Profit before people

Editor's note: Stephanie Rowley is the owner of Stephanie Rowley Coaching. 

One evening last summer, I was doing some freelance work, supporting a director-level researcher with a significantly sized project. After the fieldwork was finished, I commented on how tired he seemed. Not just “after fieldwork” tired, but really, totally exhausted. He brushed it off, but said “Yeah, I guess the last few months have been pretty relentless. I work almost every weekend just to stay on top of things.” Quite suddenly, he broke down in tears. Unfortunately for him, he had to pull it together quickly, because although it was already 10 p.m., we were meeting the clients at 10:30 p.m. to go through our initial findings. I should also mention that it was a Friday night. And not only that, he was viewing international fieldwork the next day – Saturday – at 6 a.m. This had become the norm in his working life. 

I recently had a coaching client who told me that he’d been signed off by the doctor with exhaustion and stress but he was still going to work because he felt that he “didn’t have the time to be off sick.” 

Another client had been signed off for three weeks and her boss said, “I know you’re not technically working, but if you could just keep an eye on your e-mails that would be helpful.” 

And what about the researcher who told me, as they were leaving for a two-week holiday with their extended family, that they had decided to limit their working hours to just two hours a day while they were away?

Are you surprised by these stories? I would hazard a guess that you’re not. I’d be shocked if there’s anyone reading this who hasn’t personally experienced this way of working or seen their colleagues go through it. 

Top sources of stress for marketing researchers

Research recently conducted by Opinium in collaboration with the Market Research Society in the U.K. and the Insights Association in the U.S. paints an equally worrying picture: 87% of researchers in both markets reported that they had experienced poor mental health in the last year; 70% of U.K. researchers and 77% in the U.S. have experienced stress in the last 12 months; and 45% in the U.K. and 58% in the U.S. have experienced exhaustion/burnout.

The top sources of stress in both markets? Heavy workloads, long hours and impending deadlines. Few researchers, particularly in the U.K., took time off for their mental health. And amongst those who didn’t, what was the top reason? Having too much to do.

So here we find a situation where having too much to do is impacting people’s mental health and having too much to do is the reason people can’t do anything about it.

Which brings me to the heart of my point: workloads – the demands placed on researchers, project managers and ops teams, client-side and agencies alike; the sheer intensity and pace of work. 

I think it’s getting out of hand, it’s damaging people’s physical and mental health and it has to stop.

Burnout is a significant issue for marketing research

The MRS defines the U.K. research insight and analytics industry as the “monitoring, measurement, and understanding of markets and societies in support of well-informed and evidence-based decision-making.” And so I wonder: What decisions is the industry making, faced with the undeniable evidence that feeling burned out, overwhelmed and exhausted is a real and significant issue for researchers? The irony of an industry that is based on understanding human behaviors failing to turn the lens on itself, to understand what’s going on, to see the insights and to take action, is beyond belief, and it makes me angry.

Because there IS no obvious action. What is going on when we have professional, intelligent, capable adults reduced to tears, being signed off work or toiling away while on holiday because of their workloads?

This seems like an appropriate point to bring in the topic of workplace well-being programs or employee assistance programs. They are definitely growing in popularity and of course that’s good to see. But they mean absolutely nothing if people are being pushed to the limit by the amount of work they have to do. 

It’s not about knowing how to practice mindfulness or being encouraged to take breaks or exercise. It’s about making it stop, breaking the cycle, reducing the stressors in the first place. 

And by providing tools to help people manage their well-being, does that simply transfer the onus from the employer to the employee? Is it saying to them, we’ll give you a way to try and cope when it inevitably gets too much? Is it off-loading responsibility? I fear that all too often, such programs are performative tick-box exercises, well-intentioned but missing the mark at best and virtue-signaling at worst.

Let me be very clear: I’m not here to knock such initiatives. They definitely have their place; it’s important to have systems in place to support people when they are struggling, feel that their mental well-being is suffering or they’re burning out or overwhelmed. But these efforts don’t work in isolation and they’re not silver bullets. 

Isn’t it better that people just don’t get to that stage at all? To me, there are no kudos to be earned for supporting someone once they’ve had a burnout – a burnout that their working environment has effectively created. How about just not enabling an environment where that’s going to happen?

When will the marketing research industry take notice?

I’m not talking about a utopia where nobody ever feels a moment of stress or feels overwhelmed again. As nice as that would be, it’s not realistic. But why is people’s mental health and well-being being sacrificed to the gods of revenue and profit? Because that’s what is ultimately happening. When will companies stop choosing profits over people? When will enough be enough? If the current statistics aren’t sufficient to drive serious and immediate changes in the way we work, then what does have to happen before the industry sits up and takes notice? There has to be a line between well-being and profit. But I fear that it has disappeared, far behind us in the rear-view mirror. 

I’m not naïve – I know that there are targets that have to be met, that revenue and profit are required to sustain any business. There probably aren’t many companies who could easily accept the argument of, “Just say no to the work, because it will reduce the pressure on your team.”

But actually, why not? Have companies become so greedy that we’ve reached the point where it’s profit at all costs? People are leaving the industry because they can’t stand it anymore. Good people. And that comes with a cost of its own.

Let’s start with the obvious: The financial outlay to hire someone new. Then there’s the general disruption and additional pressure put on the rest of the team when a key person leaves, resulting in even heavier workloads for those left behind.

And what about the moral cost? That people are being driven out of careers that they enjoyed and were good at because they are being screwed in order to make as much money as possible? That people are ill, struggling to cope, their relationships are suffering, they’re dreading going to work each day, because they have to hit a revenue target? How can that possibly be OK?

