I've spent my career working at startups, and now that I've started this new job as an engineering manager, I've realized that most of my team and my fellow managers have a serious martyrdom problem. They're excited about what they do, so they keep working through meals, while sick, constantly letting management push down more and more tasks on them. They say they love their jobs but then are confused why they feel so stressed and otherwise have symptoms of burnout.
Now my fellow anti-capitalists, you know what I'm talking about here. They are being exploited in a way that, if they read an article about Amazon workers doing the same things, instead of their healthcare startup, they would be upset about. Where Amazon would be doing it on purpose, the execs at this startup are stressed out but largely well-meaning despite being capitalists. Instead of not caring whether their employees are sick, they simply could never imagine doing something like skipping a doctor appointment to work. It's not like their employees are telling them that they are skipping doctor appointments, so how could they guess that it's happening? They give their employees plenty of PTO hours, but nobody ever takes them!
Our behavioral goals in this situation are to 1) only work the number of hours that you are paid for, 2) take required breaks and regular sick/PTO, and 3) clearly communicate boundaries about how much work you can get done in a certain amount of time. So I've been getting my materials ready to go over with my direct reports, and I thought I would share my big list of reasons here, because different strategies work for different people.
#1 - You need to stop working so much for your own health.
I'm starting with this one because it usually isn't enough to convince a work martyr to change their behavior. The type of person who becomes a work martyr already has trouble respecting their own boundaries. Other people in their lives are probably also saying this to them, and it hasn't worked yet. An obvious followup is "you need to stop working so much so that you can attend to the health of others," such as children or parents. But someone who pushes themselves like this at work will easily do the same thing to meet all of their responsibilities in their family life, so I don't think this one works either. "You need to be there for your kids" is also related, and again I think if that was sufficient then they would have been able to change already. They can stay up late after the kids are asleep to finish their work. They're already aware of all these arguments, so we need to keep piling on the arguments until we find a reframing device that works for them.
#2 - Take the time off you've earned in solidarity with other workers!
I have to put this one up at the top too, because my fellow communists will also be thinking this right away. We take our lunch break because people fought for the right for us to have a lunch break, even us white collar workers. We use our PTO even if we "don't need it" because our coworkers might need it for reasons they should not be obligated to disclose at work. I can't have lunch meetings because they interfere with my ability to manage my disability, and if everyone else protected their own lunch times, then I wouldn't have to explain that in order to set my boundaries. The lesson is simple here - the work martyr does not exist in a vacuum, their martyrdom does impact other people and can possibly make things worse for the coworkers they care about. The work martyr often takes on extra work to protect other people, and they need to understand that taking time off and having boundaries also protects other people.
#3 - Saying no to new work is how we communicate a lack of resources to management.
Even at a relatively small company, the context of work done is often lost and reduced to spreadsheets at the end of the fiscal quarter. Ultimately they are looking at "we got X amount of work done in Y time." In this way, a work martyr normalizes their own overwork. Even if they have asked for more staff to help them, the numbers keep going up. This is bad for the work martyr because they become burned out, but it is also bad for the company as a whole. The consequences of high turnover are the inability to scale upwards, constant loss of knowledge, and tons of wasted time that all cost the company money. It is normal to worry that saying no will have negative consequences, like getting bad reviews or even getting fired, but the work martyr by definition is not lazy, unskilled, or disloyal. When they actually try saying no, they will find in the majority of cases that management reacts with nonchalance, because they were asking in order to supplement their own planning work. A lack of resources is not an individual problem, it is an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure problems must be resolved by management in order for the company to grow. If you have a bad manager who will push you into illegal labor territory, then that is an entirely different issue outside of the scope of this advice. I do think sometimes work martyrs imagine worse consequences than are actually there.
#4 - Formalization is required for scalability of a business.
Those familiar with startup growth know that there are business practices that a small company has to incorporate into their everyday work as they get bigger - using Jira for project management instead of just spreadsheets, using cloud services like AWS instead of manual deploy processes, having a real HR department instead of it being the part-time job of the CEO or CFO. One day the employees can't keep beer in the office fridge anymore. This is often framed as management imposing something on their workers, but the flip side of this formality is also the better protection that workers get from increased infrastructure. The work martyr has the tendency to do extra work not tracked in Jira, and not think its necessary to do the extra work of documenting everything. But by participating in this formality, tedious as it may feel, they have quantitative proof to back up the boundaries they set. I think there can also be a fear as a business scales of becoming "replaceable," but in the startup context, this is expansion happening for the very first time ever. And management can't hire 3 more people, the resources you desperately need, to do the same type of job as you, until your job is clearly defined and reproducible. They will not be able to find 3 more martyrs. Ultimately you are contributing to an infrastructure larger than yourself, that needs to be able to continue to function without you. That is what it means to build a business.
On the Consequences of Burnout
I want to add one last point about overworking from the perspective of our clueless but well-meaning manager. If the work martyr continues down their path, they will eventually cause some kind of irreversible damage, whether that is a stress-related injury, PTSD, something like that. Even if the martyr stays "loyal" and doesn't seek retaliation against the company for this, their family and friends won't feel that way. It'd be completely understandable at that point for all of that martyrdom to turn into resentment. And nobody wants this to happen, not even managers or executives. Even the most selfish stereotype executive doesn't want this to happen, because they could get sued, or have bad press.
All of these talking points hopefully can help build up your argument against the work martyr's behavior toward the underlying theme: continuing to behave this way not only hurts you, but hurts the entire company. I'm going to be bleeding out this lecture in small amounts to my coworkers and see how it impacts them. So far, they have been grateful that I am even addressing it at all! So we have a long way to go...
