 So, out of the 40 plus hours that went into preparing this talk, I have a confession to make. At least one of those hours was spent looking for the perfect animated gift of fire that I could put on this front slide. Yep, yep, that was the best hour. The rest of them were all, you know, sweat and tears. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, I should have said, you know, bring marshmallows with you and whatever else you want to throw over the fire. My name is Alina Mackenzie. I am a consultant. That's a fairly recent development. As in between the time I submitted this talk and it got approved and today. I started out as a developer and I've been slowly and steadily and, you know, stealthily moving towards operations engineering. And in Twitterverse, you may find me at username chatteljaca, while in the Drupalverse, I am Ali Mack. One other thing about me, since Drupalcon Amsterdam, I have been involved with mentoring new contributors to the Drupal project. And the conference organizers ask all the speakers to include this slide. You know, it always goes at the end. I'm throwing it right here, front and center. The sprint is tomorrow, the only prerequisite for coming to the sprint is that you have worked with Drupal in some capacity, whether it's as a site builder, as a content author, as a developer, a theme or just a Drupal site user. If you have sprinted before, I encourage you to try mentoring. This is what you can do to kind of take your skills up to the next level. During knowledge, it will really boost your skills and your knowledge. If you have a laptop or a phone with you right now, I encourage you to visit bit.ly-burnout-scale. So once again, it's bit.ly-burnout-scale. I will make the slides available at that URL. This is basically the page of the talk. But the main reason why I would like you to go to that URL is so that you evaluate my session. This will help the organizers and your fellow attendees. You can share your thoughts on the subject. You can help me achieve my dream of getting the most reviewed session of all of DrupalCon. Whether it's good or bad, short musical break. So please review my session, even if you just say, that's like three-letter word, M-E-H. So let's start by taking a quick look around the Internet to see what are some of the things that are said about burnout. Here we have a prescription for burnout, five TED talks that can help you beat burnout. I'm sure those are great TED talks. I think one of them is by Ze Frank, whom I admire. I'm not sure if that's going to fix my burnout, though. So let's go to the next article. Here's overcoming burnout, 10 steps to reignite your flame and shine brightly once more. Fantastic. I'm sure it's full of good advice. In case you need more TED talks, Business Insider has curated 11 TED talks for when you're feeling totally burnt out. If Marissa Mayer was the track chair for being human, I don't think this talk would have gotten accepted. Marissa Mayer thinks that burnout is a myth, and it's just about being resentful for not getting to do the things that you want to do. So I was kind of hoping I'd find something like this. Try this one weird old tip to cure your burnout. Have we reached peak burnout? Are we sort of on the way to some kind of burnout industrial complex? The one common theme between all of these articles is that burnout is often treated and viewed and framed as an individual problem, as a failing of the individual, as a weakness. We often talk about the burnout of one, and we focus on the burnout of one. But what about the burnout of the many? I wanted to see discussion of approaches to understanding burnout on systemic levels. I wanted to see burnout put in the context of environments in which burnout takes place. So I did the thing that you would do, which is I tweeted about it. This was almost exactly a year ago. I tweeted, and I asked what I said. We should talk about systemic causes of burnout in our workplaces and organizations. And as you can guess, this was at Drupalcon, Barcelona, where I'm sure more than one person was feeling burnt out. This tweet got some traction. It got 25 reactions. Typical day, I usually am lucky if somebody likes the picture of my cat that I post. The next step after this was to find, you know, I'm a developer, ops person. Usually when I'm trying to solve a problem, I go online and I Google it because someone else probably had that problem before. So I kind of applied the same idea. I thought I have to find someone else who's smart and who studied this in depth and see what they say. And this led me to a book published, originally published in 1997, so almost 20 years ago. It's titled The Truth About Burnout. So it must be real. It's the truth about, you know, but it was really the subtitle that caught my attention. The subtitle is How Organizations Caused Personal Stress and What to Do About It. The authors of this book, one of the authors, is Christina Maslak. How many of you have heard of the Stanford Prison Experiment? Okay, quite a few. This was a study in the early 70s, a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or a prison guard. And it's considered kind of like a classic study on the psychology of imprisonment. And the person who was running that study said that in only a few days the people that were chosen to be guards became sadistic and the people who were given the roles of prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Within three days of the study, starting, one prisoner suffered a nervous breakdown and had to be let out. And out of about 50 outside observers who came in to kind of observe the experiment, there was only one who protested it. And that was Christina Maslak, who had recently gotten her PhD. She went on to become a full professor at Berkeley and continued to study the processes of dehumanization. Originally, she wanted to study something that's called cognitive reframing. And this is how people deal with strong emotional feelings in jobs where you have to remain calm and collected. And she started with interviews of people who are working in the human services