INSIGHTS TO IMPACT

Introduction

Three years. Sometimes it feels like far less, sometimes it feels like far more, but it’s been more than three years since the first COVID-19 lockdowns. While life feels like it’s slowly getting back to normal, the aftershocks of the pandemic continue to be felt in our communities, in our workplaces, and in our homes. 

YMCA WorkWell has been measuring employee well-being in our communities throughout the pandemic, collecting data on employees’ most pressing needs and how they have continued to evolve over the course of the pandemic. 

In the first year of the pandemic, our 2020 Insights to Impact Report identified the importance of clarity and flexibility. We saw employee well-being decline drastically as lockdowns changed how work looked for many people in our communities. Our homes became our workplaces, meetings became virtual, parents had to juggle work and their children, and dining tables and beds became desks. Amidst so much change, our data suggested that employees were crying out for more effective leadership communication, more connection to their now distant colleagues, and more flexibility to be able to juggle the changing demands of the new working world. 

In the second year of the pandemic, our 2021 Insights to Impact Report highlighted how employees’ primary well-being needs shifted from clarity and flexibility to more manageable workloads and appreciation. After months of recurring lockdowns, uncertainty, and staffing crises, employees began to feel the full brunt of the pandemic. Employee burnout reached record levels and staff were asked to do more with less. When we asked employees what they needed to feel healthier at work, they told us resoundingly that they needed respite and to feel like their efforts were valued in trying times. 
 
How have employee needs continued to evolve in the third year? Well, at the risk of spoiling what is about to come, we’ve seen our first glimmer of hope in our community data since the start of the pandemic. It is a tiny step, employee needs have continued to evolve, and there is still a lot of work to do to support employees in our communities, but this is the first sign of progress we’ve seen – signs that, finally, we might be building in the right direction. Let’s dig in. 

Burnout: Is It Finally on the Decline?

Burnout has been one of the biggest buzzwords in the employee well-being space throughout the pandemic and for good reason. Burnout has been such a challenge during Covid-19 that its rapid rise has been called the Burnout Epidemic, and it was such a clear trend in our 2021 Insights to Impact Report data that it became the central theme of our 2022 Special Interest Report, highlighting how burnout was driving much of the Great Resignation.

This survey provided another opportunity to get a pulse on burnout in our communities

Figure 5 illustrates a second glimmer of hope: The percentage of respondents experiencing burnout “Often” or “Extremely Often” is now at its lowest point since Fall 2021, dropping 10 points from 43% in Spring 2022 to 33% in Fall 2022. Like overall well-being scores, this is the first time that we’ve seen a decline in burnout since the start of the pandemic. 

Naturally, we want to know why. One simple reason is that the pandemic has started to subside. Our communities have started to return to some semblance of “normal”, with the challenges of lockdowns, bubbles, and pandemic anxieties starting to lessen, which has lightened the mental load on our communities and our community organizations.

Another reason might be clearly linked to The Great Resignation – the very thing that burnout has contributed to. The Great Resignation was a significant macro-trend in the workforce in 2022, with employees leaving their jobs in record numbers. The warning signs were there to see in 2021 – in our 2021 Insights to Impact Report, the data suggested that a desire for healthier work was the primary reason that many employees were looking to leave their jobs. Six months later, the data from our 2022 Special Issue Report told a similar story: employees who were considering leaving their jobs experienced burnout twice as often and had cynicism scores nearly double those of employees that were happy with their current roles.

Now at the end of 2022, it is possible that community-level burnout has started to decline simply because many burnt out employees left their roles to start something new. New roles have long been a source of renewed energy and inspiration, but this effect might have been magnified further as a record number of employees were leaving jobs where exhaustion and cynicism had grown to unbearable levels.

Figure 6 illustrates these effects. Specifically, when we asked respondents to put themselves into the energized or hesitant camps, the differences by tenure were telling. Sixty-one percent of new employees who had started their role in the last six months felt energized compared to only 26% of employees who had been in their role since before the pandemic. More than double. New roles often bring new energy and considering the turnover we saw throughout our communities during The Great Resignation, this renewed inspiration and energy might be one of the drivers behind burnout scores declining. 

It's important to stress, however, that we are not out of the woods yet. While burnout levels appear to be slowly declining, a significant percentage of employees continue to experience regular burnout in our communities.

To revisit this as your organization of 200 employees, 33% still represents 66 employees experiencing burnout “Often” or “Extremely Often” - 1 in 3. Equally as worrying, only 58 employees would be reporting burnout “Rarely” or “Not At All”. 

This is the balancing act that this data represents. This does represent meaningful progress; as we compare these scores to Spring 2022 in Figure 7, we can see that we have taken a step in the right direction: the number of burnt out employees is declining and the number of healthy employees is increasing. But we need to acknowledge and call out the reality that 1 in 3 employees experiencing regular burnout in our communities means that we still have much work to do to support employee well-being.

So where do we start? What are employees asking for? Let’s break it down.

What Are Employees Asking For Today?

We highlighted in the introduction how employee well-being needs in our communities have evolved throughout the last three years of the pandemic. This year is no different and there is a new contender in this year’s needs hierarchy.

