Impact of employee burnout on productivity: A field experiment

Following Linos et al´s (2022) design, the company´s HR team will perform an intervention in which call center agents are given access to an online platform where they can share positive professional experiences while reading their peer´s stories for six weeks. For this, HR team will create an online platform where participants could share professional stories and advice while reading other peers' stories. Invitations to participate in the platform will be sent by email and Microsoft Teams to all the call center employees. The online platform will be available through Padlet, an online site that provides visual boards where users could share text, image, and video content while collaborating asynchronously with other allowed users.

2023-07-10

2023-08-18

1. Burnout
2. Participation in the intervention
3. Compliance with payment goal
4. Compliance with the number of payment agreement goal on debtors contacted

1. Burnout: burnout will be measured by the results of the MBI-GS questionary. We will use two types of burnout measurement: a weighted sum score, following Kalimo et al. (2003). That is the the result of a weighted sum of the means score for each of the three dimensions of the questionary: Burnout score=(0.3×emotional exhaustion)+(0.3 x cynism)+(0.3 x professional efficacy).
A second measurement for burnout follows Leiter and Maslach (2016) scoring procedure and conclude in five profiles of people’s work experience:
• Burnout: negative scores on exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy
• Overextended: strong negative score on exhaustion only
• Ineffective: strong negative score on professional efficacy only
• Disengaged: strong negative score on cynicism only
• Engagement: strong positive scores on exhaustion, cynicism, and professional efficacy
For the purpose of this paper, the burnout and overextended profiles can be classified as people with some burnout symptoms, so both are considered burnout.
2. Participation in the intervention : the participation in the online platform of each agent will be measured as the number of times the employee accesses the platform. Participation for each participant is an integer variable.
3. Compliance with payment goal: is the total amount of payments, measured in dollars, received from clients attributed to the collection agent, as a percentage of the total goal amount that the advisor expects to receive, also measured in dollars.
4. Compliance with the number of payment agreement goal on debtors contacted: Proportion of the number of payment agreements over debtors contacted per agent, as a percentage of the goal of the proportion of the number of payment agreements on debtors contacted per agent.

This study aims to exploit the result of an internal company focused on reducing the burnout of agents of a collection call center. The company is a debt collection agency specializing in recovering past-due loans from banks and other commercial and financial credit issuers in the country. Its head office is in Quito, Ecuador, and it has one branch in Guayaquil. Like many call center workers, employees of this firm work an average of 6 hours per day. They typically deal with payment-reluctant customers. Their negotiation skills, listening skills, and the quality of service they give through phone calls are crucial to reaching payment agreements with debtors. According to burnout literature, jobs that demand a considerable amount of people interaction, like this one, are believed to be the most vulnerable to burnout. We will exploit an initiative of the company's Human Resources area to reduce burnout in call center workers. Assuming that call center workers are highly exposed to stress, the company's Human Resources area wants to measure the level of burnout that workers have and then implement a six-week intervention aimed at reducing burnout. The project started with a baseline measurement of burnout, using the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI – GS) in its Spanish translation. After the baseline measurement of burnout, the second stage includes an intervention in which employees are given access to an online platform where they can share positive professional experiences while reading their peer´s stories for five weeks. This stage is based on the results from Linos et al. (2022). At this stage, company employers will be randomly split into two groups. The treatment group will receive more encouragement to participate. After three weeks of having access to the platform, a second measurement of the MBI – GS will be performed to analyze the immediate effects. Finally, a third measurement of the questionnaire will be spread four weeks after the end of the intervention. The random encouragement design creates instrumental variables that allow measuring the effects of the intervention.

The Human Resources team will administer baseline and post-intervention questionnaires to measure burnout in the call center agents. Burnout will be measured by the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI – GS), a validated scale commonly used to measure burnout, which is a variation of the MBI to apply across all occupations, other than human services and education. The MBI-GS is made up of 16 questions addressed into three scales: emotional exhaustion (5 questions), detachment from the job or cynicism (5 questions), and professional efficacy (6 questions). Each question is phrased in the form of statements about feelings and the employee is expected to answer according to the frequency with which they experienced those feelings, using a 7-point Likert-type scale (ranging from 0-never to 6-every day) (Maslach et al., 1997; Ministerio de Trabajo y Asuntos sociales de España, 2004; Guevara et al., 2014; Veloz et al., 2023). The MBI – GS, has been widely validated for different occupations and countries to validate its consistency to measure burnout (Schutte et al., 2000). The MBI-GS survey will be distributed by the HR team to the call center agents through an online form on Microsoft Forms platform. The access links to the questionnaire will be sent by Microsoft Teams and by other institutional communication platforms.

Randomization will be performed by research team using a random number generator in Stata

Randomization will be performed at individual level.

No

The study takes place in the call center of a debt collection agency. The call center has a total of 232 agents with a major concentration in the Quito office, and all the call center agents will participate in the firm´s project.

232 call center agents

216 call center agents in control group and 216 call center agents in treatment group

In this study sample size is limited to the scope of the project, with a sample of 232 participants, we can calculate the minimum detectable effect size. Following Linos et al. (2022), we can expect a prevalence of burnout of 51.96% in participants of the control group after the intervention. Although they use a different index than the one that will be used in this paper to measure burnout, the Copenhagen Burnout Index, Linos et al. (2022) is our best reference. Considering a mean of 0.5196 for the control group, with a desired power of 0.80, and 95% confidence, the minimum detectable effect size estimated is 0.3694 percentage points.