So bringing it to the work environment, many times, these people are great in walking around and speaking to them, how are you doing, etcetera etcetera, but they do not perhaps say no enough to the world out there which keeps putting demands, and they let it go through maybe to look like a hero or maybe they have a false sense of what their team can deliver and still be stable, and then it starts creating that burnout. Do you think that is where we are having issues?

Frank Wander [00:26:03]:

I do think, I do think that’s a contributing factor. There are pressures that come from the top. If you can’t have an honest dialogue with the executive management and your C level executive and you can’t explain where you are, what’s productive, what has to get done and you start committing to deadlines and things without engaging your people, shame on you. That is a recipe for just a disaster because then everybody runs around trying to make a lie come true and that’s really stressful. That goes on all too often unfortunately. You get people in leadership positions who think they know it all or have a very big ego and they want to call the shots. I’ve seen it certainly in my career in organizations and these deadlines take on a life of their own because once somebody makes a commitment now it’s their face. They’ve got to save face, they’ve got to try to make it happen. So all sorts of crazy things take place trying to make the impossible happen. On top of it, you have organizations where they don’t even have the underlying culture, it’s un collaborative, the walls up, people aren’t working together. You try to take 100 people to work together on something and in fact there’s so many gaps because of these walls that exist that you don’t really have that social cohesion to get the thing done. It makes it much more complicated and makes the lifting much heavier.

Sanjog Aul [00:27:25]:

Most of the people who we speak with, they say that if they will work, they love the company. They love the management, but they hate their managers, and that’s why they wanna leave. So do you think this burnout that you see could very well exist not maybe pervasively in a in a company? It is more in pockets where someone tries to look like a hero and they essentially get the people who report to them work extra hard or get over committed and then get burnt out. Do you think that is where the majority of burnout is happening? Or would you say that there are certain cultures from top to bottom, everybody is totally going crazy with what has been put as demands on them and losing their life that they’re trying to live?

Frank Wander [00:28:12]:

In most companies, culture is not a product of design. It happens. Therefore, you have great variations in subcultures across the company. You can have great leaders on top, but because they don’t have any insight into the underlying cultures underneath them, you have all these subcultures, some of which are very, very toxic, we’ve lived in them. The reality of the situation is in many companies they have a set of values, but people aren’t really living the values. The values can be great, but they’re not living them. So I’ve seen that many times. I think it’s a real problem and that comes down to not having a mechanism to understand the culture, define the culture and understand whether that culture has been embraced through every level of that organization, and that’s where we’re heading. That is the outcome. That’s what we do as a company. The reality is that’s where we have to get to. It’s that social insight, the ability to see what’s going on at all levels of the company because there are pockets of toxic leadership in corporations. We’ve all seen it, and to have good people leaving because management doesn’t have the insider tools necessary to see how that organization or those divisions, departments, whatever it is under them are running is, it’s a shame.

Sanjog Aul [00:29:24]:

Would you say that anyone who even was a bad manager was intending to be a bad manager? Would it not be a product of that person not being groomed well? Or maybe intense pressure was put on him or her and they were buckling under that pressure, in turn, letting that seep through to the employees and which in turn created that burnout. Why are we the why are we blaming human beings for the burnout where it could very well be the product of lack of belief and trust in those individuals that you can basically get things done and giving them the immunity to say no and push back? Because then even they themselves would not like that pressure. Right? If somebody is we say is a is a jerk of a manager, and that person is making other people’s life miserable. I personally would not be willing to agree that that individual who’s been labeled as a bad manager was ready to take on that burnout burnout or stress on themselves.

Frank Wander [00:30:29]:

Yeah. I would say there are two situations. There are really bad managers around. They eventually get found out, but they tend to move from company to company and they leave a large wake behind them, and having done turnaround transformations and replaced people, many of these people moved on and kind of recreated the mess elsewhere. So there are really bad managers. There’s also managers who run a forum. Let’s face it, the human factors of productivity and innovation, these are blind spot, right? People know everything about their financials and everything about their processes and everything about the technology, but 90 years of research into industrial organizational psychology, hell they’ve never read a book. I doubt they’ve even read Daniel Goleman’s book EQ, which is a great primer. They don’t know the basics about the human side of running an organization. It’s relatively simple, but I see these human factors coming to the forefront every day. People are beginning to talk about it. So I think there is an awakening, and those people who are uninformed but really good managers have a chance to actually grab this wave that’s coming to learn about this and become really great leaders of talent because ultimately it’s going to be these servant leaders that rise to the top. You can look at Jim Collins’ book on Level five Leadership. It won’t be the only type of leader. There will be Steve Jobs and others out there, but there aren’t a lot of Steve Jobs. That’s the fundamental problem. So, yeah, we’re heading into a different time where those uninformed people I think will ultimately have a chance to really do very well.

