Is Engaging Employees a Good Solution to Burnout and Shortages?

If you’ve ever put together a piece of furniture from IKEA, you likely share an experience that many people do: while you are assembling it, you may become frustrated, but once you’re successful and the furniture is serving you well, you value the furniture a great deal. There’s actually a name for this phenomenon — the IKEA effect — and it recognizes the “disproportionately high value” consumers place on products they have helped co-create. Could this phenomenon contribute to a creative solution to burnout and widespread staffing shortages?

I work in healthcare recruiting and often hear from physicians and administrators alike about the extreme burnout that is pervasive across our sector. New research that my company and our partners at the Medical Group Management Association conducted this summer confirms that both physician burnout and turnover rates are still dangerously high. This is in part due to the rising toll of pandemic-induced stress and the consequent staffing shortages. We wanted to better understand these impacts, and better understand how medical groups — and the people who run them — can improve how physicians experience their work.

If you work in healthcare or have been treated in a doctor’s office or hospital recently, the results may not surprise you. The extreme nature of the data may give you pause, however, as you think about the critical role of healthcare in society. I know it does for me. We learned that:

• Nearly two-thirds of physicians (65%) said they are experiencing burnout this year, up four percentage points from the 2021 research.
• More than one in three physicians (35%) who are experiencing burnout report their levels of burnout increased significantly in 2022.
• Physicians don’t think enough is being done to mitigate burnout, to better include them in finding solutions, while administrators believe they are acknowledging burnout.
• Fifty-one percent of physicians report they have considered leaving their current employer, up from 46% last year.

It’s especially disheartening to hear that one in three physicians is experiencing a significant increase in their level of burnout this year. After all, the intensity of the pandemic has waned, and in theory, a “new normal” is emerging thanks to vaccines and other COVID mitigation efforts. What this survey tells us is that not much has changed for physicians, and in fact, many of them are struggling harder than they did at the worst moments of the pandemic.

In fact, we know the…