Burnout: A Silenced Epidemic

Have you experienced burnout working in the arts? If so, you’re not alone. 

But what exactly is burnout? How does it impact on people’s lives and organisations? And why is it so prevalent in the arts?

I introduce major research about burnout amongst creative and cultural workers and explore why it’s been described as a silent epidemic. 

Useful Stuff 

Laura: www.weareculturebloom.com 

Laura on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurafcrossley/ 

School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds: https://ahc.leeds.ac.uk/performance 

Centre for Cultural Value: https://www.culturalvalue.org.uk/ 

Mental health at work

Mind: https://www.mind.org.uk/workplace/mental-health-at-work 

Funders

Clore Leadership: https://www.cloreleadership.org/ 

Arts and Humanities Research Council: https://www.ukri.org/councils/ahrc/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Laura and welcome to Joyful Work, Ending Burnout in the Arts. The podcast that helps you beat burnout in the cultural and creative sectors. Burnout amongst cultural and creative professionals is a crisis. If you work in the sector, chances are you've experienced burnout or know someone who's been through it. Burnout is making us ill, destroying our confidence, and impacting our careers. It's also leading to burnt-out organisations with less motivated, less focused staff who are desperately trying to stay afloat amongst hundreds of daily pressures. I'm an arts and workplace culture consultant from Manchester UK and an expert in creating joyful work cultures that prevent burnout. I want everyone to know that burnout in the cultural and creative sectors is not inevitable. It doesn't have to be this way. By making small changes, we can create a sector that cares for its people and organizations and where burnout isn't an inevitability. In this podcast, you'll find out about causes of burnout and what we can do to address the burnout epidemic. You'll hear from brilliant people who'll bring ideas for beating burnout, and you'll be encouraged to think about what you and your organisation can do to make burnout a thing of the past. Hope you enjoy. This episode of Joyful Work Ending Burnout in the Arts will look at burnout in the creative and cultural sectors, causes of burnout, and start to look at what we can do to prevent burnout. I'll present an overview of what I've found in the research I've been doing into burnout, which has been funded by Claw and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. My research involved 28 interviews with people working across the cultural sector in different roles and 165 people completing online surveys. I also did lots of reading around the areas and had brilliant conversations with my supervisor, Professor Ben Wormsley at the University of Leeds, and friends and supporters who've really helped shape my thinking. I heard some incredibly, incredibly difficult stories, and I really wanted to take the chance to say thank you to everyone who I interviewed or who very kindly took the time to fill out a survey. I was blown away by people's honesty and generosity in sharing, some of whom were sharing incredibly difficult experiences. I just want to say thank you because it's really important to make this visible. And the more that we can talk about it, the more we can talk about burnout and the impacts it's having on us and our organizations, the better. It brings out into the open and it means that people have got to be more likely to do something about it. I know that lots of us will have experienced burnout in the arts, and I would really love to hear your experiences or great practice you've seen that's prevented burnout. There'll be more information about how to do that at the end of the episode. If you're experiencing burnout now and feeling like it's only you, I can assure you it's not. It's not just happening to you, it's not just in your organization, it's not even just in your country. This is happening to cultural sector workers everywhere. I got really interested in the topic of burnout because of my own experience of burnout. I've had burnout as a freelancer, I've always had burnout as an in-house member of staff, and I became really interested in why burnout seems to be so prevalent and what we can do about it. Burnout has a specific definition, which is exhaustion, negativity and cynicism, and reduced professional advocacy. I was really interested in my research though to find out what burnout actually means to people, because even though there is that official definition, I wondered how it was actually playing out in people's lives and experiences. What I found is that yes, people feel exhausted and yes, might be feeling negative and cynical, but it's more than feeling exhausted, it's much more nuanced. People are feeling really stressed, exhausted, they've got health issues, losing confidence. And it's a really long-term issue. So someone who experiences burnout either as a freelancer or in an organization can feel the impacts of that for years and years in the future. A lot of people talked about how burnout crept up on them. They just kept going and going and going and going. And then one day they were just so exhausted that they had to stop. But it is also impacting on the sector as people take a lot of sick days, leave the sector, lose confidence, feel less motivated, feel less creative, less innovative. So the causes of burnout in my research came as systemic, organizational, and personal. And the systemic issues are not to be underestimated. There are things like structural oppression, racism, misogyny, ableism, discrimination that impact on people's lives on a day-to-day basis and also impacts on people in terms of their work. So even on an organizational level, that can mean microaggressions, racism, not making appropriate reasonable adjustments for disabled people or people with chronic illnesses, for example. Burnout can also exacerbate chronic illness. And a number of people who have chronic illness talked about feeling very fatigued by burnout and that exacerbating existing chronic illness. That's also something that I can really relate to. I have a neurological condition that can cause fatigue. And I know that when I'm burnout, that fatigue gets much, much worse. There's other systemic