Music:
Speaker1: Hello and welcome, everybody. This is Joe from StartupRate.io,
Speaker1: your startup podcast, YouTube blog, and internet radio station from Germany,
Speaker1: Austria, and Switzerland.
Speaker1: Today, I would like to welcome Imre from Vienna here with me.
Speaker1: Before we begin, could you briefly introduce yourself and your background in
Speaker1: psychology, burnout prevention, and leadership coaching?
Speaker0: It will be my pleasure, Joe, and happy to see you again.
Speaker0: I have so many things I could tell, so I'll make it rather short and quick and simple.
Speaker0: I am a psychotherapist and teacher of psychotherapists, and before that I was an opera singer.
Speaker0: And I decided to become a psychotherapist because I was standing on stage one
Speaker0: night as Othello, And I had just arrived from a very,
Speaker0: very successful campaign beating the Osmanic Armada.
Speaker0: Yet I knew in two hours I will have killed my loving wife and will be about to kill myself.
Speaker0: And there's nothing I could change about it because Verdi and Boito had decided that way.
Speaker0: And I wanted to be
Speaker0: able to make a difference and to have some
Speaker0: influence and therefore I changed from portraying human catastrophes to preventing
Speaker0: them by psychotherapy or by coaching or by preventing burnout and other terrible
Speaker0: things that happen to people.
Speaker1: I will kill my lovely wife and then everything.
Speaker0: Kill myself.
Speaker1: Kill yourself, exactly. By the way, I'm a big fan of Puccini.
Speaker1: Did you ever play Puccini?
Speaker0: Well, I sang parts of Tosca, not the whole opera, unfortunately.
Speaker0: And I also was cast for Il Tabarro.
Speaker1: Very good, very good. Yes. Love Tosca, even though it's a little bit dramatic.
Speaker1: Talking about dramatic here, that is actually a pretty good shift here.
Speaker1: We are here today because I invited you as a guest.
Speaker1: We get something like almost 20 pitches some days,
Speaker1: and what caught my eye was avoiding and detecting burnout in your team,
Speaker1: and I thought that would be something I could invite you over,
Speaker1: talking about that would be of great use to our audience.
Speaker1: That's why we are talking today about understanding burnout in teams,
Speaker1: not only in you directly, but also if you're a founder in your leadership team.
Speaker1: Can you give us a few early indicators of burnouts?
Speaker1: What are warning signs and how can leaders differentiate between like temporary?
Speaker1: Yeah, it's been a busy time or chronic burnout risks.
Speaker0: Well, burnout, first of all, happens to those who seem to be most unlikely to
Speaker0: suffer burnout because they are the strongest people we have in our teams.
Speaker0: But they are also usually the people who do most of the work and put in the biggest effort.
Speaker0: And so they don't notice the limit when they come from enjoying their work and
Speaker0: doing good work to being driven by their work,
Speaker0: even to the point where work becomes the only topic in their life.
Speaker0: No private life anymore. No hobbies anymore.
Speaker0: Only work seven days a week.
Speaker0: And that's a first starting point when work becomes toxic in the sense that
Speaker0: this person is already starting on the road to burning out.
Speaker0: Now, we do have a little controversy or ambiguity in this field of burnout,
Speaker0: because the process of burning out, burnout.
Speaker0: And the result, the last stop, have both the same name.
Speaker0: And since we can arrive at this final state also on four different ways,
Speaker0: I prefer to call it voidness, emptiness.
Speaker0: You are void of every other interesting thing in your life than work.
Speaker0: So you can also arrive there by bore out.
Speaker0: You can also arrive there by dripping out and by draining out and by being burned off.
Speaker0: But we are talking today only about this part, where you arrive in voidness by burning out.
Speaker1: When we've been talking about this upfront, I was wondering to my audience if
Speaker1: they have ever noticed any increasing sick days error in really routine tasks
Speaker1: or defensiveness in their teams.
Speaker1: Let us know in the comments, what was your first sign that something was wrong in your team?
Speaker1: You already said that there are different ways of burnout that eventually arrive
Speaker1: at the point where you cannot work anymore.
Speaker1: And where, of course, also you lose the joy in what you're doing,
Speaker1: which is pretty bad. Can you tell us a little bit what role leadership has in preventing a burnout?
Speaker0: Well, first of all, leadership has to be very attentive to the possibility of
Speaker0: burnout arriving in their group.
