[Inside Chodong] The "Burnout Dilemma" Among High Performers... What Is the Solution?

Employees Leaving Due to Burnout Also Harm Companies
"Cutting Out Unnecessary Tasks" Is the Company's Duty for Its Own Sake
Cal Newport: "Working Less Is Working Better"

"It is truly a 'burnout dilemma.'" A senior executive at a mid-sized company I recently interviewed said they are greatly troubled by employees suffering from 'burnout syndrome.' As work piles up on high-performing employees, these employees complain of overwork leading to a breakdown in work-life balance and frequently leave the company, yet there is no proper solution.

Burnout means 'to burn out' or 'to be exhausted,' referring to a condition where a person deeply engaged in work suddenly feels drained of energy, experiencing fatigue and lethargy. In fact, 7 out of 10 Korean office workers have reported experiencing burnout syndrome due to their work life. According to a survey conducted by JobKorea in June targeting 342 male and female office workers, 69.0% answered that they had experienced burnout syndrome. The highest burnout experience was among those in their 20s to 40s, who are in their prime working years. Among workers in their 30s, 75.3% reported severe fatigue and lethargy during their company life, while 61.1% of those in their 20s and 60.5% of those in their 40s also reported similar experiences.

The cause is, unsurprisingly, 'excessive workload.' 42.4% of office workers felt that their current workload is too heavy. Many also reported working on company tasks after hours and on weekends, with 40.1% and 44.4% respectively. In the 'K Population Strategy' project conducted by Asia Economy since the beginning of the year, many interviewees complained that although companies have systems in place to support work-family balance, there are too few people and too much work, creating a dilemma where these systems cannot be properly utilized.

When employees fall into burnout, companies gain nothing in terms of productivity. What is the answer for 'sustainable hard work'? Cal Newport, an MIT-trained engineer and journalist, proposed in his book Slow Work that the solution is to 'work less.' More precisely, he advises cutting out unnecessary tasks and leaving only the work that produces 'real results.'

Cal Newport pointed out that for the past 70 years, the factory-style productivity standard of 'increasing conveyor speed to increase output' has been applied to knowledge workers as well. Due to the nature of knowledge work, where output is not immediately visible, office workers unconsciously focused on 'unimportant but visible busywork' to prove they were working, which prevented them from concentrating their time and energy on the most important core tasks.

He argued that a new productivity standard suitable for knowledge work is needed and proposed 'slow productivity' as the solution. To support his argument, he cited the example of New Yorker journalist John McPhee. McPhee spent about eight months researching for a single article in 1967. Afterwards, he spent two weeks writing 500 words a day, sitting at picnic tables meeting sources or organizing story ideas. As a result, McPhee won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, authored 29 books, and two of them were finalists for the National Book Award.

When knowledge work overload becomes so severe that high-performing employees suffer burnout and leave the company, it is a loss for the company as well. Finding the core of the work and reducing unnecessary workload, thereby gradually helping employees work at their own pace, improves the quality of results. Realizing that this ultimately benefits the company itself is a step closer to finding a solution.