The short answer is that both the employer and the employee have a stake in employee well-being. The pandemic and its economic effects have caused a permanent change in how we work—and how we feel about work. In their endeavors to bring people back into the office, 83% of employers say that employee well-being is a significant part of their return-to-work strategy. Yet burnout has risen by 17% while workplace happiness has decreased by 6% over the last two years.

Employees remain stressed out and burned out despite employers’ focus on well-being. In a recent survey from the American Psychological Association, 79% of 1,501 respondents reported experiencing work-related stress in the previous month.” There seems to be a huge disconnect between employers wanting to improve employee well-being and employees reporting workplace stress. Is that the fault of leaders? How much accountability should organisations really have for the well-being of their workers?

Read on to explore the extent to which organisations should be responsible for employee well-being and ways that organisations can take effective action to improve workers’ wellness.

Whose Responsibility Is Well-Being, Anyway?

Employers and employees have a shared responsibility to communicate with each other about work and well-being. In that sense, both parties must be fully committed to the employer-employee relationship. Like any relationship, it should be reciprocal and rely on clear communication for success.

Because well-being is unique to each person, employees need to tell their employers about their needs. Likewise, employers need to indicate their expectations for work and respond to employee communications appropriately. Faltering communication can create circumstances for burnout.

In addition to a mutual responsibility to communicate, employees and employers also have different obligations to one another.

Employee Responsibility

Individuals have full responsibility for their personal well-being. Only each person can manage their own physical, emotional, and mental health. Employers should not be accountable for employee well-being in that way.

Individuals are also responsible for reasonably safeguarding their well-being at work. Employees’ actions can affect the safety of the work environment. If eye protection is a safety requirement, but some employees won’t wear goggles, they have chosen not to uphold safety standards. If others’ behaviour causes a workplace hazard, employees should report risks to their safety. Compliance and communication fall firmly within the purview of employee responsibility.

Employer Responsibility

Employers are responsible for providing well-being support, mitigating stressors, and creating an environment conducive to workplace happiness. Their approach to employee well-being should be guided by an intention to treat people the way people prefer to be treated—an empathy-driven variation of the Golden Rule. Treating employees like individuals by honouring their needs and their wants is an employee well-being philosophy that strengthens the employer-employee trust relationship.

Employers should also provide physical health support, mental health support, and a culture established by leaders that facilitates well-being and reduces the likelihood of burnout. Any well-being programs and policies will likely need to be tailored to the organisation’s location, size, and industry.

Physical health – Employers are accountable for providing physical safety. In the US, those standards are governed by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It is a legal requirement for workplaces to be free of major hazards and compliant with other such standards. Expressions of physical health support might include safety training, flexible work schedules and paid time off, health stipends, wellness programs, and robust health benefits.

Mental health – Just as employers are legally obligated to provide physical health support, they ought to provide mental health support as well. Mental health support might include access to mental health resources, opportunities for learning and development, education in mitigating bias and harassment, generous leave policies, and commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. In fact, DEI and well-being are inextricably linked; organisations should integrate both initiatives to improve their joint efficacy.

Culture of well-being – Leaders are responsible for establishing the culture of their teams, departments, and organisations. Because their values influence the values of the group, a culture that values individual well-being starts with leaders. To address burnout and promote a culture in which employee well-being is a priority, leaders need to commit to systemic change rather than wellness programs alone. According to the McKinsey Health Institute, “Taking a systemic approach means addressing both toxic workplace behaviour and redesigning work to be inclusive, sustainable, and supportive of individual learning and growth, including leader and employee adaptability skills.”

Meaningful organisational change begins with leader action. Keep reading to learn what steps leaders can take to promote employee well-being.

Organisational Action Steps for Employee Well-Being

Employee well-being is a shared responsibility. To better fulfill their part, employers should administer personality assessments to leaders and employees, develop leaders who value well-being, and understand employee motivation, values, and preferences.

