The Issue of Burnout : Navigating the Complexities of Workplace Harm and Trauma

Up to 70, 77% of people are burnt out right now. And so there's this burnout epidemic that is creating a lot of trauma.

Hello dear listeners and welcome back to Narratives of Purpose, a place for conversations with inspiring leaders that is all about amplifying social impact. I am your host, Claire Murigande.This episode is the third and final discussion that I moderated for the 2025 International Day against Harassment and for Inclusion in the World of Work, an event that took place on 23 May in Geneva, Switzerland and co organized by Narratives of Purpose. The title of this conversation is Assessing Workplace Psychological Risk.Welcome Back to the third and final webinar session of the 2025 International Day against Harassment and for Inclusion in the World of Work. For this last discussion I'll be joined by Dr. Nicole DeKay, who is based in the United States.And a brief introduction about Nicole so she is a well being centered industrial organizational psychologist and the founder of Humanalysts. It's a bit of a mouthful, right?

It is a bit of a mouthful. I originally thought I'd be working mostly with analysts.

So just a few words on your platform before we jump into it and you tell me more about it.So it's a free platform which was created to democratize the employee experience and advocate for employee well being and harm reduction, educate employees and employers on what workplace harm, trauma and abuse can look like. And with the goal to stop it. You also studied adverse work experiences, which is adapted from adverse childhood experiences in your doctoral program.And we'll be diving a bit more deeper into that. But first I want to start with Humanalysts and tell me about the platform. If you can share with the audience what is it exactly?

Yes. And so where we are building a pretty cool platform right now, I'm working with a developer to codify some of this research in there.So a lot of people analytics, the surveys that you get when you're inside of an organization, they tend to focus on positive psychology.And there's a podcast by Adam Grant, who's the most famous industrial organizational psychologist here in the States, where he talks to Daniel Kahneman, who's another very pivotal psychologist who when it comes to positive psychology and he recently came out to say that it's not the positive things we need to measure, it's not engagement or leadership style and those positive traits that we tend to think about when we think about the things that we're trying to increase at work, it's reduction of misery.So how do we reduce people's misery at work because when we reduce people's misery at work, completely different policy decisions would be made in the workplace and abroad. And that's what we're trying to do. So I have research up right now that we're working on to figure out what are all of these harmful things.You can go on my website and take our surveys.If you provide your email address, you'll be put on a wait list for the platform that we're going to be building, which combines all of these things together to help coach people on how to stop harm. First, we need to know what harm looks like.And so getting that data, getting the things that impact people the most in their health, and that's what I really focus on, is the medical form of health. What are the things that we know medically harm people and how do we measure that for the workplace?

Would you tell us a few words? We've had previous sessions where we spoke about harassment and bullying.What are you looking at when you're analyzing basically through your platform, what type of workplace harm are we talking about?

