 Okay. Hello, everyone. So my name is Jan. I'm working for Continental Automotive. Well, I've been presenting at the ERCE and Open Source Summit quite a few times before. So, but actually, this is the first time where I'm not really speaking about a technical topic, even though it is a topic that really pretty much affects, interestingly, many, many technical persons. So this year I'm going to speak about burnout. So just to make one thing clear. It's not my intention to give a medical or scientific, correct description about this topic. So I'm not a medical doctor, neither a psychologist nor a therapist. I'm an engineer. This is basically, yeah, the point of view from which I would like to look into this topic. So it's really pretty much, as you will see from my own experience, I would like to dive into this topic. And well, at the end of the day, raise a bit of awareness of this thing, which is actually becoming unfortunately an increasing problem. So before we go on, let's have a brief look at the agenda. So, actually, I would like to start to give you a bit more background why I decided to present about this topic. I, well, we will look into what is burnout. How does it look like and how can we spot it. We'll have a closer look about the symptoms and how they evolve over time. We'll talk a bit about how we can deal with burnout and for all these steps we'll just not look into from one perspective. We'll try to cover this from different perspectives, like from the perspective of a effective person from a co-worker or from a team lead. So how can we deal with the things and how can we help out. And well, most importantly, we'll also have a look at, I mean, what can we do to avoid burnout situations. Okay, so, but, well, first of all, why did I decide to talk about this topic. I thought about this quite some time, but I never really got the motivation to make a presentation about this. And then this year's FOSTEM early this year, I saw a presentation by Andrew Hutchings, which was called Recognizing Burnout. That was a very, very good presentation. So thank you so much Andrew for giving this presentation. Finally, get me the motivation to go ahead with this talk. So at the end of the day, as you can imagine, my motivation is coming from personal experience. So I felt burnout some years ago, and I had to take some time off actually. At the end of the day, I've been quite lucky, even though it was, I have to admit, a very unpleasant experience. And well, during that time, I've been a team leader responsible for a team of engineers. And well, after my personal experience, I decided that I will do the best I could probably, I probably can to avoid that one of my team members is going to a similar situation. And what happened is actually then one of my team members suffered burnout. And to be honest, this is still something that bothers me and makes me thinking because you all think what could I have done better? Is there something I could have done? And I think this is for me still more bothersome than my own experience that I was not able to avoid this unpleasant experience for my team. So this gave me the motivation to look into this topic. I did a lot of reading. I talked to many people, to many affected persons to just discuss the experience. And what I realized at the end of the day, there are actually many, many affected persons. So that was really surprising that many people, even many of my friends actually knew about this topic, have been affected by this topic, or at least know someone who was affected. So I easily realized that this is definitely becoming an increasing problem. But at the same time, I could also see that there is still a big lack of awareness in communities, also in companies. People do not really know how to deal with burnout and do not really have a feeling what burnout really is. And this is the attention of this presentation to give a bit more background and to raise the awareness about this topic. Okay, so first of all, we're going to start with a question, what is burnout? It sounds like an easy question, but to be honest, it is actually not easy to answer because burnout is a very complex topic with many, many different aspects. So it is very individual, looks different from person to person. If I should summarize the topic, I would say it is a state of mental and physical exhaustion, which is at the end of the day, usually leading to a collapse. The root cause of this state of exhaustion is long-term unresolved stress. And when you do a bit of reading, you will often read the definition of long-term work-related stress. And I highly disagree with this definition. So I would say it is not necessarily work-related stress. At the end of the day, the cause is stress. But even still the World Health Organization creates it as a phenomenon caused by work-related stress. Once again, I'm not a medical doctor, but I highly disagree with this. So I would say it is caused by unresolved stress. It is not work-related. I would say the risk is not related to any age or to your job or to your work experience. It can basically hit each and anyone. And well, how does it look like? Pathologically, the symptoms are at the end of the day, in my opinion, not distinguishable from a depression. What might be different is the context. So the root cause is stress-related, but the symptoms are very, very similar. So now that we say it is similar to a depression, so we might get an understanding that we're talking about a very serious disease. Well, still there is raising awareness, but we're still on the way to understand this problem and just to prove that there was lack of attention for quite some time. Even the World Health Organization did not grade burnout as an official disease before 2019. So just last year, burnout has been added to ICD-11, which is the 11th edition of the International