Planet Money - Burnout (Classic)

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

All types of companies are struggling with burnout. Many try to fix it. Most of them fail. One exception: A 26-year-old call center manager, with stress balls and costumes in her arsenal. | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is Planet Money from NPR. It's getting harder and harder to keep American workers in their jobs. In August, over 4 million people quit. That's almost 3% of the U.S. workforce. And there are many reasons for this. Some people are seeking better pay or working conditions or better quality of life. And some are just leaving the workforce completely, especially women. In September, 300,000 women left the workforce

entirely. One factor to consider with all of this turnover is burnout. Childcare continues to be costly and difficult to find. Industries where women are more likely to work, such as retail and hospitality, were especially hard hit by the Delta variant. That's added to worker stress. So we figured it was a good time to listen back to this episode from 2016, all about burnout. Noelle King and Stacey Vanek-Smith will take it from here. Take it from here. This is Spot Hero. How can I help you?

Working in a call center is a tough job. It's true. We visited one in Chicago, the call center for this company called Spot Hero. And it was basically just a bunch of people sitting in a row at a long table, sort of anonymous workspaces. And they were just taking call after call after call after call. Phone up, phone down, phone up, phone down. And even just hearing their side of the calls, you can tell that a lot of people calling in are not happy. Let me ask you this. Is there some sort of obscene joke that goes on? Spot Hero is a startup. It's this online company that rents out parking spaces.

And people get very emotional about parking. I went yesterday to this garage, parked my car, get the ticket, wait for the manager to get validated. I was late for my appointment. All I'm asking, I just want a refund of my $20. What a comical thing this is, that this 60-year-old man is having to talk to you for now over a half an hour. It doesn't have a sticker. I really want to give you my number and have somebody to call me back. That's all I want. I'm the customer and that's it.

I would have a nervous breakdown. I would cry all the time. Every once in a while, one of the calls is truly, memorably terrible. There's one at Spot Hero that people still talk about today. It's like a legend. Megan Bubbly took the call. It was from a guy who had reserved a parking spot, but when he got there, someone else was parked in it. Megan gave her standard response. I am so sorry. We're a young company. We have some glitches,

but I'm here to help. That was not the right answer. I don't know what the right answer was, but it was not that. The customer started screaming. And then he called me a word that is not appropriate for any podcast or TV show. The C word. You still seem upset while you're telling the story. You still look like your hands are shaking a little bit. Megan says she kind of went into shock. She put the phone down, walked out of the office and started running down the sidewalk. She ran 13 blocks to Lake Michigan. I had to verbally, like, scream at the lake and just get it out. It's a great place to scream.

When Megan got back, she went to talk to her manager, this woman named Leah Potkin. They went into a little conference room, and Leah asked her what happened. She started crying and just said it so much, and I knew how she felt. Call centers have really high turnover, which makes sense. You're dealing with people who are anxious and angry and frustrated all day, every day. You don't get paid a lot of money. And at most companies, you're at the bottom of the totem pole. You're the person taking customer complaints. There's so many times when you just want to throw your headset off and just say, I'm done. And that's when I realized, I can't let my team feel this way. Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Noelle King.

And I'm Stacey Vanek-Smith. Burnout. It is not just a problem for call centers. Hospitals, tech companies, schools, they're all struggling with burnout. And it is really hard to fix. schools, they are all struggling with burnout. And it is really hard to fix. Companies try, and most of them fail. Today on the show, the 26-year-old call center manager who tried to beat burnout. The idea of burnout is not that old. The term wasn't even coined until the 1970s by a guy named Herbert Freudenberger. He was a psychologist in Manhattan, and he had a practice in a really ritzy area on the Upper East Side. His practice was doing well. It was thriving. But Herbert wasn't satisfied. He was a very serious, driven man. He was a Holocaust survivor. He fled Germany for the U.S. when he was still

just a kid. His childhood kind of stopped at seven or eight. So he really didn't learn how to play because he then had to grow up pretty quickly and survive in a new country. That's Herbert's daughter, Lisa Freudenberger. Herbert died in 1999. We met with Lisa in Herbert's old office. She has her own psychology practice there now. In the States, Herbert was taken in by his aunt. She made him sleep in the attic, sitting upright in a chair. Herbert ran away, and when he was a teenager, he lived on the

streets for a while. Herbert grew up to become someone who was always pushing himself to help people and also to do more. In addition to his practice on the Upper East Side, he opened up a storefront clinic on the Bowery, which was New York's Skid Row, and he worked with drug addicts. These young people were really struggling. Heroin, cocaine, acid, they were all becoming big problems back then. A lot of the kids he was working with were just fried. He would see them literally holding cigarettes and watch the cigarettes burn out. Herbert would work from 8 in the morning until 7 at night on the Upper East Side. Then he'd go down to the Bowery and work until 2 a.m.,

with thousands of drug addicts in a filthy little free clinic. He began to get more and more fatigued, and he began to get stressed, and he was not that pleasant to live with. What was that like? Was he a yeller? Yeah, yeah. He didn't use his inside voice, shall we say. So his kids tried to stay out of his way. His wife would say, you look tired. And he'd say, what do you want me to do? Abandon these people?

