The featured image for this post is a drawing I completed in 2023 called “Dancer at Rest.”

As stated in Part 1 of this article, experiencing excessive turnover costs employers a substantial amount of money every year including recruiting, temporary workers, and lost productivity. Turnover can also negatively impact non-financial components of a business as well, including its culture and reputation. For many reasons it makes sense for organizations to tackle the issue of turnover with vigor. In Part 1 we discussed principles around Knowing your data, Tightening the selection process and Improving the on-boarding process. Now let’s turn our attention to some other important strategies.

Reducing Burnout

Complaints of feeling elevated levels of burnout continue to rise among workers of all ages, but especially for workers aged 18-34. Fully 58% of that age group said that most days their stress is completely overwhelming, which is compared to 23 % of the 45-64 age group and only 6 % of the 65+ age group.

A recent issue of MIT Sloan Management includes an article that discusses the issue of burnout in terms of designing work to address the causes of burnout. The focus of the article is on how to better organize work (which is primarily the responsibility of the employer). But the authors ignore the issue of individual employee strategies which they pejoratively term “fixing the worker.” Because of this significant omission, the authors miss the fact that there are many causes for feelings of burnout that stem from the individual due to personality, educational, generational, or family reasons or a myriad of other factors. This points to the need for individual strategies and changes in approach to work. If the root causes of burnout were solely a product of how work is organized, all segments of the employee base would be affected equally, which is rarely the case. Regardless, there are some valuable nuggets that come from the research done for the MIT article, and we will focus on those. A helpful feature of the article was the suggestion to form local teams of staff to address workflow and organization.

The article also presents a model that was developed with five elements including two that we will discuss, Mastery and Autonomy.

  • Mastery

According to the MIT Sloan model, Mastery depends on making sure that employees have clarity in their roles and expectations and are provided feedback on the work they do and their place in the organization. Something not stated in the article but that seems obvious is that mastery also depends on the skill level and proficiency of the employee doing the actual work. After all, if I have complete clarity regarding the role and expectations of being an NBA point guard but still have my skill set (or lack thereof), I will not have mastery of the job. As a result, my stress level on the court will be very high. Clearly, well defined roles and expectations, while necessary, will not reduce employee turnover in the absence of the actual fitness of the employee in the role. The employer can do much to help with mastery by providing frequent, constructive feedback, which means going well beyond the annual evaluation. Also, providing opportunities for on-going education and training will assist employee mastery and provide reassurance of a feeling of investment in the employee.

  • Autonomy

Autonomy in the MIT Sloan model is defined in terms of the level of control the employee has over decision-making, timing of tasks, and methods of completing work. This is an important motivator for many mid-to-high-level employees because of the pride that they have in their own creative contributions to project success. However, the reality of many situations is that autonomy is limited due to centralization in most large organizations. As an executive, I tried to give people as much autonomy as possible, which usually focused on allowing them to complete their work in the way that they chose. Since many big decisions are made at higher levels and timing of deadlines can be well-defined and rigid, the issue of how to tackle a problem is more open to individual styles and preferences. Allowing the space for individual styles to come out is good for the employee’s job satisfaction and will also usually benefit the organization due to the creative variety brought to the table.

  • Reduce the Number of Priorities

Cal Newport in his book Slow Productivity addresses the issue of too many priorities. Newport states that when he was studying the effects of the pandemic on work and life, he was inundated with complaints from readers that they were losing the productivity of their entire workdays due to back-to-back meetings and felt like they were not getting anything done. Newport called this phenomenon the Zoom Apocalypse. These anecdotal stories were backed up by research done by Microsoft on work trends during and after the pandemic that reported a rise in time spent in meetings of 2.5 times that of pre-pandemic workdays. Excessive meetings are not the only sign of too many priorities. When employees show signs of mission fatigue, it usually means that their priorities are too excessive to allow for effective goal completion. At various points in my career, I and my peers asked for relief in the number of priorities laid out for us – sometimes we got relief and sometimes we didn’t. One way that I tried to simplify priorities for the directors and staff who worked for me was to begin the year by identifying Ten Critical Success Factors for the upcoming year. Limiting the number of top-level priorities helped us all to focus and keep those factors in mind while working on our goals.

Newport discusses at length this principle of doing fewer things, and it is worth your further reading. Leaders particularly need to take this issue seriously and pare away lower priorities so that their teams can focus on the most important initiatives.

  • Rest

Everyone needs time periodically to rest and disconnect from the constant flood of information, responsibilities, and requests that stream to our ever-connected minds. Don’t ignore the need to take time off from work at regular intervals. Each individual needs to determine how best to handle vacation time in terms of staying connected to work or completely disconnecting for a while. I have tried both during my career and determined that it was less stressful for me to remain partially connected so that I would not feel so overwhelmed on my return to work. To me, that overwhelmed feeling erased the benefits of my time off. In contrast, a CEO that I once worked for would routinely tell those of us on the executive team that when he took vacation, he only wanted to hear from us if the hospital was on fire. Of course, that was an exaggeration, but we got the message. For him, a total disconnect was what helped him recharge. Only the individual can determine what works best for gaining the most benefit from time off.

