Burnout: A Root Cause Analysis
In my everyday life, I talk a lot about burnout, work-life balance, and the boundaries people fail to have with their workplaces. Thus, it is no surprise that a friend of mine sent me this Refinery29 article. I read it with wry exasperation; watching people with more influence and larger platforms than mine catch up to my conclusions from years ago is sort of a pastime at this point. I was disappointed that the author neither finished root causing the problem, nor offered any solutions. They would not survive my day job in the manufacturing industry, that’s for sure.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a problem prevention process mostly used across process-oriented industries. Manufacturing, IT, and sometimes Medical use this Industrial Engineering technique to identify the original cause of a problem, come up with solutions, and then verify that they work. Taken together, these steps are often called a Corrective Action. At my day job, I am personally responsible for tracking our department’s corrective actions, from inception (making sure the responsible people are working on them) through verification six months down the line (checking to make sure the problem has not occurred again, and restarting the process if it did reoccur). Of course, some instances of Corrective Actions may be erroneous, but the process itself is a powerhouse when applied correctly to problems that did not occur by chance or without any traceability.
I watch my coworkers regularly struggle with RCA, despite having been through the same training as them. I struggled to pick up the language at the beginning, but once I could radically reframe it, I realized that RCA is just a ore structured and blunt verson of a therapy intake form. Contrary to the beliefs of some folks, my BA in Psychology allowed me to better understand manufacturing problem solving processes than peers who have a decade or more experience than me. Whether solving a quality control issue or getting your life together, the path is the same: identify the problem, ask why it’s happening until you can’t anymore, and then create, try, and evaluate solutions.
If I walk into a therapist’s office and say, “My life sucks and I’m depressed,” the therapist’s going to have a lot of questions for me before they can do any fixing. To preempt that multi-hour discussion and thousands of dollars in healthcare bills, I could start by asking myself, “Why does my life suck and why am I depressed?” And then, of course, come up with some answers. This is the first step of RCA, called the 5 Whys. If you’ve ever come across the Socratic Method, this portion is almost a dead ringer: ask “why” like a five-year-old until you get answers that don’t lead anywhere anymore, or are just plain stupid.
If I see that a process failed, I can generally walk my way through “whys” until I get to either “user error” or the process lacking something like instructions or bumper rails on the proverbial bowling alley of performing a work task. Most user errors can be solved with the same kinds of implementations. So how do you boil down, “My life sucks and I’m depressed,” to a problem that can be solved with bumper-rails?
Well, in psychology, those bumper rails are generally called boundaries. The Refinery29 article goes so far as to identify various reasons for burnout, depression, and life generally sucking, but never quite gets to a root cause. Thus, it’s no wonder they don’t offer solutions. Another complication is that the problem of burnout, depression, and life sucking is one with multiple causes. RCA has tools for multifaceted problems like this one, including 3-Legged 5 Whys, Fishbone Diagrams (aka Ishikawa Diagrams), and Pareto Charts.
It is not uncommon to discover more problems as one goes through the 5 Why process. Ideally, these problems should tell a story of causation: Z happened because Y happened because X happened and so forth. As the name suggests, only five layers should be needed to identify a root cause. If there are less, be sure to look at it from different angles (although sometimes the problem really is that simple, making our paperwork difficult). If there are more than 5 Whys, start looking for branches to the problem so that you can identify specific root causes.
Let’s try the latter technique on why “my life sucks and I’m depressed.” A client may list a litany of reasons their life sucks and myriad circumstances that depress them. Each and every one of these could be the Problem Statement to start asking the 5 Whys. But, then you run the risk of going through the 5 Why process a dozen or a hundred times. Using common sense, we realize we should group different circumstances together by similarities. The Refinery29 writer starts to do this sort of Fishbone Diagramming, identifying problems like working long hours and taking emails after hours; depending on work for benefits, healthcare, housing, and food (through money); and depending wholly on work for social interaction (though this is never clearly stated).
Then, the writer sort of peters out. That’s the problem with applying RCA to humans: RCA doesn’t care about feelings unless they are part of the problem or the solution. Coincidentally, manufacturing culture looks very similar. One crass way to put it is, “Money talks, bullshit walks.” However, burnout is not bullshit, and the Great Resignation is, technically, money. The lowkey cross-industry strike that covid support measures fortuitously made possible is speaking a language understood by those who have devoted their lives and identities to careers that demand a disregard for their and others’ feelings. At work, problems don’t get solved if you have to coddle a cause’s feelings. Of course, there is no reason to be nasty to anyone, but nixing someone’s idea because it created more downtime or let through more defects than another is nothing personal. Correction is the cost of doing business.
One reason that people’s lives suck and they’re depressed is their unwillingness to admit their mistakes. If RCA turns up a conclusion that you’ve been living your life wrong, well, no one can blame you for your inevitable visceral rejection of that notion. Ironically, this self-protection is one way to enforce established boundaries. The Refinery29 writer delicately touches on the subject of work-life balance and the boundaries one has to establish in order to maintain that. I say delicately because, in the current zeitgeist of left-leaning media, it is extremely easy to be called out for victim blaming when telling someone they are the only ones who can take action and effect change. Nonetheless, I’ll say it: only you can establish boundaries with your workplace. The workplace is not going to do that for you. They are going to take and take and take, and if you let them, you only have yourself to blame. You are not a victim; you are an enabler to their greed and your misery.
