[upbeat music]
>>Hi guys, avoiding burnout in IT,
because I can doesn't mean I should.
Let's just talk about it, okay?
So let's define what is burnout,
let's define what is causing burnout in IT,
and let's try to give you some ideas how to get out of it.
So I'm not a doctor,
I'm just a Head Geek, by the way this is me.
So my name is Sascha.
And as you might notice by my accent already,
I'm from Germany,
but don't you worry, I came in peace, okay?
Let's define burnout.
And there's a quite interesting definition based
on the World Health Organization.
They're using a concept called ICD-11,
which is like a classification for random illnesses,
disease, whatever.
And a burnout is defined as an occupational phenomenon.
They changed it like two years ago maybe,
before that it was just like a stress symptom,
which wasn't exactly right.
So this is actually a proper change
and an important one, too,
because let's face it, burnout is still stigmatized,
but it can affect us all.
Now, if you look into the ICD-11 thing,
it's like, scroll, scroll, scroll.
It's a lot of text.
So the TL;DR version is a state of ongoing exhaustion,
and that could be emotional, mental, or physical.
Now, I get that in IT physical exhaustion is not so much
of a pain.
We might crawl under desks occasionally,
or pull cable.
That's fun actually,
but it's usually the emotional
and mental things, like talking to people
who complain their mouse is no longer working,
but the real definition of a burnout is basically
you aren't yourself.
So you see the world with different eyes
and everything is different to you,
if you are affected, or me,
if I'm affected, whatever,
we behave in a different way.
And that is rarely a good thing.
So let's see what is causing a burnout in general.
And we see some ideas here.
So basically chronic stress and fatigue
and no carrot at the end of the tunnel.
Yes, that is exactly what I mean.
It's basically,
if the demands of a job are not really the right proportion
to the resources to cope with it,
that is actually a very good definition,
which I found somewhere in the interwebs, I guess.
In IT, let's make this a little bit more special,
obviously what's causing stress in general.
And that is probably the main reason why you're talking
to us here at SolarWinds.
There's always things that break,
and you need a solution for that,
but it's causing stress
and headcounts in IT aren't exactly nice.
And it gets worse based
on the situation we are in right now.
So there's less people, more work,
more work for each individual.
So, not very nice.
On-call duty is another one. On-call duty is nice;
as long as nothing happens,
we get paid for doing nothing, fine. But again,
stuff breaks. And if the phone rings twice in the night,
there's not much left of the night and it's okay for one
night again, occasionally fine.
But if it continues like that, not very good.
Then, we need to consider how business has changed in the
past year.
So we had like nine-to-five working.
That's no longer reality. Everything has to be available
24/7 from everywhere in the world, basically.
And in IT, we need to make sure it works.
So this is another headache caused by the increased
availability of the business. Change is also a big one.
Fortunately in IT, we are used to learn.
We are used to adapt to change, and we like,
there's always a new technology around the corner, and we
really like to dig into it and understand how it works.
But at some point, it might be a bit too much.
Keeping up with ongoing change can cause stress big time.
Also, you have to deliver,
you have to perform, and in a perfect world without any
faults.
Unfortunately, we are not living in a perfect world.
So we always do stuff that we shouldn't do.
I changed the VLAN 21 to a VLAN 12. Happens, right?
And mobility at work means, remember back in the days,
it was nice as we used our first Blackberries.
That was really great.
But now if the phones are always down,
we are like checking emails. There's no stop.
There's no rest. So not really a good idea,
but it's part of the job. But all of those things together,
they are much likely in--put us in a position where we are
quite--where stress is getting a problem.
It's always down. So who can help?
And it's actually quite simple, and that is you.
We need help from other people around us,
but step one is admitting that we have a problem.
That is very important.
And that sometimes takes a little bit of time because we
have to watch ourselves and see that things change.
Maybe our behavior changed.
What's the root cause for this, right?
So it starts with us, but obviously, we're never alone.
And that is really important. Don't hold it in.
Talk to someone, and that someone could be the family.
That is probably the people who are closest to you.
Also, you see the boss, right?
It's very important to talk to your boss.
Actually, we'll talk about that in a minute or two.
If the burnout is caused by work,
your boss is probably the only person who can actually help
you right now,
if there's a problem and you don't want to talk to your
boss or you can't talk to your boss,
HR might be an alternative.
