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He agreed working parents were increasingly experiencing symptoms associated with work burnout.
“We’re starting to use the concept in other areas apart from work,starting to look at parental burnout. What we’re realising is the same mechanisms that happen with work can happen in other areas of your life.”
Adrenaline “comedown” after the worst of the pandemic,when people coped because they had to,was a factor coming through in burnout research by workplace wellbeing organisation Select Wellness,said co-founder,Camilla Thompson.
“We’re dealing with people saying ‘extremely’ overwhelmed,‘extremely’ burned – the word extreme,we’re hearing so much more,” said Thompson,whose clients include Optus,Westpac,Atlassian,Canva,Woolworths and the NSW government.
“What we’re seeing is people got through the pandemic in survival mode,and this year,people are crashing.”
While advocating for a “hope mindset” as the solution to the current wave of exhaustion,Thompson said people’s habit of overworking and not taking breaks,and the trap of doing back-to-back video calls – creating “video burnout because we use 30 per cent more glucose in the brain[in online meetings]” – meant “people are like zombies”.
‘People got through the pandemic in survival mode,and this year,people are crashing.’
Camilla Thompson
“Then for a lot of parents,you’ve got to give to your child,but you have nothing left in the tank. The word ‘hopeless’ has been used so much this year,particularly around there being no sense of control,particularly around the economy.”
Working mother Lyanne Morel was doing long weeks juggling multiple jobs,including hospitality and retail,plus caregiving to a toddler,when she experienced burnout,which presented as exhaustion so severe she could not leave her bed.
“I lasted about three months then I burnt out,my body hit a wall. I had to quit all my jobs,” she said. Putting wellbeing first helped her recover,as well as finding better paid work with more flexibility.
Thompson said Australian workers reported the highest burnout rates in the world in a2021 study by global consultants McKinsey,with 61 per cent saying they sometimes felt burned out.
“I would say it’s worse now,” she said,causing some people to use resignation as a “stress-management tool”.
This is reflected in data from the Australian HR Institute whose chief executive,Sarah McCann-Bartlett,said 34 per cent of employers had reported a staff turnover rate of more than 20 per cent in the year to October 2022.
“We were told 2022 would be a better year. And while it was with respect to COVID-19 lockdowns,we also saw burnout levels increasing as a cycle of high levels of voluntary turnover,more personal leave being taken,and a mismatch between available staff and unsustainable workloads took hold,” McCann-Bartlett said.
She advised organisations to encourage staff to take breaks and to try to reduce workloads where possible,and if necessary,offer people incentives to take their holidays:“Health and wellbeing needs to be at the told of the employer’s agenda in 2023.”
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