Sanjog Aul [00:32:04]:

Let’s take a quick break listeners. We’ll be right back, and now that we have kind of poked this burnout effect and the stress from different angles within an organization and even done some diagnostics or spoken about the science, the next segment, let’s talk about how do we start working towards it and towards solving it so that we make some significant headway in terms of reducing those toxic cultures and behaviors and people if that’s what they have become as an agent to, create that burnout so that we have a solution to this problem versus this being just another an hour long conversation. Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:32:52]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud.

Speaker 0 [00:33:04]:

Bosch Software Innovations is proud to sponsor this program. Visit www.bosch-si.com/connectedmanufacturing to find out how Bosch can help you improve your operational performance and become a manufacturing industry leader in a connected world. Change the way you predict, manage, and produce outcomes. Bosch connected manufacturing.

Speaker 0 [00:33:35]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:34:38]:

Welcome back. So, Frank, let’s look at finding solutions to these age old problems, and, of course, this one hour will not be enough, but at least a good start to start putting some some, get some headway into this. When you look at an organization coming in, what exactly are what what exactly is a leader, either somebody’s coming as an external consultant or a leader coming first time into an organization, be doing in terms of assessing whether we have the culture which is inevitably going to create the burnout and render most of the initiatives that they have planned for as failures?

Frank Wander [00:35:20]:

You’ve got to engage employees in identifying and understanding the problem. You’re from outside and people really want to work in a good environment, they do. If they’re working in a bad environment, there’s going to be a lot of distrust. So they’re not going to necessarily open up to you because they don’t know who you are and they don’t know if you’re going to hold the truth against them or not. It takes a little bit of time, but pretty quickly people will begin to size you up. Now if you have a reputation for being a leader who cares about people and you’re known for that, hey, they’re going to welcome you with open arms. They’re going to be much more open and honest. So your track record follows you. This is a pretty small industry when you get right down to it. So you’re going to have to go in, you’re going to have to build trust and it will come in your track record. A lot of it’s going to come from how you behave in the organization. I always walked around, did surveys, talked to people like I said before, I think there’s no lack of data or inability to get it, and when you find out what the underlying problems are with your culture and your talent management practices, then you’ve got to get in and begin to put a plan in place to address each and every one of them, Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:36:26]:

If a person is coming from outside, what should they ask the management as a way to figure out if management could be one of the contributing factors for introducing this burnout slowly but surely and the current state is toxic because of that mindset?

Frank Wander [00:36:46]:

Well, the first thing you can do is go through and apply a cultural model to find out exactly how you’re operating and then look at the talent as well. So if you look at a cultural model like the one we created, lowest level is disengaged and you have people who are really on the level of survival because they’re not cared for, then you have collaborative, innovative and ultimately flourishing. There are set of factors at each one of those levels that personally I take a look at. Some of it’s based on surveys, some of it’s based on interview. So you can assess exactly what human factors are working and which ones are not. So you can find out if the environment is a fun environment, you can find out if there’s a lot of antisocial behavior, you can find out if people feel they’re empowered and have control over what they’re doing, you can find out if people think management has their back, you can find out if there’s strategic trust, which means management, the employees believe management knows where they’re going, it’s a good destination and they’re going to get them there. You could find out if the people think there’s organizational trust meaning the place is fair, or is it unfair and is that corrosive behavior that you see that makes things unfair affecting the engagement of the people. When you find out what’s broken and you find out what level you’re operating on, you can put a plan in place to correct it. It’s really not that complicated and quite honestly humans want to work together and collaborate with social animals. What happened during the industrial era is we took the normal state of people and we distorted it, turned them into parts, removed all the emotion and put them on assembly lines where they are valued for their hands and not their minds. That’s what happened, but we’re back in the craftspeople era. It’s the craftspeople that count and in the craftspeople era, it’s the collaborative craftspeople that really are the ones who are going to help dominate.

Sanjog Aul [00:38:30]:

When you came in and this was like setting a stage. When you came in as a consultant and or a leader coming in, they do a certain things, and then based on that, they start establishing that environment in which we have less stress and just the right amount of works which people can handle effectively, and then things start settling, and you have a better life for all people, involved. Now that person has to leave or voluntarily leaves or or whatever happens. There is a risk that this thing will go under again. So how do you make that whole process that you just defined or explained to become people independent?