Speaker0: They, as a leader, you must notice that we have been working on our limits now for a longer time.
Speaker0: It's okay to go over your limits for a short period,
Speaker0: let's say one or two weeks, but when a group is working way,
Speaker0: way past its limits for several months, for example,
Speaker0: you don't have enough people on your workforce, you don't have enough qualification
Speaker0: for the jobs that need to be done, you don't have enough...
Speaker0: People who can't care for the other people.
Speaker0: Then you will start to see that there are people going into sick leave,
Speaker0: not because they are actually sick physically, but they just cannot bear it anymore.
Speaker0: And they are usually the best, not the worst.
Speaker0: Then you will notice a rise in the overtime, whether it is paid or not paid.
Speaker0: But you will see that you drive out of your garage at your work plant,
Speaker0: and there are some windows which are still lit because people are still working there,
Speaker0: somehow to fill their deadlines,
Speaker0: somehow to do their actual jobs, and still because they think that their job
Speaker0: is very, very important.
Speaker0: And then they come to the next step where they think, if I don't put in the
Speaker0: extra effort, then the whole company is going down the drains.
Speaker0: And this is overestimating one's necessity, one's being needed by the company.
Speaker0: And once you're past that, you
Speaker0: are really into the funnel which sucks you into this burning out process where
Speaker0: you will finally land at being completely void of any possibilities,
Speaker0: of any power, any strength,
Speaker0: any interests, and just simply giving up.
Speaker0: And this may be deadly.
Speaker0: And now imagine you have, let's say, you have in a group a workforce of 10.
Speaker0: Now, one of them falls out because of burnout, which means that usually the
Speaker0: work of 10 has to be done by 9, which, of course, puts an extra strain on all of the 9.
Speaker0: Then the nine again, one of them gets a burnout, so all of a sudden the same
Speaker0: workload is distributed to eight people.
Speaker0: And I don't know how you can imagine to go down to finally having one person
Speaker0: doing the job of 10. It's impossible.
Speaker0: So you have to take measures very, very early and be very attentive.
Speaker0: The easiest way, of course,
Speaker0: to find out whether people in your workforce are in danger is to sit down with
Speaker0: them when they come back from vacation, if they have taken any,
Speaker0: and ask them, well, how was your vacation? Tell me about your vacation.
Speaker0: Oh, I was always thinking about the work and all the things we have to do,
Speaker0: and I have a new idea how we could do this or that.
Speaker0: That person is in danger of burning out. If one of your employees hasn't taken
Speaker0: a vacation for a year, that's a very, very bad sign.
Speaker0: This person has to be sent to take a vacation and has to be taken care of.
Speaker1: You've been talking about from a personal and individual perspective.
Speaker1: I would now like to take a perspective, for example, from a C-level executive
Speaker1: down to your managing level.
Speaker1: Are there certain leadership styles that influence the burnout rate in their teams?
Speaker1: Of course, they'll have some type of SIG percentage reporting,
Speaker1: some type of color indicator.
Speaker1: But as you've already shown, when you go from a team of 10, you go down to 9,
Speaker1: you go down to 7, that should really, really raise a lot of red flags.
Speaker1: Could you talk about the leadership style here?
Speaker0: Oh, well, definitely. You see, any
Speaker0: leadership style that does not listen very carefully to the sound of their employees
Speaker0: is prone to produce burnout and voidness at the end.
Speaker0: And also leaders who think that,
Speaker0: oh, I have so much work and I don't see why my employees shouldn't have as much
Speaker0: work as well are also dangerous leaders in the end.
Speaker0: And third, I think that any leadership style that goes by numbers.
Speaker0: You know, just looking at the numbers is way, way too far away from the employees.
Speaker0: I think leading people is a person's job.
Speaker0: You have to have the personality of the leader.
Speaker0: And this is not something you learn in any management school,
Speaker0: but this is an attitude you have to learn through personality development,
Speaker0: maybe even personal training,
Speaker0: but that is not what you learn when you follow courses of accounting and of
Speaker0: all these numbers-based leadership styles.
Speaker0: I'm also quite aware that right now there is a so-called Leadership 5.0,
Speaker0: which is basing itself on artificial intelligence.
Speaker0: Sorry, a person does not want to talk with artificial intelligence.
Speaker0: You don't want to go on a date with some artificial intelligence.