Classification of Diseases. So that means that just one year ago, World Health Organization put burnout on their official catalogue of diseases. Okay, now that we talked a bit about what is burnout, I would like to start with a couple of risk factors. So because that was the thing what I started with when I tried to understand this problem and when I realized that there are so many people affected, I tried to understand what is the root cause? Why are so many people suffering burnout these days? So I tried to figure out what are the risk factors that are causing stress and frustration, and basically stress and frustration is the root cause for burnout situations. So let's have an overall look of which risks we have nowadays. So a big issue I see is that nowadays we are always on, we are constantly available for each and anyone. You know, we have smartphones, we have computers, we can be reached by social media, by email, by phone, everywhere at any time. And I mean, this was not the case 20 years ago and nowadays it's really that you have actively to take some time off. So you have to actively decide that you don't want to be reachable or that you do not want to communicate. So this is definitely a big risk that we are always reachable and have to actively take a step back. At the same time, we have a big information overload. We have so many options to get information, we have to deal with so many different sources of information, we have to create that information. And together with this constant availability, I mean, our mind has to deal with that. This is very stressful for us and we have to learn to take our time off. Another issue I see, and that's actually also very interesting is bad communication. What I find interesting here is that, I mean, we have so many new ways to communicate, so we're always reachable, we're always on. But we just use the, well, the all these options for communication just the wrong way, instead of just efficiently exchanging the information that is needed. We always put the pressure on us that we need to communicate, that we want to be reachable, and that we exchange information even if it's not unneeded. So it's a bit that we have so many options to communicate, but we just use it the wrong way. So I think this is a big and growing problem in our society and definitely one of the root causes why so many people are suffering stress related diseases. So for sure, there's many other personal risk factors. And it's not, it's not just one factor. So usually it's a combination of things, right? So from a personal perspective, what is always a risk is a high workload. So it's not just a high workload, but high workload can always be a risk for sure stress and once again, not only work related. Extremely high ambition can be a risk because if you have high ambition and this is the case for most of the technical people. It's, it's hard for you to take a step back and it's hard to accept that you need a break. This definitely can be a risk. Another risk is that you do not really take your time off and it's not about the amount of time. So when I prepared that slide. I discussed a bit with a friend and originally I wrote here not taking enough time off. And during the discussion, we came to the conclusion that no, it's not about the amount of time, it's about the quality of time. So you need to take your time off. That would mean you don't read your emails, you switch off your phone. So you just take the time for the things you love and you're interested in. So it's about the quality of the time you have. Because if you don't do that, you start mixing up shopping spare time. And this is definitely something very problematic and is also well known cause for stress. So for sure there are also risk factors that can be given by a company, by a team or by working together in a community. And also the first point here was given by a friend of mine and I think it is a very good point. This is a classic specifically in companies that you have unclear role definitions or the tasks that are put on a person are not fitting the specific role. Because that might cause that people feel overwhelmed with the tasks they have to do. They might get frustrated because they don't have an idea what is really their role or what is expected from them. And this is definitely a risk because this can come without any attention. So I mean, if you just start up with a new team, you don't do the proper role definitions. So I mean, you just forgot something. There was nothing you actively did wrong. It's just something you forgot, but that could cause stress and frustration because people just could not deal with the tasks they get on their desk. Another point is missing appreciation. This is also very important and the common things in companies. I mean, you need to receive some appreciation for the work you do. And I mean, it's not just about the appreciation being there. It's about, I mean, the appreciation has to be actively communicated. And I mean, if you don't receive appreciation for the work being done, you get frustrated and you get stressed out. I mean, both topics that I mentioned here before are also closely related to leadership in the community or in a team. So if you have bad leadership or lack of leadership in a team, this will definitely influence the way of working. And this definitely can frustrate people and also closely related to this topic. It's communication. If a team communicates bad or does not communicate at all. This is a serious issue and it's really a topic where we should have a closer look. Then because one of the main learnings I had in my professional career is that having a good culture of open and transparent communication is really important. So if you fail with that, you will completely fail. And that communication topic is a big and underestimated risk factor in