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SOM MINI CPD: Burnout with Jalees Razavi · The SOM Podcast

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  Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by orchid Live. Find out more
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  at orchidlive dot com. Hello and welcome to the SO podcast.
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  I'm Steve Randall and this episode is one of a
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  monthly series to help you as an occupational health professional
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  with your CPD as. We invite specialists to share an
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  overview of some of the topics you've told us you'd
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  like to find out more about.
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  Speaker 2: My name is Julius Rosavi. I'm an occupation on meds
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  and specialist. I practice in Calgary, Canada. Are working with
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  the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada as
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  their Vice Chair of the Specialty. I also do a
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  lot of contract work with other companies, including the Workers
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  Conversation Boys of Alberta and Ontario.
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  Speaker 1: Well, Julie, thank you very much for joining me on
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  the SOM podcast. We're talking about a topic which comes
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  up a lot. We're talking about burnout and this is
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  a real issue, isn't it in twenty twenty six, Yes.
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  Speaker 2: It is, and if you look at the history, Freudenberger
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  wrote about it back in nineteen seventy four, but I
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  do believe it was even before that that people were
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  having burnout. It may be seen by others before you
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  can even notice that you've got burnout. And the problem
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  with it is that at this time, with the multitasking
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  being encouraged, which is actually a chaos, it's not actually
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  good for an individual to be multitasking or to be
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  wired and be reachable twenty four to seven. This was
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  not happening before the invention of the cell phone or
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  even the pages. Constant accessibility, the constant need to be
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  out there, the constant need to be checking out things
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  on social media or LinkedIn and so on. So what
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  has actually impacted us? And so the numbers are quite
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  frightening if you think about the number of people who
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  may be suffering from burnout and the occupations that are
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  suffering more than others with regards to the number of
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  people that have burnout in their sector. And one would
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  have thought that the modern technologies would actually help ease
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  these things out. But this constant accessibility, it actually never
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  lets your body rest, never lets your brain to actually
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  stable down and go back to the condition that is
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  actually not excitable. So the cycle of excitability requires to
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  have a cycle off rest after that. But a constant
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  excitability is what leads us to believe that burnout happens,
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  and it's.
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  Speaker 1: Such a difficult one to deal with because people looking
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  at their phone, for example, and we're often all guilty
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  of this, you know, last thing before you go to sleep,
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  first thing when you wake up. You could say, well,
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  if I'm looking at my emails, for example, if I'm
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  seeing those late at night, I'm then going to perhaps
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  not be able to sleep because I'm worried about something
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  I've seen in an email, or again first thing in
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  the morning, that may immediately heighten my anxiety about things
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  that I've got to face during the day. But then
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  people also get stressed if they don't look at their
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  phone because they think, well, if something's happened and I
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  don't know about it.
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  Speaker 2: Correct, it's almost like blaming the victim. And that's another
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  topic altogether. The algorithms that have been used to excite
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  you throughout the day, but also organizationally. To give you
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  an example, suppose somebody is working at an ICU or
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  emergency department. The individual is required to be working understaffed
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  looking after patients. Then they have to start to do tryazing.
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  That is also a moral dilemma. So the organization places
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  humong this part in actually the institution of burnout among
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  their own employees, and things like wellness, the yogays, the
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  breathing technique, and so on and so forth. They actually
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  almost like saying that you need to have the resolve
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  to deal with this, you need to have the attitude
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  to be able to work with this. While you're doing
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  this work, I'm going to add something else for you
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  which is supposed to make you well, but actually it's
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  something else in your schedule that you have to deal with.
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  So there is an impact, a negative impact of all
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  those gimmicks and all this direction towards wellness. It's very
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  good for pr but it's short term. It does not
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  identify the actual issues that individuals do have at work,
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  and actually it adds to your stress. There is a
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  lot of misunderstanding of how burnout gets treated. Burnout impacts
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  the high performers first, So imagine that. Imagine that you're
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  running a company and you've got your high performance and
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  they're actually burning out, and then they're looking for other resources.
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  So that's a loss of resource, loss of experience, lots
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  of workers who actually are able to put you in
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  the next bracket of performance. So addressing the issues is
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  an organizational task. It is the requirement and the expectations
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  from the organizations that this individual is there for them
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  all the time, and so on and so forth. Add
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  to that the family responsibilities they dropping your kids to school,
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  the picking them up, or looking after an ailing parent,
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  and so on and so forth. These are all recipes
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  for burnout.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's something which it sounds like it needs
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  a holistic approach to dealing with. There may be stresses
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  at work, those high performers who may well be the leadership,
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  the management, They may well be putting more pressure on
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  their teams, which you know, again creates burnout further down
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  the line as well potentially. But people, as you say,
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  have other responsibilities and what happens in the workplace is
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  not their entire life. Surely, we need to talk more,
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  We need to understand each other, and our employees are employers.
