text: During the pandemic, there was a significant corporate and cultural focus on mental health and risk of burnout – for good reason. The ambient stress of the pandemic, loneliness, financial stressors and bouts of illness combined to put mental health at risk. Post-pandemic, however, we expected a kind of “wellness dividend” that would reset levels of burnout and chronic anxiety. Companies acted accordingly, stepping back from pandemic era wellness benefits lightly at first and then with increased fervor at the first sign of economic headwinds. Unfortunately, as corporate focus on wellness evaporated, the world remained chaotic, with Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza rapidly filling the anxiety gap (if there ever was one).
  As security professionals, the dangers and darkness of the world are part of daily life. These experiences cut both ways. We may be more resilient, but we are asked to handle so much more. As security programs grow and become more complex, employees with backgrounds beyond public sector security – software engineering, business operations, data science – must also confront the challenges of security work. Training and support are good, but true commitment means integrating wellness from the ground up as you build and structure your program. Below we share some background on how PRG weaves wellness into our program building approach.
  The more you know about your program, the better you can protect against burnout. This starts with data management. At a very basic level, data allows you to understand if – and, critically, how – your program and staff are being overwhelmed. Has case volume increased? Or just case handling times? What case types have increased, and which staff are bearing the brunt? With this information, you can not only recognize the signs of burnout, but also make clear and compelling appeals to your management for more resources or better technology. There is a big difference between simply saying you are overwhelmed and proving it with data.
  The feeling of being overwhelmed, and in turn the risk of burnout, only increases when the work is not rewarding, validating and impactful. Repetitive data entry, high volume queues, disorganized databases that make it impossible to find what you need when you need it. Everyone recognizes these as productivity killers but they are also key sources of burnout. The more you can integrate AI and automation for mundane tasks – summarizing large datasets, transactional work, binary decision making – the more time your staff spends on rewarding, high impact work. We have found, over and over, that AI and automation can be as good for wellness as they are for productivity.
  But burnout is more than just being overwhelmed. In security, the nature of the work itself presents a significant risk. Content moderation is a useful analogy here: faced with a constant stream of bad, it’s hard to remember that good even exists. Content moderation requires an intentional and thoughtful approach to managing wellness, and security should too.
  - Ensure sensitive work (e.g. support for suicide, doxxing, violence, difficult terminations) is not concentrated on a few employees. Even the most resilient can wear down.
  - Don’t make assumptions about someone’s level of resilience, especially based on prior work experience. It’s common to hear “she can handle it, she’s a vet” or “they went through much worse in their old job.” Such experience may build resilience, but could equally be a source of increased trauma.
  - Create a culture of well being, leading by example. Be loud about taking time off, encourage people not to work (even remotely) when sick, keep an eye on your staff’s vacation balances. Model wellness, not burnout.
  - Clearly identify roles and responsibilities, and help your employees stick to them. Some employees disproportionately help others. Not only can this add burden to certain employees, it can blur lines of responsibility and create gaps and vulnerabilities.
  Wellness is like infrastructure. It should be the foundation of anything you build. It needs smart design, and the smarter and stronger you build the foundation, the longer it lasts. It changes as the environment changes around it, and requires regular maintenance. Most important, like infrastructure, wellness is easy to ignore because everything looks fine, until it’s not. At PRG we help clients invest in wellness in ways that protect employees and create program level resilience and productivity. If you are building or enhancing your security programs, we are here to help.