How BPM can prevent burnout with Yevgen Bogodistov

How BPM can prevent burnout with Yevgen Bogodistov

#59 Let’s think about the important topic of burnout and what we can do from a BPM perspective to prevent it.

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In this episode, I’m talking to Prof. Dr. Yevgen Bogodistov about the important topic of burnout prevention. Yevgen has spent many years researching how BPM can help prevent burnout. This fits perfectly with the human-centric approach to BPM. 

He mentions that if we listen to the feelings of the people working in the process as early as possible, we can minimize the stress level of their daily work, which can prevent burnout at an early stage. He also shares practical tips you can use in your work.

Today’s Guest:

Prof. Dr. Yevgen Bogodistov 

Yevgen has been a Full Professor of Strategic Management & Organizational Behavior at MCI – The Entrepreneurial School in Innsbruck, Austria, since 2021. 

Before joining MCI, he worked at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, the University of Applied Sciences Neu Ulm, and European-University Viadrina as a Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Associate. 

Yevgen received his PhD in Business Administration and Management from European-University Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder in 2014. He also holds a Master’s degree in European Studies from Viadrina University, as well as Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in International Relations from Dnipro National University in Ukraine. 

Yevgen formerly worked as a project coordinator at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Kyiv and between his Master’s and PhD, he built a career in a medium-sized enterprise in Ukraine, starting as an economist and ultimately serving as the Chief Operating Officer. 

You’ll learn:

• Why Yevgen did research on BPM and Burnout Prevention
• What his findings are how BPM can prevent burnout
• How he defines human-centric BPM from a scientific perspective
• What Yevgen’s recommendations are to get to a more human-centric BPM approach
• What you can do to prevent burnout as a process owner/architect/manager

New Process Learnings:

In order to prevent burnout, we need to listen to people’s energy levels as a resource – early on in the process design phase, but also in the feedback phase, of course, to be able to directly address the thoughts and feelings that arise during the process. Employees feel not only listened to, but also that their stress levels are taken seriously.

How to learn more:

Join the New Process Live Session with Yevgen and Jürgen for an in-depth look at this topic and the chance to ask her questions directly.

• When? Thursday, 23rd of January, 11:00 am CET
• Where? NewProcessLab.com/burnout

Resources

• Yevgen Bogodistov’s LinkedIn Profile
• The book: Process Management and Burnout Prevention (affiliate link)
• Yevgen Bogodistov’s Website
• Management Research Podcast
• Jürgen Moormann’s LinkedIn Profile

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Transcript

Please note that the transcript was generated automatically and only slightly adjusted. It does not claim to be a perfect transcription.

Mirko: 0:19

Yeah, welcome to episode 59 of the New Process Podcast. Today, we’re exploring how BPM can help to prevent burnout. Therefore, I’m talking to Yevgen Bogodistov. Yevgen has been a full professor of strategic management and organizational behavior at MCI, the entrepreneurial school in Innsbruck, Austria, since 2021. Before joining MCI, he worked at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management, the University of Applied Science, neu-ulm and European University Viadrina as a lecturer and postdoctoral research associate. Yevgen received his PhD in Business Administration and Management from European University Viadrina in Frankfurt Oder in 2014. He also holds a master’s degree in European Studies from Viadrina University, as well as a bachelor’s and master’s degree in International Relations from Dnipro National University in Ukraine.

Yevgen formerly worked as a project coordinator at the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Kiev, and between his master’s and PhD, Yevgen built a career in a mid-sized enterprise in Ukraine, starting as an economist and ultimately serving as the chief operating officer of that enterprise. Personally, he enjoys conducting research, and when he has spare time, he’s working on do-it-yourself projects. In this episode, you’ll learn why Yevgen did research on BPM and burnout prevention, what his findings are, how BPM can prevent burnout, how he defines human-centric BPM from a scientific perspective, what Yevgen’s recommendations are to get to a more human-centric BPM approach and what you can do to prevent burnout as a process owner, a process architect, manager, however you call that role. So enjoy the interview with Yevgen Bogodistov.

Yeah, welcome to the New Process Podcast, Yevgen. It’s great to have you here. After I received an article from Daniel Beinborn about your work, I just had to invite you to the New Process Podcast. So great that you accepted. Welcome, Yevgen.

Yevgen: 2:42

Thank you for having me. I’m pleased to be invited to this podcast and I listened already into the podcast, because Daniel also paid my attention to this podcast and said have you heard about it? Have you listened to it? I said no, I tried it out. It was fascinating and some episodes were so cool that I thought it would be great if I also appear in this podcast. And then the invitation came, so thank you.Mirko: 3:03

Yeah, that’s super cool. So great to have you here today. Then let’s dive right in and start with the check-in. So what do you prefer in an aircraft, aisle or window seat?

Yevgen: 3:14

I would prefer a window seat, and the reason is very simple I like to look at the earth from the high beam, high above. You know, this feeling of sitting in the chair above the clouds. It’s a kind of godlike feeling. This is how we depicted God, I don’t know, for the last 200 or 300 years, when we started depicting God sitting in the chair on the clouds. And I think it is a kind of very symbolic that you fly there and you enjoy the peak of the evolution of humankind, where you see what we have developed and how much technology went into this stuff, how many people worked on this specific aircraft to make it fly, and how much technology and how much knowledge is there. And if you see it from the window, you, I think, understand how cool it is to fly.

Mirko: 4:00

Yeah, absolutely. Oh, that’s so true. And what is your favorite airport?

Yevgen: 4:05

It’s a good question. I have two airports that I like most two and a half and the first one is, of course, the Frankfurt Airport. It’s huge and some people hate it, but I like it just because it is so well organized. Doesn’t matter whether you speak English or German or whatever. There are all the shields with all the pictures. You can always find a way. You have the perfect internal organization that you go with this internal trains with the buses, a lot of people helping you, so I just like it. I know if I’m in Frankfurt and there will be even only half an hour 40 minutes to switch between the planes, it will always succeed. So there are no issues with it.

Yevgen: 4:43

And my second most loved one is from the Innsbruck where I live now. It is so small, it’s really tiny, and if you want to fly usually if you’re in Frankfurt and you want to fly from Frankfurt you have to be about two to a couple hours before the flight that you can go through all the checks. And sometimes you have the long queues, although they do it perfectly organizationally, but still in Innsbruck you have to be half an hour before you fly, so you just have to come there. Very small queue, very small airport and it goes very fast. People are also very familiar, so sometimes if you live here you know all the people. They don’t know you by name maybe, but it is very smooth passing through all the controls, not a long use, and very small and comfortable.

Mirko: 5:28

Yeah, yeah, I remember Innsbruck. I’ve been there a few years ago visiting a conference, and that was a nice airport, that’s true, and I think also the colleagues from Frankfurt who are listening to the podcast so there are some Lufthansa guys, for sure, and from Frankfurt Airport as well, so they are happy to hear what you just said about Frankfurt Airport. I’ve been there sometimes twice or three times a week in the past and it was always fascinating. After passing security check, everything was fine, but security check has always been an issue in the past, so that’s cool. Thanks for the feedback on that. So my favorite question how would you describe your relationship to processes, or to process management in more specific? It?Yevgen: 6:15

is a very complex question for a simple reason because I originally come not from the field of process management and when I made my PhD, when I wrote my dissertation, I wrote about strategic management and business psychology. I investigated the impact of affective states or emotions on managerial capabilities, and it was a lot of fun. And then I was done with my PhD and I was searching for a job and I was looking for different universities. I used to work at the University of Applied Sciences in Leuquium and then I found a position at a Frankfurt School of Finance and Management with my at that time supervisor, professor Mormon, and Jürgen Mormon he leads, or I don’t know if it still exists. I think now the project has been closed, but it was the Process Lab. It was the research institute at a Frankfurt school, actually pretty close to what you have in your podcast name yeah, exactly New Process Lab, and here you have just the Process Lab and it was a research institute that dedicated a lot of time to process management. And imagine that they joined them from a completely different field and it should be a synergy effect.