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  We need to understand people.
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  Speaker 2: More absolutely, and like the burnout is a state of
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  your body. It's not a mood issue. Even the best
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  tool that you're giving. Let's talk about AI at this moment.
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  There's a lot of studies coming out about how beneficial
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  AI is going to be. But there's also another stress,
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  another layer of stress that's been built by AI, by
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  people now worried about losing their jobs, so they actually
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  are trying to outperform themselves so that that they're you know,
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  they're they're not replaced if you wish. At least in
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  my mind, there are different types of burnout. There's the
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  individual workers burner out, where the high output is sustained
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  for too long without real recovery. But then there's the
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  workplace burnout, where the structure of the job itself, not
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  the person, is producing the injury. Because there are you know,
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  so as you said, but think of a middle management.
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  The middle management is asked by the executive management to
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  be producing something and by such deadline. However, you have
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  restrictions in your budget, in your human resources and so
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  on and so forth, and so thou shall do this
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  with this many people, there is an injury to the
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  middle management. There there is the leadership burnout, which is,
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  you know, the person who's absorbing the pressure from above
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  and the stress from below. And then there is the
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  caregiver burnout. And there there is the long tail or
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  the entrenched burnout with these other people who actually become
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  so withdrawn so much just thinking about work. Not only
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  that their work quality is going to fall down, but
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  actually the production is going to be impacted. And they
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  think that what's happening to them is just normal, which
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  is not the case. Like I seen patients who have
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  been our workers, if you wish, who have been diagnosed
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  with depression, and they were given antidepressants, but actually they
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  did not have depression. They had burnout, and so there
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  was a misdiagnosis, if you may. And then finally there
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  is an organizational burnout where the pattern spreads across the
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  entire team. So you have the entire team of individuals
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  who actually a burnt out because of you know, the
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  policy itself. So the onus of recovery from burnout is
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  to provide the individual with control, to provide them with resources,
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  allow them time to heal. So think of it as
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  a battery that needs to be recharged. If you keep
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  on recharging it too soon for too short, the battery
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  dies off early. However, if you make sure that your
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  battery is always consistently being nourliged, it's being supported, the
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  battery is going to last longer. So the human body
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  is almost like that. We need to have our shutdown,
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  We need to have the ability to think somewhere outside
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  of work.
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  Speaker 1: I mean so much to unpick from this. For organizations
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  where an OH professional is perhaps trying to help the
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  HR director or senior leadership to better support their employees,
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  getting them to understand all of these different elements to
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  this is going to be challenging. But ultimately there's a
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  business case, isn't there, Because if your culture is leading
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  to burnout, people will in those same positions will get
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  to a stage where they're burnt out. They'll leave. Somebody
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  new comes in for a while, it's fine, and then
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  they get burnt out, and so the pattern continues.
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  Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's a vicious cycle. You're losing all the experience.
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  You're losing individuals who knew the company very well, the
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  policies very well, who actually work for the company and
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  do understand its culture very well. Management needs to understand
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  the importance of addressing the issues and in the butt
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  before it becomes issues of burnout and so on and
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  so forth, Because if you're consistently fatigued and your work
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  performance is reducing. But I suppose you are on a
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  control panel and you're there and you too too tired
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  to look at the control panel and something disasters happens.
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  You know, that's a recipe for disaster and not only
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  it's going to impact the workplace by means of finance,
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  but also a reputation. I mean, you don't need to
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  have humongous expensive solutions. Simple tweaking can work, you know,
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  talking to HR and saying okay, what about the rotations
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  of the task, but about making sure individuals you know
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  that who are doing this, this and that can actually
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  do other things that are less libor is less stressful,
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  and so on and so forth, and so you know,
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  the three months rotations work very very well. Of course,
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  you cannot do it for every job in the world,
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  like you cannot take a physician out of an er
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  and put them in an ICU or put them in
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  an archimedic things, but you can always support them with
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  reducing the number of hour shifts and so on and
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  so forth.
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  Speaker 1: And support, I think is you know, one of the
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  key words I guess we should we should high light
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  in this conversation is that when people feel supported, and
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  that support could be just a set of policies that
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  they know are there and they know that if they
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  have a particular issue that there's support, they're just just
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  that general feeling of a supportive employer. But also when
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  they're starting to feel stressed to a level where it's
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  really affecting them, that they can reach out and ask
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  for help without blame or shame.
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  Speaker 2: Absolutely, absolutely, you're absolutely right the ability to talk to
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  your supervisor or to your colleague and say, hey, listen,
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  I've got issues. I cannot do this, I cannot do that.
