Working 9 to 9: One expert’s experience with severe burnout

Hamza Khan believes the four-day workweek to be “an inevitability.” It is the sort of workplace trend that could help to diminish burnout, which is the main topic of this JofA podcast episode with Khan, an author and entrepreneur.

This episode is the first of a two-part conversation with Khan, who has given keynote presentations at several AICPA & CIMA events, including the Global Women’s Leadership Summit and the CFO Conference.

Khan spoke last year on the JofA podcast about the difference between managing and leading, and he’ll talk on the next episode about how strong leadership should include meaningful one-on-one meetings.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• The professional hockey team that Khan “hopelessly” roots for.
• What Khan recalls about his “9-9-7” life and what it led to.
• A key factor in the variance of employee engagement scores.
• What an email draft from 2007 told him about how the workplace has changed for the better.
• Why, about 10 years ago in a job, Khan had to “go on some weird apology tour.”
• A preview of the second part of the conversation with Khan.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hello, listeners. Glad to have you back for another episode of the Journal of Accountancy podcast. This is Neil Amato with the JofA. The episode you’re going to hear next is the first of two parts of a conversation I had with author and entrepreneur Hamza Khan. We talk some about our favorite hockey teams and hopes for those teams in the Stanley Cup playoffs. We also talk about two interconnected topics: burnout and the four-day workweek.

Those are some of the key highlights of this episode. In the second episode, scheduled to be posted next week, we’ll continue the burnout conversation and also touch on how make one-on-one meetings more meaningful. Now, here’s Part 1 of the interview, starting with my introduction.

I am happy to welcome back, a repeat guest on the show. His name is Hamza Khan. He’s a keynote speaker, a viral TED talker, and a hopeless fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hamza, thank you for joining me on the Journal of Accountancy podcast.

Hamza Khan: Neil, man. Thank you for having me back. It’s a true honor, and what an introduction. Although I got to say the Leafs are gaining traction. We’re right behind you on the rankings, so watch out.

Amato: Right behind — he said “you” — that is the Carolina Hurricanes. They’re the local team to me based in the Raleigh area of North Carolina. You’ve said that about the Leafs before, but we’ll just have to see how the season plays out.

Khan: I’m going to select the Carolina Hurricanes as my B team, my backup team. Every Leafs fan has to do that going into a season. We’re rooting for this team hopelessly, but we also have to be realistic and live in the world. Here I am selecting the Hurricanes as my backup team. We can celebrate together inevitably.

Amato: There you go. We may have a special episode of the podcast again in June, if there’s some Stanley Cup celebrating to do so.

Hamza, again, you joined me for an episode in March of 2023, and we talked about some of the topics that we’re going to talk about today and see how they’ve maybe advanced in both the work environment and in your mind. I think they’re all linked together. The first is burnout. Now you said that about 10 years ago, you were burned out at work. What was that like and how did you even realize that burnout was what you were experiencing?

Khan: Great question, and thank you for selecting this as a topic. There are times where I feel disheartened that I’m still talking about it with every passing year, even though I experienced it 10 years ago. I published a book called The Burnout Gamble. I believe it was in 2017. I delivered a TED Talk around that same time, 2015, 2016, and here we are now approaching, interestingly enough, in the Year of the Dragon, the 10-year anniversary of the beginning of this exploration of burnout. Actually, I did burn out in 2014, so this would be the 10-year anniversary of that. The problem is only getting worse, and that to me is very disheartening.

It is now a $7.8 trillion problem annually to the world. That’s the average cost to global economy for lost productivity, disengagement, health care costs associated with disengagement and burnout. What did it look like for me 10 years ago? Ten years ago, I didn’t have the language. I didn’t have the understanding of what it was that I was experiencing. Now, interestingly enough, I was working at one of Canada’s top-ranked employers. In fact, it was No. 1 for several years in a row.

There was a little bit of disbelief that I was going through something like burnout in a place where I had all of the benefits available to me. I could get massages every single week if I wanted to. We were saying all the right things, that this is a place where you could bring your whole self to work, where our employers, my bosses, prioritize psychological safety and all the things that just seem commonplace now, very innovative at the time at this employer, a large educational institution.

It was there where I fell into a trap of being a Type A personality, working evenings, weekends, pushing the pedal to the metal, burning the candle on both ends. I really gave in to this workplace martyr complex where I neglected my health, my well-being for 11 months straight, I would practice the 9-9-7 the 9-9-6 workweek. That was working 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., seven days a week. To be fair, I did have a lot going on. I was building two teams. I was running a business, writing for multiple publications, so on and so forth, but by the end of that 11-month grind, I realized that something was completely off and as is typically the case with burnout, by the time you realize you’re burning out, it’s already far too late.

