Study: Burnout is high in the public sector, especially among workforce minorities

More than ever before, today’s public sector workforce crisis is stressed out—and struggling with burnout. New research from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy (USC Price) cites burnout as “a leading reason why local governments are struggling to keep workers and operate effectively,” according to an article explaining the research published by the school, which is associated with the University of Southern California.

At least in part, this is because public service work doesn’t just require “hard” skills like understanding how a system works. There’s also a “soft” skill necessity embedded in many jobs that interface often with the public—such as the ability to empathize and work with disgruntled, frustrated constituents.

This aspect of the work can take a toll, especially given the pandemic’s unique challenges.

“Emotional labor becomes the most prominent skillset and asset necessary for success in those positions,” said Bill Resh, co-author of the report, “Deconstructing Burnout at the Intersections of Race, Gender, and Generation in Local Government,” and associate professor at the school. Other researchers include Ph.D. candidates Cynthia Barboza-Wilkes and Esther Gonzalez, and Ph.D. graduates Thai Le and Brian An.

The research will be published in a series of papers in various academic journals.

Because of the importance of emotional labor, researchers “recommend that governments provide employees with more resources and training to reduce emotional labor, the emotional effort required to consistently meet constituents where they are and provide key services,” notes the school’s article, titled “Local governments are struggling to recruit and retain workers due to burnout, especially among the underrepresented.”

Before training can be implemented, however, local administrators need to better understand how their employees feel about the workplace. While the federal government regularly takes a pulse on their employees about job conditions and satisfaction, “no such examination exists for municipal employees,” the article continues.

To that end, beginning in 2018, researchers from the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy began tracking and surveying public employees in Los Angeles County. The responses showed that “employees generally felt overworked; and those from underrepresented groups in the workforce—people of color, women and members of the LGBTQ community—were most overwhelmed.”

Beyond surveys, researchers Barboza-Wilkes, Gonzalez and master’s student Stephanie Wong began fielding interviews and documenting diary notes “to understand the emotional toll of COVID-19.”

“The responses to that question were super interesting,” Barboza-Wilkes said in the article. “You see how being an immigrant or first-generation in this country, coming from a different environment where life-and-death decisions are being made about why you’re deciding to come to the United States just creates a reference point for how you navigate crisis.”

Young women of color, especially, were noted in the research as experiencing the highest levels of burnout. The first report surfacing from the research, which was published this month in the Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, theorizes this is because minorities face unique and oftentimes overlapping stressors. For administrators, this means finding a balance. Diversity is beneficial and imperative for a healthy government, and it requires a nuanced management approach.

“We expect that local government employees vulnerable to sexism, racism, and ageism simultaneously experience burnout in ways that are similar to and also different from peers who do not stand at the same intersection of identities,” the report’s abstract says.

In this, Resh highlighted that government employers have a responsibility; they can’t take a “one-size-fits-all approach to diversity, equity and inclusion training,” the article says.

“We argue that racial, gender and generational identities all have localized histories. Because of those regional nuances, we encourage organizational leaders to understand that there will likely be differences in burnout for different subgroups across various geopolitical contexts,” Resh said. “Our work shows that differences between and within groups do exist, and leaders must be culturally cognizant of their institutions’ external environments that perpetuate those differences.”