So there's a lot of, there's a lot of different types. So workplace harm can come in so many different forms, but we have a couple of frameworks we can think about.So like an acute harm at work would be the things that I think about when it comes to like police officers, nurses, doctors, some mental health care providers, 911 operators, suicide hotline operators, the people who are dealing with inherently traumatizing content. That's one form of harm that happens at work that's well studied. There's a lot more support for that form of trauma though.I think we still need a lot more. But then there's this added piece of the elements of the jobs themselves being harmful.So you can have these harmful jobs like as a police officer, but then if you have a supportive supervisor, it can stave off a lot of the actual physical harms that come both to the person who's on the job and then to their family as well.We now have research that ties for low wage workers some of the what can be considered like some of the hardest jobs and most harmful jobs, like below the federal poverty rate. And it's this book called Work Matters by Maureen Perry Jenkins.And she does this longitudinal study looking at how people's jobs impact their children.And we now know that when work conditions are poor for a person, which includes these unsupportive supervisors, it impacts kids in their long term outcomes as well, behaviorally and health outcomes.And we need to take that into account as well, because if we're having a really hard job and then we also have a really hard work environment that we're in as well, that part isn't what's getting focused on. And so really bringing to light that part, which is the job itself being difficult because of the working conditions.And so what that can be is those bad bosses, chaotic working hours, unpredictable schedules, absolutely unreasonable goals. Do more with less.That came from Boeing, which is a company that I worked at and did an organizational development work where I learned a lot of these people practices that we were seeing are harmful to the organization and the culture and the safety culture Back in 2011, before all this stuff became public about what happened after that. So this was before the batteries caught on fire and planes started crashing with the MCAS system.These sorts of things harm people, and they harm culture. They're good for profit and the bottom line sometimes, and they are accepted as common business practice.Like, bullying at work is the only form that we. That actually gets you, like, rewarded and promoted sometimes because you're seen as more powerful. It's the only place where that happens.And so there's that piece. And I'm gonna talk, like, specifically about the systems. I'm gonna focus on the systems of harm, because for me, that's what drives harm at work.I know a lot of people when they're being harmed. It's easy to blame the individuals around us for that happening, because no one's doing anything.And it feels like you're alone and you're just so downtrodden and so abused by, like, sometimes a group. So mobbing is a bullying term as well. That's a group of people that will gang up on somebody at work.And while that can happen and it's very isolating and it's very harmful, often it's done within these systems that are harmful. And there's levels of harm. So there's. And I'll relate this to narcissism, because it's an easier way to think about it.But, like, harm can come from narcissistic systems. Complex trauma is directly tied to narcissism.And then there's this higher form of narcissism, which is like the personality disorder that's generally associated with people who have no to low to no empathy there. It's no empathy, and they're not able to really appreciate people. And that's a very, like, extreme level.And those are the people that we tend to think about that actually are nefariously intending to do harm. It can be vindictive. They can be. They're not always.But that's only about 3 to 6% of the population is the accepted number of what percentage of people are actually, like, looking to actively do harm outside of just narcissism? But in all of dark traits, who are the people with the intent?And intent is what's important, because when intent isn't there, it's usually the system that's driving behavior. So we've got 97 to 94% of people who have good intent but are doing bad things within systems that they're required to do that.And so those are called psychosocial hazards is the term. It's a big word for things that can harm your health, either psychologically or physically.But those things, when it comes to the organizational design literature, it's things like having really high or really low job demands. So there's two sides of this coin.Either you have job demands that are too much, where you're constantly feeling like you can never get everything done because there's too much to do.And then it can be such boring work that you feel, like, just completely checked out or frustrated with your job because you are so understimulated that it causes stress. Another one is having low job control. So this is called autonomy. Sometimes. How much control do you have over the work that you do?Do you have someone micromanaging you?That usually when you have low job control, it's because someone is micromanaging you and they're telling you exactly how you have to get the job done. Even when there's, like, room for it being done a different way. It doesn't have to. We can get to the same result if we do it a different way.That's another one, like a leader who isn't supportive.So I think about in this study by Maureen Perry Jenkins, she talks about a woman whose supervisor was willing to help her cover shifts when she had a really sick baby. And so when she needed to go to appointment, she had a supervisor that would say, we will take care of it. Go ahead, I'll do this for you.And so having that supportive environment, even in a really bad job, can be so critical. It's such tiny little things that can make people either feel harmed or helped not having role clarity.I think of people who have seven or eight hats that they have to wear where they have to switch between jobs every day or even meetings because they're responsible for so many things that they don't really even know what their role is. Bad change management. This is another one that's been identified that harms people.There's a change process that we go through that kind of helps our nervous system regulate. There's the change that happens, there's stress that the change is happening. There's.Then it happens and then you adjust to it and you recognize that it's better. And then you're. You go through like this period of calm where maybe change will start again. But like you should go through this cycle.And so when you don't have that, when you're just like change, stress, change stress, it is very harmful to us people. You have to change, you have to go through that whole cycle in order for change to feel okay. And that's part of the change management cycle.That's what professionals who understand how to do change management will help you do. Because there's a ton of science behind how you prepare people for change.And when people are the biggest predictor of the failure of change, it's something you should be actively managing.

I think it gives really the audience a broad view of how to approach this right.It's not just one, one lens, so to speak, but basically you can look at different industries, different professions and there's literally harm done almost everywhere, if not everywhere. And I was curious to know because I also checked on your website, and Humanalysts the approach is based on three pillars.So it's data driven, it's trauma informed and it's about really creating this holistic, healthy employees experience. So if we focus on the data right, what can you tell us about the prevalence of workplace traumatic responses?For example, I don't know if you have specific example of professions or some sectors.

