Why am I writing this article?

Throughout my time in Upheads and then in Atea, I’ve been taking on too much work and responsibilities. In Upheads, I had more than 150 customers where I was the primary consultant. In Atea, I joke that I have too many responsibilities and roles that I have no idea how to present myself to customers. This is however only half a joke. I take on too many projects and tickets, leading to emotional and professional burnout. This emotional and professional burnout comes with anxiety, overworking (unpaid overtime) and a general feeling of helplessness, unreasonable or unfounded frustration where even the smallest thing (or request) can feel like an insurmountable task.

I make light of my problems through humor, which is why I present it the way I do to customers and colleagues. This is helpful when you try to deal with the emotions, insecurities and round-about logic you get from burnout, but it does nothing to actually face underlying reasons for it.

I wanted to write this article to showcase some of the things we as an industry need to think about when it comes to facing burnout and the effects it has on your colleagues and friends, in addition to some systemic failures we have created sometimes through no fault of our own, and often because we think about the company’s own self interest (revenue) in front of colleague care and support.

What’s burnout?

Burnout is different for everyone and usually comes in stages. These are some of the common ones, but it is important to note that they are not exclusive (meaning you may face all of them or several at the same time or at random) and that there may be other symptoms entirely. These are just the common ones.

1. Compulsion to prove oneself: In this initial stage, individuals feel an intense drive to demonstrate their worth and capabilities. They often take on excessive workloads or responsibilities to showcase their value.

This is where it started for me. I had worked for Lyse as a Business Consultant for 5 years and wanted out. I have always tinkered with computers, but I do not have any documentation that allowed me to easily prove that skill. When I asked Henning Malmin, CTO at Upheads, for a job; I could not point to anything that could actually prove my skill.

I ended up taking a service-desk job for about a year where I started gathering certificates and learning. I really wanted to prove to my self and others what I knew and how competent I could be. I was the highest invoicing person on the service desk month after month because of this drive. It was great, but it came at the cost of everything else.

2. Working harder: As the compulsion intensifies, people begin to work longer hours, take on more tasks, and push themselves beyond reasonable limits. They may start neglecting personal time and self-care.

After a year on the Servicedesk I had gathered five certificates in networking, security and cloud technologies. I plowed through them them in short timeframes, hungry for more knowledge. I loved the approval from my supervisor and the company leadership, which then promoted me to consultant and threw me out at the deep end.

This was in a precarious period of the company, as we had just had our first acquisition of a smaller organization. This created huge issues for the company as the acquisition did not build standardized solutions, but a lot of half-way options and gen 1 Azure IaaS solutions. No one had really used Azure that much, but I was eager and took on all the customers from that new acquisition: About 90 of them, on top of my existing workload.

Usually a consultant has around 25 customers each, but I was passing 4x that. So did my invoicing. I thought that gave me value. If not to myself, at least to the company. I believed that would eventually give me value in my own eyes.

3. Neglecting needs: At this point, basic needs like proper sleep, nutrition, and exercise are often sacrificed in favor of work. Social connections and hobbies may also be neglected.

Work should not be your life. I am just now starting to turn my life around after tethering on the knife edge of burnout for almost a decade. I have lost all my hobbies and quite a few of my friends in the process.

I have not been there for birthdays or gatherings, christmases or new years celebrations. Just this year it put a strain on my marriage. Not because I did something dumb, but because I was destroying myself and my wife had a hard time watching it happen in front of her.

If you ever read this, Oleksandra, I love you and I’m sorry.

4. Avoiding conflict: To maintain their work pace, individuals start to avoid addressing personal or professional conflicts. This can lead to increased stress and unresolved issues.

I never experienced any conflict avoidance, but rather conflict dominance. I am on the spectrum somewhere, leading me to be very precise but not very tactful. This creates conflict as I did not have the mind-space to actually choose my words, tact and timing for feedback. This has hurt a few of my colleagues who have experienced my exasperation with half-done or what I perceived as poorly done work.

5. Revising values: Work becomes the primary focus, leading to a shift in personal values. Relationships, hobbies, and self-care are devalued in favor of professional achievement.

There is not a thing in the world I have not sacrificed to have some form of professional achievement. Consultancy often comes with overtime, weekend work and other sacrifices, but they are usually evened out with personal leave or other measures. What is interesting with this point is the emotional impact and evaluation of your professional goals is eschewed to such an extent that even the most meaningless achievement is experienced as all encompassing.

I have gained weight, almost twenty kilos in comparison to where I was when I started working in consultancy, as an example.

