John O'Brien, EDUCAUSE CEO and President, talks with Liv Gjestvang, Associate Vice President for Learning Technology at The Ohio State University, about the critical and timely topic of burnout.
View Transcript
Liv Gjestvang
Associate Vice President for Learning Technology
Ohio State University
John O'Brien
President and CEO
EDUCAUSE
John O'Brien: Here we are in the middle of just the madness and the flurry of activity, trying to find time to talk about burnout, and the irony being that we had scheduling confusion about the meeting itself, and we're rushed to finish within the time we have. So it seems absolutely perfect, but I actually want to start with a really easy question, which is, what is burnout?
Liv Gjestvang: I would say that burnout is, it's an experience of, kind of a range of kinds of exhaustion that pile on top of each other. So it's physical, it's emotional, psychological and it happens when people are operating at a very high capacity, over an extended period of time. And I think it's exacerbated by things like uncertainty and stress and ambiguity. So all of those are things that of course happening in space right now.
John O'Brien: The phenomenon of burnout I think, is most insidious because oftentimes you don't know when you've crossed over from super adrenaline-fueled productivity to, Oh my goodness, burnout. Have you experienced it? And were you aware of when you crossed the line, or when you've seen it in your staff?
Liv Gjestvang: Yeah, so I absolutely have experienced burnout. I think it's interestingly because of the prolonged nature of what we're going through right now, I feel like, I feel it kind of come and go. And it's often and I've heard this from many colleagues that it can be kind of unexpected. When you find yourself there, and it's not necessarily, it can be sustained, it can happen. I think the experience and the feeling of burnout, which shows up often as struggling to kind of find energy and find creativity and the things that I think many of us in Higher Ed, really pride ourselves on bringing to our work.
John O'Brien: So if you know, you've crossed over into burnout or your staff are exhibiting symptoms of burnout, what do you do? Or what do you do for those who work for you?
Liv Gjestvang: I think there are so many things that we can do at work that help people have a healthier experience of their entire lives, right? Of our days or nights or weekends. And so, I think that first of all, it's really important that we acknowledge that people feel comfortable and we make a point of talking about the fact that burnout is something real that people are experiencing. We're really trying to structure some of our work differently. So thinking this to me, is a year where we have to think differently about what our goals are. Really what is most important to accomplish in our community? And how do we do that work while taking care of ourselves and each other? So that means we should have less things that we're aiming to achieve, we should be focusing on the most important things. We have something we use called a didn't do it lists. So we're actually capturing and sharing publicly with each other, the things that we've determined we're not doing right now, which I think is helpful. It creates a sense of permission around not doing everything. So, I think we've actually adjusted our annual goals, to reflect the fact that people should not be aiming to deliver on four to six primary goals over the course of the year, but maybe more like two or three goals, we've shifted what are typically professional development goals into what we're calling personal care. So how are we thinking about taking care of ourselves and each other? So I think in part it's being explicit, about the fact that this is a real intense factor overwhelm and stress, exhaustion, fear, those are, you know, financial insecurity, the impact right now two of the really important conversations around racial injustice. These things are all adding intensity and stress, and struggle to our days at home and at work.
John O'Brien: Is there an element of this where supervisors might be great about caring for their staff, but they don't put on their oxygen mask first, and they violate that rule on taking care of themselves.
Liv Gjestvang: Absolutely. I mean I think, that's very common and I think it can muddle the message right? Because what we hear others saying that we should do, is hard to believe if we don't see people doing that too. I really feel like we should be creating spaces to have some conversations around how, what burnout looks like right now, this year, and how we are going to really, aside from kind of all the path list of things I can suggest, how do we really need to think about this differently? And what can we do? And then also how can maybe some of the changes that we're making or that we are being pressured to make, to create more sustainable work lives, how are those things that could help shift some of our long term models for how we work, and how we relate to the amount of work that we're trying to do.
John O'Brien: Thank you for making time during your own wild period. I'm trying to get everything done and spinning plates and juggling and all of that. It means a lot to me that you took time to chat with our community about burnout and what can be done about burnout. And I suppose now we both need to get back to work.
Liv Gjestvang: Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It was great to talk to you, John.