Speaker0: You don't want to have your boss as artificial intelligence.
Speaker0: You need a person because you work, and that is something you have to keep in mind.
Speaker0: You work with and for people. And latest research by D.
Speaker0: Lloyd has shown that people, about 75% of our workforce, come to us because
Speaker0: of the company's name, reputation,
Speaker0: or because it's a very interesting job, or whatever benefits there are.
Speaker0: But 65 to 70% of these people are leaving because of their direct superiority.
Speaker0: Because they have not gotten enough attention, they have not gotten enough mental, emotional rewards.
Speaker0: And then there are again 30% who say the workplace atmosphere was so horrible,
Speaker0: no fun, no puns, nothing just work, work, work, work, and they left for that.
Speaker0: But when you ask them whose responsibility it is to have a good atmosphere in
Speaker0: the workplace, they say it's the boss's responsibility.
Speaker0: So at the 60 and then the 30, you arrive at 90% of those who leave us that are
Speaker0: leaving us because of their direct superiors.
Speaker1: I was wondering, when you've been saying about the managing by numbers,
Speaker1: there are a lot of entrepreneurs,
Speaker1: leaders who have organizations big enough that they necessarily cannot talk
Speaker1: to all the employees, also thinking about international branches and so on and so forth.
Speaker1: How would you recommend they try to avoid the burnouts in their teams without
Speaker1: only looking at the numbers?
Speaker1: Is it like regular visits, regular exchanges with leadership team there on site?
Speaker0: Well, that's a very good idea to start with, but of course, that's usually not enough.
Speaker0: I think that basically our employees of today want to be respected as human
Speaker0: beings, and they want to have a little say about what's happening in the company.
Speaker0: So we at LeoVeen.com have developed a special tool for companies to get very
Speaker0: good feedback from their employees,
Speaker0: but not in the usual form, which is you as the employee fill out something and your boss gets it.
Speaker0: In our concept, in our project,
Speaker0: employees are invited to fill out just 48 questions and grade them from one
Speaker0: to nine and send them directly to our company.
Speaker0: And we guarantee 100% confidentiality.
Speaker1: Thank you very much,
Speaker0: Yes. So, and then from that, we calculate, this is numbers again,
Speaker0: yes, but it's an average.
Speaker0: We calculate how much the whole workforce is in danger,
Speaker0: And we also provide the employer with a possibility to see which fields of improvement
Speaker0: would yield the best results.
Speaker0: In addition to that, since all the questionnaires are coded,
Speaker0: employees get the first feedback which says, oh, congratulations,
Speaker0: you have a very healthy workplace.
Speaker0: To, well, some improvement might be necessary to the point of there is urgent
Speaker0: need of action where they can,
Speaker0: provided the company agrees to that.
Speaker0: Come to our coaches for advice.
Speaker0: They just deliver a voucher that they have got from their company,
Speaker0: but the voucher does not say to whom it belongs.
Speaker0: So, and that voucher again is our means for laying out the fees for the company.
Speaker0: So it is a very, very safe way of employees and employers getting good feedback.
Speaker0: Good feedback means it's useful feedback. You can do something with it.
Speaker0: And therefore, we have been very successful with this.
Speaker0: But since we are very much based on confidentiality,
Speaker0: we also do not use our customers for our own advertising,
Speaker0: which is something that might make it difficult in today's field of attractivity,
Speaker0: where everybody is boasting with 500 acknowledgements and feedbacks.
Speaker0: We don't do that. We invite the company.
Speaker0: First, usually it will be the HR responsible or it's the CEO himself,
Speaker0: herself, to have the first personal meeting.
Speaker0: Then we are very willing to come to the company and give a speech,
Speaker0: a presentation on burnout and its dangers and its effects and present our model of the project.
Speaker0: And then even after that there might be a vote among the employees or on the
Speaker0: other hand on the management level yes let's do it or yes we would like to have this.
Speaker0: It's all about trust and cooperation.
Speaker0: You cannot force anybody to be truthful because I say, please be truthful. No, please.
Speaker0: Just be truthful. No, sorry, that doesn't work.
Speaker0: That's what is called management style X by color, as opposed to Y,
Speaker0: which is more lenient leadership.
Speaker1: You are already quite ahead of me. What I want to ask you, let me take one step
Speaker1: back before we get into practical strategies for burnout prevention.
