It’s exactly a year since I left my long-term academic career, in a role I used to love. At the turn of the millennium I signed up with enthusiasm for what I thought would be a glittering career full of inspiring conversations, opportunities to make a real difference in my own research and in teaching and training future generations, some international travel, and freedom to organise my time and my own direction. But after 25 years I realised that the university and I were pretty much done, and that I didn’t want to continue putting myself through the daily grind. I hadn’t fully realised the extent of it until I stopped working, but I was burnt out. So what was going on?
The amount of ‘fit’ between the person and the environment is a long-standing concept in psychology, but has only recently been linked to burnout. There are five dimensions to fit at work: person–job fit, person–organization fit, person–vocation fit, person–group fit, and person–supervisor fit. If some of these aren’t right, the employee will likely not be very happy, but if many of them aren’t right, this leads to emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and low occupational effectiveness – which add up to burnout.
In a recent study researchers from Guangzhou, China compared the effects of person-organisation fit and person-job fit, looking at their effects on work pressure and burnout. Their participants were quite young, with an average age of 33, and had not worked at their companies as long as I did (average 2 years in current role). But their findings were clear that lower person-job fit led to both higher work pressure and burnout, and lower person-organisation fit led to higher work pressure.
Did this help explain things for me? In part, as my job had changed a lot over the years. Initially I was working in my specialist area, with a fairly free rein to pursue my interests, with some talented students and inspiring colleagues. But over time this shifted gradually to a point where there were too many students to build personal engagement with, not enough time for the exciting research, and an overwhelming deluge of procedures to follow and keep up with – similar to the technostress I wrote about recently. Both I and quite a few of my colleagues, through no fault of our own and despite our best intentions, were becoming emotionally exhausted, more cynical, and not delivering our best work.
To be fulfilled at work, the idea of fit is obviously important, with the most important fit being between you and your role. But the Guangzhou researchers also conclude that minimising work pressure can help protect against burnout – and this can be done through things like effective time management and stress management reduction skills.
And why the bee? It symbolises recovery after burnout. By the riverside in rural France where I am lucky to live and enjoy life now, we found this little bee earlier in the summer, dehydrated and suffering from heat exhaustion. We fed it beer and sugar water, and slowly but surely it regained enough energy to walk and then fly away. Like the bee, we can get out of burnout, but only by changing things and taking control of our situations.
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