Research-Backed Ways To Address Burnout, SoftBank’s New U.S. Investment And More

This is the published version of Forbes’ Future of Work newsletter, which offers the latest news for chief human resources officers and other talent managers on disruptive technologies, managing the workforce and trends in the remote work debate.

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As we barrel toward the end of year and its requisite flurry of performance goals, employee evaluations and final budget reports, the time is right to consider one of 2024’s least exciting trends in the workplace: burnout.

A new report this month from MIT Sloan Management Review focuses on work design and how all jobs—whether it’s your role or a role you manage—can be healthier and more sustainable with greater attention to certain positive characteristics like autonomy, variety and social support. MIT uses the acronym “SMART” to lay out its work design findings from three studies on burnout reduction:

• “S” stands for “stimulating work.” This includes task variety and the opportunity for a challenge that can ultimately lead to professional growth;
• “M” stands for “mastery.” This occurs when people feel confident in their abilities and how they fit into the bigger picture of an organization;
• “A” stands for “autonomy.” Let’s face it—nobody enjoys the experience of being micromanaged;
• “R” stands for “relational work.” This recognizes our need to feel connected, and could include good, old-fashioned teamwork on the job, but also might mean feeling as though there’s a broader purpose or mission behind the work;
• “T” stands for “tolerable demands.” While all jobs are “work” at the end of the day, too many pressures will leave even the most high-achieving employees feeling burnt out.

Putting together the right balance of these five factors, while still meeting or exceeding organizational goals, is the inherent challenge in making work design decisions. But as HR professionals likely already know, the stakes are high and getting higher: Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace report found 67% of U.S. workers were feeling disengaged at work, and 52% of employees were on the lookout for a new job. MIT also notes that when a worker quits, the cost to recruit and train a replacement can cost anywhere from an estimated 30% to 200% of that worker’s salary.

One major global player that’s working “smarter” in 2024 is the industrial business conglomerate Siemens, and my colleague Megan Poinski talked with USA CEO Barbara Humpton about her history with the company and how some of the world’s biggest businesses are tackling changing workplaces at scale.

If this is your last full workweek of 2024, we’re wishing you a sustainable close to this year and a restful pause before 2025 begins.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group is expected to announce a $100 billion investment into U.S. projects during President-elect Donald Trump’s second time in office—doubling a similar commitment made in December 2016 ahead of Trump’s first term. The upcoming investment hopes to bring an estimated 100,000 jobs in AI and related industries supporting the burgeoning technology, according to CNBC and the Wall Street Journal. While Son’s first $50 billion pledge was largely fulfilled, the jobs promise was difficult to fully track, especially given the near-collapse of SoftBank-backed WeWork.

POLICY + PRACTICE

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As of last Friday, the U.S. is still set to ban TikTok after a federal appeals court refused to pause its ruling, giving the Supreme Court just over a month to step in and overturn the ban before January 19. To that end, Congress sent letters to CEOs of Apple and Google on Friday, reminding them that keeping the TikTok app in their respective app stores after January 19 is a violation of the law. House China Select Committee chair John Moolenaar, R-MI, and ranking member Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-IL, also wrote a letter to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, imploring him to start looking for a buyer. “We urge TikTok to immediately execute a qualified divestiture,” they said. TikTok and its parent company ByteDance have maintained in legal filings that they cannot and will not sell.

A huge grocery store merger fell apart in spectacular fashion last week after Albertsons filed a lawsuit Wednesday accusing would-be partner Kroger of failing to win regulatory approval for the agreement. Albertsons, the nation’s third-largest supermarket chain, says that Kroger, the second-largest, failed to give its “best efforts,” such as refusing to divest assets for antitrust approval and ignoring regulators’ feedback, among other claims, which Kroger denied. Still, a U.S. district judge had sided with the FTC against the merger Tuesday, which states the proposed merger would hurt competition even as Americans are already contending with rising food prices and less choice in grocery stores.

WHAT’S NEXT: Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton

Siemens is a global conglomerate that connects technology and energy together for industrial automation, resilient buildings and power systems and sustainable transportation. Globally, the company has seen its orders and revenue growing, with a record high €9 billion ($9.45 billion) in net income in fiscal year 2024. Forbes’ Megan Poinski talked to Siemens USA CEO Barbara Humpton about the company’s recent moves and plans. You’ll find an excerpt from that conversation below, and a longer version is available here.

Siemens has a sprawling footprint, with involvement in a vast array of industries. As U.S. CEO, how do you keep tabs on it all?