Speaker1: We already know you recommend involving a third party, involving questionnaires.
Speaker1: But before we get into that, can a company do something in terms of workplace
Speaker1: culture, avoiding burnout risk?
Speaker1: How can they manifest, contribute to ingrain in the culture pieces that would
Speaker1: minimize, not completely avoid, but minimize the burnout risk? What would that be?
Speaker0: There are certain measures, but it makes a difference whether you just try something
Speaker0: because you have heard that it worked somewhere, As opposed to,
Speaker0: I come back to what I just said,
Speaker0: having a precise and clear-cut feedback that says most likely, for example,
Speaker0: improving the feedback culture or dealing better with so-called mistakes.
Speaker0: So I don't call it a mistake culture, I call it a development culture, or a learning culture.
Speaker0: And then of course some people think that they are in the wrong place. Now if,
Speaker0: 30% of your employees think I'm in the wrong place, then definitely re-evaluating
Speaker0: who is doing what is a very recommendable approach.
Speaker0: While if everybody thinks they're in the right place and you evaluate again,
Speaker0: that doesn't make any impact whatsoever.
Speaker0: You know, it reminds me of an experiment that was done about 100 years ago.
Speaker0: A big factory hall where women were assembling light bulbs.
Speaker0: And in came a group of researchers with their pads and everything,
Speaker0: and they talked to the ladies, and then they gave the recommendation,
Speaker0: let us increase the power of the lighting by 20%.
Speaker0: They did it, and the output rose by 20%.
Speaker0: Now, they said, well, why don't we raise it for another 10 percent?
Speaker0: It was even brighter and lighter by 10 percent, and the output was 10 percent higher.
Speaker0: And then they said, well, this cannot be true, that the output is a direct,
Speaker0: relevant coefficient of lighting.
Speaker0: So let us reduce the light by 10% again and they did it and the output rose by 10%.
Speaker0: And so they really got into researching this and finally they found out the
Speaker0: output was not a result of the lighting it was a result of being asked about their situation,
Speaker0: having somebody caring for them.
Speaker0: And so in that case, they learned you have to care for your employees.
Speaker0: You have to involve them in what's happening.
Speaker0: You have to raise their self-esteem.
Speaker0: But many other possibilities are there, too.
Speaker0: So I am still an advocate of either asking the employees directly,
Speaker0: which might yield unwanted results,
Speaker0: like pay me more, let me work less,
Speaker0: as opposed to the truly relevant factors, which might be like having more freedom
Speaker0: of action or having the information.
Speaker0: I need at the time I need it and in the full amount I need it, those kinds of things.
Speaker0: So then improving the information flow might prevent burnout.
Speaker1: I see. So if you ingrain this caring about your employees in the company culture,
Speaker1: that will be already a pretty good indicator that you try at least to minimize the risk,
Speaker1: even though we all know, unfortunately, this is not necessary, always 100% secure.
Speaker1: Let us get to a little ad break.
Speaker1: And when we're back, we talk a little bit about addressing work overload phases
Speaker1: and proactive leadership involvement and psychological safety.
Speaker1: Hey, guys. Thank you for sticking around. We are back with Imre talking about
Speaker1: early detection of potential burnouts in your teams and the roles of leadership.
Speaker1: We have just talked about how we can find and address these burnouts and what
Speaker1: data-driven approach with feedback culture you are recommending.
Speaker1: And we also talked about how to include this potentially in your company culture.
Speaker1: Now, I would like to talk a little bit about addressing the overload and regeneration phases.
Speaker1: How should companies define healthy work rest cycle for employees?
Speaker1: For example, I was once talking to an entrepreneur and he insisted that his
Speaker1: people take at least one week off per quarter.
Speaker0: Oh, I agree with that gentleman 100%.
Speaker0: And I think I said it before that if a person has not taken leave at all for a whole year,
Speaker0: that is definitely a warning sign that burnout might be already way on its way.
Speaker0: I think there is a big misunderstanding in general we have this expression work
Speaker0: life balance and we think that on the one hand there is work on the other hand
Speaker0: there is life and they should be in balance,
Speaker0: in my perception this is a big mistake it's called work life balance That means in your work life,
Speaker0: while you are at work, there must be a balance between,
Speaker0: sort of stop and go, taking a rest and then getting to work again.
Speaker0: You need these moments.
Speaker0: Resting, of getting your resilience going at your workplace,
Speaker0: not wait until you are at home.
