With the discussion on burnout growing, it’s a natural progression to dive deeper into some of its related characteristics. Fatigue is an obvious symptom of overwork and presents a daunting threat to creativity, productivity, and most importantly, mental health. With architecture’s notoriousness with long hours, rigorous (often unnecessary) deadlines, tiredness and fatigue present very real roadblocks to the workforce. What can firms do to mitigate this risk? It’s worth an exploration.
According to the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, fatigue is defined as the body’s response to sleep deprivation or lengthy physical or mental hard work. The laws requiring periodic break periods serve a pragmatic and reasonable purpose — to counteract the onset of overwork and mental fatigue.
Larissa Barber, Ph.D. and Amanda Conlin, both psychologists who focus on work-life balance among employees, talk about the vitality of frequent breaks at work. This isn’t the type of break where we vent to a coworker in the office kitchen about how annoying a contractor has been on site. Rather, according to Barber and Conlin, adequate breaks consist of detaching oneself from the work environment. “One key component of an effective break is psychological detachment, which refers to mentally disengaging from work thoughts. By shifting our focus, detachment helps us to directly reduce work demands that are causing fatigue and to naturally recover,” they explain in their Psychology Today article on the topic.
One key component of an effective break is psychological detachment, which refers to mentally disengaging from work thoughts
The experienced reader will relate to the feeling after a lunch-and-learn, “working” lunch, or any other lunch activity that takes place inside the office. As awesome as some of these things are, one still would benefit from that time away from the office to refresh and regroup.
With the architect traditionally taking on the role as the owner’s agent with the contractor, coordinator of an entire team of consultants, and manager of an internal team, social interactions make up a large portion of time. The complexity of any building project will always pose problems and, unfortunately, all parties involved in solving those problems are not always pleasant to work with. When a team member returns to the office after a rough day at the project site, the last thing they need is more stress among their coworkers.
The now popular business consultant, Simon Sinek, reminisced in an interview about one of his first jobs. When talking about his past boss Sinek said, “...she had this belief that if you don’t look harried and insane, then you’re not working hard; I remember pretending that I was stressed out.” Sinek goes further to share how if he looked too happy that his boss thought he wasn’t doing anything. This is often the case in rigorous work environments, especially in architecture. The term “sweatshop” was coined for a reason. It’s often in the pressure one receives from the leadership at their place of work that they begin to display the symptoms of mental and physical fatigue.
Matthew Hallowell, an associate professor of construction engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder who has also published work in The Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine explained, “You can be fatigued simply if you go to work and have really poor social interactions with your co-workers – it’s not just about how much sleep you get.” The workplace should be a place of refuge instead of anxiety.
But sadly, architecture is filled with stories of young team members going off to the bathroom to cry from frustration, or seasoned project managers storming out after a long stretch of built-up bitterness. All stemming from poor interactions amongst the people within the firm. Fatigue is not only caused by “lengthy physical or mental hard work” but also from unempathetic interpersonal experiences.
If the office sucks all the life out of an employee then they have nothing left when they go home to their lives outside of work. Bob Borson, architect and creator of the website Life of an Architect, even says in one of his posts, “I work regular business hours because I have a family and it’s important to me that I get to come home and see them.”
I had a young professional recently share with me how he had to work from 6 am until about 10 pm one night (this was one of many consecutive long days) while working on a design-build proposal at his firm. It wasn’t until he began to feel physically ill and looked visibly exhausted that he was allowed to go home. But not before he was asked to be back early the next morning to wrap everything up. That is utterly preposterous. When an employee is continuously put under unrealistic pressure, fatigue ensues and soon grows into real physical and mental health concerns. All for what? An extra detail?
It seems to come down to a simple question most employers should ask themselves: what is more important, the work or the people? Knoxville-based architect Elizabeth Eason answers this question: “We really want our employees to work a 40-hour workweek and go home to their family or get out in the community or be active as members” says Eason. “And so we try to make that the culture here,” she said in an Archinect profile on her firm. One of Eason’s top priorities is in limiting long hours and ensuring that her team has the flexibility they need to live their lives.
It’s workplaces that value their people above anything that flourish. And it’s employees of those places that stay loyal and produce the best work. There was another young professional I spoke with who has just left a toxic work environment. She expressed how at the previous firm she had to beg to leave at a reasonable time to study for her ARE exams. That the manager on her project expected her to work long hours and that any time she brought up studying (something the firm “encouraged”) she was intensely reprimanded).
“I started to become depressed, I’d cringe at the thought of having to go to work every morning. And when I was in the office I literally started to have mental breakdowns from how bad the anxiety started to get,” she confessed. Now, this talented designer is at a firm that values her, her time, and her ambitions to become licensed. “It’s like night and day working here,” she told me. “I actually look forward to coming to work each day and I love my coworkers.”
When this young woman started to feel valued she experienced more joy in her life, produced better work, and now looks forward to going to work in the morning. That’s what life is supposed to be about. Will there be crunch times? Of course! But people come before work. Firms that embrace this have the happiest team members and tend to attract the best talent.
Ultimately, the cure for the bombardment of fatigue in architecture seems attainable. Yes, we all need rest, we need to take breaks, get outside, and refresh our minds, but this cannot happen if the place we work does not embrace it. This is the essence of The Architecture Lobby’s Just Design initiative, celebrating those practitioners who have made this a top priority. It is an embodiment of something Oprah Winfrey said: “Leadership is about empathy. It is about having the ability to relate to and connect with people for the purpose of inspiring and empowering their lives.”