Let me lay a background in terms of how Siemens has set its strategy overall. In 2010, the company took a look at global mega trends and focused in on climate change, urbanization—75% of people will live in cities by the year 2050. The aging demographics—by 2050, people will live to be 120. The globalization that was going on in 2010, now we talk about it in terms of “glocalization,” with global innovation, but more local production, and the digitalization of everything. Against that backdrop, the Siemens Corporation set its business strategy to apply our core skills to these global mega trends. The real trick has been finding the right people. We’ve got experts in fields ranging from emerging digitalization techniques like AI, all the way to critical infrastructure and the guts of manufacturing. Anywhere that the real world has the potential to meet the digital world and perform better, that’s where Siemens has been focused.

What are some of the more recent things you’ve been doing with technology to solve industry problems and connect the physical world to the digital world to make things operate better?

What a lot of people have[n’t] seen quite yet is the fact that we are opening up a new tech sector. Think about all of the explosion of technology in information technology that’s happened over the last decades. The way we communicate with each other, the way we engage in retail commerce, entertain ourselves, all of that has been enhanced through digital technologies. Those same technologies are now coming into the built world. In other words, don’t use this technology to escape reality, use this technology to make reality better. If you think of these last decades as creating the internet of people, what’s coming is the internet of things, and it’s an order of magnitude bigger than what we’ve experienced so far.

What’s new and different in the fields of infrastructure industry transportation? Turns out the underlying use of three core technologies changes everything. One is the digital twin. We can now simulate anything. We can simulate something you want to build. We can simulate a factory that might build it. We can simulate that thing in operation. Being able to do simulation modeling, make lots of decisions before we ever build the thing, is speeding up the cycle times to market, and it’s making all of us more productive.

We are getting a real world more connected. We can now have software-defined automation. Think about the cars we drive now and how they do software updates. The same thing can happen in a factory. This changes everything. Simulation, digital twins, software-defined automation, coupled with collecting data and using AI. I think what we’re about to see is the democratization of fields that used to be unapproachable for average people. How many people do you know who say, I love programming? You can now program simply by speaking a natural language. And large language models can translate your intent into the computer language of whatever machine you’re interested in programming.

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The world of manufacturing opens up to more people who in the past might have only qualified for things we used to think of as blue-collar jobs. What if in the future, every job is a white-collar job because we’ve got machines capable of doing the dangerous and dirty things, and all we need is people who understand how to make things to really drive the operation of that factory? The things that we see happening, sometimes first they appear in the field of entertainment: Here’s this cool new thing. Have you tried it? Look at this gadget. Then you realize that we’ve got people, engineers and others, who have been bringing these technologies into labs and then into actual customer environments and trying them out. They are game changers in the real world.

Be on the lookout for a [new] field. It’s hard to know what to call it. Industrial AI? Industrial technology? We sometimes refer to it as operational technology. I call it AI with purpose. [It] is how we are applying the emerging technologies today to make the real world better.

What is the uptake like for some of these new technologies? Some of the industries that you work in are traditionally slow to update, to put it mildly.

It’s so interesting to watch how change happens because the first thing to realize is that our success is probably the biggest roadblock to change. When you find organizations who are wildly successful, the big question is: We’ve invested all this in what we already do, why would we change?

I love the way one of our leaders in digital industries talks about it. He says, our job is to help customers change at the speed of relevance. It turns out that there are a lot of fields that are becoming very competitive. Think about the auto industry. When electric vehicles are introduced, suddenly all auto manufacturers have to ask the question: Wait, am I in? And if so, what am I doing to my operations? That impacts the entire supply chain. The whole supply chain finds that they can change more rapidly if they’re using digital twins, if they’re communicating with one another in connected environments. We’re finding that the market forces are a pull, as much as we as innovators are a push into the market.

FACTS + COMMENT

The demands of starting a business are often so intense, it’s not uncommon for entrepreneurs to think of the company as their “baby.” So perhaps it’s also not surprising that new research out of the Vancouver School of Economics finds that having an actual baby has a permanent impact on women entrepreneurs:

42%: Women are this much less likely to start a business during a year they give birth. The effect lessens over time, but never fully returns to pre-birth levels

Five years: Women-led companies experienced an average decline of 21% in sales, 17% in assets and 21% in profits for five years following childbirth

‘Parallel trends up to the year of childbirth’: Study author Valentina Rutigliano found men-led firms and women-led firms sharply diverge after a first child is born. “Childbirth only has a moderate negative effect for men-led firms and instead lead to large, persistent, negative effects for women-led firms.”

STRATEGIES + ADVICE

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