Silicon Valley's workforce is feeling more burned out than before the pandemic, with nearly 70% reporting work-home-home exhaustion
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As the coronavirus crisis stretches into the fall, Silicon Valley's workforce is more burned out than ever before.
That's according to a new survey from anonymous workplace chat app Blind, which surveyed 3,023 employees at companies like
Other surveys have produced similar findings. Online job platform Monster found that between May and July of this year, there was a 20% increase in workers reporting symptoms of burnout, according to CNBC.
But those types of daily stressors have been replaced by the existential threat of the coronavirus and secondary factors like job security and financial security, according to Terri Patterson, a psychologist and principal at global risk consulting firm Control Risks.
"Counterintuitively for some, working from home carries stressors that many people didn't anticipate," Patterson told Business Insider earlier this year. "Remote work can make it hard for people to turn off the office. They're finding it hard to have that uninterrupted time for themselves." It's that lack of delineation between home and work that is, in part, continuing to cause burnout among workers, even after seven months of working from home. In another recent Blind survey of 5,500 users about work-life balance, more than half of respondents said their work-life balance has worsened since working from home."There used to be some delineation between work and home life, now it's gone," on Google employee wrote on Blind. "Not working from home, just living at work."
Beyond work-life balance, there are issues that arise for workers from just the daily toll of doing their jobs. Employees are still reporting Zoom fatigue in droves: Joan Burke, chief people officer at DocuSign, described video calls as "exhausting" in a recent interview with The New York Times. "By 7 o'clock last night, I was Zoomed out," she said.
And working from home continues to lead to longer work hours, tech workers say. The Blind poll of 3,023 tech workers found that 60% are working more hours than they were prior to the pandemic, particularly at Amazon and Microsoft, where 67% and 70% of employees respectively say they're working longer days than before. Half of Google and Facebook employees reported the same."All of the issues that we've heard about really paint this broader picture of a more vulnerable population and more stressed population in our workforce than we had going into this pandemic," Patterson said. "We really find that this is catching up to employees."
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