Leaders like Elizabeth Eason personify this ideal. Her priority is the well being of her staff; she is a leader of the people. As architecture evolves, so does its culture. Hard work is essential to produce excellent work, this is a given. But, as we see with countless examples, the prerequisite for excellence can be sustainable.
Sean Joyner is a writer and essayist based in Los Angeles. His work explores themes spanning architecture, culture, and everyday life. Sean's essays and articles have been featured in The Architect's Newspaper, ARCHITECT Magazine, Dwell Magazine, and Archinect. He also works as an ...
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I put in my time out of school and the disillusionment and burnout quickly set in. I don't care who you are, that kind of lifestyle is not sustainable. There are plenty of firms who do great work AND value their employees!
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in this day and age, there is no justification for burn out - I had a project manager a long time ago that would roll his eyes if I left at 5:30, he stayed until 11-12 PM everyday and came to the office around noon, isn't that stupid?. look, I'm going to work for you, not marry you.
I feel you on this big time.
when I started at this big office, I would leave at 8pm, and 1/2 the office was there until 11pm, and on friday, we had "posting parties" always good for a barrel of laughs, these would sometimes last until 5am, saturday -
that's not a an office, it's a cult.
The counter to examples of employee overwork and burnout are the (perhaps many) firms that do extremely boring work for corporate clients, where employers encourage a healthy work environment, nice pay, vacation time, normal hours, etc. Many times people will work unhealthy hours when they believe in the vision of the company -- that's at the heart of the contradiction here.
Chemex, that’s true. I think the difference is that the employee wants to sacrifice their time for those types of workplaces. What comes to mind is a place like spacex or Tesla. A lot of the engineers/employees know that they are signing up for a rigorous schedule and are happy to do it. But normal hours, nice pay, and vacation time are not synonymous with boring work. There are plenty of places with these qualities that also do great work. I’m not sure if it’s a contradiction.
Maybe not always a contradiction, but it would be impossible to keep employees working terrible hours for little pay at a job with bad/boring work. The key for me would be to revamp the entire economy to reward work that had real benefits for people -- then architecture/service/utilities and good work within it would get much more economic benefits.
I put in my time out of school and the disillusionment and burnout quickly set in. I don't care who you are, that kind of lifestyle is not sustainable. There are plenty of firms who do great work AND value their employees!
I personally think that the market doesn't really value architectural service which maintains pressure on our compensation. I'm willing to bet that if architecture was valued as much as "tech" (at least for North America), our wages, work life balance, morale would be better for the average worker within the industry. Let's be honest here, wages are terrible on average compared to the national average for other professionals of similar level of education and length of study. Yet architects/ designers are "expected" to work long hours. It should come as no surprise that the lack of compensation, work life balance, long hours etc. lead to burn out. That being said, every industry has their burn out problems as well.
The problem is that when principals, or project managers prepare proposals, they ESTIMATE the amount of time it takes to to do the work with little to no consideration about the ACTUAL tasks involved in doing the work AND the skill level/efficiency of the employees doing the actual work. So what ends up happening is that the scramble at the end to complete deadlines happens when they take a closer look at the fee (often when the job(s) has little money left in it) and that's when the "OH SHIT" moment occurs. Multiply that by 20-30 projects, you often find firms scrambling to make other projects profitable in order to carry the ones that are not.
Thanks Sean!
My first architecture job out of school averaged 95+ hrs/week and while the projects were complex and exciting I was done after six months, the longest anyone had been there was two years. It seemed unnecessarily inefficient to be constantly training new people.
I do think that to create good architecture requires time but that can take the form leadership agreeing to a realistic schedule, taking steps to ensure maximum efficiency, clear communication about roles/responsibilities, adding additional staff and only as a last resort spending longer hours right at the end of a major deadline. I was recently working on a large project where the 'hard and fast deadline' moved one day at a time for two weeks, after that most of the team asked to be moved to other projects...
Architecture schools also often promote those long hours. I had a TA first year who would come to the studio at 2am to see who was there and then would only talk to those students during the actual class time, so kids wouldn't start until midnight or later with the intention of just being there.
Good architecture may take time but it also requires good ideas and you can't have good ideas if you're exhausted, you just go with what ever works.
My first job out of school was at 'Skidmore, long hours - 9 - 9pm, except on fiday, when we had "posting parties" - all hands on deck to pick up redlines until our eyes where red at 5am - at least it wasnt like OMA where every week is hell week
Archie school is indoctrination to institutionalized slave labor.
Sleep deprivation has serious medical consequences including depression, psychosis, weight gain, type 2 diabetes, etc.
Sean, thank you so much for writing this article! I also read your most recent one regarding debunking mythological work culture, and its great to know that I'm not the only one who's grown weary of working in a profession that doesn't prioritize the health, safety and welfare of the people working in it (ironic, right?)
The way I see it, there are so many moving parts to solve this problem within our field that are systemic. Architecture school studio culture instills the all-nighter, studio-is-your-life mentality, Firms depend on squeezing as much energy from people as they can get away with through labor and time, and clients expect fast and profitable results. This leaves little room for prioritizing the people working on these projects (us), and currently, its an uphill battle to maintain your physical and mental health while trying to do your best work and thrive in architecture.
One thing I've been learning to do is to detach myself from this idea that architecture is a "calling". I'm definitely not going to be the next Mies or FLW, nor do I wish to do so. It's a job, a job that I can learn lots of skills I can share and be fairly compensated for. It's still taking me a lot of unlearning that studio mentality and not being hard on myself.
I'm really happy to see others taking action to call out these problematic mindsets in architecture as well, and I hope that your voice and others' voices are being heard more over time.
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