Frank Wander [00:39:18]:

Well, creating organizational effectiveness is a lot more than just culture. When I would come in I would look at a whole bunch of things. The first thing I would do is I would look at the state of governance, I’d look at the processes,  I’d

Frank Wander [00:39:29]:

look at the security and risk, I’d look at the strategy and planning processes, I would look at the culture, I’d look at the talent management practices. You really do have to get a lot of things right to build complete organizational effectiveness, but if you can fix the people piece and get them highly engaged that will allow you to bring tremendous energy to fixing all the other things. So yes, I would figure out everything that was broken and needed to be fixed with the state of it was, but I would focus tremendous energy on building a high performing culture and team, and I would start by setting a tone at the top, establishing what it was. I’d let people know that in fact we’re going to build an environment where people are going to be accepting of one another. We were going to have an environment where people cared about one another, we’re going to build relationships, we’re going to build trust and I have a whole list of things that we were going to actually roll out and deploy and then we would drive the behaviors that do that. In fact, by modeling those behaviors as the leader you go a long way towards making that a reality, and you’ve got to be fixing the other things, right. So you can have a happy group of people, but if people are committing to a portfolio of projects and initiatives that is just not even possible, you’ve got to fix it. That takes a lot of time because you’ve got to rebuild your whole portfolio planning process, your strategy process, get people engaged both bottom up and top down in that process so that you have something that’s sensible and that you can deliver on, and when things change in those plans such that a project that looked like it was X and now it’s 2X in size, you got to have an open honest conversation with the business and say, okay, great. We said we we’re going to get this done by this date. That was x. This is now two x. We got to reset expectations, and if you don’t do that, you’re just putting people back into the galley ship.

Sanjog Aul [00:41:18]:

Who’s watching? So when we talk about compliance and governance, we spend a whole lot of time, the whole governance machinery, etcetera, etcetera, to make sure we don’t pay millions of dollars of fines. Who was watching when the environment started becoming toxic? Who was watching when we were looking at somebody coming in and trying to make take those corrective measures and start making a shift towards a positive, tone of the whole organization? And who’s gonna make sure that, again, we don’t resort because there are certain other things that could start happening yet again which will take it back. So it should it will become like a roller coaster ride for people within the organization, compliance related penalty, what are we doing about this?

Frank Wander [00:42:19]:

There are two types of companies in America. You know we have what I call the traditional industrial mindset company and then we have much more modern companies that are focused on talent. If you look at the companies that are the best places to work, W. L. Gore, SaaS, Google, Valve, I mean, I can go down a long list of companies that are great places to work where people are highly engaged. You can look at Southwest Airlines, you can look at Netflix. These are companies that get it, and because management on top gets it and the culture is coming top down, individual leaders who come in are not a cultural fit, they may do some damage, but they’re gone, but yet the culture is enduring. In other companies where they’re more industrial in their mindset, what you find is that culture is very much defined by the leader at each level. They tend not to know and understand how to define a culture and make sure it’s deployed and rolled out across the company. So they don’t have a way to design it. They have some high level values. They send them out and that really doesn’t result in changing anything quite frankly. It comes down to really modeling the behavior and changing the behavior. So if they do not put a real cultural model in place where the behaviors are defined and everything is defined down to a level and they can track it and see whether or not it’s being embraced, you’ll run the good chance of a relapse, but those are companies that don’t get it, and in fact, good people come in, they transform the culture, place runs great and then a toxic leader may very well follow them and destroy it and they’ll never know.

Sanjog Aul [00:43:50]:

So should we give up on those companies?

Frank Wander [00:43:54]:

Well, over time, it’s a filter and that is what’s going to happen. I mean if you look at the Gallup studies, they’ve proven that engaged organizations have 3.9 times the earnings per share growth compared to non engaged ones. So that is what’s happening. You find that tons of companies out there who can innovate are cutting costs or buying back shares to improve their earnings per share. That’s what’s actually going on. Other companies are really growing and the ones that are growing and have engines of growth built around competent talent that’s collaborating and innovating and getting things done, They’re going to grow over time and other companies are going to fade away and that is the marketplace doing its job. So I believe in an era where talent is absolutely the key competitive asset, the companies that get talent, the companies that know how to build high performing cultures, these are the winners and those winners will shine and others will begin to fade away, and that is where we’re heading.