professions such as healthcare, social services, criminal justice, psychological services. But she wasn't getting the answers to the questions that she was asking. Instead, people were coming up and saying, you know, let me tell you what I'm experiencing on the job. And that led her to the conversations about burnout. So the plan for this talk is to talk about the results of burnout and why should we care. What makes up burnout? I want to have us try and imagine what is the opposite of burnout? What does it look like? We're going to take a look at the areas of organizational life where burnout can occur, and then we're going to close out by discussing some strategies for addressing burnout, organizational and individual. I'm going to talk mainly about work burnout, but, you know, there are other types of burnout, right? Burnout and open source contribution is something that has been discussed and also burnout in tech in general. So let's look at the effects of burnout. Let's see what the surgeon general's warning about burnout would have on its label. First up, poor quality of work. When you are burnt out, you're likely to do the minimum and not go above and beyond. You might not have a spark, you know, for innovation or experimentation. And it's not just that people start building crooked websites full of bugs and it goes beyond, you know, the number of close tickets or features that you ship. You, when you're burnt out, you cut back on the time that you collaborate with your coworkers. You cut back on the time that you mentor your coworkers. Your outreach and recruitment, are you, are you going to do any kind of recruitment or outreach? Are you going to tell anybody, hey, you should come work with me, you know, spread the burnout around? No, you're not going to do that. One of the best forms of recruitment are happy employees and a burnt out person is not a happy employee. I'll give you an example from my own personal experience. I was, I was at a meetup, Chicago Women Developers and at the time my organization that I was with was hiring and I fully intended to, you know, let everybody at the meetup know that we're hiring. But as I really thought about it, I thought, I don't want these people to be as miserable as me. So I didn't do it. Another effect of burnout is low morale and satisfaction. You're not feeling good about the job. You're not highly motivated. You start with drawing from the aspects of work. You start with drawing from social aspects. And you also start with drawing from decision making. Maybe at a meeting you're sitting there and, you know, something gets discussed and you just, you're like, well, I'm not going to speak up. Why bother? Another effect manifests itself in physical illness. Insomnia, who here has ever experienced insomnia? Yeah. Gastrointestinal problems, hypertension, heart conditions, anxiety and panic attacks. Yep. Not only that, but there is dysfunction in personal life. Burnout is not a hat. You don't hang it up as you leave work. You take your burnout with you home and, you know, that affects the people that interact with you out in the outside life. And to cope with burnout, you might be you start using excess of alcohol, drugs. Essentially burnout is a corrosive agent. It erodes your relationships with your colleagues and the people who love you outside of work. Burnout can lead to self low self-esteem and that in turn can lead to depression and to suicide. It can also cause absenteeism and turnover. People who can get out will get out. Now in some organizations that Maslach talked to, some people said, thank God for burnout. It means we don't have to fire people. Less paperwork. It weeds them out. Yes, it's pretty, uh, pretty drastic. The thing about turnover is that it isn't just subtracting an employee from an organization. You're also subtracting. I'm sorry. Yeah, turnover. It's, it's, you're also subtracting that employee from other employees. Who can recognize this board game? It's called pandemic. It's a, it's a collaborative game, meaning you don't compete with other players. You, you work together with other players. And the objective is to try and cure for diseases, which are symbolized by these glass cubes before either time runs out or the diseases take over the world. So how can burnout affect the people around us? Think of the person experiencing burnout as being one of those locations, one of those cities. And when they're burnt out, that means they have like maximum number of cubes that can go on a city. In an outbreak, burnout can start spreading to other people that are connected to them. And this is kind of a cascading effect, which can potentially destabilize an organization. So let's talk about what burnout is and what, like what makes up burnout. The so-called three dimensions. As you can see that there's a cost to the individual. There's a cost to the organization. And then there's a cost also that comes to the people that come in contact with the person who is burnt out. Now, in our world, economic values, profits are often the primary driving force that inform how organizations do things, right? Human concerns are often left to be the last thing. They're not going to be addressed or looked at unless they have some kind of impact on economic values. I don't know if you've ever noticed how in discussion of issues around social issues like diversity, like inclusion, like representation, the arguments are often framed in economic terms. I'm not saying I'm not saying that that's good or bad, but that's often the case that we looked at economic values first. But to control that economic bottom line, we have to pay attention to the human bottom line. And we really need to affirm the value of humanity beyond just that economic value. So with that in mind, let's look at what makes up burnout. Number one, exhaustion, individual stress. The first thing that people think about when they think of burnout is being exhausted. It is related to work overload. You have not enough resources to meet the demand or your resources are spread too thin over a wide and varying landscape of demand. It