a team. So that can lead to a lot of frustration and to a lot of stress. And what is important to understand here is that bad communication is definitely an issue. But the biggest problem is the communication that is not happening at all. So that might sound a bit weird, but there is a very nice example here. So there's a short story given by Paul Watzlawick. He was a Austrian communication scientist. And he gave as an example a short story which is like, there's this guy who wants to hang a picture. But he just has the picture and he has a nail. So he just needs a hammer. But he doesn't own a hammer, so he cannot hang the picture. So what comes to his mind is he could ask his neighbor for a hammer. But then he thinks, okay, but can I ask him? Because yesterday my neighbor did not really say hello to me and he looked pretty strange. And now that I think about it, he never really said hello to me. So what's the problem with this guy? I mean, if he doesn't really say hello to me, he's got a problem with me. And obviously he won't borrow me his hammer, right? So I mean, but that's not nice from him. So I mean, I would give him everything he needs. So the story continues and he's doing circles in his head. And at the end of the day, what he basically does is he goes to the neighbor's house. He knocks the door. The neighbor opens the door and he just yells at him, well, just keep your hammer, you bastard. This is, I pretty much like this example because we can see that there's a serious conflict obviously coming out of nothing because there was no communication happening at all. The whole story was going on in the head of one person and if he would have spoken, which means that he would just have asked for the hammer, there won't be any issue at all. So, and I'll come back to this point over and over again. Communication is important and it is a key aspect. Okay, so now that we spoke about what is burnout and what are risk factors, I would like to speak about typical symptoms that people show who are getting stressed out. So once again, this is very individual. This can look very different from person to person. But these are the most common ones and usually it's a combination of symptoms that usually evolve over time. So we'll come back to that. But so the classic ones are problems to concentrate. That's usually the starting point so people easily get distracted. Therefore their work is getting less effective. You have a, and I can confirm that from our experience, you have a continuous feeling of tiredness and you remember the title of the presentation is when your mind is tired. And this definitely you have, this is definitely the case we have continuous feeling of tiredness. This usually goes along with physical problems. So like continuous headaches or getting sick on a frequent basis. So also a very common thing is that you have sleeping problems. And so the thing is you cannot really get into sleep. Therefore you have trouble getting out in the morning. So for sure that that really adds up with the continuous feeling of tiredness you have. So for sure there are also some real more serious problems like losing interest in activities like sports and hobbies. So this is basically when you come to that point, you're definitely getting into serious trouble because these are typical symptoms of a depression. So if you lose interest in things that have been important for you before. This also usually goes along with the reduction of personal contacts. Also many times other changes in behavior like the extroverted person getting introverted. A calm person easily gets stressed. So many other changes in behavior of a person. And also one very classical thing is escaping into other things. So people somehow realize that something is going wrong, but you just escape from it. So the escape is usually some kind of addictive behavior. That could be classical addictive behavior. But like alcohol abuse or whatever, but this could also be doing something like extreme sports. Training seven days a week, two times a day or I don't know doing base jumping whatever just escape from the problems that you somehow realize but you just escape from it. So now all of these symptoms. They usually add up over time. They cannot come from one day to another. So therefore we have to be to look at how things evolve over time. And very common thing is that many affected person can confirm that is that people start doing vicious circles. You could draw these vicious circles for any of the symptoms I've shown before. But the classic thing is how our burnout evolves is that basically you start getting tired. At the end of the day that makes your work less effective. But if you are a motivated person and you really want to achieve your goals, what most of the people would do is they try to compensate somehow with more working time. But that's a bad decision because I mean if you're tired you increase the working time what happens is that tires you even more. So what you would do is you try to compensate, but that tries you even more and you would just go on with these circles unto the point where you could just cannot do it anymore. And at the end of the day you collapse. So this involvement takes some time it's very different from person to person. But there is some involvement so now you would think okay this this involvement should be spotable right? Yes, it is spotable but the problem here is that as an affected person it's hard or mostly impossible to spot the symptoms. You on your own you just don't realize that something is going wrong. Other people around you they have a good chance to spot it. So this is why communication personal contacts are important because then you have the chance that other at least could try to tell you something is going wrong. But at the end of the day as an affected person I would say you just cannot