Conduct assessments – Achieving employee well-being goals can be nearly impossible without collecting data that describe the current context. A personality assessment provides data-driven insights about how well people may tolerate stress and change, how they may respond to burnout, and what motivates them to work. After assessment shows leader and employee characteristics, potential derailers, and values, organisations may establish or adapt well-being initiatives specific to their talent. (Of the numerous excellent employer guides available, we were particularly impressed with the thoroughness of this one from the Society for Human Resource Management.)

Develop leaders – Using assessment results, organisations can develop leaders who value and excel at supporting employee well-being. Personality characteristics can indicate strengths, such as building team psychological safety, setting vision, and using active listening. They can also indicate overused strengths that may derail leaders and the kinds of behaviours that stress might trigger. When people understand their assessment results, they can make deliberate choices to leverage their strengths, moderate their overused strengths, and even learn new or different behaviours. This strategic self-awareness empowers leaders to effect reputational changes that positively influence employees’ workplace wellness.

Understand motivation – Assessment results also provide talent insights into people’s motivations for work. Motivation relates to well-being when our work satisfaction meets our deep-seated human need to find meaning. At Hogan, we use the 10 scales of the Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) to measure the core values, drivers, and interests that reveal motivation factors and preferred work environments. Of course, what constitutes meaningful work will differ from person to person. Some prefer public recognition while others prefer private acknowledgement (the Recognition scale); some prefer a high level of decision-making responsibility while others prefer to execute processes and tasks (the Power scale). Knowing the specific drivers for each person enables leaders to position employees in roles that the employees feel are most rewarding and to provide them with environments where they are likely to be most productive.

When employers understand the impact that leaders have on employee well-being, they can take actions to build a safer environment, encourage purpose and fulfillment, and protect against burnout by creating a culture of well-being.

Contact us for more information Learn about the Hogan 360

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Who Is Elon Musk?

Musk was born 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa. His father, Errol, was a wealthy engineer, entrepreneur, investor, and property developer, and half owner of an emerald mine in Zambia. His mother was Canadian, which allowed him to immigrate to Canada in 1989, and then move to the US in 1991 where he attended the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in Physics and Economics.

In 1994, Musk moved to Palo Alto to attend graduate school at Stanford University, but quickly decided to join the “internet boom.” With his rich and talented brother, and a loan from his father, he founded Zip2, a kind of travel search engine (for which Musk did the coding) and later sold to Compaq for $307 million in cash. He then founded X.com, an online financial services business, merged with Confinity, an online bank that owned PayPal, and then became CEO. Musk fought with Peter Thiel over search engines, was ousted by the board, but made $175.8 million when Theil sold PayPal to eBay in 2002.

In 2002, Musk founded SpaceX, a commercial spacecraft business. After a rocky start, a $1.6 billion contract with NASA launched it properly. In 2015 SpaceX started Starlink, a chain of satellites intended to bring internet services to remote locations, and which has been a major resource for the Ukrainian military in their war with Russia.

In 2004, Musk invested $6.5 million in Tesla, an electric car startup, and then became CEO and product architect in 2008. This move met criticism from those who argued the electric vehicle market had no future and that the larger automotive market was already heavily saturated. At the time of this writing, Tesla is the 6^th most valuable company in the world, just behind Amazon (5^th) and ahead of Berkshire Hathaway (7^th). In 2016, Musk founded Neuralink, a company intended to explore connections between computer driven artificial intelligence and neuroscience. In 2017, Musk founded the Boring Company, a high-tech tunnel boring business. In 2017, Musk expressed interest in buying Twitter, his favorite on-line messaging platform, widely regarded as a valuable but poorly managed business. In 2022, Musk completed the purchase of Twitter amidst huge fanfare and business news chatter.

Although it is too early to tell how Twitter will perform under Musk’s leadership, we see here an astonishing series of large-scale business development successes. This raises the obvious question:  what sort of person is Elon Musk, the world’s richest person? More specifically, what are the psychological keys to his success?

What Sort of Person Is Elon Musk?