When Lisa was about five, her mom finally said, enough is enough. We are taking the family on vacation to California. They booked plane tickets, made hotel reservations. Herbert got home at 2 a.m. the day of the flight. And when it came time to wake up, he couldn't move. He couldn't get out of bed. He was in bed for three days. He never took that vacation. And that was the moment he started to realize that something was really wrong. But he was a therapist. He thought maybe he could figure out what was going on with him. So he took a cue from

Freud and he started self-analysis. He would speak into a tape recorder for an hour or two, and then he'd take a little break and he'd then analyze himself as if he was his own doctor. I don't know how to have fun. I don't know how to be readily joyful. This is Herbert Freudenberger in an interview he did with the Shoah Foundation. I'm often very on the sad side. Play has not gotten me through. It's something that I've avoided. I've never known how to do it. That's been hurtful. That's hurt me. Herbert realized what he was feeling wasn't just exhaustion, and it was not exactly depression. It was something else. It had to do with how hard he was working, how just exhaustion, and it was not exactly depression. It was something

else. It had to do with how hard he was working, how much he cared about his job, and the fact he didn't always feel like he was making a difference. He was diagnosing something new, and he needed a word for it. So his mind went to those drug addicts that he worked with down on the Bowery with their blank looks and their cigarettes burning out. He called his illness burnout, the same word that drug addicts use to describe themselves. He wrote a book about it, Burnout, the High Cost of High Achievement. And the concept totally took off. All of these stressed out social workers and doctors and housewives and lawyers were like, I have that.

They felt like he was talking to them. He was doing these radio shows around the country. He was doing TV shows. One day he asked me how to wear makeup. I was a little worried. I'm like, what do you need makeup for, Dad? He's like, well, I think the rings under my eyes are a little dark. I'm like, so you need under-eye cover?

For TV. For TV. Herbert went on Oprah, Phil Donahue. He met with President Jimmy Carter about burnout. He even came on NPR in 1981. Are you forgetting appointments and deadlines? Are you increasingly irritable, depressed, fatigued? You may be suffering from burnout.

NPR was going through like a psychedelic phase at that time. Burnout really is a response to stress. It's a response to frustration. It's a response to a demand that an individual may make upon themselves in terms of a requirement for perfectionism or drive. Herbert became a burnout guru, and his book was a hit. Burnout was officially a thing. But also not officially a thing, because burnout never made it into the DSM.

That's the official listing of mental disorders from the American Psychiatric Association. And so 40 years later, companies are struggling with that. If I go to HR and say I'm burned out, there's no protocol. They'll treat it like an individual problem, like, oh, Noelle's burned out. She should take a personal day. Not like there's a problem with the workplace. And so people are left alone. They get depressed. They start missing work. But while Leah Potkin was talking to Megan Bubley about that terrible call she'd taken, Leah thought, this is a workplace problem and I'm going to fix it. Yes, she did. Leah is like a mix of head cheerleader and class president.

She radiates competence. She's always smiling. She's always taking spin classes. Oh, a lot of spin. And we should say Leah works her butt off. She will take calls on her days off. I just remember a wedding I was at a year and a half ago because I spent the better part of the wedding in the lobby on the phone with a customer who just couldn't remember where they parked. My date must have hated me. So the first thing she did was something actually a little obvious. She cut down the number of calls her people were taking. It was not uncommon, seriously not uncommon, to see someone doing over 100 calls a day. I sat down with our CEO and let him know that if you're okay with people

taking 100 calls and feeling burnt out, you're going to have high attrition. Did you have to fight for that? Because I'm trying to imagine like, of course. Finally, the CEO said, okay, you can have a few more employees. And that made a big difference. It took people's workloads down from 90, 100 calls a day to more like 60 calls a day. But burnout is about more than workload. And research has proven this again and again and again. So Leah went into phase two of her beat burnout plan. Give people capes and call them heroes. That is not a metaphor.

No, it's not. When we did our very first Hero Day, we bought capes and had everyone wear capes. We really got into it. Capes. I know. Where's our cape? I want a cape. The call center workers at Spot Hero are referred to as heroes. And in addition to Hero Appreciation Day, Leah started organizing a whole bunch of social events.