spot it because you at a point where you actually lost the ability to reflect your own behavior. So it's always good to have people around you communication once again is a key aspect. You can also put measures. But we'll come back to that later. Now, coming back to the involvement of symptoms. So as mentioned, this is a thing that comes over time. Basically, so you start at some point you just get tired. And then at some point you easily get distracted and then you get headaches to get often sick at some point you lose motivation and at some point it's just too much and you collapse. So this involvement. I mean this can be very different from weeks or a month to years. But once again infected person won't realize that involvement. So unfortunately most of the people just realize it when it's too late when you just completely collapsed because we just run out of energy and you cannot do it. You can also have a different view on this. If you compared like that you say you charge your batteries in your spare time. How it usually should look like I mean you should start the week with 100% charged batteries. I mean, for sure you you lose some energy over the week, but in your spare time over the weekend you should be able to recharge your batteries you start the next week at 100%. How things usually evolve when you get burned out is that your time off is not enough to recharge your batteries or you just do not take really the time off. So you do not have the chance to recharge your batteries so you start one week at 100 the next week at 80%. The next week at 70% and well at one point you end up with a collapse because you just cannot do it. So now what happens here is when this collapse comes, for an affected person, I mentioned I mean you do not realize the symptoms on your own so for an affected person it feels like that this collapse comes out of a sudden. This is definitely not the case because there was a long story before where you ran into serious trouble and while you got really seriously stressed out. But I mean it just feels like it comes out of the sudden. This is definitely very individual once again but usually a feeling of being mentally completely sucked out. And that usually goes along usually also with a physical breakdown you just cannot do anything you're not able to do anything you're not able to do the most simple decisions. So it's very individual but is definitely a serious condition. If someone is in that condition and is in serious trouble so what can we do. And first of all, let me start with the perspective of friend or co-worker or team lead. So what can you do to help someone out. So first of all, the only thing you can do is you can try to make an affected person realize the problem. That sounds way easier than it is because the problem is it's not just that you could tell hey man I think you're burned out because the fact that person just won't realize. So what I can tell is you need a lot of patience here. And this is easily explainable because if you think about how communication happens. It's not just that you say something and it makes it straight into the brain of another person. So I mean another person needs to listen and do some interpretation of things you are saying and also to do some reflection on their own behavior. So now, in the case of a person that is getting stressed out or burned out this interpretation won't work pretty well, which means that the outcome of this interpretation would not be trustable. So this is just like we would run a program in a piece of memory that is giving continuous bit flips so we just cannot trust the result. So even if we tell a person that person might not realize that something is going on. The key takeaway here is that if we want to help we need to listen and we need to be patient. And we need to understand that because I mean that could also make us angry if we just want to help someone and we have the feeling that this person is not even listening to us. I mean that person might be listening but just won't realize what we try to tell and I mean, most probably they won't even remember afterwards that you that you really talked about this topic. So you need patience, please do not force anything that could make things way worse at the end of the day. Do you need to make people realize that something is going wrong and that professional help is needed. At the end of the day this is the only thing you could do this is the most important thing. But I mean there's no guarantee that you can help and this is also a fact that we have to accept, even with a lot of patients might not be possible to really help if the person doesn't realize. So what can we do as an affected person. First of all, the most important step is to accept the situation. That sounds easier way easier than it is. But once again the problem is you're in a state of mind where you don't, where you cannot really reflect your own behavior. And I mean, you would realize when you really collapsed. And as already mentioned that for you on your own that collapse come out of a sudden. So you need to think okay what went wrong and you need to accept that situation. And it is important to understand that you're not a loser you did not fail at all. Because you have this feeling of you, you're like a loser but this is not the case you're not alone you're suffering a serious disease that others have suffered before. This is something you have to accept and you need to come to a state where you can talk about the situation. And this is pretty much the basis for all the next steps you could you could probably take. This acceptance so for all for the whole recovery process this is continuous thing you need to accept the situation you need to talk about the situation. Which kind of help is really needed this is very individual and it needs to be decided by a professional