Yevgen: 7:27

But the first year it was very hard. I tried to understand how information systems and process management is part of information systems, how they work, how they make research, how they publish. It was a completely different way of thinking. But when I started the one year, I started succeeding, started writing in the way they write and started making research in the way they do research and I became one of the information systems community. I took even more years, but now I think I’m now information systems scholar more than a strategic management scholar, although I tried always to make my research on the interface of both fields and we started combining the knowledge that I brought into ProcessLab, like dynamic capabilities, organizational capabilities, it capabilities and effective states and motions. And it was a lot of debate and you can’t imagine how many times we disagreed, how many times. And I remember one of the best studies, one of the, you know, the best studies are always studies that you, for fun, you don’t aim at the journal.

Yevgen: 8:25

And we were sitting with my co-author of my book, jürgen Mormann, and he said that emotions don’t really matter in process management. I said no, they do. He said no, they don’t. It’s an organized field. You have all the description, you have the flow chart, I said. But it is about human nature, it’s about the human element in this process about the decision making. He said, okay, let’s make an experiment just for us.

Yevgen: 8:49

He had, I think at that time, three groups of students learning process management or business process management and we organized. Then I had my students going through also. They had the same class one year ago and now they had strategic management and we organized an experiment where we just put people into a lab, organized a lab, we had a lab there and we did a very simple experiment. We showed them. They didn’t know it, but they saw three different movies, each about two minutes long. One was very quiet movie, like turn off your emotions, meditative movie, look at the street, relax and so on. So it was the kind of putting people in a neutral state. One was a kind of joyful movie there is a commercial in Thailand about whatever so a very positive movie with a lot of interesting things happening there. And the third one was the winner of the short scary movies, the horror movie. Okay, all about two minutes.

Yevgen: 9:44

And then they had to decide which of the two processes they would implement, and this was a specific task. We said what if Frankfurt School decides to implement their own bicycle service for the students? Which of these processes would you take, and they were very similar, within the small tweaks. The one was, let’s say, a bit shorter and you had just to look in with a pin, and the second one was more complex you had also to receive an SMS with a tongue which should be more secure. And then but it would be also a longer process, and I don’t remember it was many years ago I think it was in 2016 when we did it but we observed statistically significant differences, that this movie had an impact on what people prefer, what they select, and we’re kind of thinking, wow, at least for me, it wasn’t wow, I expected it to happen.

Yevgen: 10:26

And we ran a second experiment. We said, okay, let’s make the processes equally long, but one bit more secure, and one bit less secure, and compare it. Run the same experiment and again, we have statistically significant differences and we wrote a paper about it, which was not even meant to be this. We did it just for fun, just to clarify what emotions have in that, and it became one of the best at least conference paper in the strongest conference that we have in the field. It has been published there and I was surprised that it was something new, not only for both of us, but also for the whole community. So if you go to such a conference, people say we would like to know more about it, and then you understand that maybe we have found a small niche where people from process management just forgot to think about something that might also be important yeah, absolutely.

Mirko: 11:14

I can confirm that from my own experience. I’ve been working in process management for, I think, 15 years until I met a girl in a project and she was a psychologist and she asked me, mirko, how do you feel about this process? And we started talking about emotions and feelings and discovering this aspect, to to really ask the people how do you feel about a specific process? That’s so fascinating, and for me it opened up a completely new world, new process. So that’s basically how I got into all this just because of meeting this psychologist a few years back and talking about emotions and feelings and process. That’s super cool. So now you are a professor of strategic management and organizational behavior. Now you are a professor of strategic management and organizational behavior. And before we deep dive into the topic of the book and so on, I would be interested to get an overview.

Yevgen: 12:19

So what are the topics you are currently working on in your role? So I’m a professor at the Management Center Innsbruck, or MCI. We have the trademark name, which is called the Entrepreneurial School, which indicates that we’re actually a business school more than we’re a university for applied sciences, and it means we have different faculties. One of them is dedicated to business management and I’m teaching a bit by the little business administration online. So we have mostly online teaching, a blended learning. So we have online classes, we have on-campus days and I’m blended in this faculty and I’m teaching project process and quality management class, strategic management class, business psychology and research methods, and this year I received a new I suggested an elective on tactical entrepreneurial skills, where I try to teach people business communication, how to communicate better and how to use things that we know from psychology in order to, let’s say, get a better position during negotiations, and how to convince your investor to actually invest or invest more, or how to find a better job and how to go through a job interview.

Yevgen: 13:23

So it’s not really in process management, but, as you see, I have a large range of classes that I have to teach which works because of the experiences that I collected at different universities in different fields, so like process management at the Frankfurt School and strategic management that I had before at the University of Yatrina in Frankfurt, and then, of course, the communication skills that I developed, also partly in Frankfurt School, at the Frankfurt School, partly at the University of Yatrina, and, yeah, these are the topics that I teach.

Mirko: 13:54

Okay, that’s super interesting, and are you also doing research in your role as well, or?

Yevgen: 14:01

just teaching. Yes, actually, no, no, no. Actually, I’m not a good teacher, I’m a good researcher. I assume I am not. Maybe I’m not as good as I would like to be, but I’m a passionate researcher. I’ll say passionate is better. Because you can be passionate, but not the best one. I love research and actually I love research much more than I love other things and I try to combine it with my students also.Mirko: 14:24

Yeah, okay.

Yevgen: 14:24

Make research with my master’s students, major students, those who write the master and major theories with me In class. If we do something, I always implement some research topic. We have to go through some way, develop an experiment on it, because I think people underestimate what is research. And research is becoming a child again, because children are those who are real researchers. They go to the world, they try to discover, they try to see where are the boundaries, limitations You’re, as a parent, your limitations, where is it? No, where is it? Maybe you say don’t enter the room? They try to step with only one foot to see is it entering, not entering, to see whether you will respond in some way. And so they are real discoverers.

Yevgen: 15:11

And I joined here with Ken Robinson, I think was the name of the professor who said that we educate people out of this capacity. And I hope that my research, I do a lot of research, plenty of it. But I also hope that I teach to my students how to make it actually, how to become a discoverer again. I don’t want my students to be followers of it, but I also hope that I teach to my students how to make it actually, how to become a discoverer again. I don’t want my students to be followers of somebody. I want them to be thinkers and I want them to be discoverers and we investigate together the issues of, like Bernoulli.

Yevgen: 15:35

We have several theses on Bernoulli. We have the theses on different ways of thinking, what we call the analytical and heuristic or system one, system two thinking, the analytical and heuristic or system one, system two thinking, uh, and so I do a lot of research on organizational capabilities, sometimes on dynamic capabilities only, but sometimes on different other capabilities. And uh, it is very interesting. Just because you dive into the topic and you observe something, you will collect data on it and then you get to a different level of abstraction. You work with data and then you have to go back to the real life and tell the others what you have found, and we find interesting, fascinating things. Yeah, that’s why I actually I’m more researcher than teacher, but I try to combine both and all my students know me as a researcher and I think at least those who do something with me they are at the end very satisfied with what they found and they feel a bit different than I.