It is also critical on a daily basis to get enough sleep. Lack of sleep can cause unnecessary stress and should be treated as a required discipline.

Leaders need to address this need for rest in their own lives but also have a responsibility to help those under them. I once worked with a CFO who was incessantly stressed by her corporate superior who sent e-mails with assignments and immediate requests that came at all hours of the day and night. This ever-present contact is unfair and demotivating to the employee. A better practice for the times when the leader is doing work after hours is to compose e-mails to subordinates while the issue is top of mind. However, they should refrain from hitting “send” until the beginning of the next business day. That simple practice shows respect for the person’s time and provides some separation between work life and everything else.

Motivating Work

Years ago, after finishing some yard work I stopped to consider why that kind of work was so satisfying to me. Routinely, I looked forward to mowing the yard and finished with a good feeling. Perhaps those feelings can be credited to the following attributes.

  • Variety

Working in the yard was a different kind of work than what I did in my job. It wasn’t necessarily better, but it was different. The yard work was simple, it was physical, it was outdoors. As the saying goes, variety is the spice of life, and I found that adding variety to my professional work routine was also refreshing. I added different routines to my work schedule, such as increased employee rounding. Also, having “no meeting” time periods for a few hours or half a day allowed me to catch up on communication, analysis, and thinking through major initiatives and tasks. It is also good to ensure that there are fun activities scheduled from time to time so that everyone at work can have the opportunity to break up the routine. Adding variety is not just a function of work life. While away from work, spending time pursuing other hobbies and interests is also a great way to break up the work routine and decrease the feeling of burnout. For me, one of those side interests has been drawing. It is an activity that requires a different type of thinking than my typical workday and therefore is a way to refresh my mind.

  • Feeling of completion

Back to my yard mowing analogy, another advantage to me of that kind of work is that it affords me the opportunity to see progress immediately, and to survey my completed work in real time. This ability to get immediate feedback (even if just in my own mind) has been very satisfying.

In my work as a CEO or other executive role, most of the initiatives that I spearheaded were mid-to-long-term efforts. These were usually critical strategic imperatives and were by necessity long projects. But I learned that I needed to set milestones at intervals so that I could have a sense of completion along the way as a result of that leg of the project being done. Building into your workflow ways to have a feeling of completion will help provide a sense of closure for at least segments of the project. No less than the Creator of the universe surveyed His work at the completion of each day and declared that it was good. If it’s good enough for Him, it’s good enough for us, too.

  • Meaningful work

One of the most common themes of researchers who study the causes of burnout is the need for meaningful work. People generally want to do work that is valued and that they believe makes a positive difference in people’s lives.

There is a scene in the 1946 movie classic It’s a Wonderful Life in which the main character, George Bailey is eating dinner with his father, who is the executive director of a small and struggling savings and loan. George, who sees the strain of the day’s troubles on his father’s face complains that he just can’t see himself working in a “shabby” office for the rest of his life worrying about insignificant things like the cost of a length of pipe. His father, though hurt by George’s assessment of the value of his work, wisely explains to George that providing the means for families to own their own homes is actually not insignificant work even though there are times of discouragement. This was a lesson George Bailey did not forget in the end.

Sometimes we all need to gain some perspective on the value of the work that we do when it seems meaningless or discouraging. Talking about these concerns with a supervisor, peer, spouse, or friend can provide that additional perspective. Another strategy that any employee can utilize is to have a conversation with their supervisor about taking on additional responsibilities. This is not a request for promotion or a raise, but the logical outcome of volunteering for additional responsibilities and doing well is that opportunities for advancement will come.

The president of The American Institute for Boys and Men, Richard V. Reeves, has used the term “neededness” to describe the desire for people to feel like “we’re a jigsaw piece that’s going to fit into a jigsaw somewhere.” In other words, we need to feel needed. We may be needed on a personal level to provide emotional support, instruction, or income. We may be needed on the professional level to provide leadership, analytical skills, project management, and other deliverables. Shockingly, Reeves states that feeling unneeded can actually be fatal. This conclusion comes from the fact that final messages from men who take their own lives describe themselves as “worthless” or “useless” more than any other emotion. While that level of crippling emotional despair is fortunately not common, for many people having meaningful work is one of the important ways to feel like a needed piece of life’s jigsaw puzzle.

High turnover can have many causes and accelerators and each organization, or even department, can have unique root causes. It is critical that leadership and staff work together to minimize the factors that lead to it.

References:

Bernstein, M. Horn, and B. Moesta, “Why Employees Quit: New Research Points to Some Surprising Answers,” Harvard Business Review, November-December 2024, 45-53.

Sharon K. Parker, and Cline Knight, “Design Work to Prevent Burnout,” MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2025, 29-34.

Cal Newport, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, (Portfolio/Penguin, New York, 2024), 55.

Derek Thompson, “The Anti-Social Century,” The Atlantic, February 2025, 33.