An excerpt about burnout
For the next 17 weeks, I'm going to share an exerpt from a different chapter of my book, The Accessibility Operations Guidebook, and talk about it. My goal is to stir up some conversation over on Bluesky, so check out my posts over there tagged with #taog-bookclub for more discussion.
Chapter 1 is about burnout. Here's a section that talks about how burnout in helping professions is tied to how we often have to perform emotions in the workplace.
Working in a helping profession like mental health services, social work, and accessibility, can compound burnout. It’s no accident that a lot of burnout studies, even before COVID-19, were about people in these types of professions. There are many common factors, but I want to focus on a few that I think impact us most strongly.
Professionals must often fake some of our emotions in the workplace to go along with organizational goals. This creates “emotional dissonance” where our external and internal emotions clash. That is, you feel pulled in two different directions. One direction is your actual emotions about your work and working environment. The other direction is the emotions your organization pressures you to perform.
This came up in multiple interviews. One anonymous practitioner told me: "I have found it incredibly difficult in taking on this job, combining what I’m passionate about and what I do for my daily job, to mask."
Many practitioners mentioned one of the biggest emotional drains in our field: telling people the same basic information over and over again. Practitioners end up being broken records repeating the same accessibility basics to new people all the time.
And yes, education work does require repetition. But if the importance of accessibility isn’t reinforced by practice and priorities, it doesn’t survive turnover, reorgs, or changes in leadership.
This type of repetition, with little or no movement forward, can be traumatic to practitioners. It feels like no one is listening to you, no one trusts your knowledge or experience, and you’re starting from square one over and over again.
Ultimately, though, this repetition has nothing to do with the information itself. It has everything to do with how it’s deemed okay for organizations to ignore it. Ignoring it isn’t just allowed, it’s reinforced and rewarded because people who are in positions of power allow it to keep happening.
Did I consider not starting the book with this downer of a chapter? I did, many times! But I kept coming back to it as the thesis of the project. I think that it's important to define what we don't want to do as we try to decide what we do want to do.
Unless we're clear about the world we don't want, it's harder to describe and realize the world we do want.
What's your relationship to burnout been? Has it made you think differently about your work? Yourself?