I suffered a horrible panic attack on the eve of what should have been a restorative trip around the world. Never recovered from that, the trip never happened, and instead I became sicker than I had ever been in my life. I spent essentially the next month, December 2014, at home, bedridden, completely bewildered, and I began the exploration of what it was that happened to me because this was different than run-of-the-mill everyday stress. This was something that was completely debilitating.

In trying to discover what had happened to me, I then stumbled upon this growing body of research indicating that we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb essentially, and that is occupational burnout. Now, here we are in 2024 recording this conversation. It has become so widespread, again to the tune of $7.8 trillion conservatively of lost productivity alone, but the human consequences extend far beyond that.

In fact, Neil, it’s surreal for me to sit before you here and say that I have been flirting with burnout even recently. Which is such a wild thing for me to say, considering that I wrote one of the books on burnout. I’m considered to be an expert on the topic. If it’s happening to me, if it’s happening to somebody with a level of understanding that’s nuanced and sophisticated about this, I can only imagine what the reality is for people who, like myself 10 years ago, are only starting to flirt with the question of how is this different than run-of-the-mill, everyday stress? That was a long-winded answer, but I wanted to give you all of my thinking about it to the present.

Amato: If you’re having, I don’t even know if the right term is relapse of it, how do you get out of it?

Khan: That’s a great question. It’s so much different now than it was when I experienced it in 2014. In 2014, again, I didn’t have the vocabulary, the concepts, the models to understand burnout. What I went through was a very typical transition through the 12 stages of burnout, which is the compulsion to prove oneself, working harder, neglecting needs all the way to full mental, physical, and emotional collapse. What I’m experiencing now is quite different, especially given that I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a speaker. I’ve solved a lot of the earlier problems that I experienced working as an employee. What I’m going through right now, I think really gets to the underscoring factors that connect everybody is burnout story, which are namely transition and transition in a couple of different ways. In fact, the Holmes and Rahe Stress scale does a really good job of illustrating what this looks like for a typical person. It’s a list of, I think 40, 50, the number doesn’t matter, different transitions that a person might undergo in their lifetime. Each of them is assigned a numeric value.

The most stressful thing that you and I can go through is, understandably, the death of a spouse, with a score of 100, and the least stressful thing we can go through is a minor violation of the law, which has a score of, I think, 12 or something on the scale. Now, if in a calendar year you rack up a score of more than 300, then that puts you at severe risk of illness, injury, or worse, fatality.

What has been happening for all of us, especially over the last three years, is one unexpected transition after another, and the amount of changes, the amount of personal, professional, and even academic transitions that you and I and the entire AICPA & CIMA community are experiencing and are going to experience in 2024 will continue to place undue stress on us. And burnout is going to become an inevitability. It’s not a question of if we’re going to burn out. It becomes a matter of when, considering that we’re expending additional time, energy, and attention, trying to get done the work that we feel needs to get done in the next two to five years, given the rate of change and the future of work.

What do we do, to your earlier question, Neil? How do we beat it now? We have to become hyper-aware and hyper-focused on how many transitions we’re undergoing, but also look beyond the individual onus to maximize our productivity and our well-being and understand that the real reason why people are experiencing burnout in organizational contexts has to do with leadership, and this is the new focus of my research.

Understand that at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores rests with leaders. The onus is very much on leaders to work in consultation with their employees to figure out what are the upstream factors that are present at the system level in an organization that might be contributing to burnout for everyone, including the leaders themselves. We’re looking at a lack of fairness. We’re looking at inconsistent or missing values, insufficient compensation, an unsustainable workload. That’s the biggest predictor of whether or not somebody is going to burn out.

Then we look at a lack of reward and a poor/toxic community. If these things are alive and well in an organization and if leaders are accepting, neglecting, or provoking them, then it doesn’t matter how productive you are, doesn’t matter how many massages you get, doesn’t matter how healthy you are, doesn’t matter how many individual interventions are available to employees, burnout is going to happen. What’s needed more than anything are more conversations like this, Neil. I’m actually really glad that we’re still having this conversation, even though sometimes it feels disheartening, but I have to remind myself that by not speaking about it, we’re going to continue repeating the types of interventions that we’re repeating thus far that have proven to be ineffective for at least a decade.

Amato: We’re going to come back to that, how managers can help topic, in just a bit. But one way, I guess, you use those numbers, that 9-9-6 or 9-9-7, if you are not taking any days off, I guess.

Tell me how numbers could look different or maybe are looking different at some organizations that have at least piloted the four-day workweek. And, where do you see that going? It seems like it’s a trend. Maybe it’s not, but tell me what you think.