Figure 8 illustrates the top three needs identified by respondents this year and how they stack up compared to the top three needs identified in 2021 and 2020. 

Cost of Living Adjustments

Responding to the question “What do you feel you need more of to feel like you are able to be at your best at work?”, respondents not only identified cost of living adjustments as the top need for the first time, but it was also the first time it made the top three.

Pay has always been a notable concern across many industries – this is not new. What is new, however, is how widespread these challenges now are. A higher rate of pay emerged as the top need in nearly every industry we surveyed – even in industries like finance, insurance, and technology, where salaries tend to be well above community averages. In fact, government, public administration, and real estate were the only industries where other needs took top billing. 

The reason behind this need will be no surprise to Canadian families: The Consumer Price Index rose 6.8% during 2022, and its emergence is particularly understandable when you compare inflation over the course of the pandemic. For example, in July 2020, the inflation rate in Canada was sitting steady at 0.1%, but by June 2022, it had jumped substantially to 8.1%. The cost of every-day staples like food (+8.9%), shelter (+6.9%) and transportation (+10.6%) rose markedly during 2022 and wages rarely kept pace with this level of inflation.

The implications of this inflation has been significant. The latest MNP Consumer Debt Index reported that 52% of Canadians are less than $200 away from not being able to meet all of their monthly financial obligations and 35% already don't make enough to cover their bills and debt payments - the highest number ever recorded by MNP. 

In the face of these challenges, many employees were simply asking for their salaries to be kept in line with inflation to be able to maintain their spending power – nothing more.

It’s important to acknowledge, however, that this is no small feat for many organizations. For medium to large-sized organizations, a 6.8% cost of living adjustment across the board can represent tens of millions of dollars – these sums are particularly prohibitive for many industries such as not-for-profits and health care, and this is the bind that many leaders currently find themselves in.

While there is no simple solution to this challenge, leaders do need to be acutely aware of these needs and how they are impacting their organizations. For example, respondents who identified pay as a clear need were more than twice as likely to be considering leaving their job in the next six months (Figure 9), and their average employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS) was -35, significantly lower than the score of -3 of respondents who did not identify pay as a clear need.

It is worth noting that the cost of turnover can also be debilitating for an organization. When you account for the substantial investment of time and energy that is required to replace a staff member, along with the often higher wages required to attract new employees in a competitive job market, replacing just one employee can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Crucially, this amount can often run far more than the cost of a 6.8% salary adjustment for a critical employee.

Overall, it is unfortunate that organizations and their employees have been at the mercy of macro-economic trends that are largely outside of their control, and we know how many leaders in our communities are struggling with these challenges – wishing that paying their employees more was easier than it is.

While many may unfortunately feel like their hands are tied on these issues, it’s important for leaders to be aware that the rising cost of living continues to be a significant concern for employees. If employees’ income and spending power does not keep up with inflation, they are at a higher risk of leaving – and, importantly, this is particularly true for their top talent that is most likely to have external opportunities.

Workload and Work-Life Balance

While pay was a new contender on the list this year, workload and work-life balance continue to be mainstays. Both our 2021 Insights to Action Report and our 2022 Special Issue Report focused extensively on workload and balance, but our data suggests that they remain significant challenges to employee well-being.

Figure 10 highlights just how pervasive workload challenges continue to be today: 

Thirty-three percent of respondents identified a need for a more manageable workload to feel like they are able to be at their best at work, basically unchanged from our Fall 2021 results. This number rose drastically, however, for some critical groups. For example, workload was identified as a key challenge by 44% of respondents in education, 47% of respondents in health care, 48% of respondents looking to leave their job, and 63% of respondents experiencing persistent burnout.

This is the upstream issue that is at the core of burnout. Three years into the pandemic and on the heels of The Great Resignation, many employees are still being asked to do more with less and Figure 11 demonstrates how it is having an ongoing impact on well-being in our communities, with those respondents identifying that they are struggling to manage their workload reporting significantly lower scores on both mental health and overall well-being.

We have said it before, but we will say it again: If leaders want to address workload challenges, they need to address workload. Too often we see organizations focus on providing downstream solutions to help employees manage their workload instead of addressing the workload itself. Lunchtime yoga, meditation app subscriptions and mental health webinars are short-term band-aid solutions to substantial challenges – and we say this as a team that offers employee mental health webinars.

Effectively tackling workload long-term can only be done in one of two ways: Adding resources or reducing demands. Adding resources is often the first thing that leaders consider – by adding new staff, existing demands can be spread across a larger number of employees. However, in a competitive job market, many leaders are struggling to add staff at a rate that outpaces turnover. This has led many teams to feel perennially understaffed and struggling to meet the demands placed on them by their leaders.

Reducing demands is the second, often less considered, option. This can take on many forms such as lightening caseloads and taking on less client engagements. Leaders often shy away from this approach, as it leaves revenue and impact on the table. Another option is streamlining processes and hitting pause on demands that do not add immediate value to an organization’s objectives. By adding more efficiency to bloated processes, organizations can strip away demands that take employees away from their most important work.

Whatever approach is most appropriate in a given organization, our data suggests that workload continues to plague many employees and these challenges will not be addressed in a meaningful way without upstream solutions. That’s where we can help.