manifests itself in changes in terms of your health, right? Your physical exhaustion. You feel brain dead. You feel irritable, emotionally fried, overextended, both mentally and physically, drained up, unable to unwind and recover. You start lacking the energy to face another project or another person even. In addition to exhaustion, there's cynicism. And this is where thoughts about the job start shifting in this persistent negative direction. You start having a very negative, hostile reaction to the people and the workplace. You back off from the job. You don't want to be there. You start shifting from doing your best work to kind of doing the minimum, checking out. And in a way, this is a natural reaction to the first dimension, right? If you're exhausted, you have too much to do, not enough resources to do it. The natural reaction is to cut back, right? You attempt to protect yourself from exhaustion and from disappointment. People feel that it may be safer to be indifferent, especially when their future is uncertain. When this sets in, as MassLog research indicated, it's very hard to turn around. The last dimension is ineffectiveness. This is seen later rather than earlier. This is that negative, cynical feeling that's turned inward on yourself. If this kicks in, it could be a precursor to mental health issues such as depression. This is where you give yourself a negative self-evaluation, a negative reaction to how you are feeling about what you're doing, about yourself. You feel ineffective, inadequate. You lose confidence. Every new project seems to be overwhelming. Even if you're perfectly capable of doing it, it just seems overwhelming. And it's kind of a vicious circle, a self-fulfilling prophecy, because others begin to lose confidence in you. And it seems like the world seems to conspire against you. And you ask yourself, what am I even doing here? So that is our shit pie of burnout. You're chronically exhausted, cynical, detached from your work, and increasingly ineffective on the job. Yes, I picked these colors on purpose. Burnout is not an acute form of stress, right? This isn't because of one bad project or one single event. What you're reacting to is a prolonged number of stressors in the workplace over time. It's a chronic condition. It's like a death by a thousand cuts. People refer to it as erosion of their soul. And this is something that you may see in yourself. You may see it in other people, and sometimes they will see it in you before you even see it in yourself. So I know that's that was fairly fairly depressing. So I kind of want to flip it around a little bit and approach it from the other ends to see what what is the opposite of this? This pie looks like instead of exhaustion, you have energy. You have enthusiasm about your work. You know, you're ready. You wake up in the morning and you're ready to commit time and effort to the tasks on your job. Instead of cynicism, you are involved. You're not dreading Monday. You look forward to going to work, to interacting with with other people at work. You want to be there and you find the work activities meaningful. And finally, instead of being an effective, you have a sense of efficacy, a sense of accomplishment that you have that power to do the things you want to do and you feel good about what you are able to do. You feel competent and effective. So if we look at those things together, really what we have is burnout is not like a fixed point in time. It's more of a continuum, a spectrum. This is the burnout engagement continuing. You're going to be from exhaustion to energy from cynicism to involvement and from ineffectiveness to efficacy. So you may fall in various spots on the spectrum. So how do we do the things that will lead people to have and retain that enthusiasm, to be involved and to feel effective? Getting rid of the negatives is going to be a different process than building up the positives. And this is not to say that one is better than the other, but we often forget about those positives. And then some occupations. Negatives come as part of the territory and there's often not much you can do to reduce those negatives. Like if you're working in help desk support, people don't contact you when they're happy about a service, right? They're always contacting you when they're pissed off and why isn't this working? There's no way to reduce the number of these negative reactions that people have. But it could be just as effective to focus on how to build engagement and instead of just reducing burnout. Maslow gives an example from her own experience, which I think is pretty good, as a teacher. Right? You work really hard to prepare lectures and then after you come back into your office and students come into your office for office hours, you just get complaints about grades, not understanding. Why am I getting this grade? Can you increase this? So what she did, she asked specifically, she said, if you have any questions, if you're not understanding something, come see me at my office hours, but also ask students to share something that they found helpful, interesting and good. And you know what? Students started coming in to tell her some positive things as well. And this helped her feel more engaged. And less burnt out. So we want to find low-cost ways to support that engagement. Where can we find those ways? The key thing that Maslow learned from the research is that where you are on that burnout engagement continuum depends on a kind of fit or a match between you and the workplace. The more matches you have, the higher the engagement. This also means that we have more opportunities to do something about it. So let's start with the first one that most people will be familiar with, workload, right? If you have a mismatch between the person and the job situation, you have too much to do, too little time, the demands are too high, the resources scarce, you're constantly interrupted, and you're frequently contact switching. This mismatch in workload is predictive of exhaustion dimension of burnout. When you have a match, you have manageable workload. You feel