causes, world events and crises, the pandemic, COVID-19, lack of funding in the sector, the high cost of living. There's also uncertainty that we seem to constantly face in the sector around what the future might look like. And maybe as humans, we can deal with a bit of uncertainty, but I think that constantly living in uncertainty, constantly not knowing where the next funding's going to come from, how we're going to keep going in the face of all of these additional pressures is very, very draining and difficult. In terms of organizational causes, the major thing that came up in the research was we have too much to do. And that's also aligned to things like not having enough resources, understaffing, or a staff member leaving and not being replaced, and someone else being expected to take up their job as well. Overstretching and overpromising. It was also linked to some organizations not having particularly strong missions or visions or strategies, or in some cases not having strategies at all, maybe having an action plan for love, you know, a hundred things we need to do this year, but not having a really clear strategy that says what matters and what we need to prioritize. And when people don't know what the direction of travel is or what to prioritize, that can lead to taking on far too much and not really knowing what to prioritize, what to value, how to shape your work. There was stuff around spending time in the wrong ways. So spending time in pointless meetings, I'm sure we can all think of a time when we were in a meeting when we thought, why are we in this meeting? What is the point? Spending time emailing a lot. And even though those things are necessary and part of work, spending all of our time in meetings and emails and doing things that actually weren't really focusing on what mattered or weren't helping us reach the goals of the organization. There was something around not having active permission to stop working or to rest. So even if a manager would say, you know, take your lunch break, we expect you to take your toil, we expect you to take your annual leave, saying that once isn't enough. And people felt like they couldn't give themselves permission to rest. And they also felt like they weren't getting enough permission from their organizations to rest. There was something around passing stress to each other because many of us are feeling burnt out, because many of us are feeling stressed. It's like, okay, could could you just do this now? Because I'm feeling stressed about it, and I need to pass that stress on to you, so you need to do that so I can feel less stressed. And I think in that constant state of stress and anxiety, we're maybe less mindful of others' needs. Below having too much work to do, the second highest cause of burnout was considered to be just not great management and leadership, or maybe leaders and managers who hadn't received a lot of training or were maybe themselves so burnt out that they couldn't be as supportive as they'd want to be. People talked about feeling not supported enough, not being supported to prioritize their work. They felt like they had unrealistic expectations on them. Some people talked about feeling that they were being micromanaged or not given any autonomy. Some people reported bullying behavior from trustees, from leaders, from line managers. And some just talked about a general lack of kindness, a general lack of time spent with staff, not listening, and just feeling really unvalued. It really amazed me the amount of people who said, even if I could just be thanked once in a while for what I do, I'd feel a lot better about this, but I just feel completely undervalued. Something that came up around exceptional practice in the cultural sector being celebrated and highlighted. So we have awards for, you know, fantastic performances, brilliant exhibitions, great touring shows, great marketing campaigns, for example. But there's no awards to say this organization is doing a really good job within its resources and not burning its staff out. And maybe we do need to celebrate the more boring stuff, you know, because it's the boring stuff that actually makes organizations really good places to work, as well as doing the fun stuff. There was also quite a lot around poor pay. And again, I'm sure many of us in the sector will feel like our pay is under what it might be for the kind of work that we do, especially within the high cost of living crisis. Not being paid enough is a constant source of stress and worry. In terms of personal causes, people talked about being so passionate about the work that they're doing, putting in long hours and giving up time outside of work to volunteer for art organizations. Whilst not wanting to be exceptionalist, I appreciate that burnout happens in probably every sector. I think there is something quite specific about the creative and cultural sectors. That the passion which drives us can also then lead to burnout. And there's that overwork, underpay, the lack of resource that create this kind of toxic mix that that causes burnout. People also talked about their own personal circumstances exacerbating burnout, so having caring responsibilities, for example, or dealing with issues outside of work. And that's made me think a lot about the fact that we talk about work life balance, like work isn't part of life. Whereas actually it's all life, isn't it? And if we're dealing with things outside of work, of course they're gonna bleed into work, and things that work are gonna bleed into personal life, and maybe we shouldn't see it as two separate things. I asked people to tell me about what the consequences of burnout had been on them. Really interestingly, although when I asked about the causes of burnout, the main causes that were raised were those organizational causes and a little bit around systemic causes, and then a little bit around personal causes of burnout. Interestingly, the consequences of burnout were much more personal. It made me think, and and this is a thought that's just forming, but maybe that's one reason that burnout's still hidden, because actually so much of the personal impact of burnout is outside of work. It's the impact it has on us, it's the impact it has on people's partners and families, it's the impact it has on their finances, if they're paying, for example, for