Mirko: 16:30

Hope it has some positive impact on my teaching too absolutely sounds like a very effective approach to involve the people into research than just giving lectures, and yeah, I really like this approach. I did a lot of research in the past myself as well, and that’s super cool to have these examples which you can then use to convince people that things are working or not working, and so on. So you already said um, you wrote a book together with jürgen mormann, um, and this book is called Process Management and Burnout Prevention a Human-Centered Approach to Reducing Work-Related Stress. So I just had to invite you because of this human-centered approach related to process management. But what is it all about with this book? Why did you write it? And so on.

Yevgen: 17:24

So let’s say there are several reasons why we decided to write this book, mostly when I was applying for my professorship. So it was like at the end of my postdoc career and searching for new opportunities as a professor, I contacted a colleague of mine, professor Hanna Pogrebna. She’s now at the University of Sydney, a professor at the University of Sydney. At that time she was a professor at the University of Birmingham and she gave me a lot of suggestions and one of the suggestions was Eugene, you have to write a book. I said why should I write a book? I should write articles. This is what counts, because if you go as a professor, if you try to apply as a professor at the university, they want to see your research and the book is a kind of usually a combination of thoughts referred to your research, but it’s not about the research itself, it’s mostly also it goes broader. The books are broader. We stop reading our books, we read our academic papers in academia, which is kind of sad, and I was one of those people who stopped reading books and was more focusing on the papers. And she said no, you don’t get it. The book will first of all show you what you already discovered and you can summarize your research and the book is something people will read and people will fight. They will not know you and normal people, not only those who sit in the committee of a university, but just other people, the practitioners. They don’t know what you have done and if you write a book about what you have done, more people will get into it, will understand it and it will create a kind of position where you will apply from a strong position for a vacancy somewhere. And actually she said it’s just good to have it. I was skeptical but then I thought, okay, I just have to follow Sometimes you just have to follow people who are more proficient than you are and she is much more proficient than I am and I started searching for the topic of the book. I thought about strategic management, but there are dozens of books and too many and I’m not too good to write in a way like others let’s say, much more established professor would write about it. I thought about process management. Again, my competences were, I think, not sufficient. I’m not very good in process management. Again, my competences work. I think it’s not sufficient. I’m not very good in process management.

Yevgen: 19:26

Professor Uri Mormon is the one who is the process management guy in our group and while I was thinking about it I contacted Daniel Bynburn and he said Eugene, you have to find something that will be on the interface what you do, try to find a kind of segment that would speak the audiences from both fields, from process management and, let’s say, from strategic management, process management and psychology. And this was kind of very close to the book. And finally, I was invited to an interview at one of the universities and I met there let’s say it was a technical university, I don’t want to name them, but if they want they can write in the comments section, anyway, and they explain the situation that they have, that they are a kind of psychologist in the Department of Psychology at a technical university, so mostly teaching to engineers. And I thought that this could be something very good, just because all my parents are engineers all but me, more or less, so I know how to talk to them and my family I mean my aunt, is also an engineer and my grandfather was an engineer, so I was the only one not fitting the profile. But I thought maybe there is a way to explain what we can do from process management or what we do in psychology to explain it to those who work with processes, like in Germany, so those who make process work, and this is where actually the idea came. So there is something that we have and we had a big data collection in Ukraine that was about burnout. We can talk about it maybe later, if we can’t do it and it just came to like all of a sudden you know this, like sudden, this Eureka feeling. Wow, we have something. Not only we can learn from psychologists and process managers, but, by the way, process managers can learn from psychologists. We can learn from them.

Yevgen: 21:14

You said about the situation when you talked to your colleague who’s a psychologist and you started looking at processes differently. I’m pretty sure that she also started looking at processes differently. She did, yeah, we thought why not? And then I came up with this idea to you. You’re going to have an idea.Yevgen: 21:30

We can write a book like this, and the whole book is a kind of result of our skepticism and conversations, because we not always agree on many things, because we have different ways of thinking, which is good.

Yevgen: 21:44

Exactly that’s how science should work, and we try to write down this results of our communication over, I think, five years at a Frankfurt school and also like unofficial exchange, informal exchange, and combine it with different stories from our life just to explain how we saw it, how we experienced it, and write it then for the practitioners, because academics know, psychologists know how they work, process, process management.

Yevgen: 22:05

They also have their theories. We have, of course, the spillover effects for the academia, but this book is not about academia, so it was mostly about make it practice-oriented, show our stories, explain academic theories in a way that are tangible, that people can understand them, regular people. They can just immediately apply them and not think about the correlation analysis or progression analysis. We wanted to show what are the findings, what are the results of our debates, and we tried to tell it as a bunch of stories. We wanted not to have an academic type of writing but interactive type of writing, with a more informal one, with sometimes funny stories, sometimes sad stories from our lives, from our parents and relatives lives. We don’t call them by name, but all the stories that you read there could have happened to one of the friends of us whom you, coincidentally, know okay, that’s.

Mirko: 22:58

That’s fascinating. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the time to read the book yet. Yeah, it’s on my list for the next vacation, but we got in contact so fast and agreed up a meeting here that there was no chance to read the book before. But I’m really curious and I definitely will in the upcoming vacation. So how did you come up with this interdependence of BPM and burnout, or better burnout prevention in more detail? You told us how you get to the topic itself, but how does these two topics belong together?

Yevgen: 23:33

So I think I have to make a remark here, a comment here, that we don’t write a book about burnout. It’s really about burnout prevention, because if burnout already appears, it’s the issue of psychologists and we’re not trained psychologists. That’s why, if something like this happens, if you are in the state of burnout, you have to talk to a psychologist or the book will not work. Moreover, I know I experienced burnout in my life at least once in Ukraine when I was working there, and I remember that in this stage it was like all gray, you didn’t like anything. That’s why any evaluations, any estimations, will be far from objective. Probably you will just not be able to apply methods. That’s why, if you are in the state, don’t read the book. But if you want to prevent the state in the future, if you are a manager, maybe in a firm and you would like to organize your processes differently, that you don’t have this issue, or you’re an employee and you experience something like this and you want to upload it in the future, then the book might be for you. And we came to this book. Again to this topic, let’s say the book. It was later, it came when we decided to write this book. But why Bernhold? It happened more or less coincidentally.

Yevgen: 24:36

I invited a friend of mine to Frankfurt because we wanted to make some research and we were interested in access to new data, and he was one of the managers from the healthcare department of the city council. The city of Krivoye in Ukraine. This is a big city, this is a minor city. We do a lot of mining it is the iron ore mining city and 650,000 inhabitants, so it would be great data access and we wanted, of course, to collect data on something related to processes and we knew that Ukraine at that moment it was 2017, so before we started writing the book undergoes a reform and they tried to reform the healthcare system and move to something what you have in Germany, what you have in Austria, with a separation into the primary and secondary healthcare. Before that, we had, like, all hospitals for all types of healthcare in one, and we decided to separate them, as you have now. You have in Germany the home physician, in the UK you have general practitioners and in Ukraine we have the family physician and also split them from the secondary type of healthcare, which are the surgeons, which are the different type of therapists and so on, and we wanted to investigate how this process will happen. But you cannot just come and say we want to investigate something. You have to give something return.