like you've accomplished something by the end of each day and you have a balance of work and outside life and some capacity to monotask. Being a great firefighter looks great from the inside, but from the outside it looks like a bunch of excuses for not improving. If your team doesn't have enough people and you are constantly firefighting without respite, your skills are atrophying. This is a quote from Effective Dev Ops, which is another great book that I recommend. So in organizations that Maslow worked with, people predicted that workload would be like the biggest problem, but actually the research suggested that it was the other five areas. Control, how much say, how much discretion, how much choice you have over your job and your tasks. When you have a mismatch, you're either being micromanaged and you lack influence and discretion and autonomy, or you're in a chaotic environment where it's not really clear who has control over what's going on. The worst that can happen is that you're being held accountable for things that you have no control over. On the flip side, when you have a match in control, you have input. You can make decisions, you can make choices. It doesn't mean you have total control over everything, but it means that you have enough wiggle room to sort of shape what you're doing. Reward, that's the psychological principle of recognition as well, raise and praise. It's a positive feedback that we get when we do something well. Do people notice? Are you praised? Do you get a raise? When you have a mismatch, you feel like there's lack of appreciation, lack of equitable rewards. When you have a match on reward between you and the workplace, you are recognized. You receive some reasonable financial returns and you have enjoyable work. In many instances, recognition by others can count a lot more psychologically than tangible things. Community is another area where, if there is a mismatch between a job and a person, burnout can occur. Community includes colleagues, managers, direct reports, vendors and clients. Your coworkers have skills, information and materials that you need to get things done. So, when people admire and trust one another, they will more readily share those resources. But in hostile workplaces, it will eat away at a person's ability to do their work. When you have a mismatch in the area of community, you have isolation, conflict, disrespect. You don't get enough social support. There's no sharing of information, there's no trust, no collaboration. There's unresolved conflicts and no good process for resolving those conflicts. It's what's called a socially toxic workplace. When you have a match in the community, there's cohesion, there's cooperation, there's social support, there's respectful handling of disagreements. Another quote from my favorite book, and I posted this on Twitter and it also got a lot of reaction. Giving people the time and space to strengthen bonds leads to better retention. We often stay at jobs longer than intended because people make the difference. I think it's quite important. The next area where a mismatch can occur between a person and a job is fairness. It's about the sense of justice that we feel about who gets what assignments, who gets promoted. When people perceive their environments to be unfair, their primary reaction is going to be resentment, anger, hostility. When you have a mismatch in fairness, there are secretive political deals going on, clicks, there's lack of procedural justice. It's all about who you know. On the other hand, when there's a match between a job and a person, you have open resource allocation, you have effective appeal procedures, and there's transparency about things like promotions. Now, it's important to know that this is all about perception. Things may or may not be fair or unfair, but they are perceived as such. If people feel this, this is going to drive their behavior. Mismatches on fairness are most closely tied to the rise of cynicism. In Maslak's research, this was an early warning sign. People who perceived favoritism, cheating, or other inequities in their workplace were more likely to be burnt out by the end of their study. Conversely, other employees who may have had mismatches in other areas, but who viewed their workplace as a just environment, they often came back and tilted toward engagement by the end of the study. The last area is values. Values are what makes life meaningful. What is it about the work that I'm doing that's consistent with the values that I'm pursuing in my life? When you have a mismatch, there are ethical conflicts. What you believe in versus what the job asks you to do. Sometimes say things like, this job is eating my soul. The conflict between values can also occur between what the organization preaches and what it practices. The organization may say, we believe in providing customer-oriented service, but then your performance is evaluated on upsells and selling things to the customer that they don't need. Conflicts can also occur between organizational values, such as organizations that say, oh, we believe in work-life balance, but then their policies and practices say otherwise. When you have a match, you have meaningful work, and you have an overlap of personal and organizational values. So these six areas where match or mismatch can occur that can lead to burnout are workload, control, reward, community, fairness, and values. And we can roughly map them to Maslow's hierarchy of needs For example, for basic needs, think about fair compensation, which aligns with reward and fairness. For the safety and security, you need to feel assured that your job is not going to disappear on you, that your work is valued by the organization, and that the organization is going to be open and forthcoming about things that might impact you, such as potential layoffs. This aligns with control and community. For belonging, people need to feel comfortable in their workplace and appreciated by both their managers and their peers, and this aligns with community and reward areas. And finally, for self-esteem and self-actualization, people