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  That also, by the way, prevents the medicalization of non
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  medical issues. If I have a parent at home who
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  is like and the reason I'm mentioning the issues of
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  parents and so on and so forth, because this is
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  among the most talked about presentations of workers that I see,
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  that they have to look after this, this and that
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  on top of that there you know, they have to
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  do their twelve hour shift and so on and so forth.
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  So that the conversation to listen to somebody and really
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  actively listen to them, not just hear them, you know,
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  listen to them, then try to try to I mean,
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  you cannot carry the luggage for the individual as an
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  occupation health specialist, but you can always have that conversation
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  as an occupation helped being a physician or a nurse,
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  but the human resources folks, with the supervisor and with
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  others of course, respecting the privacy and the confidentiality of
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  the individual. As a team you can actually provide active
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  support to the individual, not just lip service. And so
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  I hear the word lip service so much. I expect
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  it from individual zoos sometimes come to me. The other
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  thing is that that community around us, the family physician.
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  I know that in the UK there is a humongous
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  issues with regards to the sick leaves. You know, that
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  is the medicalization of non medical issues. Even if you
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  take the person away from work because you believe that
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  they have got the burnout, that they've got depression, or
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  because of the burnout and so on and so forth,
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  you are not resolving the main issue, which is the
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  support from the workplace and organizational factors that can help.
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  So I think the conversation needs to be broad and
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  I think the conversation needs to be clear. It needs
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  to be with individuals who are decision makers at a
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  level that they can actually enforce few tweaks that I
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  am not going to actually arm the economy. Actually, they're
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  going to be supportive to the economy. In the Londrun.
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  Speaker 1: I see a lot of stuff in my timeline about burnout.
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  What I don't see much and what I'm really kind
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  of getting from this conversation. Something I think perhaps we
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  do need to shift the narrative on is that very
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  often burnout is as you highlighted, it's seen as something
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  that the individual suffers from, rather than a cultural issue
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  within workplaces in all kinds of industries and businesses and
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  businesses of all sizes. Perhaps we need to recognize more
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  that there may be elements of burnout culture within what
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  we do and address that rather than always putting it
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  onto the individual exactly totally.
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  Speaker 2: Prevention sits up straight. The workload, the control, the recovery,
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  the ethical alignment. These are the four levers that I believe,
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  and actually I wrote about it in my book The
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  Anatomy Burnout. They are the factual preventive methods that will
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  prevent burnout from happening in an organization. At an individual
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  level and at a group level. You have to have those.
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  You know, anything downstream is a damaged control. The rest
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  fixes tiredness, redesign fixes burnout. That's the way one should
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  view it. And so the conversation has to be at
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  a level that has the control, It has the policies
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  for ethics in alignments and you know, productive productivity and such,
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  and also the human resources for the recovery and so
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  on and so forth. So simply by giving the individual
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  the gym membership or providing them with EAP numbers, you're
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  just putting out fires. You just damaged control. Whereas sitting
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  with the individual's understanding the cycle of work, the organizational factors,
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  the ends, the through puts and now outputs, these are
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  the things that are going to actually make the employer,
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  first of all, the employer that everybody's going to talk about,
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  because they are preventing burnout, and it makes the individual
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  feels at their end that I'm actually valued as a
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  human being. They are listening to me, you know, and
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  remember that what I say to my residents and such.
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  Recovery is not linear. There are setbacks, so one cannot
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  expect what I started something today, the results are going
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  to happen tomorrow. Burnout happens over years. So recovery also
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  takes some time and one has to take a deep
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  breath and you know, let that happen. But I think
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  that ocupational health specialist nurses, physicians, physical therapist and so
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  on are learning more about this. Burnout is now talked
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  about in a way that it's not a stigma. Burnout
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  is just an outcome that is inevitable for certain situations,
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  not because of individual weakness, rather than a process, a
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  workplace issue, or a home exposure issue.
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  Speaker 1: Hopefully we've given our listeners a lot of thought there
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  of you know, wanting to do more research, look into
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  this more, find out more about you and where can
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  they do that? Where can they find out out about
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  your work? Your book as well.
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  Speaker 2: So actually I'm on LinkedIn under Julie Rosavi and the
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  Burnout Book is actually you can find it in Amazon,
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  you can find it out at Barnes and Novels. It
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  has a lot of tools. I always believe in easy,
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  doable solutions, and these tools are actually going to be
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  helpful at different levels.
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  Speaker 1: Brilliant. Look, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking to you.
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  Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast.
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  Speaker 2: Thank you very much Steve and Mated ask everybody, and
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  thank you very much for hosting me in this podcast.
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  Speaker 1: This podcast is sponsored by orchid Live. Orchid Live is
• 15:52
  a specialist occupational health software used by a number of
• 15:56
  some members to run every aspect of their occupational health operations.
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  They hold healthcare records for over one million UK workers
• 16:05
  and work with both in house OH teams and OH providers.
• 16:09
  You can find out more at orchidlive dot com