# Hot Take: Why Tech Can't Fix Burnout with John Chan

- **Episode:** [184](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/184.md) (2025-04-01)
- **Type:** hot-take
- **Tags:** burnout, technology, productivity, workplace wellbeing
- **Time:** 21:43–34:06 (start 1303s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/184?t=1303](https://truthliesandwork.com/184?t=1303)

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[21:43] John Chan: Yes, my hot take is that technology alone is not going to improve productivity, right? And no amount of AI is going to solve some of the systemic problems that are entrenched in a lot of organizations. Now, no amount of technology is going to change how we are thinking about work today and how the new generation of the workforce thinks about work and what their relationship is with work. It's very different from previous generations. And so, I guess investing— so what I would say is that investing in creating what I'm calling a sustainable workplace is the key to unlocking productivity. workplaces that we don't actually need to recover from. We always try to recover at the end of the day or on the weekend. We spend a lot of time trying to recover from work. Imagine if we didn't have to do that, how much more productive on everything else we might be. And so, within our research, we see, we know that healthy people are more productive people. And we have a lot of data, and not just us, there's a lot of data out there that shows That is the case. And what our data is showing is that when people are experiencing burnout or chronic stress or this lack of psychological safety or feelings of belonging, they're less productive. They produce lower quality of work, and they're less engaged in the organization. And so, investing in sort of this workplace well-being really will be the best solution to improving productivity. And kind of unlocking what's already there. And one thing I want to be quite clear about here is, you know, when I talk about improving the health or workplace well-being, I'm not talking about fruit bowls or, you know, having more yoga sessions at lunch
[23:37] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[23:37] John Chan: I'm talking about addressing these systemic issues like unsustainable workloads or removing psychosocial hazards. I'm talking about how do we build stronger team connections within the organization? And how do we have the time to evaluate work structures to ensure that we don't have these kind of old, outdated processes that are actually creating a lot of undue stress for our people? Just one last thing about, in this current political climate that we're seeing so many organizations kind of regress in their kind of people policies. And there really is a real danger that all of these gains that we might have made in this area, especially during COVID when organizations were really generous, they showed that they really wanted to take care of their people. A lot of this is going to start to roll back. And there, you know, we're already hearing organizations kind of fully roll back from all of these things. So, if we don't shift this mindset and perception to prioritize wellbeing as an investment in productivity, we have a real risk of losing it all
[24:52] Leanne Elliott: Mic drop, John. I just, I just, oh, there's so much good stuff in it. And I'm, yes. First of all, I'm sorry, I'm very excited. First of all, I just want to, just for our listeners who maybe aren't quite clear, If we are creating unsustainable organizations, that impacts our wellbeing, that impacts our productivity, and then technology coming in to increase our productivity ain't gonna work if we're experiencing negative wellbeing because we're in an unsustainable organization. Have I got that loop right?
[25:25] John Chan: Yep, that's exactly right. You know, the people who are already exhausted, they don't wanna learn another new system, or there's nothing that you can convince them. Once they lose that, well, once they've disengaged, trying to come in and say, hey, we got these new systems, we got these new fancy tools, they're not going to be engaged to actually use them, or not use them at the rate that you want them to. So, organizations can spend millions of dollars on very nice technology that nobody ends up using
[25:54] Leanne Elliott: Why are they so drawn to that? That doesn't really have, as you say, much evidence, but behind it and ignoring the systemic issues of organizational life. Why is that? And also, can you maybe talk us through some of the systemic issues that you think needs fixing as a priority?
