Burnout continues to plague Corridor workspaces

You cannot pour from an empty glass. 

Brad Baldwin
Brad Baldwin

That’s one of the pieces of advice Brad Baldwin gives individuals and businesses when they come to him for advice about managing burnout.

Mr. Baldwin, the founder of the mindfulness-focused Iowa City coaching and consulting business Aperture, said burning out compromises people’s abilities to be the best they can be in every facet of their lives. 

“At the end of the day, we’re here to serve somebody else,” he said. “We’re a nurse serving a patient, an employee serving a customer, a leader trying to support our employees. We generally live a life of service. You cannot serve others from an empty cup. If you want to continue to be able to perform at a high level, you have to invest in replenishing yourself.”

Burnout, a state of physical or emotional exhaustion that also involves a sense of reduced accomplishment and loss of personal identity, continues to be an issue for workplaces worldwide. The World Economic Forum reported in 2019 that the cost of burnout globally is $322 billion.

Eean Crawford, an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business, said the cost of burnout was alarming before the pandemic but is even higher now.

“To try and understand how much money $322 billion is, if you took a stack of fresh $100 bills from the mint and stack them up vertically from sea level, they would be taller than three Mount Everests stacked on top of each other,” he said. “That was before the pandemic. And now, more people are impacted by burnout and we’ve seen this rise to record levels of it. The cost is staggeringly high today.”

Burnout impacts the Eastern Iowa Corridor

Kim Casko is stepping down from the Iowa City Area Business Partnership in May. CREDIT ICABP
Kim Casko

Kim Casko will end her tenure as the CEO of the Iowa City Area Business Partnership at the end of May. One of the two main reasons for this decision has to do with burnout, as she explained in a release on March 23. 

Ms. Casko said in an interview that she did not realize she was burning out because she is a perfectionist and a workaholic. It wasn’t until the physical symptoms impacted her that her perspective changed.

“My throat would get tight and I’d have chest pains for a good part of 2022 and I just kept ignoring it,” she said. “I attributed it to everything else, and it wasn’t until I had a break over the holidays and those things went away and when I came back to work, they reappeared. I just couldn’t ignore it. The symptoms were right in my face.”

In the discussion of burnout, Ms. Casko said people at all levels of businesses must be vulnerable to deal with the problem before it gets too serious, as it did in her case.

Sharing stories and building better habits to take time and space when needed is the first step, Ms. Casko said, in changing the culture of businesses. 

“It’s hard to understand (burnout) and then, once you understand it, then you have to be vulnerable with people,” she said. “You need trust in terms of conversing about burnout, so people talk about it in certain circles or smaller groups. That’s a good thing to have those safe spaces, but it’s very lonely at the top.”

Ms. Casko said she was lucky to have the space to talk through her symptoms of burnout with colleagues, friends and family, but she knows that is not always the case. 

Kate Moreland
Kate Moreland

After experiencing burnout herself, former Iowa City Area Development Group president Kate Moreland started a new business, called Kate Moreland Coaching & Consulting, focusing on understanding well-being and creating balance in January. She said people in Eastern Iowa and across the world need to continue working to separate life and work.

“The work-life balance is becoming very blurry,” she said. “You can’t really separate the two, especially after years of remote working. So, how well people are doing is directly affecting our productivity and engagement so we need to educate and provide tools to leaders so they can best support their and others’ well-being.”

A large part of her work, Ms. Moreland said, is teaching people how to discuss the topic of well-being and mindfulness to prevent burnout and understand the physical and emotional sides of the experience. 

Conversations about burnout continue to grow

Eean Crawford
Eean Crawford

Mr. Crawford said there are larger and more plentiful conversations about burnout happening in 2023. These conversations stem from an increased willingness to discuss mental health in the 2020s, he explained.

“The public and widespread acceptance of how much people are struggling is more under the surface than prominent and obvious,” he said. “We can see evidence of the effect that this is having every day, so it is being discussed.” 

Ms. Moreland agreed that the pandemic played a role in the increased discussion about burnout and stress tied to one’s job, but the continuation of the conversation depends on the environment.

“The discussion and if it’s a large enough conversation depends on the organization,” she said. “Often that means it depends on the leader and whether those topics are being openly discussed and whether the environment feels psychologically safe for people to talk. We’re at varying degrees of that, and I think a lot of people are waking up to that fact.”

She said leaders need to be vulnerable about sharing their own experiences and model to their employees how to advocate for themselves when they’re stressed or need to take a break. 

Misconceptions about burnout

Mr. Baldwin said he sees many people assume someone experiencing burnout is broken, which is not true. While some people experience an acute version of burnout that is more extreme and has limited solutions to fix, he said that is rarely the case.

“Burnout is a process that develops,” he said. “The reason that misconception is important is because it gives us an opportunity to move up the intervention earlier in the process and, hopefully, prevent more people from getting to an end state, which is bad all around.”

Ms. Casko did get to this acute end state and she is now reexamining how she works as she takes time off. When she looks for a new position after taking time to heal and process her burnout experience, she said she will look for a job that suits her skills best and aligns with her personality. 

Another misconception is that engagement and burnout are the same thing. Mr. Crawford said the two are related, but one’s engagement is not equal to the likelihood they may suffer from symptoms of burnout. 

He said the two are inversely related, so if someone is burnt out they might not be as engaged, but that isn’t always the case. 

“In general, you find people who are more engaged tend to be less burned out,” he said.

Business solutions to burnout 

One solution people can examine, Mr. Crawford said, is through subtraction. He said discussing what is essential and nonessential about one’s work needs to be examined so the nonessential pieces can be subtracted to minimize burnout. 

“We often default, in any problem we’re trying to solve, to adding something,” he said. “We ask what new thing we should try. Instead, we need to think about the one thing we can stop doing.”

Waiting to fix burnout when someone is already running on empty is part of the problem, Mr. Crawford said. People need to start taking breaks when the exhaustion or other burnout symptoms begin to set in, rather than waiting to be at a point of no return. A major part of this in the workplace, he explained, is about communication. 

“My general advice would be to be intentional,” Mr. Crawford said. “Reassert and publicly communicate your boundaries. If you don’t have boundaries, then you never have a space to take a break and you will begin to burn out.”

Ms. Casko said she believes the culture can shift enough to prevent chronic burnout, like what she experienced, but it will take time. She said the beginning of this conversation and process starts at the individual level.

“It’s one person at a time; if all of us commit to taking better care of ourselves, eventually we can change the culture and values and how we prioritize things,” she said. “We really have to support each other as the human race.”