that means you should talk to a doctor and see what is best for you. In any case, taking really taking time off and taking enough time off is important. And if you return to your daily business you should do that by step by step not going from 100 from zero to 100% just do it step by step. This is important because what we also have to understand is that I mean, there are many ways, good ways of recovery so don't worry, the way might be long. But even after the recovery process life will be slightly different. Because I mean like any serious disease also this disease will leave some scars, which means there's a very high risk to fall back to old behavior and bad habits. There's a high risk to run into a similar situation again. And so you need to continuously work on your behavior. This is a fact that you have to be aware of if you've been to a burnout situation so you continuously need to accept the situation and to work on the situation. So now, last but not least, we've been talking a lot now about burnout what are the risk factors how it looks like and how we can deal with it. But I think most importantly what we also need to understand is what can we do to avoid this kind of situation how what can we do on our own or what can we do in the way we work together to prevent these situations. So now, starting from the personal perspective. What can you do so what I can recommend you for my personal experience is to implement some kind of personal alarm system. Which means that the thing is you cannot grade your, your, your state of health, just based on your feelings. Because once again, if you're getting stressed out you won't realize that something is going on. So you need to put some measures. So what I really recommend is think about what is important for you in your life. What are the most important things so for me, most important thing is to spend time with my friends in my family. And I also want to spend time for doing sports. So I'm a cyclist I'm into cycling so training means a lot to me that this really relaxing me so I really want to do that to relax. So now, what happens if I lose energy or if I do not have enough time for sure, I would skip sports just to be able to spend still enough time with friends and family and this is basically the step where I realize that things are getting risky. I need to take countermeasures because what would happen in the next step if I lose even more energy I would also skip time with friends and family and then I'm already in a very serious situation. So I would need to take countermeasures so I really recommend to implement some kind of alarm system and, most importantly, also make others aware of your alarm system so others could spot that some things go wrong. Like for me if I won't show up for training for cycling for a few weeks. I mean the guys I'm training with they would usually realize that something is going wrong and they would talk to me and ask me why don't you join us for the training. So this alarm system is pretty simple thing. I mean for sure it's not a silver bullet but it helps a lot to put some measure in your daily life. Well, there's definitely more you could do once again take your time off and really take your time off. I mean that means turn off your phone don't read emails just take your time off. Do not focus on your passion on your job. This is also something I could tell you from personal experience what I always try to do is to do something at the same or even higher level of passion. So the same passion I bring into my job. I want to bring it into something else in my spare time just to have some, yeah, countermeasures in your spare time. And for sure. I mean, whatever you do this cannot avoid frustration or conflicts this is natural in. I mean, when we work together there will be conflicts and there will be frustration. But you should talk about it I mean once again communication is a very important point and we learned that communication that is not happening can be a serious problem. So, but what can we also do when working together like what can co workers do. I mean at the end of the day we should have a culture where we value each other where we talk to each other, where we listen to each other. And what we can also do as a co worker for sure we can spot changes in behavior so we see that someone is getting tired or getting sick on a frequent basis or just shows changes in his usual behavior. Then we should talk about it I mean for sure once again we need patients we need the people make realize but we could talk to others we could talk also to other team members we could make the team leader where. So there's a lot of things we could do if we spot serious changes the behavior of a person. So, and another important point, we also should look at the like leadership perspective so what could a team lead or a community lead do to avoid that team members get stressed out. So, most importantly, and I've mentioned this before. I think it is important to establish an open and transparent culture of communication. Yes, this is a leadership issue. You need to give people the feeling that I mean they can speak up they can talk about your problems and you should be a good example I mean it doesn't have much if you tell people talk to each other and you do not talk to people. That does not make any sense at all so it is also specifically up to the to a team lead to a community lead to establish a good way of communication. For sure you need make people feel valued so we talked about this also for the risk factors if people are not feeling valued they get frustrated. What we have to learn is for sure. If you're leading approach that we usually talk about the topics that go wrong for sure because we need to deliver something we get the need to get the work done. So, but we need to learn that we also explicitly state what went