want to feel proud of themselves and the work that they do, and this aligns with values. So once again, here are some of the mismatches that can occur that will produce burnout. Work overload, lack of control, insufficient reward, breakdown of community, absence of fairness, and value conflicts. The more mismatches you have, the more likely that burnout will occur. So, is it the person or the job? When we focus on people's behaviors, we tend to focus on people's problems, and that often makes burnout a personal issue, because we've experienced it on a personal level. We think, oh, maybe it's a character flaw. And this focus on the individual is why the majority of burnout prevention techniques will focus on that personal scope. What's wrong with the person? It doesn't tackle the larger environmental and social system issues. And what organizations often do is invest in personal change programs like workshops and stress management, workshops and stuff. This is valuable to organizations because they're very low-cost individual strategies. However, they often have low return on investment as well. And many people find them demeaning or patronizing, because essentially what they say is you don't know how to take care of yourself. And even if you take advantage of those and you change your own behavior, you're not changing the social environment in which you have to work with and in which you exist. The research data says that it's really the job situation. What is happening in those work situations? So is it the person or the job? Well, it's both. You have to look at a person in the context of their workplace to understand what's going on. The context is the workplace, the relationships that people have in the workplace. And organizational approaches, rather than individual approaches, can be more productive than an individual approach. Because changing things at work is never going to be an individual process. It's not going to happen. It has to be a group process. So, Maslack discusses two organizational approaches and offers case studies and example for both. The first one is bottom-up. This is where it starts with a person who knows the six paths from mismatch to burnout. They have some kind of ability to work with their colleagues because you can't go at it alone. And you have the commitment to stick with the process of change. So that employee goes and seeks out other colleagues who agree with them and want to work on this. Because you ultimately are the subject matter on your job situation. So you formulate a plan with your colleagues and then try and get an organizational buy-in to implement the plan. This obviously won't work if your organization is not supportive. So to kind of recap, it starts with a person, you get together with coworkers, you have a group project that you connect to the larger organization. And Maslack has some case studies of where this succeeds. But overall, this is very risky. One, you need organizational buy-in, which you might not get. And even more risky is the fact that beyond... It could be beyond the resources of a group of burnt-out employees. So the second approach is top-down. It starts with management, it becomes an organizational project and then ultimately it connects with the people in the organization. Any kind of organizational intervention to build engagement and to prevent burnout, it has to be an inclusive project. It's not something that you do to the people, you have to do it with the people. So what's the outcome of this? Do you get a burnout-proof organization? Do you get some kind of certification? No. Like documentation, like security, the outcome is a process. So where do you start? Well, in most organizations, you do things like financial audits or security audits. Those are standing operating procedures to assess how an organization deals with its fiscal responsibilities. In turn, what we do in this case is a staff audit. You assess how the organization deals with responsibilities tied to its employees. The goal is to identify problem areas, much like you would go to a doctor and get your vitals and bloodwork done. Or much like you are looking at your Nagios dashboard to see which servers need to be restarted or whatever. So an effective organizational strategy to address burnout begins with a staff survey on key aspects of organizational life. The staff survey, you are aiming for as many people as possible to answer it. You don't want just the people who are like, let me tell you about this, you want everyone to participate. In their studies, Maslach aimed for 80 to 90 percent. And you will have to work very hard to get a high number of participants. The survey has to be anonymous. It has to be confidential. And if you have a large organization, it should be broken into organizational units. There are two phases to the survey. One is finding out what's going on with the organization's workforce and then using that information, well, sharing that information and using it to improve the organizational culture. What goes into the staff survey? Well, you ask questions about the three dimensions of burnout and the six areas of work-life quality. But in addition to that, you ask questions related to management areas, such as communication. Is there a clear line of communication and credible messages that your employees are receiving? Supervision. Are the supervisors' managers supportive, responsive? Are they effective? Professional development. Is there support in your organization for skill enhancement? Doing work that builds skills? Support for work culture for learning? Or is that something that's delegated to you doing on nights and weekends? You ask about cohesiveness, which is supportiveness within a group and a shared values within a group. You ask about the view of the organization over time and the confidence in the organization's future and overall assessment of the organization. What you get from a staff survey is an organizational profile. And it's a profile of the organization as a whole, but then if you have subunits, you can break it down by subunits. So you might