Understanding Employee Burnout (June 2021)

Project Length: 2 Weeks Scope: Exploratory Research, User Interviews, Journey Map, Personas Role and Responsibilities: Project Lead, Research Practice Lead, Discussion Guide Development, Participant Recruitment, Renumeration, Interview Facilitator, Synthesis and Analysis

Project Overview

Problem

90% of employees experienced burnout last year, which cost businesses 190 billion dollars in healthcare spending and contributed to 10% of their overall churn. mello had just been created as company and we wanted to explore building a product to address employee burnout.

Context

In June 2021 the Product team at mello wanted to better understand the opportunities and gaps with regard to employees in tech companies facing burnout. We had two assumptions:

1. Burnout was a problem mainly handled by HR professionals. Therefore, we designed HR as the buyers and primary users of our product.
2. Burnout was also handled by managers, but they did not have as much buying power as HR, but would be secondary users.

Therefore we interviewed HR, managers and individual contributors in tech roles to understand the mental models and experiences people who have or experienced burnout. This would allow us to identify product opportunities need to build solutions as features for mello.

Methods

1. Semi-structured user interviews (with employee)
2. Persona creation
3. Journey mapping

We conducted 89, 1:1 45 minute paid, semi-structured user interviews with employees working in technology roles.

What Did We Find?

Insights

• The majority of participants who experienced burnout did so in a cyclical fashion (with at least 2 episodes in the last two years)
• People of colour, LGBTQ folks and Women reported the highest instances of Cyclical Burnout
• Employees identified that HR departments are the department within the business that is responsible for coming up with company-wide strategies to address burnout.
• Employees and Managers expressed different painpoints when talking about their experiences with burnout

Employees Expressed

1. Feeling a disconnect between workplace due to remote work brought on by the pandemic
2. Feeling a level of inadequacy due to perfectionistic tendencies
3. Not feeling like they can push back if they feel they have unreasonable work demands
4. Loneliness and feeling like they can’t control their work environment
5. Struggles with work-life balance, never feels like work is done, and there isn't enough time to do what they want in their personal life

Managers Expressed

6. Feeling the pressure of heavy work demands whether it be hiring, employee coaching and 1:1s in addition to their own work responsibilities
7. Trying to keep up with a quickly growing company
8. Feeling squeezed by work and personal commitments - feeling as though they have to “shoulder it all”

Common Tools to Manage Burn Out

9. Project Management Apps (Asana, Jira, Motion)
10. Fitness Apps (Apple Activity, Peloton)
11. Mindfulness Apps (Calm, Headspace)

Personas

We Developer personas from the interviews

Journey Mapping the Employee Experience

We developed a journey map based off of our user interviews focusing on the shared experiences people face during an episode of burnout and recovery.

What did we do next?

Findings were translated into user stories and led to further workshops on product opportunity identification.

In order to build a solution to address employee burnout out we realized that it would be HR would be our primary purchaser and would be in charge of coming up with company wide strategies to address employee burnout.

We began user interviews with HR managers their approaches in addressing employee burnout.

After completing our user research with HR departments we discovered that HR Managers had no metrics to track or measure employee burnout.

As a result we created the mello Slack App that allows employees to complete checkins to measure, track and prevent workplace burnout that they could share with HR.