6. Denial of emerging problems: As negative effects of overwork begin to surface, individuals often deny or minimize these issues. They may become irritable, impatient, or blame others for their difficulties.

There are many reasons to it, but I always felt alone dealing with the feeling of inferiority, imposter syndrome and the strain of work. I get irritable, but I am usually not explosive. The affliction for me was always people pleasing, so I implode inwards instead of exploding and blaming others.

Communication failures are always the first problems (remember how I wrote communication is the most important thing in consultancy?) to manifest. Burnout is devious this way, as you try to avoid conflict, your ability to communicate and denial of emerging problems make it difficult to ask for help. People may try to help you, but you are in the end an adult who should be capable of asking, right? But you may not find yourself quite able to.

I asked everyone for help in Atea, but I found if difficult to explain what was wrong and how egregious the problems were. I was half-proud of how much work I managed to do – and that duality made it very difficult to effectively address how burnt out I actually were.

7. Odd behavioral changes: Noticeable changes in behavior occur, such as social withdrawal, increased cynicism, or adopting unhealthy coping mechanisms like excessive drinking or emotional eating.

I disagree with the “Odd” part of this stage-name. None of these are odd to me. Social withdrawal makes perfect sense, as you are at work and that thought process never stops. As a burned out individual, you often experience conflict with others – why would you seek out social interaction where conflict may arise when you can isolate and be safe?

When I was at my worst I would come home and sit for 20 minutes in the car in the garage just to have peace and quiet for a while. I would not sleep well because my stress created a cortisol overdose leading to insomnia like symptoms, which just made everything else worse too.

Cynicism makes sense too. You feel alone, amplified by social isolation. You may want to deal with the issues you have and with the workload, but you’re scared of making yourself irrelevant again. This duality makes any help seem useless and scary. Cynicism gives you an unhealthy coping mechanism to push people, help, feedback and other kind hearted communication and people away in order for you to be left alone to work. I have myself reacted to the call for a employee career conversation with my supervisor with anger because I’m temporarily removed from my work.

8. Depersonalization: A sense of detachment from oneself and others develops. Work and personal relationships become impersonal and mechanical.

Depersonalization is one of the later stages where you just perform your job because you have lost the love for the work you do. You may do your job well, but you are not performing it with the feeling, attention or care you usually would. You detach from people because they take you away from the thing you derive value from: Your professional goals and achievements.

My brother gave me a real wake-up call two years ago, when he said: 
"There’s no point talking to you. All you talk about is work."

9. Inner emptiness: A profound feeling of emptiness sets in, often accompanied by anxiety and a loss of purpose. Some may try to fill this void with risky or addictive behaviors.

The inner emptiness is no joke. At this point you have dropped all but the essential friendships and social contacts you have. Sacrificed both physical wellness and off-work hobbies in the name of professional achievements.

What is left of you? At this point I was crying at work regularly with no control what so ever. My wife begged me to get a doctor’s notice for sick leave, but I knew the work would just pile up, leading me to a new crash upon return to work – so I never went down that road (Cynicism?).

10. Depression: In the final stage, individuals may experience deep depression, hopelessness, and exhaustion. At this point, professional help is often necessary for recovery.

On my hardest point I thought about un-aliving myself over and over. Not because I was sad but because I wanted so badly to get out from under this rock I had managed to create above my head. Compress oxygen enough and you will make that cloud over your head into a boulder.

If you think to yourself regularly; what if I just jumped in front of a train? Maybe my wife would be happier if I just un-alived myself. Then maybe you too have a problem you need to address with burnout.

What creates burnout?

Burnout comes from several sources. In my situation, there was a series of unfortunate issues from my past that I never addressed that played a role. On top of this I was trying to break into a hard industry with very little formal knowledge, no education, sales pressure and people who depend on your work – means you need to know your limits to not be swallowed by a company’s self interest.

A business’ “how to create burnout in your employees quickly” list could have the following cliff notes:

• Having to return to the same job or task over and over.
• Having little to no non-interrupted personal time
  • Why do you think Australia has a “right to disconnect” law?
• Having projects with no clear goal, or where the goalpost is ever moving.
• Having little to no follow up and oversight from leadership.
• Having little to no collaboration with others.

Why is burnout so common among IT professionals?

Look at the list fromt he previous chapter:

• Having to return to the same job or task over and over.

Depending on your specialization, you will either perform the same actions over and over again or you will have to correct the same problem repeatedly with different customers. In security, we will have to help our customers forever with MFA, in conditional access tuning, auditing, data loss prevention, Zero Trust policies and application governance until the end of time. When you have done one you will have to do it again a thousand more times with other customers.

