Why Everyone Loses When Employees Burn Out: Julia Rock (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Julia Rock’s talk titled “Why Everyone Loses When Employees Burn Out” at TEDxMSJC conference.

Career coach and employment expert Julia Rock’s insightful talk, “Why Everyone Loses When Employees Burn Out,” delves into the pervasive issue of workplace burnout and its detrimental effects not only on individuals but also on organizations and the broader economy. She highlights a startling statistic from a 2022 Gallup report, revealing that 60% of workers worldwide feel disengaged, leading to a significant loss in productivity, estimated to cost the global economy around $7.8 trillion.

Rock attributes this disengagement to factors deeper than mere job dissatisfaction, such as unresolved trauma and a loss of personal identity, asserting that these internal struggles are often overlooked in the professional realm. Through personal anecdotes and global research, she convincingly argues that the path to combating burnout lies in addressing these underlying issues.

Rock advocates for a supportive work environment where employees are encouraged to seek help and companies invest in effective management. She suggests that by shifting focus towards these hidden factors, individuals and organizations can achieve greater fulfillment and success. Ultimately, Rock’s talk is a call to action for both employees and employers to reevaluate and reinvigorate their approach to work, emphasizing that well-being and business success are intrinsically linked.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

A Surprising Decision

A couple of years ago, a girlfriend of mine sent me a one-sentence text message that caught me all the way off guard. The text message said, “I quit my job.” Now, that’s not that big of a deal; I mean, people quit their jobs all the time. It’s not exactly earth-shattering, but in her case, it really was for me because I always thought she loved her job.

We’d always talked about how much she loved being able to use her degree for her career. She was getting paid a ton of money, was able to buy her first home, and her company had given her lots of opportunities for promotions. So, my friend was winning at work.

But yet, for some reason, she still felt burnt out, overwhelmed, and unhappy, and couldn’t figure out why. As a career coach, I’ve heard so many stories like this from employees all around the world, in industries from financial services to fashion. In fact, according to a Gallup report published in 2022, 60% of the world’s workers feel disengaged at work, and 19% are actually miserable, bringing others down with them. Today, we see workers hopping from job to job, trying to find the right work environment, the right cultural fit, the right, you know, fill in the blank.

The Global Impact of Disengagement

But the impact of this disengagement and movement is not just individual. It also impacts us globally as a society. As Gallup also estimated, the cost of low workplace engagement on the global economy might be about $7.8 trillion, and that’s trillion with a T. But if we dig a little deeper, the source of this disengagement is not just whether we can get the job we want, but rather if we can fill the heart we have. And in my experience, what prevents us from filling the heart are often hidden factors that are driven by internal struggles rather than external influences. Let’s take a few minutes to cover two of the primary ones that I see.

The first factor is trauma. The trauma we’ve experienced throughout our lives can paralyze us on our journey. Because what we’ve gone through in our past shapes how we go through our future. For many people, the trauma they’ve experienced can negatively impact their ability to achieve their career goals. And according to research by the European Psychiatry Journal, as well as the International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, people who’ve experienced certain types of trauma may have difficulty building relationships at work or even fulfilling job responsibilities.

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Personal Stories of Struggle

Think about people you may have worked with where you couldn’t quite get that rapport to happen, or important deadlines are ticking by and you’re still waiting on them to give you information. And then for some people, the trauma we’ve experienced drives a need within us to always be perfect, to never make mistakes, and to never fail. That, in turn, has hindered us from wholeheartedly going after our dreams and pursuing new opportunities. I’ll give you an example.

When I got my first real job out of college back in Wilmington, Delaware, about 16 years ago, so dating myself a little bit, it honestly wasn’t the magical experience that I thought it was going to be. You know, back then we all thought we’d get an amazing job that’s paying us a ton of money, we’d live happily ever after, but that just wasn’t the case for me. I absolutely hated that first job after college. I sat at that desk for 13 months doing practically data entry, bored to tears, and frustrated that my skills were not being put to use.

I remember feeling, why did I even bother going to college? And things got so bad that my friends started to notice a change in my attitude. I mean, because at this point, you guys can see I’m pretty animated, but back then I just wasn’t anymore. One of my friends took pity on me and decided to help me search for new internal positions at my company. Finally, a role opened up in our finance department and she was so excited about this job because she just knew that this was it, this was the job to get me out of my funk.

Overcoming Fear and Trauma

So, she sent me a link to the job description, she called me, she sent me an IM, just doing the most. But I didn’t share that same energy or excitement. My first reaction was, “I can’t apply for that job.” And it honestly made no sense that I was self-eliminating from a role that was perfect. It was in line with my degree and it paid more. And on paper, I had all of the qualifications, business honors student, graduated cum laude, but even with all of that, I still felt underqualified. And I was just afraid that I wouldn’t get it.

So, it wasn’t that there weren’t opportunities for me to get out of that data entry job that I hated, there was this amazing role right in front of me, but it was that I was battling with this hidden factor and struggling with trauma. You see, growing up, excellence was non-negotiable. My father had extremely high expectations for his children. Failure just wasn’t an option for us. The first time I remember my dad actually being proud of me and voicing it was my college, not even my high school graduation.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my parents. But growing up in an environment where you’re constantly afraid of failing, of never meeting the standard, and you’re seeking approval that never comes, it caused me to put pressure on myself to always succeed, to always be perfect, and to never fail. Now in this scenario, I would have rather not applied to the perfect job and stayed in a role below my potential, all to avoid the feeling of failure and being a disappointment. Good news, there is good news.

A Turn for the Better

That good friend who found that job, she actually peer-pressured me into applying. And guess what? I got the job. But it was this fear, this pullback to my upbringing, this ever-present perfectionism pressure that could have crippled my future. I’ve now had time to think about what that meant on a broader scale.