Yevgen: 26:03

And we asked them what are the topics that you would be interested in? And they started listing different topics and one of them was burnout. So they have different other things they wanted to know, like emotional labor, and they wanted to know about because if you are a physician and he represented physicians you have to interact with many people, which leads to depletion of energy and some people can do it better, some people can do it worse, and we had some competence. Before that I also worked with emotional labor topic. Before that, I also worked with emotional labor topic and they said burnout and for me it was like a first time. I already heard in my life about burnout, but I never made research in this field.

Yevgen: 26:37

So we went through the topic and we developed a questionnaire that we distributed among physicians in Ukraine and it was the first time we collected data. And when we analyzed data so data is there we made a report that they know what is the state. It was not the best. It was the first report. Each next report was better just because we knew actually how we should do it because everybody has different expectations. If you go to McKinsey, they would like to have a different report, they would be happy to have progression coefficient, but if you go to physicians and show them regression coefficients, they will say what should I do with it? So that’s why, but anyway, it started going in this direction and when we analyzed data, we discovered that our process management data that we had there was correlated to the burnout, that those we call it clinics like in Germany so usually a small clinic with two, three general practitioners and several assistants or nurses that those who had cleaner processes, more transparent processes, that they also had a lower level of burnout. And it was something where we did the first thing, where we thought, well, this was not what we aimed at. We wanted to see how this process innovation, because it changed to completely different types of processes and the kind of running all processes in parallel in how much it has impact. But actually, with the burnout, there is also correlation. And we started digging deeper and we discovered that we have a big issue In process management.

Yevgen: 28:06

We have not only different way of thinking, we use different theories. These theories have different assumptions. These theories are. They have different assumptions. This is one of the reasons why many practitioners have a problem with the process management.

Yevgen: 28:20

Practitioners have a problem with issues like motivation or like burnout or like stress, just because they don’t fit into their way of thinking. In any theory you have some assumption, like in neoclassical economy, you assume that people are rational. And if you have some assumption, like in neoclassical economy, you assume that people are rational. And if you have this assumption, try to integrate motivation into it. Motivation speaks against it. Motivation assumes that we’re actually not completely rational, we’re boundedly rational. But there are some other things that we don’t take into account. That’s why we need the behavioral economics, just because we saw that classical economics sometimes gets to its boundaries and stops working.

Yevgen: 28:50

And the same happened here. We had the process management theories and burnouts. It was something different. It wouldn’t fit because, yeah, or some different reasons. And we started a decision for a theory that would unite it and require one, and this was the Joplin-Monson resources model by the Maruti-Baker-Chaoferly, I think, mostly Dutch scholars I don’t know if they are now in the Netherlands, whether they’re Dutch or not, I don’t know but anyway they developed a theory that’s called Jog de Maals en Resources theory, and we saw that this theory is compatible with what we have in process management.

Mirko: 29:25

Okay.

Yevgen: 29:25

This theory works with the resources and we can actually we do all the time in process management working with the resources, arranging them, deciding what is where. So we think through a process, but at the end you have to arrange all the resources that they allow you to get from the client demands to the final supply of the product that is demanded.

Yevgen: 29:45

And yeah, we wrote the first paper about it, but we thought it was just the first step and we continued working on it. Paper about it, but, uh, we thought it was just the first step and we continued working on it. And then, when I came up with this idea to write a book about it, I said, jürgen, jürgen, we wrote already, we started already, let’s elaborate on this. Let’s see, we have more information, more data, more studies, that we kind of summarize them and write a book about it okay, that’s cool.

Mirko: 30:06

And what are the findings or your recommendations based on your research on how BPM can prevent burnout?

Yevgen: 30:15

It is a very complex question.

Yevgen: 30:17

It’s like you know. I know many people who start reading a book like this or take a book for dummies. You know burnout for dummies. They want to find a simple recipe that you have to make A, b, c and burnout will never appear. It’s a bit more complex, but I’ll try my best to answer this question. First of all, I think we need to understand burnout better. There are different ways to explain it, different theories explaining it, and we stick to these job demands and resources and not all that actually explains it as an overusage of psychological resources. And, as you see, we have here the two keywords that process managers are perfectly aware of over-usage and resources. They know it all, but they know it from a bit different field. They work with the resources, like having steel, having I don’t know the sufficient time for the machines, having a sufficient number of employees working at a certain I don’t know warehouse or something like this, and they know when they overuse resources that they have the bigger storage facility than they have the employees. They know it will not work. So we speak actually their language and we can work with the psychological resources.

Yevgen: 31:22

There’s something that we underestimate and in the psychological resources we talk about things. If you think about the psychological resource, it is something that depletes your energy. You have a certain amount of your energy when you come to work and then you go away and there are different things that let’s say we call it job demands that deplete your energy in this psychological resource that you have. And we have job resources, the things that kind of give you some energy. Simply explained, an example could be emotional labor. When you have to talk to clients or you have to talk to students or you have to do something. There’s something that can deplete your energy and things like supervisor, support or clarity or well-organized processes. These are the things that can give you a kind of energy. When you feel thanked for something, when you see that what you do is appreciated, when you see that what you do is important for somebody, you have that feeling of relatedness and you start engaging with something. So it kind of keeps you energy to work with something.

Yevgen: 32:16

But it becomes a bit more complex because if you think about this, job demands is something that you have to do at work that will deplete your energy. The job resources will not compensate for it, not completely, with some minor exceptions. Mostly it is something that will allow you to go through the process easier. So it’s kind of hard work, but if you’re being thanked, if you’re being acknowledged for what you do, it’s easier to go through this and you lose a bit less of energy because you have a bit of energy inflow where you see it is needed and you want to walk an extra mile, and you do it and then it kind of helps you and these job resources, they really help you not to lose too much. And this is the difference to a kind of process management, because in process management if you have a warehouse facility and you elect some employees, you just know you have to hire more employees and it will work. In this event it’s kind of hard if you hire more employees. In this event you give some energy. It will just help not to lose too fast.

Yevgen: 33:13

So mostly it’s about the task of process manager is actually to include these two types of resources the psychological and physiological resources into process management planning and see that we don’t overuse them. So I think it now became too complex. Let’s make it simpler. As a process manager, at the end you have to organize the processes that will take into account not only the amount of time and skills you have or the equipment that you need to have, but also to incorporate these psychological job demands and job resources in order to make you deplete the psychological resources not too fast. And if we overuse the resources, let’s say you have a really hard day, you have to work more. Then you go home, you sleep overnight, maybe you meet your friends, you drink a beer, if you like beer, or maybe wine, or maybe whatever tea, and you replenish your energy and next day you’re back at work and you can continue.

Yevgen: 34:09

But if you are constantly overusing the resources, people stop managing to replenish them. You know the feeling when you wake up and you think two more hours of sleep would be nice, or now I need a day of vacation. And if it constantly happens over a long period of time, then we come to something that is called a burnout. And a burnout is actually this long-term state. It’s not a tiredness. Tiredness will disappear the next day. And burnout is actually this long-term state. It’s not a tiredness. Tiredness will disappear the next day, burnout will not.

Yevgen: 34:34

And this is when people start being cynical, because cynicism is one of the ways to save on your emotional energy, because you don’t have to engage, you don’t have to smile, you just have to say that everything is bad and nothing will work. You disengage from something or you stop believing in yourself because you believe and I remember when I had a feeling that you just think about whatever they say, it will be as always, nothing will work. As always, the bureaucracy will kill this process. As always, the IT department we had at our firm very special IT department chief who undermined whatever has been done. At least at that moment I saw it like this.