It's actually not a bad one because it is part of HR's job
to make sure that people are able to do their job.
And they might have received training to deal with such a
situation. And I'm pretty sure
if you go to HR and explain them what's happening,
they might tell you you're not the first.
So it's a good idea.
Doctor, obviously, that is always a good advice to burnout,
quite often. And it's like in a depression,
or shares symptoms with a depression. And that might be just
an imbalance of chemicals in your brain, and the doctor can
fix it. It's not a big deal,
actually.
Also, people who know me, I'm into cats.
So talk to your pets, talk to cats
when you play with them, talk to dogs
when you take them for a walk.
They will understand. Just don't talk to parents because
they might repeat it when you don't expect it.
So that might not be a good idea. How to fight it.
So we talked quickly about what is causing a burnout in IT,
so now let's find some ideas that could help you fighting
it in IT. We'll see. If we define that--sorry,
if we discover that workload is causing an issue,
we need to find ways out of the workload or to distribute
it, and that would be to delegate it to others.
It could be a colleague who is less stressed right now and
has a few resources available, or in a perfect world,
we all have interns somewhere, right?
And we could assign tasks to an intern.
If there's no intern, then delegate it to a machine.
And that would be automation. That's an interesting topic,
isn't it?
And in a monitoring suite, for example,
there are some forms of automation available, and that would
ease the stress on you. So it's pretty important.
Also, if things fail frequently,
something is seriously wrong.
So what we do is firefighting, and we fix the situation and
fix it,
but we can't really look into the root cause because there's
a fire somewhere else. So we have to run again.
But if we notice that something breaks twice, three times,
whatever, demand the change, because it's not just for you,
it's for the company, because fixing a situation over and
over again is just burning money.
So it doesn't really work out. If in the root cause analysis
you discover that it's a specific piece of hardware
or software that's causing an issue,
don't really start fixing that thing
or that software. We pay maintenance contracts,
we pay for support.
So it might be a good idea to involve the professionals for
this problem as early as possible. So talk to the vendors,
they have experts and they might be able to fix it within
five minutes, and you would need, like, five hours to
investigate the problem. Another thing is,
if there is an uneven balance of--an imbalance, right,
of workload, bring it up in team meetings,
talk to your colleagues.
The team meeting is usually a good idea because it's a
half-public audience, and you're most likely not the only
one in such a situation.
So you get others into the boat and make it a team thing.
Okay? So obviously last time you've asked a colleague,
"Hey, can you help me with--
can you do whatever?" Did someone ever reply with
"I can't do that right now, sorry"?
Most likely, right?
And how did it feel? Was it bad?
No, it was probably like an answer.
And you go to someone else.
So why don't you use the same phrase?
If someone asks you something, I can't do this right now.
Sorry. It is basically saying no in a nicer way,
but you have to create some boundaries for yourself.
And that's basically rules that would help you to find the
right point where to say no without saying no.
And obviously, as is pointed out here,
if you're focused into something,
if you're half an hour into a troubleshooting scenario,
it's a no. If someone interrupts you, it's a no,
do it like talk to the hand, right?
It's not going to happen.
You have to fix this because if you're out of this,
if you do something else, even if just for a minute,
you have to dig into it again.
Waste of time and hair is getting gray. Okay?
What you also could do is ask for a due date.
When do you want it back?
And depending on the time given and
the workload required to work on it,
you could either say, okay, I can do it now
or tomorrow.
What I usually do is yes, I can do it by next Wednesday.
Is that okay?
So that is my way to say, "Not right now."
And that is basically setting expectations.
So you don't say, "No,"
you say, "I'm willing to help, it's just not possible
right now. I can do it at a later point."
Also, you could try offering alternatives. An alternative
could be,
"I know someone better for you to deal with this status,
the colleague over there." Whatever.
It's an alternative
Sometimes if someone is asking for specific help, like,
like pick your brain for a second,
they might need something completely different because they
just don't understand. Right?
So alternatives is always a good idea.
Now, let's have a look at talking to your boss.
We figured already if--
if the burnout is based on stress in the job,
and that is quite often the case,
talking to your boss is important.
If you don't talk to your boss and someone asks,
you ask your boss, how is employee
ABC feeling, it's probably like, yeah, he delivers.
She's fine.
That is very bad because maybe you're not fine.