find that burnout is prevalent in some units, but not others. And different groups could be dealing with problems in different areas. The reporting stage is critical to the success. You have to have a report and share it with everyone. And you can share it. You're in the subunit. This is how the organization looks like as a whole. This is our profile. This is how you compare within your particular work group. It has to be timely and short and address the objectives. All right, so you have that profile. Now what? Alina, give us the answers. Give us the red pill or the blue pill to fix this. Well, there is no simple answer. I'm sorry to disappoint. This is where most of the negative reviews of the talk are going to come from. That's why you said it at the beginning. Yeah, not enough fire in this talk. The thing to remember is that factors in work environment play a much larger role in predicting influencing burnout than any kind of individual variables. So building this profile will help you clear up any kind of wrong assumptions that could lead to solutions that completely missed a mark. Maslak gives a really great example of this. At the start of the school year, there was an assembly of teachers that were given a speech by a motivational speaker. They're sitting there as they're faced with budget cuts and increased classroom sizes and staff cuts and everything. And then there's this motivational speaker motivating them. That was not what they needed, and it made them feel extremely patronized. Sometimes the result is not what people expect. Common expectation is that it would be the biggest problem is workload or reward. But sometimes it's something in the other five areas that makes the workload difficult. If you hire more people to deal with workload, but your burnout is fueled by breakdown in community or issues of fairness, hiring more people, throwing more people in the fire is not going to help. And change and improvement will never take overnight. It takes time to implement. The thing to remember is that no matter what the change is, even if it's the best thing for the organization, it is going to get worse before it gets better. Why? Because it'll be different. There will be glitches, missteps. The man's of doing things in a new way may sometimes, on a short term, outweigh the benefits of innovation. It's kind of like when you're modeling your house, right? You have to break everything down and it looks like shit. And then, you know, you have to kind of live through it and then it looks a lot better. The important thing to do is come back in a year or two and have another one of those organizational checkups to see, are you getting better? Are you getting worse? You have to know what the goals are. What are you aiming for? Sustainable workload, right? If a server, if this laptop is at 100% CPU or memory usage, that's not a good thing. So why do we expect the same thing of ourselves and fellow humans? Hell yeah. You want sustainable workload that keeps you going, lets you come back energized and allows you for experimentation. Choice and control in what you do. Appropriate choice and control in what you do. Recognition and reward, both intrinsic and extrinsic. There's this conversation that happened on Twitter last month that I found very interesting in which one person says, remember folks, your staff are motivated by autonomy, mastery and purpose, not cash, ping pong and desk beers. And the response to that, which I found quite witty, is honestly, I'm also quite motivated by cash and it'd be nice to stop thinking of software devs as aspirational aesthetics. The word aesthetic means severe, it's characterized by severe discipline and abstention from all forms of indulgence. So if you like, you know. Yeah, I don't know much about desk beers or ping pong, but I know about cash and I know that can buy me food and stuff. So pay people well. Supportive work community that has open communication, ways to resolve conflicts and in which you can trust each other. I couldn't resist one more quote from that book. Employees that trust in their organization to support them can take the time they need to invest in themselves and in their skills. This strengthens the connections to their work and reduces the cost, the risk of burnout. High trust organizations are positively correlated with higher quality of work as well. And you want employees and people in the organization to trust, to have that ability to trust their own judgment. Fairness, respect and justice. If an organization shows no fairness, then we lose trust in it. And we feel that the people in authority are not honest and do not respect who we are. Finally, we want clear values and meaningful work. Okay, so as I was preparing this talk, I struggled with exactly how much, how personal I was going to make it. And after some thoughts, I opted for the following. This is an open letter. To everyone who is feeling stuck, to everyone who is feeling hopeless. Maybe no one here is feeling that way, which would be great, but... This is for you. In 19th century factories, during industrial revolution, workers were seen as cogs and machines, easily replaced. And there was considerable effort and legislation and protests to end that exploitative, that set of exploitative labor practices. But the idea of the workplace as an inhumane, efficient machine that just feeds on people and talent, it is back. Organizations, unfortunately, often do not expect to retain their employees forever. And as such, they are unlikely to serve your long-term interests. If you're in that position where you are burnt out, here are some of the things you can do. Think of yourself as an independent contractor, even if you are not. A company of one. And then make the primary focus, preparing yourself for whatever next career opportunity that may happen. You will need to stick to a routine, even when you are pressured to behave otherwise. I have an example of this, not from my personal experience, but from somebody I know. She is a network engineer and she was experiencing burnout from a mismatch in reward. So... During