Yevgen: 35:08

And finally, you are kind of disengaged. You get emotionally exhausted. You don’t want to enjoy the holidays, you want to go home, at home. It disappears. At home you can enjoy it, you can have some skill, but at home it’s fine. So the difference to depression is that depression will not disappear at home.

Yevgen: 35:24

Burnout will you go to France? You enjoy your time. You don’t want to go back to work, but it is something different. You enjoy your time. You don’t want to go back to work, but it is something different. You can enjoy the time and the three things that they talk about the cynicism, emotional exhaustion and this low self-efficacy that you don’t believe that you will succeed these are actually the symptoms of burnout, at least based on one of the definitions, one of the theory definitions. Now we have the newer one that would say it’s a bit different, but the most classical one that you will also find, I think, on the World Health Organization definition will be this one.

Yevgen: 35:54

And if you are a PM’s process management specialist and you want to avoid these things because after people are in this state it’s very hard to get them back they will probably go to physician. Bernhard is not an illness, so they will not get a kind of base off, but the physicians always find a way, starting from the headaches to spine problems, and they will assign you at least two weeks of staying at home, sometimes up to three months there are different durations depending on the situation and you will lose this person and the best way, of course, is to organize the process that this state doesn’t appear, because after it has appeared you have lost the person for a long time, moreover, with terrible consequences, because the people usually, or very often, go to another organization Just because they know when they come back, nothing will change. This is the most terrible thing that you can have as a process manager If you don’t give people a vision that if they come back, something will change and it will be easier. They go back and they know in three months they will be in the same state because if nothing has changed and the process has run as they ran before, most likely they will end up in the same state. That’s why, if I were you, if I would be a process manager or a process management specialist the one who is responsible for organizing processes I would start thinking about how to incorporate these psychological and physiological resources and organize the processes in a way that this burnout state, when overusage of this resource, doesn’t come.

Yevgen: 37:26

And I think this is a very hard way to do because you are not used to it. When you work with machines, when you work with steel, when you work with different equipment, it is not self-reflecting. The steel will not get tired and, you see, if there is less of steel, we just need to buy more of steel. People are different, they are self-reflecting. If I tell you about the motivation, your attitude towards motivation will change just because of your knowledge about motivation. And if I tell you about what you know about the motivation, how you behave now, your behavior will change again because you will self-reflect on your behavior, change about the motivation and so on. So it’s like it’s a big difference.

Yevgen: 38:02

So it is not as easy as, let’s say. I give you three simple steps and you can get rid of burnout immediately. You need to. That’s why I recommend read through the book where we describe all this issue, where it’s like what is the difference between psychological resources? But it’s possible, it’s the way of thinking of a process manager. These are the resources that you just need to understand how it’s like IT resources. They’re also different from tangible resources, but you learn to work with them. Why not learning how to work with the psychological job demands and job resources or different types of them?

Mirko: 38:33

That’s so fascinating and for sure I’m going to read the book to learn more about how to do this. But for me that’s more or less core of the human-centric BPM approach and I would be super interested in how do you define this human-centric approach to BPM from a scientific perspective.

Yevgen: 38:54

You know this question is also a matter of debate. When we already finalized our book and I had a guest from the Manchester Business School who came to our university, we had a discussion with him. He stayed here for several days because we worked on a research project and I showed him the book and I tried to explain that we actually argue for this human centricity and he said but Eugene, your role, the process management, very human centric. Look at the tools that they have, look at the lean thinking or lean management, look at the total quality management. There is human in every step. And you know he’s absolutely right. And I teach process management also. I teach very shortly, briefly, total quality management and lean thinking and Lean Six Sigma. There’s really, you see, the human in every step of this one of the process management. But it is different. Actually, process management mainly come from Taylorism. It is about organization of work, it’s about the division of labor, so the human beings are included there. This is probably my personal opinion Jürgen agrees with me in some parts of this opinion is that we included people only later, when we saw that we get to the boundaries of the processes, that they sometimes stop working.

Yevgen: 40:07

We need to include something. What does the ecologist say we need motivation? Let’s include something. What do psychologists say we need motivation? Let’s include motivation. And we come to the same issue I talked about before. You try to include something. You try to bring ideas from psychology to process managers who think in a different way. In process management we have seen, for instance, that process management is very equilibrium-oriented. There are supply and demands. We’re pretty close to neoclassical or classical economics where we have the supply and should be automated by demand. If there is more of demand, there should be more of supply, or the prices will change, so on. So the system tries to be constantly in this balance.

Yevgen: 40:47

Can you tell us the same about the motivation? Do you have to be intrinsically or intrinsically motivated? No, you can be both. You can switch between these types of motivation. I wouldn’t say that intrinsic has to be outweighed by extrinsic. No, you can have a different situation, different types of motivation. There is not something like this.

Yevgen: 41:04

Process management is much more kind of thinking about. The has the assumption of rational human beings putting that, developing this flowchart, process flowchart, developing the resources, working with, controlling, buying resources, so on. We include the psychological states and we know there are plenty of papers now that we need to work with the human elements, that it is important. But we kind of speak different languages and what we offer in our book is not we don’t say anything new. We knew about that human beings matter. We offer a language that a process manager can use in order to explain motivation, for instance. You know this extrinsic, intrinsic motivation or burnout. There are different ways to explain it. The theory that we use actually allows you to explain, through the lens of what you got used to the resources, interaction of resources, planning, client centricity. Your client is just your employee or your manager. They have also their demands and they have unique needs. And if you know about their needs, you can address them. And they have unique needs, not regarding something abstract, but regarding very specific psychological or physiological resources.

Yevgen: 42:12

Have you thought about the following? That we all have to teach the classes, our professors? But there are. We have different kinds of ways we teach.

Yevgen: 42:19

I like standing in front of people. I like talking to my students giving a lecture. What I hate is administrative stuff that they have to organize. I hate grading and I hate the and I hate checking the exams. It’s not only the grading, just reading through the exams. It’s not bad. It’s my way of thinking.

Yevgen: 42:40

I don’t know why I should judge about somebody, and I think it’s the matter of the intrinsic motivation of the student. If he or she doesn’t want to study, why should I give a grade? The result will be just lack of knowledge and he or she will not find a good job or at least maybe would go to a different field. And my class is of no interest. Why should I grade it? Why should I make a kind of overall grade of 1.3, whereby the person is interested in only one class and not interested in the other one? Think of the following Many people go to university because they want to judge. How many people go to university because they want to give grades? They want to explain who is right and who is wrong. Why not designing our work in a way that some people will teach and the others will give the grades?

Yevgen: 43:25

The others will go through the exams. It’s not a kind of rocket science, but it will make both of us happier. Here I come to the main idea that we have in the book, that not only you have to understand that we are different, that there are psychological resources, but because we’re different, the processes have to be tailored to employees, and this is probably something new that we have. Theoretically, we do it already. We do it informally, and if you go to the office, we call it routines. There’s it informally, and if you go to the office, we call it routines, these informal ways of interaction. But I constantly do research with only the same people. We have many more people in the team, but I have those people with whom I like to make research. There is a reason for it, but nobody accounts for it, so we have to develop it on our own. Why not Teaching our students, teaching our process managers, how to do it at scale? Imagine how many resources we would have saved, how many people would not leave the organization with data, how many would be happier, how many would be not devastated at the end of the day. And if I may, I would like to add one more thing that is related to what you asked. This human centricity allows us not only to include human element in this structured, systemized, resource-based way into the processes, but it allows us to expand psychology, organizational psychology.

