When ‘Going Above and Beyond’ Becomes the Operating Model

25 Sept

Burnout isn't always an individual wellbeing problem. Sometimes it is evidence that the organisation has been relying on people to compensate for something that isn't working.

There are phrases we use about good employees that sound entirely positive.

She always goes above and beyond. He'll never let you down. They just get on with it. Nothing is ever too much trouble. The team always pulls together when things get difficult. I don't know what we'd do without them.

I've probably said versions of them myself. And I've been the person they described.

There is nothing inherently wrong with going above and beyond. Good organisations are full of people who care deeply about what they do and occasionally give more because circumstances require it.

But I've become increasingly interested in a different question: What happens when going above and beyond stops being exceptional and quietly becomes part of the operating model?

Because at that point, commitment can start hiding something the organisation needs to see.

I didn't recognise it immediately either

I've experienced burnout. And one of the things I understand better looking backwards is how difficult it can be to recognise when you're inside it.

You don't necessarily wake up one morning and announce: “I am now burnt out.”

You compensate. You work a little longer. You think about work when you're supposed to have stopped. You absorb another problem because dealing with it yourself feels quicker than allowing something to fail. You tell yourself things will calm down after the next deadline.

Then the next project. Then the next difficult period. You remain productive. You remain dependable. Perhaps you feel you become even more indispensable. From the organisation's perspective, things may still appear to be working.

That's the problem.

Because sometimes the employee who appears to be coping brilliantly is actually absorbing organisational failure personally.

High performance can hide low organisational resilience

Imagine an employee consistently delivers 120% of what their role should reasonably contain. Management sees a high performer. But perhaps what is actually happening is:

· the role is too large;

· priorities are unclear;

· systems are inefficient;

· decisions take too long;

· management capacity is insufficient;

· vacancies haven't genuinely been replaced;

· responsibilities have accumulated;

· or the organisation has simply grown without redesigning the work around it.

The employee compensates. Performance remains good. Customers remain happy. Deadlines are met. Nothing appears to break.

So the organisation concludes: The model works.

Does it? Or does it only work because somebody is subsidising it with their own capacity?

The organisation may be borrowing capacity from its employees

I think this is a useful way of thinking about sustained discretionary effort. An organisation has a certain amount of formal capacity.

Employees. Hours. Systems. Management. Budgets. Processes.

Then there is another, less visible source. People staying late. Checking emails at night. Skipping breaks. Taking work home mentally. Covering vacancies. Absorbing additional responsibilities. Working faster than is sustainable. Being constantly available. Not taking all their leave. Solving problems outside their actual accountability because somebody has to.

That capacity doesn't appear on the organisational chart. It doesn't appear in the budget. But the organisation is using it. And unlike financial borrowing, nobody is recording the liability.

Resilience is a strength. Until the organisation starts depending upon it.

I like resilient people. I would probably describe resilience as one of my own strengths. But organisationally, I have become wary of the word.

Because there is a difference between: “Our employees are resilient.” and: “Our organisation requires employees to be unusually resilient in order to function.”

The first can be a strength. The second may be a warning.

If an employee needs extraordinary personal resilience to survive an ordinary working week, perhaps the organisation should stop admiring the resilience for a moment and examine the working week.

This is not just about workload

The Health and Safety Executive's Management Standards identify six areas associated with the management of work-related stress: demands, control, support, relationships, role and change. That matters because it moves the discussion beyond simply asking whether somebody has “too much work”.

An employee might have a manageable number of tasks but still experience sustained pressure because:

· they lack control;

· priorities continually change;

· responsibilities are unclear;

· leadership messages conflict;

· support is inadequate;

· relationships are difficult;

· or organisational change is poorly managed.

That is why offering another wellbeing initiative doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem.

Sometimes the yoga class isn't the intervention required. Sometimes the job needs fixing.