Sanjog Aul [00:44:51]:

Let’s take a quick break. Let’s just we’ll be right back and look at those specific individuals who were labeled as bad managers and leaders, and they could be seen as having a direct impact on the toxic culture that may be getting created or there is a relapse of that culture even though there were some good steps, taken to improve the culture and the environment. How do we deal with them? Do we just weed them out? Should we work towards improving them? Are these deep rooted, habits or other issues which causes them to do it? How do we deal with that issue so that if we are fundamentally willing and committed to making that environment great and have it sustained in that fashion, what do we do with these individuals? Please stay tuned, listeners. We’ll be right back.

Speaker 0 [00:45:45]:

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Speaker 0 [00:46:17]:

HP is proud to sponsor this program. Tap into our expertise, innovation, and services to bring your most important workloads to the cloud. HP is proud to sponsor this program. Find out how the HP as a service solution for SAP HANA can help you gain instant impactful business results without capital investment by logging on to hp.com. Transform information into intelligence and a competitive advantage with a full spectrum of SAP HANA products and services from HP, a global SAP hosting partner. You are listening to CIO Talk Radio with Sanjog Aul. To learn more about the show, please visit www.ciotalkradio.com. If you have a question or comment, call toll free at +1 (866) 472-5790. That number again is +1 (866) 472-5790. Now back to the show. Here’s Sanjog Aul.

Sanjog Aul [00:47:33]:

Welcome back. So the question I asked was if we see there are people who have been labeled as bad managers or leaders, what should happen to them as per you, Frank?

Frank Wander [00:47:45]:

Well, first of all, when I come into a place to do a turnaround transformation or when I’m advising someone, if they’re new to an organization, the first thing you do is don’t listen to what everybody says. I think you’ve got to find out on your own who’s good and bad, and it really isn’t very difficult. We’re talking about outcomes. We’re talking about the mood and tone of the organization. We’re talking about how people feel when the surveys are given. It should be very clear and the results should speak for themselves. Now those individuals fall into two groups. Some of them you may have to coach and they may be coachable and may be able to move up and there’s others who really probably just aren’t going to be leaders in IT. IT is a very complex leadership role, not only because the underlying technology and the number of legacy systems and things, the vendors, it’s a very complex environment regulatory wise, control wise, security wise and you’ve got complex talent, you’ve got people who are professionals and you’ve got to weave them together, you’ve got to take your people and weave them together with the business, not everybody suited for that role. They may very well be individual contributors or maybe it’s time for them to move on because they’re not a cultural fit, and that’s where you end up. I think you know, you’re not going to judge people on the results, and, I don’t judge people based on what other people say.

Sanjog Aul [00:49:05]:

So one end is where some people you actually made a statement here where you said that there would be some people who will not be leaders. So are you saying that they could not be repurposed into a role which may not be about managing somebody else? Maybe they were better off going back to as an individual contributor or some other role where they would be happier. So all the institutional knowledge they have garnered is useful and not necessarily marginalize them. Because I got a tweet when I asked this question before the break to say that we should not marginalize the people. It was the system that asked for them and they could be perhaps given something better. So what do you say?

Frank Wander [00:49:42]:

Yeah. Like I said, I don’t I don’t wanna, you know, I don’t judge people. I do think there are many, many really good technical people who get pushed into management, you know, level one managers, because they were excellent at technicians, they knew the business really well, and maybe it’s just not for them and that’s really okay, and it’s not a failure, it means they tried something and it means that they tried it for all the right reasons and it didn’t work out and they’re a very, very valuable individual and that individual should be remain in high esteem because they’ve been an excellent contributor all along and they can go back to an individual contributor role and do great things for the company. There are other people who are at higher levels of management. They’ve somehow moved up and they’re not suited at least for the culture you’re building or the company, and for them it’s time to move on because they’re really not an individual contributor anymore. There are roles maybe strategy wise or other things you could try to fit them in. I’m all for doing the best for people, but there are people where it’s best for them to go and try to find their way, and your company may not be for them.

Sanjog Aul [00:50:51]:

There are companies who have attempted to or at least they are trying to go on that path, and some of the obvious very visual things that they have done is to put a foosball table or, get laundry in and other things, and somehow, there is a perception out there that when you do these cool things, that means you’re trying to have employees have less burnout and more work life balance, etcetera. How much truth is there to that? Because perhaps those things are done, but when they are actually invited back to work, the same old style prevails and that may not be really helping.

