Roger Kapoor is the author of the new book Working Happy!: How to Survive Burnout and Find Your Work/Life Synergy in the Healthcare Industry. He is a physician and is the senior executive vice president of Beloit Health System in Beloit, Wisconsin.
Q: What inspired you to write Working Happy?
A: Like so many other healthcare professionals, I remember racing to understand the COVID-19 virus, do my part to help secure personal protective equipment, and try to work with others to explore every possible treatment to save lives.
During all of this, as the senior vice president of our health system, I made it a priority to stay connected with our entire staff—doctors, nurses, receptionists, maintenance crews, EMS, and first responders.
During those encounters, I began to hear the term "burnout" more and more often. And while my focus had been solely on patient care, I began to realize that the pandemic was impacting the well-being of our workforce. The book became my humble attempt to better understand the problem and try to do something that could help.
Of course, burnout had been a pressing issue in healthcare long before COVID-19, but the pandemic magnified it. We had stories like that of Dr. Lorna Breen, an ER physician who tragically took her own life during the height of the pandemic, highlighting just how severe this issue is.
Beyond being a personal struggle, burnout has systemic implications. For example, burnout is estimated to cost us $4.6 billion per year due to turnover and reduced hours, and other ripple effects include changing the culture of healthcare from one that was founded on relationship-centered practices to one that has become transactional.
I hope the book sparks a dialogue, offers solutions, and helps preserve the fundamental humanity of healthcare for the long term.
Q: What do you see as the major causes of burnout among medical professionals?
A: I categorize the causes of burnout into two large buckets: your workplace and yourself.
The workplace causes are more obvious.
For example, maybe you are working for a private equity company where profits are valued over the mission of healthcare.
Maybe you are finding that you are being compensated to do things to people instead of doing things for people.
Maybe you are depressed but hesitant to talk about it because you know that it may have to be disclosed on your license renewals and applications.
Maybe you are dealing with burdensome and repetitive administrative tasks like prior authorizations, or feeling a lack of control over your work environment, or finding that you are spending more time staring at a computer screen instead of talking to your patients.
Of note, I am not mentioning working long hours as a cause of burnout because surprisingly, burnout is very often unrelated to whether the work is hard or if someone spends long hours at work.
One of the interesting things about people who love their work is that they often work harder and longer at their jobs than people who are disengaged! Nevertheless, the list of workplace related causes of burnout are long.
The second cause of burnout is our own lifestyle choices and attitudes. It is easy, maybe even natural, to focus solely on the things around us as the cause of our internal happiness, but the truth is, that the way we manage our own lives, our thoughts and emotions, can play a significant part it either making burnout better or worse.
For example, making a few simple mistakes, like depriving yourself of adequate sleep, not fully understanding your capacity for emotional resilience, or chasing the elusive goal of “work/life balance,” may actually contribute to the development of burnout.
These behaviors can not only heighten our stress but also diminish our ability to thrive both personally and professionally, ultimately degrading your overall quality of life.
Q: What advice would you give healthcare workers about work-life balance?
A: My advice would be to stop trying to achieve a so-called “balance.” I would humbly suggest that the concept of work-life balance is misguided because it treats work and personal life as if they are entirely separate domains that need to be kept in some sort of equilibrium, like two opposing weights on a scale.
Balancing requires compartmentalizing and creating distinct boundaries between work and personal life. While this may work for some, it can also result in a constant struggle to juggle competing demands.
Especially in high-demand professions, this balancing act can itself become a source of stress and frustration, leading to a cycle where work and personal life are in perpetual tension thus itself factoring into burnout.
In fact, people chasing a balance often get trapped working at a job they don’t like, to buy things they don’t need, in order to impress people they don’t even care about!
On the other hand, work-life synergy is about seeing work and life as interconnected parts of the same big picture. This approach encourages flexibility and an understanding that there will be times when work demands more of our attention and other times when personal life takes precedence.
It recognizes that our work is often a reflection of our life and our life is often remembered by the work we do or the impact we have on the world around us.
In summary, work/life synergy encourages us to view work and life as related dimensions of who we are, instead of two separate parts, and in so doing can help alleviate burnout by allowing each dimension to complement and further energize each other.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope readers appreciate that your fulfillment should not hinge on what’s happening around you, but rather on what’s happening within you.
We often think of burnout as a result of being overworked, but it can just as easily come from feeling underworked or unfulfilled. Whether you are doing too much or too little, if your work does not bring you joy, it can lead to burnout.
As I mentioned above, in any profession, including healthcare, it is easy to point to our work as the source of burnout and say, “If only that were fixed, life would be so much easier.”
While there may be some truth to that, we have to remind ourselves that earlier generations of professionals in most careers did not have it any easier. Every generation faces its own set of challenges – just like every phase of life.
As toddlers, almost anything can set us off. My daughter, for example, will sometimes urgently cry out for her Elsa doll from Frozen, and her voice gets filled with panic as if the world were ending. After I frantically search the house to find it and bring it to her, she will suddenly change her mind and, with tears still in her eyes, say that she wants a cookie!
As teenagers, we feel like the adult world is our enemy, and we can get overwhelmed by hormonal changes. If we all take a moment to recall our teenage years, we had some serious stressors that we had to deal with.
As we move through life, some people suffer from being single, but when they find their soulmate, they suffer from being married. In middle age, we desire more money, and lament waiting until it happens; but give us more money and we start focusing on the taxes.
When we get older, we wish we were younger, but when we were younger, we wished we were older. Again, every phase of life has its challenges.
And so my question is, “When will we be happy?” Today? Tomorrow? Next year? And by “we,” I mean us as a profession, in this case healthcare, but honestly for whatever profession you may be in.
Will we find happiness only at some future time when everything around us is exactly the way we want it to be? If that’s the answer, then we are setting ourselves up for a lifetime of struggle, burnout, and possibly even depression. When you find work that aligns with your passions, your happiness becomes independent of external circumstances.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: For now, I am focused on being an available resource to anyone who might benefit from the message of work/life synergy. I am continuing to learn from others, and hoping to spread a message that might resonate and maybe even empower others to find a path to discovering their own fulfillment.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: A lot of times, when you feel frustrated, stuck in a rut, or beginning to feel that your job is not aligning with your sense of purpose, it might signal that it’s time to start thinking about making a change; but before you do, force yourself to find a reason why you might actually be at the right place for now, even if it’s just for this moment.
In other words, before you decide to chase after the next job or a new title, do an experiment and fully immerse yourself in what you are doing right now. The goal is to try to get the most out of your current situation with a focus on enhancing your competency and bloom where you are planted.
Think of it this way, if you have ever been apple picking, you know that in order to get the best apples, you need to find a healthy apple tree; and in order to have that, the tree must have strong roots; and for that to take place, someone has to nurture just a tiny seed.
Here is my point: many of us, we just want the apples without being willing or truly understanding the effort it takes to nurture the seed. We focus on getting the new title, wealth, social status, possessions (in other words, the apples), but we overlook the importance of pursuing our passion, cultivating our competency, and generating goals with clarity (the seed). Focus on the seed, and the rest will take care of itself.
This approach requires some honest self-reflection. Because none of us are perfect, we all have areas to work on. You need to start working on those areas right where you are, right now.
Again, think of your competency, your skills, and your passions as seeds that need nurturing. By focusing on developing them—becoming truly skilled and knowledgeable in your current role—you will be ready for your breakthrough. Do not let your ambition overshadow the importance of developing your skills and competencies.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment