Earlier quoted context omitted.
What does MBB mean in this context?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Three_(management_consul...
Much appreciated.
Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
121–130 of 207 posts
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
With a full time job, you're spending most of your waking hours preparing to work, commuting to work, working, and commuting from work. There's not really much time and energy remaining to do something meaningful. Like it or not, your work is to a good approximation your life, the rest is a rounding error.
I don’t think that’s always true. With remote work, flexible schedules, etc, you can reduce the costs of working. In the worst cases, you might have a long commute making your 8 hour work day into 10+. But you still have weekends and probably at least 6-8 waking hours outside of work. (I’m imagining an 8-6 with commute, so assuming 8 hours of sleep, 6-9pm and 5-8am) Best case, you remove a commute and gain a whole da…
Those additional 6-8 hours dwindle down to 1-2 hours real quick when you consider you still have housework to do on top of work, cooking, cleaning, washing, you also need to eat and buy groceries. Also can't do anything exciting immediately before going to sleep.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#123I mean, it's hard to not feel burned out when your day consists of process, navigating politics, and implementing ideas that are clearly doomed to fail. It's a lot better than homelessness though.
> It's a lot better than homelessness though. Yeah, I feel like more people in the developed world should go spend quality time with the least among us, the homeless, and folks in the developing world. A lot of people with burnout will find themselves skipping to work. Because at least you're not living in trees with insects and hollowing out a log to sail to another island to get your special needs kid to a doctor o…
I’ve been homeless. I’ve also been burned out. Being homeless did not magically prevent me from becoming burned out in another stage of my life.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it normal in the US for software developers to work 60-70 hour weeks? I understand this is the case in hip startup culture, but what about normal, boring companies? I work as an embedded software developer in Belgium, and here 40 hours is normal.
No not typically. In my experience most people work 40-45 hours at the boring companies that I’ve been at
In my experience it's usually 35-40 hours "butt in seat" time but 1 mins - 5 hours of work actually happen. The rest of the time is dopamine switching between news, personal communications, and other forms of non-work entertainment.
I count checking emails, work instant communications, and working through bureaucracy (paperwork flows) as work, not just hands on keyboard working on software solutions.
Also in my experience there are people who focus on only work at work, and they usually drag others into performing their job function.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#125I did some volunteer mentoring for a while. Burnout was the most common complaint. However, once you dug into each complaint of burnout you discovered that “burnout” has become a catch-all term for a very wide range of feelings. Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lac…
In my experience there are different levels to burnout, with each stage is progressing towards a full-blown one like you described.
Agreed that I also wouldn't trust any self-reported burnout unless the person has experienced a full-blown one before.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#126The humanity has been taken out of jobs. It's all about making an optimised monkey making machine. I think MBAs are destroying everything. See how Google is being destroyed from the inside. Boeing has pretty much been destroyed from the inside.
> The humanity has been taken out of jobs.
Absolutely, but...
The humanity was taken out of jobs before, too. An assembly-line job wasn't like being a craftsman. There was "alienation" (to use the Marxist term) there too. The factory workers were just biological components of a big machine.
The difference between then and now was that much of the rest of life still had the humanity in it. You knew people in your neighborhood, at your church, at the bar, at the barbershop, at the grocery store. Now... not so much. There's no humanity anywhere. So people feel alienated, not just at work, but everywhere.
But they feel it especially at work, because that's the place that they interact with other people the most, so it's the place where there should be the best chance of real human contact. And it's not there.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#127I used to think my burnout was from long hours, but I recently got a chance to work on a greenfield project at work and loved every second of the 60-70h weeks just building something really cool with a small team. The burnout nearly vanished during this time and only recently has started to reappear and I have a much better understanding now of what causes burnout for me specifically.
That's not burnout you had, you were bored out.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#128> it’s far higher for certain subgroups. ... and deskless workers
I'm still happily doing a fully remote job, but I've noticed that a number of my friends have been forced to return back to the office 2 or 3 days a week. The irony is that many of their companies have scaled back office space due to decreased natural demand when people had the choice of full-time WFH, but now there isn't space for everyone to come back to the office full-time, even if those employees wanted to. So now, they've lost their desks but have to come in and hot-desk twice a week. One friend has to carry around a heavy laptop (not a powerful one, just a heavy one), the power supply AND a dock (because the hot desk docks aren't compatible), plus all the pens and stationary he needs to and from work twice a week. He used to love being in the office and now hates it. If desklessness really does lead to increased rates of burnout, companies will be setting themselves up for an even bigger problem a year or two down the line.
Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#129I have no doubt that BCG will be more than happy to help anyone troubled by the implications of this "research" with an "engagement" to study and reduce burnout in their organization. For a nominal fee of course. I have even less doubt that said engagement would not lead to more fulfilled employees given that the MBB consulting cargo cult has arguably given us the modern corporate culture that leads to such prevalent…
What does MBB mean in this context?
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Re: Half of Workers Around the World Are Struggling with Burnout
#130I did some volunteer mentoring for a while. Burnout was the most common complaint. However, once you dug into each complaint of burnout you discovered that “burnout” has become a catch-all term for a very wide range of feelings. Before that experience I assumed everyone defined burnout as a severe state of deep distress and lack of energy following extended periods of intense stress, frustration, overwork, and/or lac…
I wonder if this shift is due to the web. Everybody can read medical terms and interpret it as they want.