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MIT Sloan Experts

Organizational Culture

Join the #Overload Twitter chat with Erin Kelly on May 6 to discuss workplace burnout and what we can do about it

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Join MIT Sloan Experts for the next Twitter Chat on Wednesday, May 6 at 11 a.m. ET. Host Brigid Schulte (@BrigidSchulte) will speak with Erin Kelly (@_elkelly), MIT Sloan Professor and author of Overload: How Good Jobs Went Bad and What We Can Do about Iton why current workplace policies are leading to employees to feel burned out.

Erin L. Kelly is the Sloan Distinguished Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management and core faculty in the Institute for Work and Employment Research.

In Overload, authors Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen document the greater prevalence of employees being asked to do more with less, and how this creates chronic stress, leading to burnout, attrition, and underperformance. “Flexible” work policies and corporate lip service about “work-life balance” don’t come close to fixing the problem. But this unhealthy and unsustainable situation can be changed—and Overload shows how.

 

Drawing on five years of research, including hundreds of interviews with employees and managers, Kelly and Moen tell the story of a major experiment that they helped to design and implement at a Fortune 500 firm. The company adopted creative and practical work redesigns that gave workers more control over how and where they worked and encouraged managers to evaluate performance in new ways. The result? Employees’ health, well-being, and ability to manage their personal and work lives improved, while the company benefited from higher job satisfaction and lower turnover. And, as Kelly and Moen show, such changes can—and should—be made on a wide scale.

 

To learn more about how companies can adopt healthier practices, tune into the Overload Twitter Chat using the hashtags #Overload and #MITSloanExperts on Wednesday, May 6 at 11 a.m. ET. Use the hashtags to ask your questions for Erin Kelly and Brigid Schulte and share your experiences and ideas on how to combat workplace burnout.