We think there are three keys, and they fall under the headings of power, structure, and style. Power has to do with cognitive capability; structure has to do with cognitive orientation, and style has to do with interpersonal impact. Concerning power, Musk is very smart and, with a background in physics and economics, and he knows more about numbers, technology, and finance than most people. In addition, his business associates say he is remarkably perceptive about forecasting business trends and detecting flaws and biases in other peoples’ reasoning. So, he is very smart has the capacity to make good decisions – not all otherwise intelligent people do. He is not big on planning; he takes action and evaluates his decisions. Or as he Tweeted on November 9^th:

As for structure, Musk has the same orientation as most entrepreneurs—for whom Hogan has a lot of data. Entrepreneurs, relative to the average person, are analytical, data-based problem solvers, energetic and hardworking (100-hour work weeks are normal), fearless about risk, competitive, and focused on making an impact and a difference. Hard working, fearless, competitive, and achievement oriented—key ingredients for success regardless of cognitive ability.

Musk describes himself as having Asperger’s syndrome, which has been consolidated under autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and this neurodivergence may affect his interpersonal style. In our experience, ASD is common among engineers, mathematicians, chess players, and entrepreneurs. People who know Musk describe him as “the life of the party,” and as further testimonial of his vivacity, he hosted the sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live. Outside of work, he often seems witty, irreverent, and mischievous.

As for Musk’s leadership style and effectiveness, this raises a very interesting question.  Leadership is about building high performing teams, and good leaders are people whom others want to follow. Entrepreneurs as a group are bad leaders—like most managers in finance and engineering, they are interested in results and not peoples’ feelings. Musk describes himself as a demanding “nano-manager,” impatient and quick to find fault. He is action-oriented and doesn’t worry much about staff sensitivities.

Musk isn’t the first leader in the public eye to have a reputation of being difficult. Elsewhere we have talked about “the Apple Paradox”: how can someone as duplicitous and unpleasant as Steve Jobs build a business as successful as Apple? Our answer is twofold. On the one hand, the most critical capacity for CEOs is to make good decisions about products and markets, not worry about peoples’ feelings. On the other hand, good managers below the level of the CEO often protect the staff from the bad behaviour of abusive CEOs. We know that Musk is an immensely successful entrepreneur and a mediocre leader—but a mediocre leader compared to whom? Zuckerberg? Bezos? Gates? Welch? Rockefeller?

Finally, then, there is Twitter and how Musk’s recent actions to restructure an underperforming and badly managed company have affected it. Although the previous CEO admitted that Twitter was overstaffed, it seems clear that it was a mistake to fire half the workforce without first evaluating their function and performance. This kind of hasty downsizing creates unnecessary worry and confusion among employees, which is unlikely to contribute to high performance. On the other hand, Musk and his engineers have begun a detailed and granular review of every aspect of the Twitter business and that effort is the essential first step in improving processes and products. Musk himself told his new staff “Revolutions are not done with caution. So we want to try things, ideally things that don’t break the system, but…as long as we’re agile, and we react quickly to improve things and correct mistakes, I think it’ll be fine.”

In response to Musk’s takeover and layoffs, many individuals impersonating Musk on Twitter engaged in mocking the new owner. It is worth pointing out that, if the target weren’t the Twitter CEO and richest person in the world, some of this mocking would be declared cyberbullying. Regardless, much of the criticism seems to be inspired by critics of Musk’s political views. But like most entrepreneurs, especially very successful ones, Musk is not backing down. Instead, he’s firing back with his own sarcastic Tweets and changing the rules regarding impersonation accounts. It is difficult to say how the Twitter acquisition will work out for Musk, but if his past business ventures are any indication, it would be hard to bet against him.

Contact us for more information Learn about the Hogan 360

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The way we work has changed a lot recently, and that transformation isn’t likely to stop soon. An environment characterized by constant change can be described with the acronym VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Under VUCA circumstances, it can be difficult to forecast the next quarter, much less the next year or decade. Preparing for an unpredictable future is a formidable challenge for organisations, but reskilling is an integral part of success.

Among the numerous drivers of the need for reskilling, two stand out most. The automation of work and the pandemic’s effects on the economy have led to significant changes in work around the globe. As many as half of all employees everywhere will need reskilling by 2025.