Yevgen: 44:43

If you talk to psychologists, if you see how they work, they think different. They work differently. Imagine what would happen if somebody applied a DMAIC cycle. You know it, probably from Lean, six Sigma or whatever Define measure, analyze, improve, control Two psychological issues. What would happen if somebody would treat burnout days or stress situation as defects and apply Lean Six Sigma methodology? What if they would not, I don’t know, make the usual stuff? Let’s go all together to a symposium for two days and get the rest. It will help to some extent, but it will not be a systematic issue. We do it without thinking why it works.

Yevgen: 45:18

Now, using these tools, the information you have, you can understand it through the prism of the psychological, physiological resources. Some people like to go to symposia, some people dislike it, some people just need some rest. If you understand it, you would organize it differently, that more people would get more rest and you can apply the Lean Six Sigma just to, for instance, to decrease the variance in the states that there are not very stressful days very often and not stressful days, that we have at least average stressful days. That would help a lot already that you don’t have this volatility in your stress and your feelings. And you can apply different other tools. You can apply whatever tools you have and extend the organizational psychology thread. We can, as psychologists, teach us how to work with burnout and how to work with its prevention, let’s say, with burnout, its prevention. We can apply the same to show how we could approach this issue in a structured in this classical information system process management way, and probably both fields would prospect.

Mirko: 46:17

Nice. So, summing that up, what are your top three recommendations to get to a more human-centric approach?

Yevgen: 46:25

Oh, summing it up in three sentences is hard, but I think the first one. I would recommend you reading the book. It’s not perfect and what I’m talking about now is already a kind of feedback and response to different comments that receive some feedback, which is why maybe what we’re talking now you will not find in the book, just because at that moment we didn’t go through the issue that somebody like our colleague from Manchester Business School gives this criticism and we now can respond to it. But you will not find this in the book, just because we didn’t think this criticism will come In the second edition, maybe when, once the second edition is going to appear and try to understand the notion of psychological resources, what they are, how they’re different, how they can be converted into something that you cannot convert. You cannot always just thank people. It will not work. You have to give them different type of resources. You can show acknowledgement, show support. You can give them days off, install their rooms so they can sleep. So different ways, how you can give them this energy. And reading through suggestions would at least inspire you. What to start with? The second thing I think you should recognize the signs of psychological issues as early as possible. It shouldn’t be burnout. It can be just stressful states. It can be different other things that you have at work Conflicts, why not conflicts?

Yevgen: 47:35

And in our book we suggest several simple visual tools that can help you start a journey. One of the tools that they are mostly developed by our students. We acknowledged all the students we gave it as a homework to our students also had our tools that we developed. One was so simple and so easy that you install in your office kitchen. The coffee cups are different colors and if you feel well and like to talk about it, take a green cup. If you feel not so well or you don’t want to talk about it, take a gray one. If you feel exhausted, take a red one, and you will see by these cups when people, how they feel and sometimes you will know how.Yevgen: 48:08

By the way, I did this experiment at our university. It worked really fine. People liked it, but our university decided not to implement it. But yeah, there are many reasons for this. At least the organization is also hard because you need to buy the stuff and organize it. So it’s not only having fun. For one week it would work, but at scale.

Yevgen: 48:25

But think about this in a very simple way. My students are. My students suggested many ways with the buttons in the elevator or the lifts. If you take the buttons, you have the floor 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. What if you have three buttons, one with a happy smiley, one with a sad smiley and one with neutral smiley? Then you can manage. First of all, measure how people feel and how they feel when they move between different floors. Maybe when they visit the management floor they feel much worse than before they get to the management floor. There are many simple things that you can apply and we know them. Actually. These are the visual tools for process management.

Yevgen: 48:56

And finally, don’t be afraid to acknowledge you have issues. It’s the problem. Managers don’t want to do it. They are afraid. They are afraid they will not be able to deal with it. They are afraid to just acknowledge they have an issue. Some just hope that when they will go to the next position it will not be their issue anymore.Yevgen: 49:13

There are many reasons. Acknowledging the existence of the problem is the first step in problem resolution. But if you want to do it, be also prepared to provide a vision. Acknowledging without a vision is not good. Really this would be a problem, but if you say we acknowledge we have the problem and we know what we’re going to deal with it. Remember, I tell my students in strategic management class any strategy, even the wrong strategy, is better than no strategy. If people don’t know where they have to go, it’s much worse than if they go in the wrong direction. But on the way, you can change the direction, but if they don’t know where you have to go, this, this is the worst you can do as a strategist. So think strategically and just be aware that you will have to acknowledge its existence as a problem and develop a vision, even if it’s not perfect. Suggest it to all your employees, to your managers Managers suffer from burnout, as well as employees, and give them away and start moving.

Mirko: 50:07

Yeah, love that, and I’m so happy that I decided to have only one real deep dive episode per month, because this gives me the time to really process what I learned in the interview and to make something out of that. So thank you very much for these recommendations. I cannot interview a professor without asking about the hot research topics right now. So what do you see right now and for the future? What are the hot research topics right now?Yevgen: 50:37

So there are many research topics in different directions in the process management field or information systems product field, and I think any professor whom you ask will give you different ways of different visions.

Yevgen: 50:49

I want to probably stick to what we talked about about the burnout prevention and psychological issues at work, and the first thing is the topic of human element. The human beings is always the hot one. It has been. It will be, just because we still have not really incorporated into the science, maybe because we like this theoretical lens. But first of all, if you don’t know how on board the people are in your process, you most likely will end up with a huge variance in your outcomes A lot of good, a lot of bad ones. So you have to get people on board and you have to think about motivation of people and avoiding psychological issues. And, by the way, the theory that we suggest would explain motivation differently would explain motivation through the lens of having certain type of resources that are given to you and not overusing you with a job demands, and this will lead to motivation. So this will give you probably a different hint about how different psychological issues that we already investigated can be translated into the language of process management. Second, we have to think about process innovation, because what we’re talking now I give you a suggestion about how to use visual tools to understand where you have issues, but it cannot be a minor change in the process. If you find out there are issues, most likely you’ll have to change the process, and maybe at scale. So maybe you have to make it really human-centric and tailored.

Yevgen: 52:08

Tailoring processes or rethinking processes is process innovation. It’s a much harder process or much harder effort and be ready to do it, but strategically it’s worth it Because you know the issues. Now just look around. We have the problem of personal turnover. People go away with all the skills, with all the knowledge, with all the experience. They go somewhere else and then you that come. You have to teach them, you have to explain how the things work here. So you lose a lot of information, a lot of capacities just by people going and give people with the same skills come back. Still, you have lost the knowledge. We have constant deficit for the employees. We constantly search for more people, especially in the field of process management Actually, in any field. Now, especially, think of the following that if you undergo this process innovation and you start working with people in the organization differently, treating them as your customers, internal customers, getting onto their needs. You will become a magnet for people who will want to work with you and you will also retain a lot of people who would have gone. You will not lose their knowledge. So, strategically speaking, not like in the weeks or months speaking about next years of people who would have gone, you will not lose their knowledge. So, strategically speaking, not like in the weeks or months speaking about the next years, this would be a very good approach.

Yevgen: 53:29

And finally, the third topic is technology is the key in this specific event too. I don’t know, I have a smartwatch on my wrist and I think almost everybody in our office has a kind of fitness tracker or smartwatch and so on, and everybody tracks the data how they sleep, how they feel, how much they run, how many steps they did. My wife is counting the steps, my aunt is counting the calories on the steps, I’m counting the number of hours I slept this night. This is all information given. If you manage to get to this information anonymously, just to know what it is, you will know how people feel. So this technology analyzing, using AI to analyze it in each phone. We have now AI. Theoretically, this whole information can be analyzed to make a kind of understanding of how people feel and design your processes better. Of course, you have to take some discretion. This is private data, but if it’s shared anonymously, just so you know what is the state of the art within the organization, using AI, using the technologies, using a lot of indicators that we have now variables in our variables will help you understand how you feel.

