Some people want better jobs. Others would prefer a better work-life balance. Others want to take a complete break from the corporate grind. Almost two years into the pandemic that has forced millions to work from home, many Americans are reconsidering their relationship with work.
Companies are struggling to retain employees and boost morale. Some companies are experimenting with mandatory companywide vacation days and blackout hours when meetings are prohibited. Executives are experimenting with new ways of working, such as four-day workweeks and asynchronous schedules that allow people to work when they want.
Employers say one of the primary causes is burnout, which has long been a problem for American workers and has been exacerbated by the pandemic. According to a September survey conducted by the Conference Board, more than three-quarters of 1,800 U.S. workers cited stress and burnout as major challenges to workplace well-being, up from 55% six months earlier. Workload-related stress was cited by half of those polled as negatively impacting their mental health.
Tom Larrow, a 45-year-old information-technology manager for a financial-services company in Brunswick, Ohio, juggled work and helping his two young sons attend school online for more than a year. Covid-19 killed his mother-in-law. His nerves were frayed, he said.
He said he had a panic attack in September while trying to give his diabetic son insulin and couldn't figure out the dosage. "I couldn't divide 50 by 25 in my head," he recalled. "Because my brain was so fried, I had to pull out a calculator and do that very, very basic math."
Mr. Larrow's employer, he claims, has provided stress management sessions, including recommendations to take five-minute breaks and meditate.
According to Alastair Simpson, vice president of design at software company Dropbox Inc., chronic overwork was already rampant prior to the pandemic. DBX is down 0.04 percent. "We equated being busy with being good or as a badge of honor," he explained.
According to Gallup Inc. polling, the average American workday has grown by 1.4 hours over the last two decades. As commutes vanished and schedules became more erratic, the pandemic lengthened days even further for millions of Americans. In a recent survey, 16% of US workers said they worked more than 60 hours per week, up from 12% in 2011.
Employees were inundated with pings and chat requests as companies increased their use of collaboration software such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. According to Microsoft data, time spent in Teams meetings more than doubled between February 2020 and February 2021 and has continued to rise. According to Microsoft, half of Teams users respond to chats in five minutes or less, and after-hours emails have increased by 10% in the last year. According to the company, the number of messages sent via Slack increased by 62 percent between February 2020 and November of this year.
According to Gallup polling, stress and anxiety levels among workers of all stripes increased during the Covid era. According to Gallup, 48 percent of Americans reported feeling a lot of stress the day before in 2019. By December 2020, that figure had risen to 51% for on-site workers and 59% for remote workers. According to Gallup research, burned-out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and nearly three times more likely to be actively looking for a new job.
Dropbox has been attempting to reduce burnout by giving employees more control. It decided to make some pandemic-era changes permanent in the fall of 2020, such as allowing its 2,000 employees to work full-time from home and have more control over when they do it—as long as they put in their hours and are available during certain times.
In theory, asynchronous work allows morning people and night owls to work when they feel most productive. Mr. Simpson, the design executive, said he leaves work at 3 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays to spend time with his children, then returns at 7 p.m. Employees gather at the office only for special events or when in-person collaboration is required, according to him.
Dropbox considered a hybrid model of in-person and remote work, which many businesses are adopting, but there were too many pitfalls, according to Mr. Simpson. Concerns include a potentially uneven playing field in which pay and promotions may go to workers who have the most face time with managers.
Many managers hoped that combining remote work and flexible schedules would result in happier employees, but work-from-home days were frequently stacked with video calls, forcing individual work to be completed outside of regular business hours.
"It's not just the long hours," Citigroup Inc. CEO Jane Fraser wrote in a companywide memo this fall. "It's the day's density." Zooming from one to the next. You have less than a minute to catch your breath. To ponder, digest, or prepare for what comes next."
Citigroup joined other major U.S. banks, including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., earlier this year in offering more flexible work options in an industry known for long hours. Employees with at least 15 years of service at Goldman Sachs will be able to take up to a six-week unpaid sabbatical. Citigroup advised employees to avoid scheduling calls and meetings between noon and 1 p.m., and to keep hourlong meetings to 45 minutes.
Burnout is defined by the World Health Organization as feelings of exhaustion and decreased effectiveness caused by chronic workplace stress. Burnout had been building up long before the pandemic. According to Gallup polls, the percentage of American workers who describe themselves as "very often or always burned out" increased from 23% in 2016 to 28% in 2019, where it remains today. According to the surveys, by March 2020, rates of stress and worry among workers had risen to 60 percent and 58 percent, respectively, from 46 percent and 38 percent before Covid.
According to surveys conducted by insurer MetLife Inc. prior to the pandemic, 60 percent of employees believed that mental health was something they should handle on their own. By June, that figure had flipped, with 62 percent believing their employer was responsible for their mental health.
