Experiencing Burnout? Your Workplace Might Be Making Things Worse
Is your office environment helping to improve burnout; or is it making it worse?
The discourse around workplace design privileges metrics such as “productivity” and “well-being” while downplaying their inverse—i.e., burnout. With improvements in technology that allow for global, interconnected, 24-hour work cycles come expectations that employees be available for most, or all, of those hours. It’s a condition that normalizes work-related anxiety.
Burnout and its causes and effects were at the core of a recent Think Tank discussion at AECOM’s Washington, D.C. office, moderated by Metropolis managing editor Lila Allen. As the dialogue made clear, the challenge is how to create distraction-minimizing environments and management strategies with the goal of building stress resilience—the ability to bounce back from stressful situations quickly.