Yevgen: 54:27

I think this is the interesting way to continue with this research to have it not as conceptual and some questionnaires, but we have it with the data, objective data that arrived from the fitness trackers or maybe from whatever your employees will be. I’m pretty sure they will be happy. I would like that my chief department knows how I slept. Maybe it would have impact on the design of my task for the next week or the next day. Just because what’s the issue? Nobody asks me. If somebody asked me Eugene, kind of stuff I would say I slept so many hours, so many deep hours, so probably I won’t be able to focus on the research this day, but I will be able to focus on teaching or maybe do some of this creative stuff where I don’t have to think so much. This would resolve a bunch of issues.

Mirko: 55:09

Yeah, absolutely, I love it. Oh, that’s super cool and we’re already approaching the final destination of our flight here. But to wrap it up, what is your key message to our listeners? To rethink processes.

Yevgen: 55:24

I remember the episode with the professor von der Alst who talked about process mining, and I remember that you asked him to explain to your daughter what is?

Yevgen: 55:33

process mining and just re-explaining it again. So, process mining for process mining, you need to know the two time steps, like what happened at time point A and time point B, and look at what happened between these time steps. So for your daughter, if she finishes the school at four and arrives home at 4.30, what is interesting is what happened between this time. It was the event walking home and we can apply the same knowledge of process mining to your feelings. I looked yesterday at my smartwatch and it also measures your stress levels, probably based on the heart rates and maybe based on the oxygen level in the bladder. So I don’t know how they did it, but they had the stress level and had a spike Between 12.30 and 1 pm and I looked at my calendar what I did at this time and at this time I wrote an email to my students who asked me why did they receive such a bad grade?

Yevgen: 56:26

Actually, I’m the one who’s given usually good grades, but this was the case where the grade was. It was not bad, but it was not as good as they expected it to be, and I became probably very stressful at this moment, maybe because I had to legitimize myself. You don’t like. It’s like weak position. I have to explain why you did what you did. Or maybe because, let’s say, these were some problematic students with whom I had already problems and you already automatically have a kind of negative emotional attachment oh, again the stress, and again I have to be angry, and so on. Or maybe because my department chief wasn’t a copy so actually she wasn’t, but it could be a reason why I would have felt myself stressed. But I know the two timestamps 12.30, when the stress level based on my blood and oxygen level in the blood and heart rate was low, and then there was a peak and disappeared. Knowing this already helped me understand what are the processes that deplete my energy and will help me rethink these issues and will help me to treat these issues systematically, because we don’t know, is it each time the students contact me or is it this specific case? In this event, you have to collect a bit more data. Just observe yourself, write it down if you want. What’s the problem? Open up an Excel sheet and write down when you had the spikes over your stress level and what you did at the time. The same as process mining.

Yevgen: 57:43

Just redo it for your psychological issues and we can treat it in many different ways. When it is a systematic issue, then we can treat it, for instance, by providing the students not with a final grade but also with the intermediate grades, with all the subtasks they have to do, but also with the intermediate grades, with all the subtasks they have to do. They would at least understand how this grade appeared. And we can do, probably, like I already suggested, that somebody else makes grading. They know the issues, they know the contents. We have the assistants in our class that maybe they can make grading. We can make that somebody else writes these types of emails. If they don’t do grading, they at least can respond to these emails, knowing the information that I provide them. They are not emotionally attached, so they will not be angry and I will not have to write it Already.

Yevgen: 58:25

A good suggestion, and this is how it would help. So just think about yourself. What are they? When do you have the most issues? And try to look at this situation. Try to understand why it happened. And try to look at this situation. Try to understand why it happened and try to see whether it’s systematic or just coincidentally. Sometimes it just happens.

Yevgen: 58:43

But if you’re thinking at scale, think that the processes as you do it for yourself, should be also done at the organizational level. They should be tailored to individuals. We have different ideas and we don’t know about them. We have many people. If you look around, you will see that some people like to make DIY project do it yourself. Some people like communication. Some people are local politicians who do a lot of stuff. Some people are introverted but they love working with data. There is always the job that can be assigned to anybody individually. That will just, at the end, make everybody a bit happier, at least less tired at the end of the day. And yeah, so I think this is the first thing that I will start with. If you are an individual and if you’re a manager and you’re thinking about what to start with, think about what would fit any or each of your managers, each of your employees individually. When will they be happier? And you will discover a lot of things.

Mirko: 59:37

Yeah, love it. Wow cool. So time really flew by here today. Where can our listeners learn more about your activities?

Yevgen: 59:48

First of all, you can read our book. I don’t say whether you would like it, but try it, try it. Second, how big is it?

Mirko: 59:58

How many pages?

Yevgen: 59:59

300 pages with a lot of pictures.

Yevgen: 1:00:00

So it’s like you don’t have to read the whole book, because at the beginning we explain what are the issues and what are the theoretical. What is the history of process management, history of psychology related to burnout. Then we talk about how you can discover that you have issues to work. Maybe it is all you need, but then we also explain how you can keep it, how can you apply the process management tools. So maybe you don’t need to go to the. Or, by the way, you already know a lot of stuff. You don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe you’ll need only one chapter, so don’t be afraid.

Yevgen: 1:00:28

It’s first of all, short, with inches illustrations, and at the end you may need only one specific thing. Or, if you’re a manager, you want to have a specific exercise. We have several exercises that can help you cope with this problem. The second I have a small podcast that nobody listens to. So I have my I think 20 something subscribers and the podcast is already two and a half years old, so feel free to listen there. I have some results on burnout and maybe when I’m done with my Five Forces framework in the next week. So we’ll continue elaborating on the burnout again. You can search on ADNG for the management research podcast. You can find it, I think, on all the platforms okay, we put that into the show notes.

Yevgen: 1:01:12

So yeah, but don’t expect too much. And finally, you can contact professor Jürgen Mörmann or even contact myself if you have some issue. Don’t contact us with psychological issues. We’re not psychologists. We cannot help you if you have burnout, but maybe you have a question about how to design a process, what to do something. Drop an email. In the worst case we won’t respond to a response, that we cannot answer your question. But we both try to respond to such emails because we value that people do something with our knowledge. So we’re always afraid that nobody will read our book. We’re always afraid we see it’s being downloaded but we don’t have any feedback. Even bad feedback is a feedback and we still wait that somebody will tell us well, it helped or you know, it would have helped more if I knew something.

Yevgen: 1:01:57

Then we know that we can address something in the next version of the book.

Mirko: 1:02:00

Okay, that’s super cool. I’m always asking my guests at the end of the episodes for a recommendation which topic method tool expert you would recommend to take a closer look at, to get new ideas, to rethink processes. So it doesn’t have to be in relation to what we talked about, it just could be anything, I recommend some works by Evangelio de Maruti, Arnold Becker and Wilmer Schaufel.