counselling, or if they leave a job because they're so burnt out, maybe because a lot of the impacts are personal. Maybe that's why it's not taken as seriously as it could be. So, in terms of personal impacts of burnout, people talked about impacts on their health, things like insomnia, memory loss, anxiety, depression, even PTSD came up. Lots of people also talked about it being damaging to their personal relationships. They didn't feel able to properly care for themselves outside of work because they were so exhausted by work. And so a partner or family member had to do that for them. So then there's a real impact on families as well. People talked about having lower confidence, lower self-esteem, and a growing cynicism about the sector, feeling like burnouts everywhere and there's no way to escape it. Many people who said that they've been burnt out had ultimately said that they left their roles as a self-protection measure. It's really important not to be in those toxic situations. But of course, that can lead to unemployment, it can lead to less financial sustainability. So many people said that they felt like a personal failure because of burnout. And what I want to make really clear is how can we possibly be personal failures when the causes of burnout are systemic and organizational in the main. You know, we we can't be failures when we're trying to fight against this wider system. We are working in a sector that has kind of been designed, unconsciously maybe, but designed to burn us out. It's a sector problem, it's not a you problem. In terms of organizations, people talked about they were less motivated at work, less focused, less effective, they weren't being as creative or innovative. And there was a real narrative of hopelessness. There was a real narrative of nothing is going to change. This is what the sector is like, it's always going to be like this, we're always going to be burnt out, there's nothing that we can do. And I want to say that I absolutely hear that and validate that, that I have certainly been there where I've felt like there's nothing I can do, there's nowhere to turn. How can I possibly ever not feel like this? And I want to give validity to that. But I also, I said, want to say there are things that we can do, and we can collectively turn that narrative of hopelessness into a more positive, optimistic narrative. I presented this work at the University of Leeds, who've been supervising me, and I said, it feels like a silent epidemic. So it's a huge crisis, huge amounts of people are dealing with burnout, it's having terrible impacts on people's personal lives, people's organizations, but like nothing's being done about it. But then I said, but people do talk about it. People are kind of screaming into the void, because so many people I spoke to or who responded to the survey said, you know, I've I told my manager about it, I told the trustees about it, I talked to my friends about it, I tell the funders about this. People talk about it all the time, but for some reason it's just like screaming into the void and nothing happens. And Dr. Jonathan Price from the University of Leeds came back with a really brilliant observation that it's a silenced epidemic. So it's this epidemic that people know about, people talk about, a lot of people have experienced, whether themselves or a colleague, but nothing happens about it. And what I want to say is it shouldn't be silenced anymore. I would really like everyone to consider when listening to this podcast. Have we built a sector that we can be proud of? Or have we built a sector that does brilliant, brilliant things for audiences, brilliant things that we can be proud of, but that inevitably burns staff out? Do we want a sector where staff inevitably get burnt out? Do we want a sector where we know that people are going to be harmed by working in the sector? Not everyone, but lots and lots of people are going to be harmed. I certainly don't want that sector. I absolutely love the culture and creative sector, and I really want a sector that we can be proud of. So I would urge people to take action and stop this epidemic. Let's create brilliant workplaces in exactly the same way as we try to create great experiences for audiences. As I said, just to finish, I really want to say that this is not a hopeless situation. That's not about denying that people are having horrible experiences, but it is about saying we can take an optimistic approach and that careful, intentional action rooted in self-compassion and compassion for others can make a really big difference. And I hope that listening to Andrea and Chris and Kate as part of this podcast series and hearing their great examples of how they have prevented burnout for themselves and other people, and then hearing about some of the results of my research, which I'll go into in episode five, about things that you can do to prevent burnout will help because I promise that really small steps can lead to big change. I'm going to be researching this in the long term. I'd love to hear from you about your experiences of burnout and crucially, what great practice have you seen that is helping prevent burnout in the arts? I'm looking forward to seeing you next time. Thank you for listening to Joyful Work Ending Burnout in the Arts podcast. I'd love to hear from you if you have an experience of burnout or if you'd like a chat about my work. You can find more about my research and more tips for beating burnout on my LinkedIn profile and my website, both of which are linked to in the show notes. Thank you to Fundus Claw and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this podcast and my research into burnout in the cultural sector. And to Professor Ben Wormsley of the University of Leeds for supervising the research. You can find a link to the School of Performance and Cultural Industries at the University of Leeds and the Centre for Cultural Value in You've Guessed It, the show notes. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast today, please like and subscribe. And if you're listening on Apple Podcasts, give it a review to encourage more people to listen. Our next episode will be with Andrea Hadley Johnson, a creative producer and PhD researcher, who will be talking about ways to inject joy and creativity into work in the cultural sector.