Be careful when your best people make difficult jobs look easy

This is particularly relevant to high performers. They often develop workarounds. They know who to speak to. They hold organisational knowledge in their heads. They compensate for weak processes. They spot mistakes before anybody else notices. They quietly resolve things that technically belong somewhere else. They protect customers. They protect colleagues. Sometimes they protect senior leaders from seeing the consequences of poor organisational design.

That makes them extremely valuable. It can also make the organisation dangerously dependent upon them.

Then one day they leave. And everybody asks: “Why has everything suddenly stopped working?”

It hasn't suddenly stopped working. The organisation has simply lost the person who was making a flawed system work.

Nobody else can do what they do isn't necessarily a compliment

Whenever I hear: “We couldn't manage without Sarah.” I increasingly want to ask: Why?

Perhaps Sarah possesses genuinely scarce expertise. Fine. But perhaps Sarah:

· holds information nobody else has;

· owns processes that aren't documented;

· has accumulated responsibilities over several years;

· has relationships the organisation has never institutionalised;

· or routinely works beyond reasonable capacity.

That isn't merely a people issue. It is organisational dependency. And therefore potentially a risk.

What does your employee survey actually tell you?

Organisations increasingly run engagement surveys. Useful.

But I would be cautious about reading individual measures in isolation. Suppose employees report:

· high commitment to the organisation;

· strong belief in its purpose;

· good relationships with colleagues;

· high willingness to go the extra mile.

Excellent. But they also report:

· excessive workload;

· unclear priorities;

· poor communication;

· limited influence over decisions;

· exhaustion.

Don't allow the first four results to neutralise the second set.

In purpose-led organisations particularly, strong commitment to the mission can coexist with unhealthy working conditions.

People may continue giving because the work matters to them. That doesn't prove the organisation is treating that commitment sustainably. It may actually make overwork easier to sustain for longer.

Purpose can become particularly dangerous here

Charities, housing organisations and other purpose-led services often employ people who care deeply about the people they support. That is one of their greatest assets. But consider the language that can develop:

· The residents need us.

· We can't let people down.

· We're a small charity, everybody has to muck in.

· There isn't anybody else to do it.

· We're not here for the money.

All may be said with entirely good intentions. But purpose should not become an unlimited claim on somebody's personal capacity.

An organisation can have an admirable mission and still design work badly. Those two things can coexist.

Boards should be interested before people become unwell

Burnout can easily become framed as an HR matter. Employee struggling. Manager intervenes. Occupational health. Employee assistance programme. Sickness absence. Return-to-work plan.

All may be necessary. But by then, the Board may be looking at the consequence rather than the cause.

HSE says employers have a legal duty to protect employees from stress at work by carrying out a risk assessment and acting on it.

So I would want Boards and leadership teams looking further upstream. Not individual medical information. Organisational indicators. What is happening to:

· turnover;

· absence;

· vacancies;

· overtime;

· unused annual leave;

· employee engagement;

· exit feedback;

· grievances;

· working hours;

· management spans;

· workloads;

· and reliance on particular individuals?

Then triangulate them. One indicator may tell you very little. Several moving together may tell you considerably more.

Ask what happens when people work only their contracted hours

This is a deceptively simple organisational test. Imagine that tomorrow every employee:

· works exactly their contracted hours;

· takes every break;

· takes all their annual leave;

· stops routinely checking messages outside working time;

· does only work appropriate to their role;

· stops informally compensating for vacancies or weak processes.

What breaks? If the answer is: “Quite a lot,” you may not have the workforce capacity you think you have. You may have a smaller formal workforce supplemented by substantial amounts of invisible discretionary labour.

That should concern leadership. And potentially the Board.

Look at the people who never complain

Another lesson from experience: I wouldn't assume silence means somebody is fine. Some of the people most likely to compensate are also the least likely to announce that they are struggling. They solve things. They adapt. They keep going. They don't want to let people down.

They may also have built part of their professional identity around being the person who copes. That means asking: “Are you OK?” may produce: “Yes, just busy.”