Sara McElroy, a chief marketing officer in Atlanta, said she had stress-related health problems earlier this year, including stomach issues and shingles, which her doctor attributed to stress. The 36-year-old self-described serial overachiever said she was under a lot of pressure at work and was afraid of looking weak if she asked for help.
"I didn't want to disappoint anyone," she explained. "I started feeling really depleted, like I wasn't meeting the mark in pretty much everything I was doing."
She resigned in April and relocated to Boca Raton, Fla., to begin a new digital-marketing-director job at a slower pace. She stated that she has worked hard to establish boundaries between her personal and professional lives, such as not logging on at night.
Some businesses are debating whether to abandon the traditional workweek entirely. Unilever PLC, the London-based consumer-products company whose brands include Dove and Ben & Jerry's, is conducting a four-day workweek trial in New Zealand, in which employees work 80 percent of their previous hours for the same pay.
Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform based in New York, plans to launch a four-day week pilot program in the coming year. Aziz Hasan, CEO, expressed hope that the new model will help employees feel more engaged while also providing more time for family and personal pursuits.
"I don't believe the four-day workweek is magical," he says, adding that Covid has demonstrated that many workers can be productive outside of traditional work arrangements. He claims that the last two years have demonstrated how desperate people are for ways to achieve a better work-life balance.
Getting the details right is critical, he says, because Kickstarter must meet some demands in real time, including those from customers who require customer support. He suggested that the four-day workweek experiment might necessitate staggered scheduling, which could lead to communication issues. Mr. Hasan believes the model will be too difficult to implement across his 100-person organization.
One strategy that is gaining traction is the addition of an all-company holiday—a sort of penciled-in day off for the entire company to allow employees to recharge. SAP SE, an enterprise software company, shut down earlier this year for a mental-health day. It intends to allow most employees to work from home on a permanent basis, with more flexible hours.
According to Ben Wigert, Gallup's director of workplace-management research, the most important determinant of worker burnout isn't the number of hours worked, but rather factors like unmanageable workloads, unclear communication, and a lack of manager support.
"Taking a vacation and then returning to the same work circumstances does not solve the problem." "It might irritate you even more," he said. "You might not come back the next time."
Bumble Inc., a dating app, gave its 800 employees an entire week off in June to focus on mental health—with the exception of some employees who provide critical services such as information-technology security.
Bumble President Tariq Shaukat stated that the company intends to have two weeklong shutdowns next year, with special arrangements in place to not exclude employees providing critical services, and to set aside two days a month free of email and Slack messaging so that employees can focus on tasks without interruptions.
Boeing Co. has embraced the concept of meeting-free Fridays and flexible schedules for white-collar workers, but has left it up to team managers to decide whether to provide such options.
"They help reduce stress and create a more positive work environment," said Mike D'Ambrose, Boeing's executive vice president of human resources.
Companies that are rapidly expanding are especially vulnerable to burnout from overworked employees, according to David Heath, CEO of online sock brand Bombas LLC. During the pandemic, 75 of its nearly 200 employees were hired. "It's this never-ending game of resource whack-a-mole," he explained.
According to Mr. Heath, teams can begin to show signs of stress long before most people speak up about it. He stated that he has one-on-one meetings with each new hire to check in. The company also trains its managers to ask employees if they are overworked on a regular basis.
As Covid-19 spread and there was social unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder in the spring and summer of 2020, executives at many companies held town halls and listening sessions with employees. According to Gallup data, workers reported feeling more enthusiastic about and committed to their jobs during that period. That summer, according to Gallup, worker engagement in the United States reached an all-time high of 40% before falling back to 36%.
During the pandemic, "companies were more understanding, flexible, and empathetic," according to Gallup's Mr. Wigert. According to Gallup's research, such efforts help to mitigate higher rates of burnout.
Chief Executive Bruce Broussard of insurance and clinical-services company Humana Inc. began writing weekly dispatches to all associates in March 2020. Managers were directed to meet with direct reports one-on-one, and the company increased child-care and elder-care benefits. Internal employee engagement increased by five points, despite a 15% increase in worker hours, according to Roger Cude, senior vice president of digital and community development.
Kristen Starr, a consumer-demand analyst at a technology firm in Austin, Texas, said her company was considerate of employee stress and family concerns when the pandemic struck. But by this year, she said, her workload had become too much due to supply-chain constraints and soaring demand.
Prior to the pandemic, the 46-year-old worked for her company for seven years and enjoyed her work. She began to feel hopeless this year as her 8-to-5 workday gave way to a new normal of starting emails at 6:30 a.m. and work meetings at 7:30 a.m.
"I was thinking, 'I can't get all of this done.'" "It's pointless to even try," she said. Ms. Starr resigned in October and is looking for a new position.