In operations you will do backup, updates, testing, restarts, change management, configuration changes and reporting meetings until the end of time for the same reasons.

In my experience this is often an ouroboros. With more work you have and more organizations you support the harder it is to perform the same job over and over again without loosing the enjoyment of the process. In 2019 I helped 50+ organizations to adopt Microsoft Teams. I held “Teams introduction and use” webinars, seminars and workshops for companies to adopt the application properly. Do you think I enjoyed explaining the difference between a team and a channel after the third time I did? No, of cause not. As consultants we build IKEA furniture if the customer is willing to pay our rate for it.

• Having little to no non-interrupted personal time

The more customers the more calls I got after work. This could be sales teams working afternoons, customers who needed help with something, a server that needed a restart, updates that failed or simply applications that stopped working. This meant that I would take time away from my family to deal with issues. I would stop parties to work for customers because they needed the help.

This down prioritization of yourself and the prioritization of your customers, even when it is inconvenient to you is a serious sign of burnout.

• Having projects with no clear goal, or where the goalpost is ever moving.

There are some projects, some sales who should never have been signed by either party involved. Projects that when sold had no plan and no idea of what the definition of done should be. Sales that sold huge, complicated tasks for a pittance, with a tight timeframes with no resource allocation or too few consultants to perform as advertised. Nobody likes working in a complicated “best effort” project.

I had a project where we were supposed to migrate a company from one to another, with on premises solutions, active directory, a different language (date and comma structure too) and a moody accounting application. I had no allocated consultants, no third party that could help in that short a time frame and devices in a different country that needed to be reset and reconnected to a new Intune instance. This took more than 100 overtime hours, hundreds of hours of work and stress for weekend after weekend to complete.

This customer called repeatedly at all hours of the day throughout the project, which ended up with an internal cost of over 3 million NOK where the customer only paid just over 360.000 because that’s what the contract stipulated + 20%. I performed 80% of the technical configuration, migration and user support throughout the project, which almost destroyed me.

• Having little to no follow up and oversight from leadership.

There are warning signs to burnout. With me it was filing more hours than what I was supposed to, between 9 to 21 hours a day. Sure, some hours were double invoiced, but most of them were worked. I sat in the cantina with blood shot eyes more than once, and even when I was praised from the stage by my previous region director, they said all I need to learn now is to not take on so much work. It was an open secret that I had too much to do.

We humans rarely exist in a vacuum. The problem with my approach was that no one was here to notice.

• Having little to no collaboration with others.

Loneliness is difficult to deal with in our profession. We are rarely masters of the universe and with the speed the market is evolving in it’s difficult to gain the necessary competency, skills and experience to make informed decisions and configurations to match every niche use case.

If we are working alone often you will not get any new input making problems harder to solve and allowing you an intimate relationship with the notorious “wall”. When you do not get new input, you will have to work harder to figure things out. Read documentation, work on your code, your design, find new information – All time consuming work. Time you probably can’t invoice as paid overtime.

I remember a case where I had a customer who had their entire infrastructure in Azure, with a singular firewall who upheld a VPN connection to the Azure VNET. However, after power blink and some work performed by the ISP, the VPN did not come back. I came in and realized it was a firewall type I was not familiar with (Zyxel USG - ugh), so I went back home and read through the entire configuration manual for the device. The day after, I could confirm it was all OK and the then I found the cause in the input errors (High CRC) on the ISP customer port.

If I had help from other consultants or someone to talk to, the problem would be much easier to solve. Having an angry customer over your shoulder and an ISP support center with no competency makes it difficult to figure things out.

The customer was happy to get it fixed but unhappy he had to pay for about eight hours of my time on top of lost productivity. This was of cause only about 1/3 the time spent reading documentation and pondering the problem, but it was all I was allowed to invoice for. No paid overtime here either; to keep the customer happy.

Consultants in the view of employers and customers

Consultants are rarely viewed by their customers as anything else than an expense post. There are exceptions of cause, but mainly this is the perspective in my experience. This view is part of the reason a lot of consultants long to buy a farm, start a sheep or goat herd and just live like luddites far away from people. The expense post view is often connected to burnout because it tapps into two of the typical reasons for brunout: Having little to no uninterrupted personal time and having to return to the same task over and over.

A customer who view their consultants as expense posts will make some typical assumptions:

• You are here for me. Whatever I ask is what you’ll do.

This is not necessarily wrong, but it reduces you as the consultant to nothing but a pump-bottle of knowledge; The customer will push with their questions and in response you will puke out some knowledge.