So there's some information on that. And I'll approach it in two ways. One is my own research where I tested the.It's like a trauma response, but I'll call it psychological distress response. I took the PTSD symptoms checklist from the medical field and made the questions contextualized to the workplace.So it's not an exact measure of a PTSD response, but it's close. So things like I had nightmares about the event became I had nightmares about work. And in my sample, what I found was that 25% of around.It's a little under 25% of the people who took my survey. They had the criteria that you, the minimum criteria you would need to be assessed for PTSD in the states.And so that's one in four active workers who are feeling those stress responses. And this is a behavioral checklist that talks about what are your symptoms and so that's one piece.And just to kind of underscore the prevalence of what's going on here, the Workplace Bullying Institute here in the States puts out a study on the state of workplace bullying. And they found that approximately 30% of the population has been impacted by bullying either in the past, like the past, or present at work.And so it's one in three people have been impacted by this. And then let's go to burnout. Burnout. It ranges right now between 40%. I've seen up to 70, 77% of people are burnt out right now.And burnout is a workplace form of depression. There's such a high correlation between burnout and depression that it's hard to say that they're completely different constructs.And so likely what's happening is we're finding the workplace form of depression and, and a depressed workforce is costly, it's not productive, it's not good for the environment. And so there's this burnout epidemic that is creating a lot of trauma.And it's all these things that I talked about with having all of these high demands and having no control over your work and not being able to.There's this also, this expectation, I don't know if it's, this is abroad, but in the States, like for salaried workers who are not protected in unions, it's often an expectation that you work 50, 60 hour weeks, that you work well above the 40 hours that you're paid for, which is a recipe for burnout if that's something that you're doing chronically. And so those are like big numbers. But there's a lot of people who are experiencing trauma in the workplace.And it's so understudied and so under talked about, but.And at the same time it's there like these stats are out there, you can find them because there's a lot of people who are having a hard time in this area.

So if we look at now from the employer perspective, from your work and your research, what do you think the role or the duty that they have? Because I mentioned in the beginning, right, you worked or you studied adverse work experiences.And you also, in the beginning of the discussion you mentioned that whatever you go through at work, you also bring it at home. And so there's an impact on your family.Can you talk a bit about what is the role of employers or at least what is the duty of the workplace for what you call adverse work experiences, which is adapted from adverse childhood experience. And maybe it's a bit of a Twofold question. So explain to us what does that mean and what is the role of employers there to support the employees?

Yeah.So adverse childhood experiences was this pivotal study on chronic traumatic experiences that happen for children that they tied to major health like consequences. This was in the late 90s that this study came out.It's one of the best predictors of early death that we have is how many adverse experiences you have in childhood. So these are things like divorce or loss of a parent in some other way, emotional neglect, physical neglect, alcoholism or drug use in the home.A lot of these like chronic stressors that happen to children.It's then been expanded to include things like bullying on the playground, living in a neighborhood that's unsafe, these sorts of things that are also adversity in childhood that they're tied to. I believe it is a 740% increase in alcoholism, a thousand percent increase in intravenous drugs, and a 1200% increase in suicide attempts.If you have had four or more adverse childhood experiences, and so they're cumulative, the results get worse as you start stacking them. So if you have one, your results are pretty good.And then there's this cumulatively worse if it's 2 and then 3 and then they stop at 4, the list can get bigger. But at 4 there are all of these consequences because they found that it can change the way that your brain is wired to respond to stress differently.And around the original study found around 20, 26% of the population has adverse childhood experiences. So again that's one in four. And then recent studies with the expanded questionnaire have said that it's actually probably closer to 37%.So that's more than one in three have had four or more adverse childhood experiences that result in early death. The some of the largest, like the biggest and best predictors that we have of early death also includes things like I believe heart failure.And the study has a lot of interesting information, but it hasn't changed the way that we practice medicine. They thought that this would really change the way that we do work.One of the head of the American Pediatrics association here in the States, a doctor came out and called it the largest unaddressed national health crisis that we're just not facing it. It's an unaddressed health crisis. And so when I learned about this theory, I was like, no one has studied this in the workplace.And what harms you as children is obviously going to harm you as an adult, especially if your brain has been wired to react to stress in a way that isn't necessarily a good coping mechanism. It worked for you when you were a kid to maybe avoid the trauma.But then as an adult it's not as good of a coping mechanism when you are faced with similar things.So for example, if you had a parent who was really critical of you, called you stupid, annoying, frustrating, and then you went to work and all of a sudden you had this manager who used those same words that's going to create a stress response that is in an individual that shouldn't be there. You shouldn't be called annoying, slurred or stupid or any of those terms in the workplace. But it still impacts us.And so there's this, I think societal duty for us to reduce harm because it reduces our lifespans. And we're seeing this in the data. American lifespans are going down for the first time consistently for a while.And so there's that piece and then there's this financial piece. Burnout costs, costs billions if not trillions of dollars to the economy. Things like abuse are extremely expensive.And we have all these examples outside of the states for ways that you can reduce harm at work that have better long term outcomes.I think a lot of the competitiveness that comes into the workplace and the kind of the this I feel a lot of the early childhood harm comes from this idea that you're never going to be good enough. That's one of the ways that like neglect and back to narcissism again shows up in early adversity. And there's a.Tim Fletcher is a researcher who talks about there's a direct tie between complex trauma and narcissism. Like you have to understand the two together.And so when we're talking about these narcissistic tendencies that make you feel like you're never going to be good enough that shows up at work and so it will eventually result in harm. And if we want to think about the long term good, like positive reinforcement is much more effective than negative reinforcement.So how do we positively work with people?How do we, especially when we're entering this AI age, how do we augment relationships rather than train computers on a bunch of data that is not, not a full understanding of the human experience because we've ignored the negative for so long. And so I think there's like a twofold piece or threefold. There's a duty for this for the children of our nation.There is a financial responsibility to reduce harm because it is good for the bottom line. It's really good for the bottom line to treat people well and Then there's this longevity thing.Instead of short term thinking, having a long term goal in mind for the long term health of both organizations and people.I think the organizations that are going to be leading the future of work and I think we've seen that are the ones who have people first strategies, who have adopted more than just profit as their bottom line, but they think about people planet and profit.And those are the companies that we see taking off and they're doing better because this new generation really cares about a company that cares about people, which.

