Research from Sydney’s University of NSW shows that employees who truly believe in the stated values and mission of their organisation are at higher risk of burn out than more cynical colleagues when those values ignore the well-being of the employees charged with delivering them.
Through seventy interviews Dr Anna Kiaos from the University of NSW's School of Clinical Medicine sought to examine the impact of the way Service NSW reinforces its mission ("putting customers at the heart of everything we do") on its frontline workers.
Services NSW engages multiple monitoring, reinforcement and corrective mechanisms to enforce customer-centric language and behaviour in workers, thereby potentially exposing workers to psychosocial hazards such as high workloads, low job control, intrusive workplace surveillance, stress and fatigue. The monitoring mechanisms include real-time customer feedback machines, cultural surveys, scorecards, customer performance indicators and key performance indicators.
The "intense" customer-focused ideology led to some workers suppressing their emotions to achieve high customer satisfaction reports, ultimately suffering burnout symptoms like exhaustion, irritability and emotional withdrawal as a result.
In Service NSW the study found that while leadership articulates a coherent, values-driven ideology at a senior level, many frontline workers experience a radically different reality characterised by surveillance, unmanageable demand, and the suppression of genuine distress.
The most disturbing finding from Dr Kiaos’ research is that the workers who burned out most severely were not the cynical or disengaged workers, but the "true believers" who take the organisation's ideology to heart – the ones that go above and beyond to achieve the “vision”. Such workers have a tendency to push through warning signs, absorbing the extra demands, and are the most vulnerable when the demands became unsustainable.
The study results show that having a strong organisational ideology is not the problem. Mission and value statements can create real benefits for an organisation such as higher engagement, stronger discretionary effort and genuine pride in the work.
It is the practices that underlie the goal where the problems occur. When a compelling ideology is layered over unmanageable performance demands, inadequate resourcing, rigid monitoring systems and a workplace culture that sees absorbing high demands as a virtue, the belief that employees have in the mission becomes the mechanism of their psychological harm.
To prevent these psychosocial harms, employers need to actively decouple the organisation’s ideological commitment from its means of measuring performance.
"If your recognition systems only reward those who absorb the most – longest hours, highest customer scores, most calls handled – you are incentivising the suppression of burnout symptoms," Dr Kiaos says.
Examining what behaviours are being rewarded and whether these behaviours are sustainable, ensuring that formal recognition includes boundary-setting, help-seeking, and appropriate workload management, will lower the risk of employees experiencing burn-out.
Read more: Customer-centric ideology and symptoms of burnout: A case study in the NSW public sector