Horrible as that particular root cause may be to hear, it is also empowering. If you are the enabler, you are also the one who can take steps not to enable anymore. Get up and walk out after you’ve put in your 8 hours. People didn’t die in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1919 for retail workers to kill their souls being polite to entitled plague rats while their listless, discouraged store managers give up on requesting more personnel because the franchise refuses to pay a livable wage. (See? Another problem to run through RCA.) People didn’t get hosed, stabbed, beaten, and jailed for 60 years during unionized protests for 8, 8, and 8 until 1935 for us to waste our lives staring duly at glowing screens showing repetitive tasks because our corporate overlords can’t comprehend automation. Get up and walk out after your 8 hours, and don’t answer calls unless they pay you an awful lot. And fuck emails after that time.
If you’re afraid you’ll lose your healthcare and other benefits because you’ve decided to defend your work-life-sleep boundaries, then you’ve identified another massive can of worms that, unlike the prior root cause, we do not have individual power to solve. It’s one thing to stop letting your employer take advantage of you. It’s another to burn down an entire system of racketeering and price fixing, especially when they have lobbyists devoted to securing profit margins at all costs. Pro-tip for this debate: just like environmental policies, money talks and bullshit walks. Moral and ethical obligation are not the languages these people have been immersed in. So, lay that issue to rest and vote and protest and send money to support issues you think will help solve the problem.
Instead, focus more energy on enforcing personal boundaries at work. Walk out after 8 (or your assigned shift time) as often a you can. Refuse to take jobs for less than $15 an hour. Do the leg work to learn the jargon for positions you think you aren’t qualified for. And when bosses, coworkers, and workplace cultures disrespect your boundaries, do your best to keep a few months of savings in your account (another one for RCA), and then steal time where you can and get that resume brushed up and on the market. Unlike the romantic relationship that the Refinery29 writer drew analogy with, a job expects you to hold your relationship with it hostage; in fact, threatening to leave is a tried-and-true way to get a raise. Plus, they do the same to you with their rules and regulations. Whether or not it feels like a hostage situation depends on those rules being used to violate your boundaries. To use a childish example, if you’re not a morning person but your job expects a 6am sharp start time, then maybe your boundaries and theirs don’t match, and it’s time to move on. In Organizational Psychology, we call this “fit” and don’t blame either party.
This brings us to the final problem statement identified in the other article: the social needs that jobs fulfill. Accounting for the variance of comfort levels between individuals, the problem here is quite simple, actually: You will be afraid to leave your sucky, depressing job if it is the only place you get human contact outside your home. As a Five Why statement, this explanation reads in reverse:
Problem Statement: My life is sucky and depressing
1st Why (job)*: My job is sucky and depressing
2nd Why (work-life balance): My job doesn’t leave me time for anything else
3rd Why (social): I don’t talk to anyone but family and coworkers
4th Why**: I have no social life outside of work
5th Why: I work long hours all the time
Root Cause: I don’t enforce temporal boundaries, so I don’t have any time to make friends outside of work.
*The parentheticals indicate which leg of the 5Why we’re pursuing. This helps to stay on topic, because there are obviously multiple causes at each level that can be spun into new 5 Why forms.
** Here, many people may loop back to the third why. I see this with my coworkers all the time. When you encounter this sort of logical feedback loop in the 5 Why process, acknowledge its legitimacy, determine which makes more sense in order after the prior statement (here, the third Why), and examine all the other Whys to see how they read with both parts of the logical loop. A key part of this process is not getting endlessly hung up on the same thought. It’s better to list all the whys and weed some out than let a few limit your thinking.
The Corrective Action process allows for more than one solution — although, to the chagrin of overloaded office workers, every solution must be followed up on to verify that it solved the problem and kept it from occurring again after some amount of time. Although, if the problem occurs again, the entire process is redone to make sure that there isn’t another cause for the problem. If another cause is found, it is not uncommon to keep the one solution and add another. The problem statement, “I don’t enforce temporal boundaries, so I don’t have any time to make friends outside of work,” could be another branching set of Whys. This meandering, deep-diving method is both exhausting and critical for mental health.
Sometimes, though, it’s not necessary to explore part of the Root Cause, such as, “Why I don’t enforce boundaries” because the answer might be as simple as, “I hadn’t made them a priority.” In these cases, it’s worth just trying out the solution “enforcing boundaries” in whatever way falls between “natural” and “appropriate,” and then assessing how you enforce them only if the desired outcomes are not achieved (reduce burnout, increase social interaction outside work). Note, however, that this solution only solves half the Root Cause statement. “Enforcing temporal boundaries” will gather more time to your hands, but it will not assure that you use it for socializing. Thus, when you verify that you have been enforcing your boundaries, you will look for more time on your hands, not the development of a social life. Just expecting more free time to magically manifest a social life is silly.
How you want to develop your social life would be impetus for another self-assessment of your interests, and then Cost Benefit Analysis on each interest, and finally research and planning for your entry into that hobby. Of course, this is an overblown business-jargon way to restate a very simple Process Flow:
What do you like to do? Can you afford the money to do it? (Sorry this has to be prioritized, but we live in a capitalist society for the foreseeable future).
If no, pick something else and start over. If yes, is your life improved enough by it to justify the cost? If no, pick something else and start over.
If yes, research events, gatherings, platforms, and go from there.
As you can see, the Refinery29 article was long enough without finalizing the problems or attempting to solve them. Hopefully you have also noticed that each solution is, by necessity, personalized. This is why the 5 Why, Corrective Action, and other problems solving forms are blank forms. It’s not often that one solution can be applied to multiple problems (and thus we relish that scenario on the rare occasion that fortune gifts us with it). There are also always road blocks and dead ends to certain solutions, often found when asking Why. However, if you follow this process down enough rabbit holes and are brutally honest with yourself — known in the business world as being “objective” — you may find a handful of problems that you actually have the power and means to solve. And if you do, you’ll know your solutions are working when your life sucks less and you are less depressed.