Read on to learn what reskilling is, reasons to implement reskilling, and how Hogan can help.

What’s the Difference Between Reskilling and Upskilling?

Reskilling isn’t the same as upskilling. Upskilling refers to learning new technical skills or disciplines, usually through apprenticeships, certifications, or degree programs. It tends to be job specific, training someone for a known role. Reskilling is a retention strategy to develop talented employees to deploy them elsewhere within the business. Reskilling tends to be generalised because the intended job isn’t known ahead of time. In fact, the job may not even exist yet.

The core competencies and widely applicable skills gained through reskilling equip employees to be agile and adaptable. An important category of skills that help employees flourish in a changing environment is socioemotional skills. At Hogan, we define socioemotional skills as including social skills (e.g., getting along with others), self-regulatory skills (e.g., emotional control, impulsiveness), motivation (e.g., values, interests, preferences), and other personality characteristics including ambition (status-striving) and openness to experience (curiosity).

Among the many reasons to emphasize socioemotional skills in a reskilling plan are that they are most in demand by the most workers and that they offer the best response to VUCA environments in the workplace.

Why Do Employees Need Reskilling?

Reskilling helps companies respond to automation, arm against talent shortage, strengthen retention, and save money. Reskilling is also an employee-positive response to job change. VUCA situations are challenging even to people whose personalities tend to take uncertainty in stride.

Reskilling addresses the rise of automation.

Organisations that reskill employees belong to a large-scale effort to address skills gaps created by automation. In 2019, more than two million people in the US were reskilled or upskilled through more than 70,000 organisations. That number, while commendable, is only a small percent of employees who will soon need reskilling.

Automation has become and will continue to be an increasing part of work. McKinsey reported that by 2030 up to 800 million people globally might need new jobs because of automation. The report also pointed out that many occupations currently have activities that are automatable, meaning that employees in those roles will likely need to learn new skills and perform new tasks. Reskilling empowers workers to better perform tasks that cannot be automated or to integrate automation into new workflows.

Reskilling addresses the rise of job openings.

Reskilling is an efficient and economical way to address the surge of job openings. Currently, there are more than 11 million job openings in the US but only six million unemployed workers, according to the US Chamber of Commerce. While automation might help assuage the technical skills gap in part, reskilling workers by boosting their socioemotional skills will help organisations address talent shortages in two ways. First, they will be able to retain talent with the socioemotional skills to reskill more easily in the future. Second, they will be able to hire from a broader candidate pool with the confidence that talent with socioemotional skills can be more easily developed.

Furthermore, most people are willing to reskill to keep themselves employable. The dual forces of automation and the pandemic have put employees in a frame of mind open to reskilling to retain employment. In fact, research indicates that over two-thirds of workers worldwide are willing to retrain.

Reskilling increases employee retention.

Reskilling is a direct link to retention. Not only are employees willing to reskill, but they expect and desire development opportunities. In one study, new hires were 42% more likely to be retained if they received job training. Forty-six percent of learning and development plans in 2022 wisely prioritised upskilling and reskilling because employees who feel their skills are underused are 10 times more likely to search for a job than those who believe their current job uses their skills well.

Employees might be disposed to quit organisations that do not offer opportunities to grow in a preferred job and career. According to the Work Institute’s 2021 Retention Report, career reasons—which encompass development, career change, promotion, school, and job security—represented 18% of total turnover in 2020. Of those who reported leaving for career reasons, which has been the top-cited cause of turnover for over a decade, 31% named development as their motivation.

In short, people often leave if they don’t receive skills development, but they tend to stay if they do.

Reskilling saves money compared to rehiring.

Reskilling pays for itself quickly. Reskilling programs can cost $10,000 to $15,000 per employee—or even less. Rehiring, on the other hand, can cost from 33% to 200% of the employee’s salary depending on the industry and role. It’s simply more affordable to retrain and retain than to rehire.

What Are the Steps for Reskilling?

To build a productive reskilling program, follow these three steps:

Step 1: Conduct assessments.

Even though you may not know which jobs or skills will change, you can still expect to need to reskill employees for new or evolving roles. To identify these talent gaps, organisations need to assess individuals to identify current skills and future potential.

