It’s no wonder that people are burning out professionally. Every week there are new things to learn, changes to deal with, strategies to reconsider, projects on deadlines, etc. We don’t often get a chance to simply do the work, let alone rest.
Juliet has written an entire book on the subject, so you should at least read the full article above. As mentioned in the paragraph I quoted above, though, what you’ll find are the things that would allow the American workplace to allow for translating the increased productivity in to fewer hours worked; universal healthcare, overtime pay, loss of unions, and income ineqaulity, are the same things that powerful corporate interests will convince politicians, and voters, are bad for society.
I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. Change is our reality. The most challenging students I worked with as a trainer weren’t the ones who struggled with a concept or had to overcome a barrier related to language or cultural understanding. It was the ones who didn’t think they needed to change anything they had been doing for years. They didn’t understand why they were being asked to change the way they worked.
So when they tell you that the risks and dangers are overstated, and not to worry about it, because the benefits will surely outweigh everything else, come back and remember that the wealthy said the same thing about slavery. For them, the benefits did outweigh everything else. That wasn’t the case for people who were different from them.
Have employees given up on trying to change the workplace? If that many people don’t bother to speak up, that’s a condemnation of workplace culture. We all say we want engaged employees, yet many of them are disengaged to the point of not bothering to try to make a difference.