And if you're not fine, bring it up.
If your boss doesn't know better, you're lost. Okay?
So make sure that your boss always knows what is the current
workload.
What is on your plate?
Give them ETAs. Like I can do this, maybe this next week,
whatever.
But also point out if there is a possible delay,
if there is a roadblock, like, I can do this now,
but this one here is, like, under the table.
This one is far on the horizon. Okay.
But really, don't say, "I'm fine"
if you're not. Next statement, I can't do that.
Make sure if you bring something like this up,
your boss is really aware of the workload,
like we learned previously.
That is basically a requirement before you can use
"I can't do that" as a statement.
Make sure that there's a bigger thing behind it.
It's not about you being lazy or you want to leave early
or whatever.
It's like an emergency, there's no other way possible.
I just can't do it, no way. And make sure that others
understand that if you're out, if you're out sick,
the tiny team,
which seem--the tiny teams get even tinier, more tiny,
and if one falls, the other one is next,
that's the domino effect. It's going to happen.
So another idea here is to let your boss handle the
prioritization.
Like I got this and this and this and this to do,
what do you want me to do first? I can only do one thing.
You decide. Fine. Okay?
If your boss finds something for you, that will happen.
This one here could end up in a very dangerous conversation.
"I've lost my motivation."
If you bring this up,
it is definitely a conversation which will come up with
some results at the end.
It is important that you don't complain. Bring ideas,
bring suggestions,
explain why you lost your motivation,
and expect the question, "What would motivate you?"
And then that's your point, okay?
Come up with something that would actually help you.
Also, what you could probably expect
in a discussion of "I've lost my motivation" is,
I don't know, a few days off, right?
You need a short break, go home. Go home
now, today, come back tomorrow, refreshed, whatever.
But if there's
no motivation and you're still repeatedly doing the
same job over and over again,
it's going south, it's going downhill. So bring it up,
really. Now let's define a burnout versus a boreout.
We just talked about the burnout.
What is the boreout? The boreout is the opposite.
Actually, what I'm talking about, I've been through both.
So I know what I'm talking about and actually had both one
after the other,
from the burnout to a boreout scenario.
The boreout is if there's nothing to do.
Sounds amazing for a day, two days, maybe three days.
But if you don't do anything for weeks,
or if you just do
your tasks in a couple of minutes, let's say maybe an hour,
and what do you do the rest of the day? At some point,
there's no more YouTube videos to watch.
You've been through all your interesting subreddits,
whatever is interesting, right?
So you need an urgent way out of a boreout.
But the advantage here is that you are a little bit more in
control, how to get out of this.
So the obvious thing is start a pet project.
There might be something interesting.
You always wanted to look at, spin up a few VMs or whatever,
and play with new technology, whatever it is.
So I'm pretty sure there are some ideas that you had
in the past, and there's time, right?
Also, if you want to,
if you would like to advance in either your role or looking
towards a completely different role at the same company
or a different company, use the time and study,
learn new things. Look into soft skills, whatever it is,
there's time. A pro tip is use the time to post useful stuff
on social media that puts your company into shiny light.
It might help. You never know, there's some smart,
I think, people who are like, "Ooh good man."
So we learned a few things, right?
And basically if nothing helps, what are you going to do?
This is basically the last resort. What options do you have?
And before you really look into different options,
there's one important message.
And that is basically,
you are the most important person in your life.
You might say, no, it's my kids.
It's my family. No, because if you're not there,
if you can't support them, they're completely lost.
So you have to take care of yourself.
And that is basically
what you learned in the past couple of minutes.
And if you look at this from a different angle,
it's not too different from troubleshooting.
So first of all, you have to admit that something is wrong.
That might take a while.
And then you look into the reasons. What is happening,
why is it happening, and what can you do to fix it?
That's classical troubleshooting, right?
So I think I've given you a few ideas.
And admit it, if it's the case, admit it,
and look into what's causing the issue and try to fix it.
Talk to people, talk to your boss.
I hope that helps. I'm not Doctor Sascha,
but it might be an interesting--
might be some interesting ideas to talk to others,
even if there's currently not a burnout situation.
But it's always a good idea to bring it up, to prevent it.
And you don't know if you are fine,
if the people next to you are still fine,
but I hope that you are fine.
Enjoy, guys. Bye.