Dubai: On December 28, 2016, Dentsu Inc President and CEO Tadashi Ishii resigned from Japan’s biggest agency following the suicide of an employee who had worked excessive hours.
It brought back into sharp focus the dangers of an unhealthy work-life balance.
Reports were circulating in the trade press on Friday of yet another advertising agency employee, this time in Manilla, Philippines, who had died, at least in part, because of being overworked.
A less extreme consequence of the punishing hours that many spend in the office is the concept of the “burnout,” which has risen to prominence in recent years.
In his influential 1974 work Burnout: The High Cost of Achievement, New York-based psychologist Herbert J Freudenberger coined the term, defined as “the extinction of motivation or intent, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce a desired result”.
In psychological terms, a burnout reflects an extreme physical and emotional exhaustion that is triggered by protracted stress in your life.
In Europe, where people are working longer hours than ever before, burning out has become a public health issue.
Governments take notice
The cost to both the health system, and the overall economy, of having people out of work being treated for exhaustion is huge, and governments are starting to take notice.
Enter, Butterfly.
The young New York-based start-up of 15 people has built an employee intelligence and management coaching software designed to assist the next generation of corporate leadership. Weekly pulse surveys allow managers and talent teams to view and act on data in real-time, and Butterfly’s self-learning virtual coach, Alex, is there every step of the way to speak to managers.
The technology is already being used at companies like Coca-Cola, GE, Citi, Ticketmaster, Jet.com.
Speaking in an interview on their first visit to Dubai, where co-founders David Mendlewicz and Simon Rakosi were participating in the Global Dialogue on Happiness, the pair cited a specific case study where they worked with an advertising agency, Social. Lab, to balance the stresses of agency life with transparent and motivational coaching moments.
Riding high from a slew of new business, the agency wanted to keep people motivated and engaged despite the increased demands.
“The agency’s Managing Director implemented Butterfly across his entire team, purposefully monitoring for trends — via weekly pulse checks and anonymously shared comments — that would indicate his employees were feeling overworked and nearing burnout,” Rakosi said.
Noticing trends
With a constant pulse on the team, Social. Lab’s leadership was able to identify dips in work-life balance scores as they happened. Upon noticing these trends, the MD provided clear and concise communications to his team, thanking them for their work and providing a transparent game-plan for alleviating the pressure moving forward.
Rakosi and Mendlewicz are both huge proponents of happiness. They described in detail the socioeconomic, physiological benefits of a happy workforce, and by extension a happy population.
“The dangers of an unhappy, restless population are very real. We have seen the turbulence caused by unemployment and unhappiness in several Arab countries in recent years, so the importance placed on happiness in Dubai is crucial.”
According to Ohoud Al Roumi, UAE Minister of State for Happiness, the country is championing happiness for its people to counter global statistics that suggest 350 million people suffer from depression and that “18,000 people die every day from depression between the ages of 18 and 29”.
The World Health Organisation, she said, predicts that depression “will be one of the three main diseases by 2030”.
Promote happiness
Opening the Global Dialogue on Happiness, Al Roumi said that the key challenge for governments is to balance economic growth with well being, to stave off deepening depression.
“Governments should assume responsibility in order to improve the living conditions for its people,” Al Roumi said. “We, in the United Arab Emirates, believe that the main duty of the government is to promote happiness.”
Rakosi and Mendlewicz believe that the key to a strong, happy and engaged population begins and ends with the workforce, which in turn begins and ends with the manager.
“In other words, great managers make great teams,” Mendlewicz said.
The statistics seem to suggest they are correct.
According to one Gallup study, managers account for at least 70 per cent of the variance in employee engagement scores across an organisation. Moreover, individuals who rate their manager as excellent are five times more engaged than those who rate their manager as poor.
“Millennials today occupy a significant and growing share of total employees worldwide, but there is a decade-long gap between the time a new manager takes on team and when they are formally trained in executive coaching best practices. This gap can set young managers up for failure, and lead to unnecessary attrition among teams,” said Rakosi.
Finding a solution
The two young men from Belgium have had their own taste of this failure, both formative experiences that drove them to search for a solution.
“Simon, Marcus Perezi-Tormos (another co-founder from Belgium who was in New York at the time of our interview), and I founded Butterfly because we experienced this challenge first-hand. Ambitious early in our careers, we jumped at the opportunity to oversee large, often remote teams,” said Mendlewicz.
“Yet, as we stepped into these roles, we realised we lacked the support that senior managers typically receive when it comes to leadership training. As a result, each of us suffered avoidable setbacks because of a simple — and quite obvious — problem,” he added.
So, the trio built a tool that was designed for people that had been through similar situations: busy, forward-thinking managers who were striving to improve their soft skills and nurture stronger teams.
Feedback
Today, Rakosi said, managers at companies are using Butterfly to build more transparent team cultures and develop their leadership skills. Teams are using the data to keep an eye on important trends in their organisations. And most importantly, employees are able to see their feedback turn into action.
The company is in talks with several organisations and companies in Dubai to start trialing their technology, where the government’s goal of a happy society intersects perfectly with Butterfly’s ambition of being a start-up that makes workforces more happy through better management.
“We’re on a mission to deliver first-rate coaching to all managers across the UAE in a way that makes sense for the next generation of leaders — changing the world one manager at a time.”
