Burning Out the Workforce: Why Acquisition Needs to Apply Sustainability to People

Having spent an entire career in Acquisition, I’ve heard the word sustainability more than most humans I haven’t worked with.  Now I’m hearing it more outside of Acquisition than ever before.

Isn’t it funny how we can apply the word sustainability to weapon systems and forget to apply it to people?  How often did I see the “new guy” come into an organization and work people to death, get promoted, and then leave an exhausted workforce behind, just in time for the next boss?  We weren’t just providing heat and light—we were the kindling, being consumed, burned out.

My favorite example is from a survey of a 400-person organization I was a member of way back in my GS-12 days. That included engineers, program managers, financial managers, and contracting personnel.  Legally, we were only supposed to work 40 hours a week, but attrition (often from burnout) had us down by 45% and our workload was up by 40%.  Or maybe it was down by 40% and workload up by 45%?  In any case, if we didn’t get it all done, we were penalized.

We were doing more with less until we were soon doing everything with almost nothing at all. Those platitudes about not working harder but some better way? There’s no amount of working smarter and faster that can keep up with an ever-increasing workload if resources aren’t keeping up as well. Pretty sure there are laws of physics that address this gap.

We were being surveyed to figure out how to keep people from leaving the organization for greener pastures—and the daylight hours to run through them.  I was candid (go figure) in my assessment when filling out the survey, and that got me noticed.  The majority of my bailing coworkers and I had young children at home and wanted a life outside of work including staying married and our pets not barking at us as though we were strangers, so I suggested a flex-time schedule, among other things.  I was called into a senior-level staff meeting to represent the worker-bees.

“Everyone’s burned out and wants that extra day of the week just to take care of doctor’s appointments and mowing the lawn,” I said. “Perhaps four 10-hour workdays and Fridays off might be an option for some employees.”

Our SES actually rolled his eyes and scoffed at me in front of all the division chiefs. “Why would I give them Fridays off?   They’re already working five 10-hour days.  I get an extra 10 hours a week out of them, and you think I should lose 20% of their productivity?”

Well, yeah.   Because it wasn’t sustainable, and by the time he left the organization, many of my coworkers had already burned out and found jobs elsewhere. Some found divorces, too.

We talked about sustainability all the time, but rarely applied the concept to the workforce itself.

In the last two years, I’ve been hearing more about sustainability of non-Acquisition careers from my non-Acquisition friends.  It’s easy to understand how this has happened if you look at their career expectations up until the last five years.  Before that, they were expected to turn out one or two big deliverables a year.  About five years ago, something shifted, and they were suddenly expected to turn out one or two deliverables a MONTH or never get any traction.

And after a year or two of pouring everything—every free moment and way too many moments intended for sleep and basic self-care—into building a career, they one by one began to crash and burn.  They just couldn’t keep up the pace they were expected to, even though they’d had the energy to push hard for a little while.  They couldn’t sustain that level of effort and lack of resources.  They had nothing left to give their projects, and I have watched friends either quit their dream careers or find a way to make their careers sustainable.

I think for many people in the workforce—Acquisition workforce and every other workforce—are in that same position of not being able to sustain that pace without burning themselves out.   The answer I usually hear is that we just need to work harder.  Or, in the case of Acquisition careers, work “smarter.”  We may know how to define sustainability for our hardware systems but not so much for people.

Maybe it’s the shift in generations from Boomers and Gen Xers to Millennials and Gen Z?  The sheer exhaustion of trying to do everything in a world that moves faster and faster?

It seems we are all finally beginning to understand what the word sustainable means in terms of human needs.

To truly address the growing issue of burnout, it’s time for organizations (and entrepreneurs, as in the case of my friends) to take meaningful action by applying the same sustainability principles to their workforce that they apply to their systems. This means prioritizing work-life balance, implementing flexible schedules, and investing in long-term employee well-being. Leadership must recognize that pushing people beyond their limits isn’t a sign of productivity—it’s a sign of an unsustainable environment that will eventually lead to diminished results, high turnover, and lost expertise. Now is the moment for both employees and managers to advocate for change. Let’s make sustainability about more than just hardware; let’s build workplaces that sustain the people who make success possible.