You may feel like this is the normal experience of a tradesman, but have you ever insisted on your plumber to ignore lunch? Have you ever heard of a carpenter or a road-worker being forced to skip lunch by a customer? No, of cause you haven’t. The scope of work may be different, but we provide these tradesmen different rules than IT teams. I have not had 30 minutes of uninterrupted lunch for as long as I can remember. Usually I have 10 minutes for lunch and then I have to run back to work.

• I pay you for your employer for your work. Therefore, your achievements are my achievements.

This is one of the reasons we tend to do the same work repeatedly. We do not belong to the teams we support and do not partake in it’s successes. In the case where we come in as MSP’s we are service providers and the “you are here for me” – experience rules. Or we come in as competency and capacity resources where we provide services directly to other IT teams. In such situations it is all too easy for the team that hires you in to celebrate your work as their own.

The reason for this is because you are an expense – an invoice. You are not a part of the team you support, but a resource they pay access to. You don’t celebrate Azure for the fantastic application you created on the service.

This often leads to short, case by case, assignments where you end up performing the same processes and then moving on to the next one. Or you get stuck performing work over long periods of time that you do not get credit for.

Not getting credit for your work and performing the same processes with little downtime and customers with little time for consultants who can not provide answers to problems on short notice makes it easy to slide into burnout.

Employers are on some levels the same as customers. For en employer, you as a consultant have two things:

• A recognizable name and reputation

You as a consultant will eventually create a name and reputation for yourself. This is inevitable if you do good work and burn for your field. If you’re on my blog and you’ve gotten this far, you are probably one of the ones who burn for your field. This is incredibly beneficial for your employer as the more you’re known by customers, the more your employer can charge for your time. In essence, you are a fine whiskey. Exclusive and rare.

• Your experience, but more importantly, your certifications equals money.

The more you can prove your competency the more your employer can charge for your time. This means it is in your employer’s best interest that you keep learning and gathering more knowledge. This is in direct conflict from allowing technical employees non-interrupted downtime. In essence, your knowledge is fine caviar. Expensive if fresh.

• We do not have good KPI’s for measuring consultant capabilities.

Consultants are usually measured through invoicing rate. How many hours out of 7.5 you invoice. This is usually expressed through a percentage. In some companies (like Upheads), there is an expectation that each consultant will invoice at least 70% each week. This leaves two hours of downtime per day or one day of idle time each week.

Why is this a bad KPI? Because it only measures whether the company makes money on your work directly. It penalizes consultants who support sales (pre-sales), perform supporting and competency sharing work like mentoring and improve company products or services. If you have very competent consultants would you not like them to share that competency to other consultants and build your teams? Well, yes. But this will ruin the KPI most commonly used, invoicing percentage as the consultant is focusing inwards instead of outwards.

Good consultants with good reputations are your best sales tool, but creating KPI’s that actually capture that sales work and put a value on it is difficult to maintain and even harder to implement as sales personell who get bonuses rarely want to share credit.

Are consultants more susceptible to burnout?

No, not really. All jobs have their difficulties. We are just working in environments that are not supportive of our emotional needs and have systemic issues that directly counter healthy work life balance. This means we need to figure out how to take care of ourselves instead of relying on our employers and customers to give us the necessary feedback, down-time, emotional -and moral support.

Dealing with IT workloads, customer requirements and knowledge attainment in an ever changing field

There are several things we need to do in order make IT consultancy easier. Here are some of my best suggestions:

1. We need to stop focusing on invoicing as a KPI for consultants.

IT consultants can do so much more than just invoice. I am proud to support our internal teams with designing new solutions and applications for customers, do mentorships and help create new and better products. This is almost impossible to track for an employer as it is difficult to get any real “value” numbers on the subject.

2. We need to provide leaders with tools that notice when employees take on too much work or give notification when more than normal hours are filed.

This is the “if a computer is ransomwared but nobody is there to care; is it really compromised?” question. The more alerts we can create to alert on the workload anomalies of employees the better life will be for them.

3. We need to communicate honestly with our leaders.

This is much harder than it sounds because it means we need to learn to be vulnerable with the people around us. Being honest with our experiences and feelings is difficult and especially with our leaders and colleagues whom we want to impress or look up to.

4. We need to work in teams and collaborate with others. In addition, we need to make sure sales (contracts) are checked on several levels so we end up with projects who have clear goals and plans.

There is nothing worse than dealing with projects that never end or where the goal post is constantly moving. These situations end up burning out teams quickly as there is never downtime or project closures. Working with others and tag-teaming tasks with colleagues who can support and provide different perspectives help immensely, allowing consultant teams to have some time between returning to similar tasks.