You will be able to create a specific plan for change only if you understand your starting point. Take inventory of the skills currently represented within your organisation. Assess your talent, technology, and processes. Be sure not to overlook personality strengths. Personality assessment enables organisations to understand the unique qualities of each employee, as well as the distribution of strengths across the employee base.

Step 2: Strategise needs.

Compare the skills available in your organisation with the skills that you are likely to need. Consider what skills may be necessary for new activities in current roles, as well as for altogether new roles. Understanding how values play into employees’ needs is important too. Values speak to the working environment that someone will strive to create. What work do employees want to do? What do they find rewarding?

Instead of being exclusively reactive or predictive in your reskilling strategy, stay dynamic instead. A dynamic approach involves operating within a VUCA environment while identifying talent who are prepared for and receptive to reskilling.

By leveraging what Harvard Business Review calls “skills adjacencies,” organisations can quickly reskill workers who already have foundational knowledge related to new skills. For example, a former science educator might excel in B2B tech sales with very little reskilling because she can already communicate complex technical concepts to a nonscientific audience. Or a former journalist might readily reskill into an outstanding podcast host because she already has mastery of interviewing techniques.

The concept of skills adjacencies is essential to the step of strategising needs because it can often be easier to hire someone who understands statistics than it is to hire a data scientist with at least five years of experience, for instance. Arguably even more than technical skills do, socioemotional skills offer ample skills adjacencies for nearly every role, especially those changed by automation.

Step 3: Create an action plan.

Depending on your organisation’s needs, reskilling might look like a program, pathway, or curated experience. It could also be conferences, coaching, or company-wide initiatives. Reskilling should be part of a broader talent development strategy that accounts for employee personality strengths and values.

In putting together your action plan, don’t overlook socioemotional skills. Employers need employees with socioemotional skills—and employees desire to develop socioemotional skills. It’s a combination that begs for reskilling.

The need for socioemotional skills in the workplace has increased dramatically with the evolution of work. According to Pew Research Center, “The value placed on social and fundamental skills in the modern workplace reflects the rapid growth in employment in jobs in which these skills are most important, by 111% and 104% from 1980 to 2018, respectively.” With the continued emphasis on workplace automation, the need for socioemotional skills in employees is only likely to increase even more.

Not only do employees need socioemotional skills, but they also value them highly. Nearly all employees want to develop their socioemotional skills, with 84% saying that such training is important to them. Leadership is the most desired socioemotional skill of 54% of respondents. Recalling that two-thirds of workers are willing to retrain and that socioemotional skills are in extremely high demand, personality-driven talent development makes an essential component of any reskilling plan.

How Can Hogan Help with Reskilling?

Hogan provides data-driven talent insights that help organisations assess the personality strengths and values of their talent.

Strengths – The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) has seven primary scales that assess day-to-day, bright-side personality characteristics. The HPI is one of the most versatile of the assessments and can be used across the employee lifecycle. Most related to reskilling are talent acquisition, career pathing, development planning, and succession planning.

Values – The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) contains ten primary scales that describe what we call the “inside” of personality, or what motivates talent to succeed. The MVPI provides data concerning organisational culture, career motivation, preferred work environments, and leadership characteristics. An employee who wants to interact with people and use science to solve problems would likely show enthusiasm and commitment toward reskilling that involves interpreting data gained through automation for various stakeholders or customers—because it supports their core drivers.

The first stages in creating a reskilling plan are assessing what skills or strengths exist and determining what are needed. Hogan belongs in the assessment stage to provide an evaluation of strengths and values. This helps organisations identify the everyday behaviours of their talent, as well as the environments they value.

Based on those results, Hogan personality data can facilitate development planning to boost the socioemotional skills that are lacking in the workforce, especially among early-career professionals. With hiring managers reporting that socioemotional skills, such as leadership, problem-solving, communication, and teamwork, are lacking in job-seeking college graduates, the need for socioemotional reskilling is pervasive.