A better management conversation might be:

· “What are you currently doing that we could stop?”

· “What are you carrying that shouldn't sit with you?”

· “Which part of your workload is only working because you're putting additional hours into it?”

· “What happens if you don't intervene?”

· “Where are you compensating for a process or capability that isn't working?”

Those questions examine the work, not the person's toughness.

Don't make resilience training the answer to structural overload

Sometimes resilience training is useful. So are wellbeing initiatives. Employee assistance programmes. Mental-health support. Flexible working. Good supervision. Leave.

All have legitimate places. But there is something fundamentally wrong if an organisation identifies sustained structural overload and responds primarily by teaching employees to cope with it better.

If the problem is:

· three jobs compressed into two;

· poor systems;

· unclear accountability;

· permanent vacancies;

· unreasonable deadlines;

· inadequate management capacity,

the intervention should address those things.

You cannot wellbeing-programme your way out of poor organisational design.

There is a governance question hiding underneath all of this. Boards don't need to manage individual employee workloads. They shouldn't. But they should understand whether the organisation has sufficient capacity and capability to deliver its strategy sustainably.

That makes questions like these entirely legitimate:

· Where are we dependent upon sustained discretionary effort?

· Which services would struggle if one or two key employees left?

· Where are vacancies being “absorbed” rather than actually covered?

· What does exit feedback tell us?

· Where have responsibilities accumulated without roles being redesigned?

· What evidence tells us workloads are sustainable?

· Are managers managing capacity or simply relying on people to cope?

· Where is strong employee commitment currently masking weak organisational design?

That is not operational interference. It is organisational assurance.

Sometimes the answer will be uncomfortable

Perhaps the organisation cannot currently afford all the capacity it ideally needs. That is real. Small organisations face difficult financial decisions.

But acknowledging insufficient capacity is healthier than pretending it doesn't exist because committed employees are bridging the gap. If the organisation genuinely has ten people's worth of work and funding for eight, there is a strategic problem.

The solution cannot indefinitely be: eight people working like ten.

Eventually something gives. Quality. People. Customers. Control. Or all four.

I see burnout differently now

My own experience has changed how I look at this. I still believe individuals have responsibilities around their own boundaries and wellbeing.

Organisations cannot know everything happening in somebody's life, and not every experience of burnout can fairly be attributed to work.

But I no longer look only at the individual and ask: Why didn't they say something sooner?

I also ask: What was happening around them that allowed this to continue? Were there warning signs? Had additional work become normal? Was being constantly dependable rewarded? Did anyone genuinely understand the person's workload? Was the organisation benefiting from behaviour that was unsustainable?

Those are harder questions. They are also more useful ones.

The real measure of a resilient organisation

Perhaps we should stop measuring organisational resilience by how much pressure our best people can absorb. A resilient organisation should be able to cope when:

· someone takes leave;

· somebody becomes ill;

· a high performer resigns;

· demand increases;

· a manager isn't available;

· circumstances become difficult.

Without requiring somebody else to become heroic. That requires:

· clear accountability;

· appropriate capacity;

· good systems;

· documented knowledge;

· effective management;

· realistic priorities;

· permission to say: We cannot do everything.

Sometimes that final sentence is the healthiest sign of organisational maturity.

One question for the next Board meeting

I wouldn't ask: Are our employees resilient? I'd ask: Where does our organisation currently depend upon people consistently doing more than we formally employ them to do?

Then listen carefully. Because there may be people in your organisation who are:

· highly committed;

· excellent at their jobs;

· deeply invested in your purpose;

· currently making an unsustainable operating model look perfectly sustainable.

They will probably continue doing it. Until they can't.

And when that happens, describing the problem as employee burnout may tell only half the story. Sometimes burnout isn't simply evidence that an individual has run out of capacity.

It is evidence that the organisation has been borrowing theirs.

Sources:

HSE: Tackling work-related stress using the Management Standards approach

Jo Simcox