good. This is important. I mean, we need to address both and at the end of the day we need to give feedback this is this is very important. Positive and negative feedback, but giving no feedback at all is the worst thing you could possibly do. Because if you do not give feedback to a team I mean that gives the impression that you do not really care about about the work that is being done. And this does not make people feel valued so and there's a reason why many companies have actually mandatory trainings in giving and receiving feedback so that might sound a bit weird but it is very important. And also you have to give people a big picture of why their work is needed. That means make your decisions as transparent as possible. Sure, but always everything can be transparent but make decisions as transparent as possible. Tell people why their work is needed and why their task is important because some specific tasks could look boring or useless. But if you understand that this is a very important puzzle piece for the big picture, then I mean this gives just the completely different motivation to get that work done because you know it is important and you know why it is needed. I think it's also in the responsibility of the leadership level that you make sure that people take enough time off and not just taking the time off and really taking the time off. So it's not just once again about the amount of time. It's really about the quality time they are taking off and I mean as a team lead you need to make sure that your guys take the time off. And I've done this before that could include that you just switch off their email or their VPN access just to make sure they take their vacations. If there are conflicts within a team, we need to understand and address it. I mean conflicts are natural. We just need to understand it and if we have continuous conflicts. We need to understand the root cause. And I mean for all the things that go wrong in a project. It's I mean it's easy to find a culprit and this is usually what happens. You people just try to find a culprit know what you should do is go and find the root cause I mean it's like the one of the main rule of engineering is a problem that you do not understand will always hit you back very badly. And this just does not apply for just technical topics. I mean this is just the main rule we need to understand problems so we can address and solve it. Also, a topic for team leads is spot changes in behavior for sure if you see that one of your community members one of your team members shows a different behavior than usual. Talk about it, try to address it. And last but not least, I know it's a difficult topic, but we need to give people enough time for that task. For sure. If we work on a project if time is running out, we're hitting a deadline and I know we all like deadlines. It's specifically that nice whooshing sound they make when they pass by. So we usually get stressed and want to get things done but what I learned from an old engineer in the early days, and I just finished my studies. What he always told us is, if it's urgent, take your time. And that means for sure that won't change the urgency of the topics but just remember, take your time to think properly, properly of what you need to get done. And this is something I mean from a leadership perspective you need to make sure that your team has the proper time and the proper environment even things are getting urgent. Okay, so this was basically a lot of topics related to burnout. So let's quickly try to summarize what I've been talking about. What have we learned. So at the end of the day we have learned that burnout is a complex and a very serious topic. So once again, it is very individual. It looks different from person to person, but there's a lot of things we can do. So we have learned that there are symptoms that are evolving over time. But these symptoms are really hard to realize or how to spot for an affected person. So but as a co-worker, as a team leader, as a friend, we can spot these symptoms and we can try to address it. But also remember here that this is a continuous effort and it needs patience because the affected person might not realize, but we can try to take countermeasures early. As an affected person, we have to accept that the recovery process is a continuous effort. So that means that we need to accept the situation and continuously accept the situation. We need to talk about the situation and just continuously we need to, I mean, we need to remember that in our daily life and once again remember we can put measures. You can implement your personal alarm system just to spot early if things go wrong again. So once again, it is a continuous effort. And well, if you want to take one key message from this presentation, then I mean we need to come back to the communication. I cannot stress that enough. Good communication is a key aspect. So if we fail with communication, we will fail with many things and that will just cause stress and frustration for a team and for a community. So please remember, good communication is a key aspect for avoiding burnout situations. It is the key aspect for dealing with burnout situation and it is the key aspect for recovering from burnout situations. So at the end of the day, communication is the key. This is pretty much what I wanted to tell. Once again, it's important for me to raise awareness on this topic. Let me take the opportunity and thank each and anyone that gave input on this presentation. So basically this presentation was an outcome of many, many conversations. And I got a lot of good input. So thanks to each and anyone who helped me out. And I hope I know it's a very complex topic. It's not that easy to explain. So I hope it was kind of understandable. And for sure, if you have questions, please contact me at any time. Thanks a lot.