Whether to reskill teams or individuals or to determine selection criteria, Hogan assessments are the foundation for a reskilling strategy that properly prioritises socioemotional skills.

Contact us as step one in your socioemotional skills-focused reskilling strategy.

Contact us for more information Learn about the Hogan 360

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• Do elite sports players differ from non-elite sports players in terms of their personality?
• How do any observable difference vary by sporting code?

Participants in this case study included professional sports players in Australia (N=422) from cricket (n-242), rugby union (n-113), and rugby league (n=67). To access the case study click here.

In terms of personality, elite athletes are a competitive, hardworking, organised, goal-driven, motivated group of individuals. Would you expect them to be people pleasers too?

On The Science of Personality, cohosts Ryne Sherman, PhD, chief science officer, and Blake Loepp, PR manager, recently discussed what personality characteristics translate to success for elite athletes.

Hogan Assessments has collected personality data from a unique sample set: the draft classes of 2021 and 2022 for the National Football League (NFL)—approximately 600 athletes performing at the 99.9th percentile.

Let’s dive into what data tell us about the personality of elite athletes.

A Deep Dive into the Data

Given that the NFL draft prospects are proven team players, you might expect to see that they have specific personality characteristics in common. But the data could surprise you.

Hogan Personality Inventory

The Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) measures the bright side of personality, how we present ourselves at our best. The elite athletes scored 74% on Adjustment, on average, which means they likely show resilience to stress and failure. Professional athletes have their every move scrutinised and criticised by hundreds of thousands of people, and they overcome failure repeatedly to achieve their incredibly high level of performance. “Being able to handle that pressure and rise to the occasion is really important,” Ryne pointed out.

A drawback to high Adjustment can be overconfidence. In the United States, football players are often celebrated and even glorified in high school, college, and their professional careers. This can make it easy for them to believe they don’t need any feedback. (Listen to our conversation with Gillian Hyde in episode 17 to hear more about downsides of high Adjustment.)

Hogan Development Survey

The Hogan Development Survey (HDS) measures the dark side of personality, or derailing behaviours that may manifest under stress and pressure. There were a few remarkably elevated scores, specifically on the Reserved, Bold, Diligent, and Dutiful scales.

• Reserved (84%) – High Reserved scores show that these elite athletes likely see themselves as individualistic, tough minded, and distant. They’re less focused on group participation and more focused on individual accomplishment.
• Bold (84%) – A high score on the Bold scale indicates confidence. This is not unfounded, considering that these athletes are performing at the very top of their profession. Another factor affecting the Bold score is age. Ryne pointed out that Bold tends to be higher when younger and lower when older. The athletes who completed the personality tests were in their very early twenties.
• Diligent (84%) – A high Diligent score indicates meticulousness and perfectionism, a necessary characteristic for players who have drilled in precision skills from an early age.
• Dutiful (91%) – Dutiful, the most prominent derailer of the group, refers to having the loyalty and discipline to follow orders but can also suggest being deferential or ingratiating.

Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory

The Motives, Values, Preferences Inventory (MVPI) measures the inside drivers that underlie behaviours. Surprisingly, Affiliation was not a high score but a low one at 26%. Affiliation concerns values associated with social interaction and working with others.

Ryne suggested this low score might stem from the need for self-focus in preparing to play in the NFL. “I don’t have time for friendships and relationships that are outside of football,” he surmised. “I’ve got to stay focused on my ultimate goal.”

Another aspect of the Affiliation score is the toughness that the football players adopt to appeal to the NFL. This could cause them to value relationships lower than individualism and competitiveness. “For the most part, I think we’re capturing something representative of how these people want to be seen, even outside of this athletic context,” Ryne added.

What the Data Mean for Coaches

Coaches who want to handle and mitigate the elevated HDS derailers should take note of Dutiful. “That high Dutiful score suggests to me that a lot of these players are looking for structure,” Ryne said. High school and college provided routine and fixed external expectations. Considering that, coaches of new professional athletes should protect their players from the risks posed by a sudden loss of structure.