Yevgen: 1:02:26

These are the three professors from the Netherlands who developed the model. They have not only very deep academic articles, they also have the overview articles where you can just learn about what it is, just to get a feeling of what it is. They do like more psychologists view on the problem, but just maybe one or two papers of them, just to understand what it is. You can learn any process management tools like Lean, Six Sigma, Lean Thinking, maybe Total Quality Management. There are plenty of books about it. You can even take the one for dummies and you will discover a lot of interesting things there. Just to understand what it is. Try to apply it. It can even take one for dummies and you will discover a lot of interesting things there. Just to understand what it is. Try to apply it, it will already help. And finally, look around. There is one thing that we have from the evolution we can discover how people feel. We know very well if somebody is sad. We know very well if somebody is happy. We learned to read the clues on the faces. It is an evolutionary perspective, just because we need to know how other people feel. It’s like the lion is approximating Antelope’s middle name. Only the first Antelope has to discover the lion and start running away with a kind of fear, let’s say or you cannot say on the face, but they show also fear, as dogs do, as cats do, and the others just need to discover this fear on their faces. They don’t have to see the lion, they don’t have to see the tiger and they really start running away. This is what we inherited.

Yevgen: 1:03:48

We’re very well, very good at understanding how people feel. Look around how people feel. Look around. Look at your managers and their faces at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, During different situations in your organization, when you start with a new process or when you’re deep into the process, improvement and so on.

Yevgen: 1:04:07

You can read through the emails, see the emotionality in emails, how people felt when they wrote these two lines. You know it immediately. You have this going on. You really don’t think it’s an angry emo. Everything is kind of neutral but you feel it is angry and sabotage behavior, Many things where people don’t come to work, when people come later, when people the absenteeism, they’re just always somewhere in a different building because they have something to do. These are the things, that kind of small sabotage behavior. People express how they feel about work. So maybe this is the simplest cue that you all evolutionary have, that we all evolutionary have. That will help you understand whether you should start thinking about how to deal with your processes. Or maybe everything is already fine and you don’t have to. It doesn’t mean that your work is bad. There are many organizations where everything just runs smooth.

Mirko: 1:04:56

Yeah, wow, love it, super cool. So before we leave the aircraft or this episode, is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners?

Yevgen: 1:05:06

I think I can share one exercise that I give to my students in a process management class and I ask them to pick the process. And I ask them to pick a process that is emotionally exhausting and as an example, I give the process of my reading through evaluation of my classes, because our students also give grades to us, not only we give grades to our students, and usually it’s like you know this flowchart we have the boxes, start the process. I have to read through the evaluations, then you open the system, then you download the file, then you go through and we have three blocks the overall evaluation, then positive commands and negative commands, or they call it suggestions, they call it politically, politically, politely, but actually these are the negative commands and then at the end I have to implement some of my classes In this kind of process. You can depict it as very simple in these boxes and then, when I depict it, whatever it is maybe working on a team, maybe building a team, so students have different ideas and said and now take each of these boxes and draw their smiley. If you feel very, very well, make three positive smileys. Well, two smileys kind of not bad. One smiley, positive smile if you feel angry or bad about it, make a sad smiley and so on, and they attach the smileys and then you can see how the process looks, how you feel within this process. And I feel very happy when I read through the positive comments. I like when the students tell how great the stories are, that they tell them and they enjoy the exercise.

Yevgen: 1:06:25

But I hate negative comments especially. I had very interesting negative comments. I had within one class, the same slides, two students One complained that they have too many pictures. The second one complained they have too much text and I said guys talk to each other before you complain, you know. But anyway, it is something that makes me nervous because you see that, yes, there are reasons. Some people like to complain, some people have a different vision of your class, some people do something whatever. But if you know it, you can change the process and changing it on the paper is easy because we have this process management skill and I mean all your listeners probably do have it.

Yevgen: 1:06:58

And I discovered that I don’t have to read through negative comments. I can send them to my wife. My wife has no emotional attachment, she just read through the stuff and if there is something systematic, like five people complained about the assignment one. It was not clear. She tells me you have to just change the assignment. So I don’t have this negative feeling. I get information she spends about usually a relationship, half of the page, probably five minutes, seven minutes, and if there is something systematic she gives it to me and I have the process. That is kind of mostly positive. I read the positive comments, I’m happy. My wife tells me if there is something systematic to improve, I make the improvement. It’s neutral and the process is over.

Yevgen: 1:07:35

The simple way to depict it, to find out what actually makes you sad and to think about. There are many ways you can avoid this issue. Change this issue, introduce additional step. Take a coffee and a croissant. With a coffee and croissant anything will be a bit better than without a coffee and croissant. So different small changes will help you get to these positive results immediately. Because if you change this small little process or this activity of this event, it can happen that you will just increase your mood immediately and then you will see it works and then you will probably make it at scale in the whole organization.

Mirko: 1:08:09

Yeah, yeah, that’s a super cool example or task given to the listeners and, wow, that perfectly fits to what I was just working on. I think I will add more on that in the recap of this episode. So, wow, thank you for all these insights. So, finally, how would you describe your flight experience with just three words?

Yevgen: 1:08:37

Deep, fascinating and attention drawing.

Mirko: 1:08:44

Cool. For me it was wow, just eye-opening. So many cool insights, and I definitely will take the time to read the book and process all the learnings from this episode for the recap. And yeah, Yevgen, thank you so much for being my guest today. I guess this is going to be one of the most impactful episodes. So thank you so much for being my guest. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thank you for inviting me. Bye-bye.

Mirko: 1:09:18

Wow, I just love this scientific perspective on human-centric BPM and how it can even help to prevent burnout. Isn’t that cool? So, simply put, as I understand it, it’s all about designing processes in such a way that the activities give people energy instead of sucking energy from the people. So we simply have to optimize all activities to this end. That’s super simple. Right For more details? I really recommend reading the book.

Mirko: 1:09:51

There are some pretty cool examples on how to do this. So if you are familiar, for example, with the eight types of waste or DMAIC, you will just love it. So just go ahead and read the book. I’ll put the link into the show notes of this episode. You’ll also find the example with the smileys from the end of the interview in a more advanced version in the book, where all activities of a process are rated if they cost or bring energy to the people. So super cool ideas and practical methods. Just read the book.

Mirko: 1:10:26

And if you don’t like reading but you would like to deep dive even more into this topic, I’d like to invite you to join the deep dive session on New Process Pro in January. Not only Eugene will be there, but also his co-author, professor Dr Jürgen Moormann from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management will be in the live session, so you can ask them all your questions and try to find out more about how to use BPM to prevent burnout. Actually, I’m very honored that both will be at the live sessions, and if you will be there too, that would be so cool. To sign up for free? Just go to newprocesslabcom/burnout. Okay, I know it’s not the best URL, but I think it’s easy to remember, isn’t it? So just go to newprocesslabcom/ burnout.

Mirko: 1:11:23

In the next episode, I’ll share the results of my BPM Topics 2025 survey with you. More than 100 people posted their topics. So, guys, thank you very much, and I’ll share the top topics you just have to have on your radar for 2025 too, and, in addition, there will also be some special guests sharing their BPM topics for 2025. So don’t forget to subscribe to the New Process Podcast, but for now, thank you much for listening. Have a fantastic day.

Have you already heard about my new process guide? It’s the perfect handbook for developing a mindset that puts people at the center of process work. It’s packed with insights from over 20 years of BPM expertise, my learnings from new process podcast and the exchange with you, the new process community, with you, the New Process community. It offers practical tools, real-world examples and actionable checklists to help you create inspiring and sustainable processes. And, by the way, I’ve already picked up the idea with the smileys from Yevgen and integrated it into the New Process Guide. So to get access, just go to newprocesslab.com/guide. Thank you very much, have a fantastic day. Bye-bye.