It's somehow even a no brainer, right? Because who makes your organization it is your people and you should actually care about your people first.Simply put, now that the data also shows that only the companies that do that are sustained longer in time and they also thrive more in terms of financials. What have you seen from these companies? Whether it's in a research or previous experiences, what do these companies actually do that is better?Or what should other companies learn from them? Easier way to, to ask the question and the reason I'm asking that as well is you can just give a few examples that you might have in mind.Is the whole session today and the whole day is also to give like some practical insights to, to the audience. So what would you like to give them as a sort of a conclusion to this conversation?

I'm going to give like a practical one for managers. When an employee comes to you with a problem, saying that sounds really hard. Can you tell me more about it?That can reduce someone's trauma response in, in their body so much. But if you instead, if that manager came in, I want to, I want people to avoid their avoidance responses which is like no, no, no, no, no.That's not like you got that wrong because it's about you. That's not about, that's not about the situation that this person is bringing up.That's bringing up a reaction in you that you want to like quash something down so you're not stressed out.So when they're bringing something legitimate to you, recognizing it instead of avoiding these hard things, letting them talk to you, even if you can't do anything about it, even if you can't change the situation, letting them talk to you so you understand it is so critical to that relationship that we need as humans with people at work, it'll make your teammates feel less isolated, less minimized because minimization telling you that oh, you're being dramatic. Like I'm not though.If I've just seen a ton of people on my team laid off and I'm worried about being able to afford my rent and pay for food and I'm afraid and I want to talk to my manager about it. That should be okay. That's part of the job.Your employees have to be able to talk to you about their fears because if you, if they don't, there's health consequences.And so getting those trainings, there's, if managers are interested in this, there's, I don't know if this will still be available when this goes out, but right now the center for Healing, it's out of Australia, they're offering a free trauma informed coaching certificate. And every manager is a coach.And it's several hours, but it's videos teaching you how to be a more trauma informed leader and how to show up to these conversations better. And so that's, it's only $700 is a lot, but it's only $700 if your company pays for training.That's usually within budget for a training if it's not free. So there are resources and things out there that can teach you how to be more, more human as a manager.Because that's what we really need to reduce harm is you have to learn how to do it. And that means becoming trauma informed.Because little, these little t traumas, big and little, but the big ones are those acute traumas like the police officer's jobs. These little t traumas that show up every day in work, they cause complex react that we have to be able to handle.

Thank you for mentioning that. I think it's a good takeaway for our audience being trauma informed.Find the resources wherever you can and we'll make sure to have at least a link so people can also reach out to you if they have more questions. Thanks a lot for being with us today, Nicole DeKay Founder of Humanalysts.

Thank you. This has been a good conversation.

Thank you for tuning in today. If you wish to connect with our guest and follow her work, visit the following website Humanalysts.com the link is available in the show Notes.This episode was created in collaboration with Rezalliance, an organization dedicated to raising awareness about harassment and discrimination in all its forms.