Coaches should also remember that individual achievement motivates elite athletes. “Here is a group of players who, despite all their success, despite being 99.99th percentile, are still hungry,” Ryne said. Although they’re disciplined about following rules and excel at taking instruction, they are highly competitive people. They measure their worth with achievements in their field. In other words, coaches must spur their players to succeed.

Advice for the Player-to-Coach Transition

Players who want to become coaches need to focus on relationship skills. Competence or even excellence at the sport is not enough to make it as a coach. Successful coaches understand how to build relationships and teams.

Instead of succeeding through competition, a coach succeeds through cooperation. Therefore, a player transitioning into coaching should focus on the answer to the one essential question: Will they play for me?

“The critical thing I would be developing as someone who wanted to go into coaching is understanding other people to build those relationships,” Ryne said.

Listen to this conversation in full on episode 45 of The Science of Personality.

Contact us for more information Learn about the Hogan 360

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The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines burnout as “a syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”² Burnout is not something that happens to employees who are disengaged or whose performance is poor. In fact, burnout tends to occur highest in passion-driven occupations.³ People who experience burnout are typically those who were once highly engaged and impassioned by their work. In other words, you must first be on fire to be susceptible to burnout.

The top reasons for employee burnout are due to issues leaders can control, making it more of an organisational problem than an individual problem.³ Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have identified six factors that make a workplace prone to inducing burnout: demand overload, lacking control, poor reward systems, a socially toxic work environment, inequity, and a conflict of values.

Burnout has a major cost to both organisations and individuals. Between lost productivity, employee disengagement, absenteeism, lower organisational commitment, and turnover, burnout costs organisations as much as $190 billion annually.⁴ Burnout’s impact on individuals includes prolonged stress, stress-related health issues, and decreased productivity. Moreover, the effects may be disproportionate for different demographics. In 2020, when COVID-19 made remote work prevalent and schools shut down, the rate of burnout increased among women, in particular.⁵ Women began dropping out of the workforce at an alarming rate to manage home responsibilities, which exacerbated the burnout many were already experiencing.

Employer response to burnout can no longer be reactive. Employers must start proactively addressing burnout before it happens. While all six burnout factors are critical for organisations to diagnose and address, there’s a practical solution for addressing potential value conflicts. The Motives, Values, and Preferences Inventory (MVPI) is often described as assessing “the inside of personality” because it measures our core drivers, values, and interests. The values someone holds give us insight into what that person strives to attain both personally and professionally. Alignment between employee and organisational values ultimately leads to increased well-being, productivity, retention, and more desirable outcomes. On the other hand, when an employee’s values are not being met in their role or organisation, the organisation tends to see poorer employee outcomes, which may eventually result in turnover of that employee.

The COVID-19 pandemic put healthcare workers at increased risk for burnout due to the heavy demands they face and the lack of control they have over their environment. A nurse who scored high on the MVPI for Recognition, Altruistic, and Affiliation may have been getting their values met prior to the pandemic by receiving frequent recognition for their accomplishments from their manager (Recognition), connecting with patients (Altruistic), and having numerous opportunities to form relationships with team members (Affiliation). Under those prepandemic circumstances, the nurse likely would have felt good about their work.

But the circumstances of the pandemic are different. The nurse must now maintain distance from both patients and coworkers, which means the Affiliation value is not being met anymore. Being an essential worker means increased demands, which may interfere with the nurse’s sense of altruism. The nurse’s manager is also overworked and overwhelmed and is unable to provide the level of recognition the nurse needs to feel motivated and valued. This is clear example of someone who is already at risk for burnout due to the pandemic and whose value conflict may accelerate burnout.

Although it is a challenging problem to solve, it is up to the organisation to figure out creative ways to help employees who are experiencing burnout. In addition to value alignment, employers can seek an understanding of the personality characteristics measured by the Hogan Personality Inventory (HPI) and the Hogan Development Survey (HDS) that might be predictive of burnout. In addition to helping employers understand and prevent burnout, our tools can also help employees become aware of their unique burnout indicators and — with the support of their employers — take actionable steps in preventing burnout.

To learn more about how PBC can help your organisation take actionable steps to prevent burnout in your employees, please Contact us

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