Bowling, happy hours, pizza lunches, a talent show. Suddenly, the people taking customer complaint calls were like the cool kids. They were doing all the fun stuff. They were the people having the best time. Leah also wanted a place where people could go after a hard call. So she took this corner of the office and she converted it into a de-stress area called the Shake It Off area after Taylor Swift, of course. It was stress balls. It was, of course, a area after Taylor Swift, of course. It was stress balls. It was, of course, a picture of Taylor Swift.

So walking over there was a signal to everyone else on the team, hey, I just got off a really hard call. I'm feeling it right now. So this sounds a little, yeah, a little cheesy, right? But it worked for employees like Megan Buble, the woman who took that really terrible call. I think the biggest testament to why I want to be here, I have not had one day where I woke up and I was like, I can't go into the office today. I don't want to go into work today. Like being able to wake up and not like not have those Sunday scaries that we always joke about. Like because all of my friends are at the office. Like what am I going to do if I'm at home? It stinks.

out, like, because all of my friends are at the office. Like, what am I going to do if I'm at home? It stinks. And when Spot Hero moved to a new building, Leah got the CEO to take the shake it off area to the next level. Can you tell me where are we right now? So right now we're sitting in the Spot Hero Zen Den. The Zen Den. Coloring books, little sand garden with a little scraper, big couch, sort of soothing colors everywhere. You got very into something called the Buddha board, which is just like painting with water and then it vanishes. It's so, get out of my Zen den, Noelle King. Okay, but come on, we were both a little bit skeptical. But why the Zen room then? Like, why do you need the Zen room? Why can't you just be like, okay, you're taking a hundred calls. We're going to have you take 70.

Well, where's the fun in that? Then maybe they won't be burnt out from how much work they have, but they'll be burnt out emotionally from just feeling kind of like empty and not really thinking their work matters when the work they do is just so, so important. The work they do is just so, so important. And this seems to be the final key. Leah believes, like actually believes, that the people who work in the call center are making the world a better place.

And she has somehow convinced everyone else at the company that this is the case. Executives, the app developers, the marketing team, everybody at Spot Hero is like obsessed with their call center. Truly. We talked to one employee, Margot Conrose, and we tried to see if we could get her to crack. It's absolute reverence. I mean, we call them heroes and we feel like they are the heroes. The rest of us are trying to make a good product and help our company grow. The customer heroes

are on the front lines making those, you know, those minute improvements to humanity all the time, all day, every day. I mean, you guys are an app that sells parking spaces. You're talking about a department that is pretty minor in the grand scheme of your app and which I see head shaking, but I'm just gonna keep going. And which a lot of companies take care of with a website, like frequently asked questions. And you're talking about humanity. That is really weird. I mean, we think of them as, you know, the heroes of the company because they're, they're, you know, heroes for individual humans out there in the world. Really? But they just take customer complaints. Do they, though?

She was not going to break. No. No, she was not going to break. And maybe she shouldn't. Because here's the thing. This culture that Leah created at Spot Hero has had a pretty powerful result. Spot Hero's call center has zero turnover. Nobody is quitting. And it's been this way for years. We just really haven't had anyone full-time leave. I actually honestly hadn't thought about it too much, that that actual number was really next to zero. And other companies are taking a similar approach to burnout. The Mayo Clinic has done a series of studies on burnout. It's a big problem for doctors. The Mayo Clinic has done a series of studies on burnout. It's a big problem for doctors. And now Mayo sponsors dinners where doctors can vent and bond. And and recognition and respect that he got for his work. His daughter Lisa says he still worked around the clock, but he was able to enjoy his life more.

When Lisa was about nine, he actually went on a family vacation. They went to Lake Carmel in upstate New York. And there's her dad, who was never not in a suit and tie, wearing swimming trunks. And she realized he was like a different person. He says, come, let me, let me show you how I swim. Let me show you how I swim. He then got into the lake and he proceeded to do a dead man's float. And I'm like waiting to see any flapping of the arms or flapping of the legs or something. Stayed there, got up with the biggest grin. And I could see like this little boy, this inner child in him just flourished, and he was so proud.

He goes, did you see me swimming? I'm like, yes, Dad. Fabulous. Fabulous. Fabulous. This episode with Stacey Bannock-Smith and Noelle King originally ran in December of 2016. The original version was produced by Sally Helm. The rebroadcast was produced by Andrea Gutierrez. Ebony Reed and Louise Story are the consulting senior editors for Planet Money.

Alex Goldmark is our supervising producer. I'm Erika Barris. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.