lunch, she started doing a study for certification. And she did this for several weeks, I don't know, maybe it went into months. But this paid off. Eventually, she got an offer and then a counter offer. So it worked for her. Physical fitness. I'm not framing this in diet or weight loss or VMI. I forget that shit. This is about self-care. You're a company of one, you want to live healthy, you want to increase the resilience of your company. You want to reduce any kind of vulnerability that you might have to exhaustion. And to do that, you can use a combination of appropriate exercise, good nutrition and getting enough sleep. Now, I'm not kidding you, your job is not going to change because of this. But you will increase your endurance. I don't have any examples for this because... I'm not really great at this. Recovery cycles. Integrate some kind of recovery cycles into your everyday activities. You want to give it a structure, otherwise you will not make time for recovery. You could incorporate small months of exercise, like a midday walk, into your workday. If you have a friend at work, it's always a good thing, recruit them and share that burnout reduction project together. Having a mutual support is very, very powerful. My example of that is that I was with my office mate. We decided that we're going to schedule time every day at lunch, where we're going to watch My Little Pony. And not, you know, not worry about work or email or anything. That was our time. I would always try to guess what the plot twist would be. Positive feedback. We all know that receiving good vibes from other people is really, really uplifting. But so is expressing them to others. This is really, really tough to do when you are burnt out. I know this, because burnout corrodes your empathy. And this is why it's crucial for you to hold on to that, to nurture that empathy. And, you know, keep doing those acts of kindness towards your colleagues. Maybe not the assholes, but, you know, the people who are neutral. An example from my own experience of this is I implemented a chat bot in our work chat. And it had a module for giving kudos or props to other people. So you could say, you know, username plus plus. That would give them a point. The points didn't really matter. It's more about kind of like a public expression of appreciation for your colleagues and for what they do. The final bit of advice that I have is job crafting. This is where you identify duties that you find tedious and also aspects that you find fulfilling. And you attempt to increase the instances when you do the fulfilling work within whatever, you know, ability that you have. Your job is a collection of tasks and interpersonal relationships that you have assigned within an organization. So see if you can redesign your job to get a little bit more satisfaction from it. You know, maybe alter boundaries and take on more or less tasks. Change how you perform certain tasks. Or change the nature or extent of interactions with other people. Like, you know, avoid assholes altogether, if you can. You very likely have more latitude in your work than you think. Example of this, from my own experience, we were rotating... There was a rotation of who would answer tickets every week. And it would be like this wild range of tickets, you know, ranging from web-related stuff and email-related stuff. And I said, okay, here. I'm going to take over the web-related tickets full-time, but never ask me anything about restoring somebody's inbox again. You know, and so this way I kind of did a little bit of job-crafting. I also started to slowly inch towards operations and, like, stop doing development work, so that's the other thing. All right, if you want really cathartic... If you're burnt out and you want really cathartic reading, I highly recommend The Truth About Burnout. This was a chicken soup for my burnt-out soul, basically. And it's like penny plus shipping from the usual places. The second book that I highly recommend is Effective DevOps. And, you know, if DevOps is too buzzword for you, forget the DevOps. Okay, focus on that subtitle, which is building a culture of collaboration, affinity, and tooling at scale. Everything is better when you add at scale, at the end. It's a lot of actionable advice in this book and a lot of stories. And it's been recently published, like, this year, so it's, you know, it's fresh, like a delicious butter croissant. Okay. Please visit bit.ly-burnout-at-scale and tell me, is this session what you expected? Is there something memorable at this session? Which parts were completely bogus and unclear and need more attention? And what are the things that you want to see in a future burnout talk? My DrupalCon Dublin dream, again, is to have the most reviewed session, whether you hated it, liked it, or are indifferent. You know, you can just say, I'm indifferent. I don't remember this session. I was there, but I don't remember it. Yeah, say that in your feedback, and thank you very much. I'll ask this, you know. Back channels, man. I can't find out. So wait, wait, wait. Officially, what time is the talk over? In ten minutes. Okay, so we can all literally fill out the survey right now. Yes. Lock the doors. You cannot leave. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. Does anybody have any questions or things? Come on up to the mic. It's disabled. This leads, yeah, it's just a shorter URL. So this is a question I feel comes up a lot, or at least implicitly comes up a lot. So every company downstairs in the booth, and then more that aren't even there, are hiring. Right, literally everybody's hiring. And everybody's looking for jobs. But why do so many people accept shitty ones when the demand is so high from everybody? That's a good question. I don't know. Does anybody have any idea? The answer is simple. Companies have a demand for shitty jobs, that's it. There are a lot of open positions for shitty jobs. That's it. Yeah, in the room. Okay, sure. Hi, excellent session. I would speculate that we tend, in the hiring process, to attract people with empty stuff. Like we have a foosball table. We have a certain vacation policy, but you're not really addressing those core issues. So it's really easy to just wave your hands around and talk about, you know, having video games at your office, but not really talking about the things that provide fulfillment, right? So I think as a person who's looking for a job, I think we need to be more educated around those things that actually, you know, make us feel fulfilled as opposed to, oh yeah, it looks like an exciting start-up and I get to play with new services, blah, blah, blah, but that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of life in the day-to-day. Again, thank you. Thank you. What's your name? I mean, so I think I mean, got a really good point there that we tend to think when we're looking for jobs that the person is doing the interviewing and maybe we would get a little bit better results if the person was interviewing the company instead and asked for information that was relevant, like the result of a survey, like Alina mentioned. So that was a really good point. So I'm Gabor. I think we accept shitty jobs because we believe that it's going to improve. Like we have confirmation bias because we accepted the offer and we are there because it must be good. So it needs to improve somehow. And if we don't do steps ourselves for it to improve, do we just expect it to happen somehow in some way for us? Then it may not improve and then we'll just go into this endless cycle of burning ourselves out in there and then if we don't just leave there, then it's becoming a disaster. So I think we may not recognize it early enough because we have this confirmation bias that it must be somehow good. Hi, here is Eugenio. On the topic of you were talking about actually I'm responsible for hiring at my company and we do that. We ask people to ask us what they expect, what are their potential, what do they like to do. But sometimes they get also confused because it's like you should tell me which position you are searching for. But we are not forcing people to do what they don't like. We try to search the power of the people and to use for what they are good for. So it's also difficult to manage in that way. Take ownership over other people's problems. I think that there's... I didn't attend any of the imposter sessions this period, but I think there's a lot of... I've seen other information online about how that's something that you tell yourself. I should solve the imposter syndrome myself by thinking of myself differently as opposed to expecting other people to treat me differently. So I think a lot of times burnout comes from this person treated me badly or I don't feel fulfilled or I don't... And there's something I should be doing to fix it myself. I shouldn't be bringing my problems to someone else. I should be addressing them. So I think that there's almost too much empowerment or too much expectation of people being self-actualized and not enough support. Two minutes to go. Some companies might not necessarily know the kind of job that they actually are. This is particularly bad with companies which are fast-growing or have very deep management structures because those at the top might not necessarily have the impression of what it's like to be an employee at the coal phase. And when that cognitive bias kicks in, people at the top might think this is an awesome company, we're great, everything's wonderful, and they only talk to the top level. And of course they want to make that person happy and the person below that wants to make them happy and everyone else is miserable on the bottom. And that actually happens a lot in large organizations. I've seen it in IBM, I've seen it in HP and it just gets buried by the management structure. So it's something you always have to be careful of. Don't just ask, you know, the next supervisor, if you're a CEO, if you're a supervisor, don't ask your team manager, ask every person individually. Okay, so I have a question. I hope it's like, what are your tips for dealing with burnout? Because you have the answer to those. No, I'm going to ask you a question, you don't have the answer to. So sometimes I go to like super amazing talks. I remember going to hear Greg talk about the community. And I would put this talk right up there with that one. And I feel like what happens with these really great discussions and sharing of information and helping us kind of understand, it's limited to the people in the room. And the people in the room, it's helpful for us. And it's entertaining for us. And I'm really, really glad that I was here, but I'm so goddamn pissed off because the people who can affect this change are not in the room. And I don't know what to do about that. Drag him in here. So I'm not as good a speaker as Alina is, but I was keynoting it at Drupal North. And when they asked me to do that, I felt like I had everybody in the room that would never go to a talk like this. And so I gave what I felt was like the things that I thought were really important for people who would never be in the room, right? So that was cool, but I don't know what to do about it in general because it just happens over and over again. I hear people share amazing things, but I feel like that information doesn't get to the other people. And I feel like we're in this talk and the people who need to be here. Okay, some of you probably are, I'm sorry. Okay, props. Props for being here. But I feel like there are people who need to hear that, who hear this, who aren't in the room. And so what do we do about that? The people with the energy, resources, and autonomy to make a change in an organization. I will. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Can we get Alina to repeat the question? Yes, of the people who are in this room who are the... Who are hiring. Who are hiring. I can't talk anymore, my time is up. What's the size of your company? 100, 400, 10, 200, 120, 700. Are we getting kicked out? I want to make myself available to you. Okay. Establish a sense of urgency. Yeah, he's a great guy. All right, thank you. Thank you everyone for coming. Thank you.