Frank Wander [00:51:27]:

I think it’s great to try and improve the work environment, but that’s not going to replace the basic human needs like I’m appreciated, management has my back, I trust that the organization knows where we’re going, we’re going to get there. No, that will never replace that. If you can build a good culture and say, look, I care about people, we want to make this a better place to work, we’d like people to decompress, so we’re going to put foosball tables in. We think it’s important to decompress. Science shows it’s important to decompress actually, so that people can regenerate some of the glucose in the brain, get back some energy. The fact of the matter is that’s great if it’s done within the context of an environment, but if it’s done because people are doing that in place of building a caring, nurturing, collaborative environment where they’re healthy relationships, people feel appreciated, no, it’s not going to work.

Sanjog Aul [00:52:17]:

People being people, they just don’t become smarter because they now you can can use technology and connect from anywhere. What is the human average human endurance level, which should become the baseline or rather the ceiling for anyone being offered to do the type one and the quantity of jobs or work so that they can remain effective?

Frank Wander [00:52:41]:

You know, Sanjog Aul, I’m I really I don’t understand the question. Could we just go through that one more time?

Sanjog Aul [00:52:47]:

So there is an endurance level to how much work somebody can take on, how much complexity somebody can handle. Is there some sort of objective measure so that when things are assigned, we just don’t say, oh, it depends on people, and we try to maximize what their ultimate limit is, and we if we were to stay under their overall endurance level where the stress level starts creeping in, then we would be better off in reducing that burnout as we said.

Frank Wander [00:53:20]:

Yeah. Number one, a little stress is very, very good. If you look at and understand the whole nature of humans and who they are and how they’re wired and how they work, humans do have a need to conserve energy, and frankly, this is why projects take all available time to get done. If you take a project that could be done in 3 months and set it out and say it’s going to be done in 5 months, people will relax and they’ll as the pressure builds towards the deadline, they’re going to get the work done. So you do want to wisely structure the work, you want to have a certain amount of pressure because that pressure will keep people productive, but you want it to be healthy because you want an environment where people are engaged and they’re really tied into what they’re doing. More importantly, it’s very hard to tell what somebody is really capable of. So I always found it best as people take assignments and they get them done easily to give them more and more, and I would always say, hey, listen, if you think you’ve gotten too much, cry uncle, and quite frankly people say, hey, woah, woah, woah, woah, yes, I think I’m at that point. So I believe you’ve got to let people set that kind of boundary on their own. Highly motivated people want to do good work and they wanna do more and they’ll take more on, but if you don’t have an environment where they can speak up and it’s open and honest, then, yeah, you’re gonna over commit them and it’s not gonna be good for anybody.

Sanjog Aul [00:54:47]:

One last question. What is your appeal to the leaders and managers who may or may not be causing this burnout to solve this problem? I mean, if we could do it in an effective manner for good, that would be awesome, but at least to minimize recurrence of this problem?

Frank Wander [00:55:08]:

Well, my appeal to everybody is that 60% of the cost in many companies is on talent. Human capital remains the number one expense for most corporations. As leaders you need to use that talent wisely. If you have environments where people are burning up absolutely tons of energy doing unproductive work, overcoming barriers like an un collaborative environment, behaving in a protective way because the environment is unsafe, you need to fix it because at the end of the day, it’s the return on talent that is ultimately going to determine the winners and losers, and I don’t think anything could be more fun or more challenging than building a really high performing environment and becoming an expert on what are the human factors of engagement, what are the human factors of leadership, you know, why should I give people more control and empower them. There’s a science behind this. It’s very, very well proven. Why is it important to have somebody’s back? Why is it important to nurture them and be a servant leader? Why is it fun to design a culture? This is the future. This is where it’s going, and leaders should embrace this, not only because they want their people to flourish, they want their companies to flourish and in fact they need to flourish, and that’s really what this is all about. You can answer all of those questions and people can have a great time at work, the leaders can grow and you can out compete and that’s why they should do it. There’s really no alternative, right? There’s two alternatives. You’re going to out compete or you’re not, and if you want to out compete, it’s going to come through talent, intelligent talent management practices, and that’s the appeal. This is all about winning.

Sanjog Aul [00:56:55]:

On behalf of the show and our listeners, I’d really like to thank you, Frank, for, sharing your thoughts on this employee burnout issue. It’s important that we take necessary steps, and we have a good balance between work and life for all people who are working with us and creating value.

Frank Wander [00:57:12]:

Thank you so much again. Yes. Thank you for having me.

Sanjog Aul [00:57:14]:

And, listeners, please like us on Facebook, search for CIO Talk Radio, and please be sure to follow us on Twitter. Thank you again for listening to CIO Talk Radio. This is Sanjog Aul, your talk show host. Till next week, take care and God bless.