Speaker0: And that is something that good workplaces provide,
Speaker0: be it, I know of an organization here in Vienna where they offered half an hour of sports after lunch.
Speaker0: So just gymnastics or throwing the ball or frisbee around or whatever was possible due to the weather.
Speaker0: But, of course, it was not just the people,
Speaker0: okay, you can go out into the park now, But we have an animateur who is with
Speaker0: you in the park and who will play all kinds of relaxing and at the same time
Speaker0: mind-opening games with you.
Speaker1: Actually, that really plays into what I've been learning about myself.
Speaker1: When I started Sotabrate.io and I still do this, I work quite a lot.
Speaker1: So working until midnight is not uncommon once or twice a week.
Speaker1: But I realized I get a much better balance if I do spend in the meantime more time with my family.
Speaker1: Plus what I tend to do like the old people do. I get out for a walk at least 30 minutes a day.
Speaker1: And that helped me really very much. We try to also communicate some German culture here.
Speaker1: What we say for unwinding here in Germany is let your soul dangle.
Speaker1: Give it some time, relax it. That was what I had in mind when we were talking about that.
Speaker0: Well, actually, this letting your soul hand dangle is a quote from Johann Wolfgang
Speaker0: Goethe where he already said,
Speaker0: just lie in the meadow and let your soul dangle and you will find the most fantastic
Speaker0: and amusing or even clarifying ideas.
Speaker0: And basically you have to get out of thinking always of your work in order to
Speaker0: have better ideas for your work.
Speaker0: So we know that you can get the output you want in the quantity and in the timeliness
Speaker0: you want by being strict.
Speaker0: But if you let your people work as they think it's right for them,
Speaker0: you will in addition get the quality,
Speaker0: get the innovation, and also get the persistence.
Speaker0: So it will not be broken in two days, but it will stay working for maybe decades.
Speaker0: All that is part of why leadership should take care of these threats of burnout,
Speaker0: also from an economic point of view.
Speaker0: It's not just because we are so nice.
Speaker0: It's not just because we like humans.
Speaker0: Excuse me, we trap ourselves into this type of thinking.
Speaker0: It is very, very economic because it's not the weakest in performance who go
Speaker0: to burnout, but the best.
Speaker0: Those really carry your whole success.
Speaker0: And therefore, I think it's like taking summer tires in a winter snowstorm,
Speaker0: not to look after your employees',
Speaker0: well-being in that sense, not to make sure that they can and want to stick around.
Speaker1: I was wondering when you talk about not only from the goodness of your heart,
Speaker1: but what actually should drive your curiousness for human beings and should
Speaker1: be already something you want to do.
Speaker1: But also there is, of course, a financial rule to this because it takes quite
Speaker1: a long time for an employee to recover from burnout.
Speaker1: I had this here around in Germany and you can be sick up to 18 months and then
Speaker1: you have a phase of up to half a year of reintegration.
Speaker1: Can you share your experiences with that?
Speaker0: Yes, this is exactly the number I have too. And I know that,
Speaker0: It is a big, big loss for the company because what do you do?
Speaker0: You have no guarantee that, number one, this person will come back at all.
Speaker0: You don't know the exact time, how long it will take that person to recover.
Speaker0: So you cannot say, okay, I hire somebody else for six months and then the other
Speaker0: person will be back. So you have absolutely nothing to go by.
Speaker0: And therefore, maybe the idea is, now, I have been giving this person definitely too much work.
Speaker0: Let's assume he will be back in one and a half or two years.
Speaker0: Then this person will still have a need of a certain time to reintegrate.
Speaker0: And for those two years, it's definitely feasible and sensible to get somebody else.
Speaker0: And then when this person comes back, then we sit together and redistribute the workload.
Speaker0: So it's always about not having enough people.
Speaker0: And replacing a person who is on sick leave is definitely a better investment
Speaker0: than just to have the others burn out while waiting for him or her to come back.
Speaker1: I was wondering for our audience, what strategies have worked for you in reducing
Speaker1: burnout in your team in the past?
Speaker1: Have you implemented any specific policies or initiatives that have made a difference?
Speaker1: Drop your thoughts in the comments here.
Speaker0: Okay. First of all, what worked very well was to clearly define the number of people I am leading.
Speaker0: And that number should not be more than seven.