And what about the impact of these working conditions on the research itself? After all, we’re talking about an industry that is built on intellectual capital. Writing a debrief or a proposal, late at night, in a fraction of the time that it really deserves, when you’re exhausted – is that honestly the way to do your best work? Is that fair on anybody? 

I know that the fabric of the industry is changing. Real people are competing with digitized processes and algorithms and that brings a lot of pressure. The focus on automation means that timescales are getting shorter and shorter. Everything needs to be faster and cheaper, which squeezes both timescales and costs. 

I also believe that as a sector, things haven’t really moved beyond transactional relationships. Many agencies pride themselves on forming partnerships with their clients and while that may indeed be true when it comes to the business implications of the research, all too often, when it comes to timescales and demands, we are stuck in a pattern where the client says jump and the agency asks “How high?”

Are marketing research clients part of the problem?

So who’s at fault here? That’s not easy to pin down. Clients have their own deadlines, their own stresses and pressures; they too are subject to the ever-increasing requirement to prove their value and their worth, to stretch budgets and squeeze timelines as far as possible, to satisfy their stakeholders’ demands. But when they ask for work to be delivered within tight timescales, do they understand what’s involved and what impact that will have on agency teams? Should they? Is that their responsibility? Do they exploit the relationship knowing that agencies will pull out all the stops to keep them happy? Do they ignore the – often surely obvious – fact that someone is going to have to work over the weekend or late into the night to deliver what they’re asking for? Should they be pushing back to their stakeholders, rather than rolling the problem on to the agency?

And should agencies be bolder in saying, “That can’t be done, because it comes at a human cost that isn’t going to be offset by adding an extra couple of grand on for a ‘speedy turnaround’ project”? By firing the clients who push too hard and have unrealistic expectations? Should agencies be working harder to educate research buyers on the amount of work that’s actually involved in designing and delivering projects? By ultimately agreeing to all but the most impossible timescales, are agencies complicit in perpetuating the problem? 

I think all parties are culpable. Whether people ask the questions or don’t ask them, or feign unawareness, or ignore uncomfortable truths because they don’t fit in with what businesses are trying to achieve, something isn’t working and it has to be addressed. 

Need more than a temporary fix for burnout

So what’s the answer? Is it hiring more people? That’s an obvious solution and a credible one – as long as it doesn’t become a temporary fix, whereby more people are hired but then the targets are reworked to take into account the fact that there’s a bigger headcount than there was last year…thus keeping the problem alive.

Is it about flexible working? I think that can certainly be part of the plan but, ultimately, choosing where and how you work isn’t that much help in the face of a mountain of work that you simply don’t have enough hours in the day to do. 

Is it up to individuals to learn the skill of setting their boundaries? Yes, you can push back on your workloads but let’s be honest: There are few people who are comfortable with digging their heels in and simply refusing to do something. Worries about how that will be perceived or how that will affect their colleagues makes that extremely challenging. It only works if everyone in the team does it and, once again, it puts the onus back on the individual to deal with the problem. 

To me, it comes down to poor management and bad leadership. Because ultimately, leaders are allowing – if not facilitating – working environments and working relationships that are directly conducive to burnout. 

It’s a lack of respect. It’s turning a blind eye because it’s too complex to sort out and it bucks all the conventional thinking about how businesses in the sector operate. It’s greed – profit over people. 

There have to be systems in place to manage workloads better. Things have to be resourced properly. 

Agencies have to be better at saying “sometimes” to their clients – “It’s not a no, but it’s a not-now, because the cost is too high and we are not prepared to pay that price.”

Clients have to be better at acknowledging the reality of what they’re asking for.

Leave irresponsible market research employers

These things have to become the norm so that those who do try to do the right thing by their teams don’t lose out to those who won’t. So that people feel empowered to vote with their feet and leave those irresponsible employers in search of healthier, more humane alternatives. So that it becomes universally unacceptable to run your business in a way that disrespects people’s well-being and makes it hard for you to attract people to work for you. 

Research is an industry that’s filled with quality standards, guidelines and codes of conduct around how to conduct high quality, ethical research. But where are the standards around working practices? Imagine an industry quality standard that labelled agencies and insights clients as being committed to not overburdening people. As ethical workplaces that don’t push people to their limit and that give people the time and space they need to deliver good work and maintain a healthy life at the same time. Is that a naïve fantasy? Maybe – but only because it feels so far removed from where things are now. 

And ultimately, if you are a leader in research, if you run an agency or you head up a team, you need to ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly: Are we guilty of this? Are we OK with doing this to people? Are we OK with the fact that the very people who work so hard to make our businesses successful, whether we are agency or client side, are the ones that are suffering as a result?

If the answer’s no – and I really hope that it is – then please, please stop and have a good hard think about how you can make a difference. 

An industry-wide transformation for research

For me, this all boils down to something quite simple: a sense of responsibility and accountability. Who is prepared to take responsibility for the decisions that they’re making? Who is prepared to be honest and acknowledge that things are not as they should be? Who is brave enough to take a stand and say, “We’re simply not going to work like that anymore” and hold themselves accountable for that? Who is really, really going to stop and consider that the decisions that they make have a direct impact on someone else’s quality of life? Who is prepared to commit themselves 100% to changing the way we work and consigning burnout to history?

This isn’t about individual people or companies, although it’s a good start. This is about an industry-wide transformation. Reset, restart, recalibrate – whatever you want to call it. It’s the right thing to do. It’s a conscious choice. And it’s a decision that can be made. I really hope – as a leader – you’ll make it.