When I got to that awesome finance job, I ran a project that saved my business line $4 million a year. If I had stayed in that god-awful data entry job and continued being disengaged, there were real bottom-line savings that were left on the table and missed opportunities for me.

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Now, when I speak to my clients, I’ve learned that they’ve held back on launching businesses, on designing new projects, on pursuing career opportunities that would improve their quality of life and that of their families, all because of the trauma they’re struggling with. Now let’s move on to the second factor, what I call the loss of identity. Or in other words, we are no longer able to connect with who we are because what we are has taken clear prominence and ultimate importance. For many of us, we’ve defined ourselves by our careers, our job titles, our fancy degrees, and qualifications.

Loss of Identity and Its Impact

But let me give you an example as to how that can play out. After that awesome job back in Wilmington, Delaware, I went back to grad school to get my MBA and I rejoined the workforce after that. When I got to my new company, I worked really hard to build a reputation that I could be proud of, top-ranked performer, leader in finance and accounting, all the senior leaders knew who I was, or at a minimum, knew how good my work was.

After years of that performance, I was nominated for a short-term work assignment that I was really excited about. It wasn’t anything I had done before, so I was like, you know, Miss Eager Beaver, ready to learn and do all the things. But when I got to that assignment, I was partnered with a colleague who was supposed to be helping me, but instead made my life hell.

Even though they knew that this was my first time with that assignment, they made me feel stupid for not knowing certain things. I received pop quizzes to check my understanding like I was a child back in school. And God forbid I got any answers wrong, they would deride my prior work experience and me for not being equipped. This went on for weeks and it totally crushed me.

I became extremely depressed, I comforted myself with food, and I gained about 25 pounds in just two months. My parents would call me to check in to see how I was doing because they knew how excited I was about the assignment. But I would just have to cut conversations short with them before I broke down and cried. But it wasn’t just this person’s berating that wore me down. It was that I had defined myself by that awesome reputation I had built. Now, in this scenario where my work and experience were constantly being questioned, it caused me to view myself differently, my self-esteem, and my worth.

The Consequences of Losing Identity

So, I completely lost my identity, I didn’t know who I was. I began to pull back at work and I honestly thought about leaving my career altogether because obviously I wasn’t nearly as smart as I thought I was.

Looking back now, I realize how differently I showed up at work after that. I spent more time reviewing analysis, wasting precious time. I stopped bringing good ideas forward to my managers because I was afraid of what the senior bosses would think after this experience, eliminating good input for major projects at my company, and again, missed opportunities for me.

So, when we think about that 60% of disengaged workers and what that means for individuals as well as the organizations, these are the kinds of tangible impacts to consider. You know, when we look online these days, wherever you’re at, Twitter, Instagram, whatever your platform, we hear a lot about layoffs and the recession or the non-recession recession. But honestly, there are plenty of opportunities to still find meaningful and high-paying careers.

Earlier this year, LinkedIn published its jobs on the rise list that highlights 25 U.S. job roles that are growing in demand. And when you look at that list, many of the roles are paying well over six figures in a variety of industries and disciplines, growing industries, supply chain, manufacturing, and healthcare. So, it’s not that there’s some sort of limitation on lucrative career paths or career advancement in the market. It may be that we need to shift our focus from solely external environmental factors, like the colleague that’s berating us, the work that no longer seems interesting, to also then consider these hidden subconscious impacts, like trauma and loss of identity.

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A Shift in Perspective

But what could this shift mean? What could this shift mean for us as individuals, but also our society as a whole? Well, first, we would improve our work, our work for our lives, both at work and at home. The quality of time we spend with our family and our friends would improve because we’re not dragging home daily from the jobs we feel stuck in. The hours of our lives we spend working will actually feel meaningful and fulfilling.

We would also improve our mental and physical health as we stop being so stressed and depressed at work. Stress is linked to many of the health conditions we see today, hypertension, obesity, you name it. And according to the World Health Organization, the cost of lost productivity due to mental health conditions, like depression, like anxiety, the cost might be as high as $1 trillion. So, if we shift to consider these hidden factors, not only will our employees feel better at work, we would also strengthen our organizations and improve productivity and profitability.

Confronting Hidden Factors

So, the fact is, workplace disengagement and lack of career fulfillment is not just a you issue or a me issue, it’s about us. It’s about the world we desire to live in and not just for ourselves. If we want to realize our own career destinies, but also create a society where our family, our friends, our neighbors, and future generations can thrive, we need to look inward and confront these hidden factors. So for employees, let’s stop looking outside ourselves for ways to heal our disengagement and detachment at work, another job, another city, another company.

Let’s take time to reflect and ask ourselves the tough questions. What we confront and address loses power. So, what haven’t we healed from? Who were we before we got into these careers and lost ourselves in them? But we can’t do this work alone in a room in a journal hidden away. We’ve got to engage people we trust, a therapist, or a trained professional.

Encouraging Supportive Work Environments

And for employers, let’s create safe spaces for our employees to feel comfortable voicing their concerns and their needs. Consider encouraging your leaders to hold more one-on-one sessions with their employees and sometimes outside of those four walls. Advocate for the use of employee assistance programs and consider increasing your investment in training more effective managers who can be supportive of their teams.

Regardless of the approach, the intentional focus on understanding what’s driving this disconnection at work and then looking at these hidden factors, it’s what’s going to help us solve a lot of what we’re experiencing.

Listen, we can achieve the career fulfillment we desire. We can build profitable organizations with employees that are engaged and committed. We have the power to put better people out into the world every single day, but it starts from within. Thank you.