Speaker0: If I have more people, because I'm building up the company, for example,
Speaker0: that would mean that I already have to work in some sort of divisions system.
Speaker0: So generally, going from the top to the bottom, it's groups of sevens, maximum tens.
Speaker0: And that means that these are your direct reports.
Speaker0: You don't have more than 10, let's say,
Speaker0: direct reports, and you have to have enough time to lead these direct reports
Speaker0: consequently with all aspects involved.
Speaker0: That is to say, we're talking to them at least once a year, this famous once
Speaker0: a year evaluation in German called Jahresgespräch,
Speaker0: where I have seen so many companies who have realized, yes.
Speaker0: Bosses need to talk to their employees.
Speaker0: And then when they introduced it, some of the supervisors said,
Speaker0: why do I have to talk to them?
Speaker0: They know everything anyway.
Speaker0: And others came and said, may I only talk to them once? I like to talk to them several times.
Speaker0: But this is one basic conversation that only has three topics.
Speaker0: Number one, what did we do well in our cooperation?
Speaker0: You and I. Not the company, not the others. You and I.
Speaker0: Secondly, what are we going to improve concerning our cooperation in the coming year?
Speaker0: And then we're talking about wishes. is, we're talking about needs,
Speaker0: we are not talking about complaints, because the complaints have to be turned into future actions.
Speaker0: And then the third topic is, where should, respectively, would the employee like to develop?
Speaker0: And that's all, not about paying,
Speaker0: not about any other things, only these three topics, and take one and a half
Speaker0: to two hours for these three topics,
Speaker0: and you have done all you can do to plant the seed of trust between your employee and yourself.
Speaker0: And then you will get honest and valuable feedback from your employee when he
Speaker0: will tell you in time, listen, boss, this is getting too much for me.
Speaker0: I need some other arrangement.
Speaker0: We have to talk about finding different ways of doing my work,
Speaker0: or is there something I could let go of,
Speaker0: which is the hardest thing for every employee to get,
Speaker0: to let go of something, because the more jobs and the more chores you have,
Speaker0: you feel the more needed and important.
Speaker0: Not just to say powerful, but important.
Speaker1: We are a podcast also focused on tech entrepreneurship, talking a little bit
Speaker1: about future trends in burnout prevention here.
Speaker1: Do you see any potential with the rise of AI-driven workplace analytics that
Speaker1: technology can be used to monitor and mitigate burnout risk?
Speaker0: Well, I'm not a great friend of AI, but I'm also not a terrible enemy of it.
Speaker0: I think that it needs to be used in a very human way,
Speaker0: which is to say what can be done by AI and not so well done by a human should be done by AI.
Speaker0: And that is to have one or two monitoring systems, but never replacing the interaction
Speaker0: between superiors and employees,
Speaker0: but rather assisting also the employees so that the employee can see,
Speaker0: oh, wait a minute, I haven't had a week of leave for the past 12 months.
Speaker0: I need to take one now, and then AI maybe shows a red flag right there to the
Speaker0: employee rather than to the boss where
Speaker0: many employees think they are being controlled by some machine or so.
Speaker0: I think you may remember this big scandal in Germany where a company had name tags for everybody,
Speaker0: but the name tag was at the same
Speaker0: time a monitor that was registering every time you pass certain doors.
Speaker0: And so usually the company knew earlier than the female employee that she was
Speaker0: pregnant because she was going to the loo more often.
Speaker0: And so they had an increase in the frequency of her visits to the restroom,
Speaker0: which told them, oh, maybe she's pregnant.
Speaker0: I think we have to get rid of her before she goes on pregnancy leave.
Speaker0: So examples like these stick unfortunately in the minds of our co-workers and give them a sort of fear,
Speaker0: what if the machines control me even more?
Speaker0: So AI is seen usually as a means of being controlled and being manipulated.
Speaker0: While put at the person's use and control, it may seem very helpful to say,
Speaker0: listen, you haven't had your leave now for such a long time.
Speaker0: Hey, you have gained 10 pounds in the last five months.
Speaker0: You know the seats can be easy measures of weight they almost look like scales
Speaker0: anyway if you sit in them at least mine does.
Speaker0: So very comfortable and at the same
Speaker0: time you should tell me oh you gained again or
Speaker0: I lost weight I mean so yes AI can be helpful if it is used openly and to the
Speaker0: advantage of the employee and where the employee can understand,
Speaker0: the meaningfulness of this measure.
