When Self-Help Won't Help Employees

Source: Jared Rice/Unsplash

Employees are exhausted. Burnout levels keep rising. People are languishing.

Many well-intentioned people suggest that self-help can get you past these issues: “Practice meditation.” “Set stretch goals.” “Try these superfoods for more energy.” This advice may be helpful in certain situations, but it can also be problematic. It can create the feeling that exhaustion and burnout are byproducts of an individual’s lack of self-care.

In reality, burnout and exhaustion are largely due to long-term and systematic factors, such as workplace policies and societal norms, that are beyond any individual’s short-term control. As Pooja Lakshmin aptly said on NPR’s 1A podcast, “you can’t meditate yourself out of a 40-hour workweek with no childcare.”

There is great value in self-help. Meditating, setting goals, and eating right can help you feel better. But to really help employees, we have to be clear about when self-help will help and – just as importantly – when it won’t.

Here are three perspectives that help make this distinction:

The Difference Between Daily and Enduring Burnout

Traditionally, research has focused on how burnout and exhaustion accumulate over time. However, more recently, researchers have begun to focus on the fluctuations that individuals feel from day to day.

For example, consider Frank, feeling pretty burned out this past year due to the pandemic, strain from his job, and having young kids at home. On Monday, he found out that he was nominated for a prestigious award at work, which made him feel good about himself and boosted his engagement.

However, when his eldest child woke up on Wednesday with a mild fever, Frank felt an immediate onset of stress. He had to work from home to be with his child and was forced to take two big meetings remotely. His feelings of frustration and exhaustion intensified when his internet connection dropped him from the first meeting. His enduring burnout and how he felt each day are two different things.

Research has shown that employees’ feelings of exhaustion, burnout, and engagement fluctuate around 30 percent from day to day. Long-term, stable, and systematic factors, including organizational policies and societal norms, represent much of the rest. In other words, daily actions have an impact, but factors that take longer to change do too.

For example, if Frank’s overall feeling of burnout is rated at a 7 out of 10 on Wednesday, this might mean that his self-care practices of meditating, setting goals, and eating right can reduce that to a 5 out of 10. Longer-term changes regarding the pandemic, childcare, and work-from-home norms are likely needed to account for changes to the other five.

Exhaustion Is Not an Individual Problem

Our workplaces and society in general, especially in the United States, glorify working long hours. This perspective is so abundant that many employees exaggerate the number of hours they work to impress others. When people believe that success is tied to working more hours rather than producing quality output (regardless of the time it takes), employees tend to wear their exhaustion as a badge of honor.

Yet, there are two problems with putting exhaustion on a pedestal as an indicator of success. The first problem is that after a certain point, working more hours is counterproductive. People universally need rest to function at the top of their game. Without this rest, people make mistakes, overlook opportunities, and take longer to get things done.

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The second problem is that exhaustion doesn’t just influence employees. It also influences their leaders and the organizations in which they work. In research that I conducted with a few colleagues, we asked employees questions such as, “Does your manager define success not just by results but also the way that they are obtained?”

We found that employees who answered yes to these questions were more empowered only if they were not also exhausted. Exhausted employees were depleted and couldn’t think about much beyond what they needed to accomplish at that moment. As a result, their leaders’ efforts to engage them went missing, and the employee’s success floundered. Employees, leaders, and organizations all suffer when employees are too exhausted to leverage their skills and talents.

A Toolbox of Potential Solutions

We often see self-help sold as a one-size-fits-all approach, but there are many times that these self-help tactics have limitations. For example, mindfulness – or present moment awareness – and meditation have generally benefited employees.

However, recent research demonstrated that when mindful individuals are required to act differently than they feel at work (such as when they have to be pleasant to a rude customer), their mindfulness actually becomes detrimental to their performance.

As another example, although goal setting has generally been shown to be an effective motivational tool, research indicates that creating stretch goals can backfire and lead to detrimental behavior toward others if the goals are excessively difficult.

We have to get better about encouraging people to build their toolbox with self-help tools under the explicit explanation that there are many times that the tools won’t work. It isn’t your fault if a certain tool isn’t working for you right now, and you are not failing if a tool isn’t having the same impact on you that it is for someone else. Rather than seeing a tool not working as a sign of failure, it is helpful to view it as a sign that you may simply need to switch to another tool.

As Mona Amin explained, “Sometimes you’re thriving, and sometimes you’re barely surviving. Both are acceptable and important places to be.” Adding on to her astute conclusion, both thriving and surviving require different tools from the toolbox.