5. We need to provide proper feedback, credit and support to our colleagues. Especially in situations where customers take that credit internally in their own organizations.

We should be celebrating the achievements of our colleagues. Being proud of your colleagues and telling them gives them a boost and allows us to talk about our work in a constructive way while still providing credit and support. One of the best situations for this is to show off achievements to other technical staff internally as a knowledge sharing event.

6. We need to support each other when dealing with difficult customers.

When a customer is shouting or difficult to deal with we need to support each other and take to our common defense. Too often have I seen consultants sit in meetings where some mistake have happened, watching the customer berate the consultant who made a mistake. We learn from mistakes and it’s a valuable thing to experience. But we need to be able to support each other in this situation and build each other up.

We all started somewhere. And a lot of us seem to forget that. Just to add to this, we need to see each other. If a colleague is down, ask them why.

I would not have been able to break out of this burnout if it was not for Rolf Julsrud a project manager who was unafraid of reaching out.

7. We need the right to disconnect.

Close your work laptop (or just outlook and teams) at 16:00 – If you’re not paid to work overtime or working in shifts. We are supposed to work for 7,5 hours a day and no more. A lot of our work is going to be performed in weekends, after office hours or at night. This is however supposed to be the exception not the rule. Making sure your consultants get time off after weekend and after hours work is essential to keep burnout at bay.

In MS Intune there’s such a thing as “Quiet time”, putting the both teams and outlook into muted mode in specific time and days of a week. Implementing this on most of your company to allow for company mandated down-time for your users.

8. We need to have concrete plans for our consultant’s certifications paths in comparison to their professional goals and set aside time to attain them.

I usually write concrete plans for my certifications and help other consultants write theirs. The certification path expectation should be formally connected to what your title is. I know other companies already do this, like Sopra Steria who create pathways that define what “level” of consultant you are. All companies should do this and use other KPI’s to show what they expect from the different levels.

I am tired of hearing of consultants who just exited the school system come into consultant companies as senior consultants with no experience. We should have clear baselines of what we define as the different levels so the titles are not assigned based on vibes, but competency instead.

What I have learned about myself in this process

1. I need feedback. I am not great on taking praise to heart, but I am trying.

I put my soul into my job and when the credit for my work is taken from me it makes me feel worthless and empty. I need feedback, collaboration and support from the people around me. I find other people difficult to read, meaning I need clear feedback on how I’m doing. If I’m doing well, that’s wonderful and I it in clear and concise language.

I am simply not good when I’m alone. I have always been alone.

1. I find it hard to be vulnerable. Leading me to disregard the people who want to help.

When I was young, I was “the one who didn’t need watching”. I watched my siblings, started working when I was well below working age and didn’t drink until I was 18. I found out early I’m a terrible criminal, so it was the straight and narrow for me. But it means I was usually left on my own and I was not supposed to make waves at home while my parents dealt with everything else.

I am scared of occupying too much of other people’s time and mental space and it makes it difficult to ask for help. Especially from people like supervisors, HR representatives and other people in leadership.

1. I people please.

I put other people’s needs in front of my own. This means I usually take my supervisor’s role in any situation where I need to make choices and priorities. I often think to myself: If I don’t do it, who will? This in turn, leads to me to with do more work in order to not inconvenience others.

Another thing this leaves me susceptible to are people’s direct requests where “only you can do this” is implied.

I have of cause worked on this part of me a lot, and rely on my supervisor to prioritize and delegate work to other team members instead of taking on all tasks on my own these days. Being able to say “no” and knowing that I can do so without facing penalties has changed my life.

1. I need to focus on what’s important to me and rebuild my hobbies and social relationships

I need to rebuild the things that mattered to me outside of work again. Take up hobbies, work out and find out what I can do to create enjoyment in my life again. This is difficult for me as I have built almost all of my self-worth on what I have been capable of producing instead of what really interested me. Now, at the tender age of 34 I need to rebuild again. This time from scratch.

1. I feel inferior to most of the people around me.

As I have no education, no special competency and often find the people around me to be self-assured, confident, competent and often heralded as lighthouses by the organization I work for. It’s difficult for me to look to myself and believe that I’m anything to be proud of. With the lack of education and certificates proving my capability, I thought I needed to prove myself to others to be respected. I was wrong.

I’m looking from inside my head. I find it hard to take other people’s perspectives. I need to trust in my own abilities and understand we all look up to the people around us.

Because we only see what we want to see: The best in people.

Thank you for reading. This one was difficult to write for me.
Thank you, Eszter, for putting me up for this article.

Thank you, Oleksandra for always being my greatest cheerleader! I am very grateful for every single day I have with you!