Speaker0: If not, then you will get very controversial results, like, imagine, Joe, I am your boss.
Speaker0: And I come to you and I'm very open and honest and say, Joe,
Speaker0: I would like to motivate you.
Speaker0: Oh now tell me what's going through your mind I.
Speaker1: Would at first assume that he thinks right now that I'm not motivated enough right
Speaker0: Yes and how do I know that you're not motivated enough some machine or some
Speaker0: super surveillance must have told me,
Speaker0: secondly you will ask Okay, let me see, how are you going to motivate me?
Speaker0: There's no way. So, and unfortunately in every business school,
Speaker0: the second or third item on their schedule is learn how to motivate your employees. It's not your job.
Speaker0: But the point is any effort at motivating people is already a step in the inverse direction.
Speaker0: So the same thing goes for I want to look for your health. You're not my mother.
Speaker0: I mean, I can look for my health myself. But if I say, listen,
Speaker0: I have seen that your sick leaves are getting more and more,
Speaker0: and I'm worried about your health.
Speaker0: And let's see what we can do together to improve your health situation.
Speaker0: That's something different, because also you must keep in mind that many employees
Speaker0: are afraid of losing their jobs if they take too much sick leave.
Speaker0: And that would be exactly the sign for everybody. Wait a minute.
Speaker0: Health is in jeopardy.
Speaker0: And then in order to avoid that,
Speaker0: they work overtimes and more overtimes, and that's straight into the funnel
Speaker0: of burning out and into failing.
Speaker1: I see. How do you see the prevention of burnout and other problems at work,
Speaker1: because burnout is just the one we're focusing on here, evolving in the next five years?
Speaker0: Well, I'm a bit ambiguous in my view.
Speaker0: On the one hand, there are more and more leaders learning that they can have
Speaker0: the best company and the best technology.
Speaker0: But if the workforce is constantly ill, they will not be making any profits.
Speaker0: That's why I think you see it too, all these offers of generating income without doing anything.
Speaker0: You know, this famous automatic and automatized income. I think it is stupid
Speaker0: because if everybody does that, who is going to do the work?
Speaker0: So we are going down the wrong alley there.
Speaker0: And on the other hand, all the efforts to reduce human work to less and less
Speaker0: mean that we need people who are higher and higher qualified.
Speaker0: Now, the higher the people are qualified, the more it is a risk for a corporation that they burn out,
Speaker0: because nobody can just come from the street and step in,
Speaker0: as opposed to this famous movie with Charlie Chaplin where they just grab a
Speaker0: guy from the street to do the struths.
Speaker0: Nobody can come in and do very complex and complicated work.
Speaker0: Just, you know, I haven't done it before, but I've been a gardener,
Speaker0: so I'm sure I'm good at cutting hair.
Speaker0: It will not work.
Speaker1: We are already talking on learning for more than 50 minutes here,
Speaker1: and I was wondering for your final thoughts, a call to action for leaders.
Speaker1: If you could give one piece of advice to startup founders and executives about
Speaker1: preventing burnout in the teams, what would it be?
Speaker0: It would definitely be to become a real leader, which is to say,
Speaker0: forget about the numbers and work on your own personality.
Speaker0: Make sure that you do not burn out by doing the wrong things and spending your energy there.
Speaker0: A manager is a person who makes sure that things are done right.
Speaker0: A leader is a person who makes sure that the right things are done.
Speaker0: So become more
Speaker0: aware of your real role
Speaker0: as a leader and that implicates
Speaker0: that you have to have good health that you have to have enough time to reflect
Speaker0: and think about your company where nobody disturbs you where you can talk to
Speaker0: maybe a coach maybe several coaches,
Speaker0: about how to proceed and where to proceed.
Speaker1: Great. Thank you, Imre, for sharing insights on burnout recognition and prevention.
Speaker1: We appreciate your expertise in helping companies build healthier and more resilient
Speaker1: teams. Thank you very much.
Speaker0: Thank you very much, Joe. And we supply this service to leaders and business owners at leoveen.com,
Speaker0: where they are free of any influence by employees or coworkers or competition
Speaker0: or any other people who mean just the best.
Speaker1: Thank you very much. We link down in the show notes.
Speaker0: Thank you.
Speaker1: Have a good day. Bye bye.
Speaker0: You too. Bye-bye.
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