[26:09] John Chan: A couple years ago, we did research with leaders on why exactly that question, why aren't you fixing systemic things? And, you know, that was one of the problems that they had kind of stated. And also, 2 other things that sort of really jumps out, I'm not rewarded to do this. Like, it's not It's not something that anyone gets rewarded for doing, changing some of the systemic things. So they don't do that. And the other one is, it's quite a big risk in wanting to fix these very difficult systemic type of issues. You know, like workload is a really simple, or it's a very common kind of systemic issue, like these just unsustainable workloads and pressures that we put on people. I mean, where would a leader even start in trying to fix that? I mean, that has to be a whole culture that needs to be changed there. So they're really hesitant to kind of stick their neck out as well. Let's say we're on a team and I'm the only one that says, hey, let's try to fix this, and nobody else wants to. Me personally, that's sort of damaging for my reputation as well within the organization. Or worse yet, I've heard a couple of times this happen where the organization says, yes, go fix it
[27:23] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[27:24] John Chan: And obviously, one person can't fix all of this stuff. And then they, again, like, their reputation ends up being quite tainted because they weren't able to solve this very difficult issue. We found in our research is it's really important, and it's such a great mitigator for burnout when you have really strong, supportive teams. So even when things around them are sort of on fire and there's a lot of chaos going on, When you know, hey, I've got my team, they've got my back, and we're quite supportive of each other, that is a really good kind of mitigator for burnout. And the third one I'll kind of talk about, and it's what we found in this year's research, is this distrust in the organization. And what we've been seeing is the steady kind of erosion of trust within the organization where people, for the most part, people still trust their direct manager. But when you kind of ask about, hey, does the organization act in the best interest of their employees, they're getting quite low scores of that. And what we've been able to link that to, again, is to things like productivity. If you don't trust your organization, you're probably not very likely to do your best work or do what you can for the organization that you don't trust. So fixing at that level, you're really going upstream in terms of fixing some of these root causes of the problem instead of kind of looking at some of the much more kind of superficial things in the downstream. All of us have a million things on our mind at work, personally, about the world, lots of stuff going on. And with technology and social media, there's this constant bombardment of information and pings or notifications. And what that is doing is that it is causing a lot of— basically, it's overloading people's brains. And when that is happening, what we're seeing is people are a lot more distracted so that they have a much more difficult time focusing, especially when they need to focus, do focused work in the workplace, or even when we're kind of having this conversation. A lot of times people are having conversations, but they're actually thinking about, oh, what's my next meeting? Or what's all the things I need to do before I leave today? And all of that kind of makes your work more likely to kind of make mistakes or kind of not do—
[30:03] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[30:05] John Chan: Or do work that you kind of have to redo. And all of that is kind of causing, again, a much higher increase in lower productivity. And so what we're finding in terms of the age group, the younger generation do have much higher rates of kind of being distracted. And I think that's— yeah. And, you know, we've been trying to find out, so— With that question, why are younger generations burning out. And with research like this, we're trying to figure out, so this might be one of the root causes for that. There is no sort of one right answer at the moment. And what we need to do is to be open to doing pilots, doing experiments within our organization to see what works. Talk to your team about what the issue is. What do they think their solution might be to alleviate this. And if you've got big enough teams, have one team do one thing, another team do another thing, see what works and what doesn't work, and keep evolving from that. When you do that and you can kind of figure out that magical formula that actually does work for your organization, you're really creating this kind of competitive advantage that other people can't copy. We know one organization that's been able to kind of move into a 4-day workweek while keeping— while being, you know, as kind of productive and as profitable as ever. And they had to go through at least 18 months of just trialing different things, failing at certain things, learning from that. But now what they have is a version of a culture that no one else can really copy, at least not very easily. And I think it's time for, you know, John has absolutely nailed it
[31:55] Leanne Elliott: There is simply a fundamental misunderstanding of what productivity is and what influences it within an organization. And because of that, we keep throwing technology at systemic issues like unsustainable workloads, poor team communications, outdated processes. It drives me nuts because technology is not the answer. You're spending money as a business owner on solutions that simply don't and will never work. It is all about connecting problems and solutions and solutions with the actual problems. And the research is really clear on this. When people are experiencing burnout or chronic stress, they produce lower quality of work and they're less engaged, engaged. So even if you give them the fanciest AI tools, they're simply not going to have the capacity to use them effectively. I think there's also this myth as well that you can demonstrate the return on investment on software or a product, um, easily in a way that, that's, that's, yeah, that's trackable. Whereas actually, with any good wellbeing initiative, employee engagement initiative, you should be able to do that. If you're working with an expert, if you're working with a psychologist, they're going to build an evaluation process into that intervention, and that will include a return on investment in terms of commercial, Um, outcomes, organisational outcomes, and individual outcomes for the employee themselves. So, the red flag isn't whether— isn't that this solution can't measure ROI, it's that you're not working with somebody competent enough to measure the ROI of that solution
[33:25] Al Elliott: Yeah, I suppose like anything, there's no silver bullet, really
[33:29] Leanne Elliott: There isn't. And, you know, as John said, his research does show that there are 3 areas that will really make a difference, and that's around addressing unsustainable workloads, which is where AI could potentially play a role. Building strong, supportive teams, train your managers for goodness sake, and rebuilding organisational trust. I refer to my previous point, train your managers. Um, yeah, trust has been eroding. This is why we're seeing these return to work mandates. We need to, we need to do better and we need to listen to the actual scientists who know what they're talking about, which includes John. I will leave a link to John's LinkedIn profile, the latest, um, State of Workplace Burnout 2025 report
[34:06] John Chan: Yeah
[34:06] Leanne Elliott: And also his website where you can find out more about his services