Khan: This is so top of mind for me. As recently as 1886, which is under 200 years ago, there were protests …

Amato: Just the other day.

Khan: Just the other day. In 1886, as recently as that, protests were made for reducing the workweek, believe it or not, from seven days to six days and people were taking to the streets, chanting, marching, picketing for this and to reduce the workday from 14 to 12 hours. What we’ve seen in the grand arc of time, at least within the United States and labor history, is that the workday has only been getting shorter, the workweek has only been getting shorter.

To quote a good friend of mine, Joe O’Connor, from the Work Time Reduction Center of Excellence. He says something along the lines of the four-day workweek is already here, but it’s buried under the rubble of unnecessary and over-long meetings, distractions, and interruptions in the workday, the poor use of technology and outdated processes. So, the four-day workweek is already here.

Interestingly enough, I found an email earlier today in my drafts that I had written to a boss at one of my first internships. I think this was in the year 2007, and, Neil, it made me cringe because it felt like I was begging another adult to take time off to go see a dentist. It was just surreal to me that that interaction happened back in the day, where somebody had to advocate for time off to do perfectly normal, human, adult things, if you will.

Fast forward to the year 2014, I’m running a team at Toronto Metropolitan University, and this was a workplace where we were expected to work Monday to Friday, 9 to 5. But I was running a creative team of knowledge workers, and it was a team that I wanted to fully empower. I wanted to remove all obstacles from their path and I didn’t want them to feel the way that I felt earlier in my career, having to experience the power imbalance that was essentially dehumanizing.

I instilled, right from the get-go, a very flexible workday, a very flexible workweek. We were doing the four-day workweek 10 years ago and interestingly enough, I was actually punished for it. Once word got out in the institution that this is how we’re running our team. I had to go on some weird apology tour, I had to change at least the optics of how we were working, even though I had a boss that understood the wisdom of it. But the results of that experiment were evident. We won award after award. The organization became well known across the country. We were pioneers. We created blueprints for institutions and programs that are still alive and well today. The people who were part of that team have gone on to do successful things.

I hope I’m not getting too distracted here from the initial question, Neil, but the four-day workweek is an inevitability. For everybody listening to this, especially accountants and bookkeepers and people who are part of the community, it might seem right now that it’s far-fetched. But know that, again, looking at the great arrow of time, we have been moving in this direction for a lot longer than we think.

Amato: Does GenAI and other artificial intelligence expedite that?

Khan: Big time. That is why I feel so galvanized to speak about this with as much passion as I hope is being communicated across the airwaves here. AI has tremendous potential to automate the mundane, scalable, repeatable, and predictable tasks that we’re already doing.

But, we know in our hearts, if there was an opportunity for an AI technology, some other solution that was supported through AI to do, we would gladly offload – if we had the psychological safety from our leaders to know that that is a thing that would then lead to not more work, not lead to more filling of the time, but to hopefully an era of leisure, greater education, adventure, and even passion.

Neil, even think about just the podcast episode that we’re recording right now. I know that after this, as a fellow podcast producer, you’re going to have to sit down, transcribe this, edit it, find the soundbites, so on and so forth.

Amato: We do actually have an AI tool for transcription, so we’re moving in that direction.

Khan: I’m the same way as well, man. For my podcast, I use Rev, so I transcribe it through Rev and then I use Riverside.fm. Now Riverside has an AI tool that actually extracts the best social media-worthy bits and spits it out to you in clips that can be used for shorts on TikTok, on Instagram.

We’re already here. We’re at the dawn of the technology that will allow you and I, Neil, to just have this conversation, and every other piece that led to this conversation and from this conversation, whether that’s the scheduling or the email follow-ups, will be automated – as they should – because this will allow you and I to just focus on our gifts. I truly believe that the technology is not only here, it’s only going to get better, but this is why we need to put pressure on leadership to think differently about this moment in time. What we don’t want to do is fall into the trap of filling our time with more work, especially work that can be given to AI.

Amato: Again, that’s Hamza Khan, a keynote speaker at multiple AICPA & CIMA events. When I recorded with Hamza earlier this year, I didn’t intend the conversation to be two parts, but the answers he gave led me to ask more unplanned questions, and we just kept talking. So, next week will be Part 2 of the conversation, which will start with what I jokingly called the celebrity gossip segment of the show. It’s a leadership question about Jay-Z.

We’ll also discuss takeaways from recent speaking engagements and why those manager-employee one-to-one meetings are so important. Thanks for listening to the JofA podcast. If you like what you’re hearing, go ahead, give us that five-star rating, write a short review, and share the show with your friends. We’ll talk again next week.