Prioritizing Wellbeing to Support Career Success
When Alison Campbell graduated from Bentley in 2007, she landed a prestigious financial analyst position at Morgan Stanley. For the next two decades, she successfully advanced through increasingly demanding jobs at companies like Home Shopping Network, Wayfair and Workhuman.
Campbell says the journey was rewarding and fulfilling — until she began to feel unwell. “We tend to normalize exhaustion, as if it’s just part of the gig,” she says.
As her professional success grew, she developed stomach aches and brain fog. She wondered if her busy schedule was the culprit. Then one day, upon returning to Boston from a business trip, she experienced such severe stomach pain that she went to a nearby hospital emergency room. After a series of tests, doctors recommended surgery.
“That was the big moment of understanding that I was ignoring my own personal wellbeing in order to just push through,” Campbell says.
Recognizing a Need for Change
Campbell decided to leave her company to prioritize her recovery, creating a new nutritional program for herself and adding gentle exercise to her days.
She began sharing her story with friends and colleagues only to discover many were experiencing similar challenges. “What I saw was a pattern of keeping your head down, white-knuckling through, being chronically overwhelmed, and yet, for self-preservation, wanting to just keep the status quo.”
Campbell conducted research on burnout and workplace exhaustion and spent time reflecting on what made sense for her as she moved forward. “After 20 years of building operational efficiencies, I realized there was something at the intersection of personal wellbeing and operational excellence. I decided to pursue that as the next phase of my career.”
Launching a New Business
In 2024, Campbell launched unBurnt, a consulting firm focused on workplace wellbeing. She works with clients to examine project workflows and determine pain points. A typical client engagement includes delivering programming about building capacity, collaborating with leadership to define an improved workflow with defined responsibilities, schedules and ownership. She emphasizes team reflection time at a project’s end, which she considers essential for team members to regroup, celebrate wins and compile learnings ahead of the next project.
Currently, Campbell is also an executive in residence at Bentley’s Center for Health and Business, where she is conducting research focusing on cultural and workplace stressors and how to modify leadership to reduce employee burnout. “Our aim is to better understand the post-COVID, rapidly evolving AI-landscape that we are now in.”
Drawing From her Bentley Experience
She credits her Bentley education with preparing her to work hard, set goals and adapt when needed. Her experience as a Resident Assistant had a particularly significant impact.
Campbell’s mentor at the time encouraged her to become a Head Resident Assistant, a role with far more responsibilities that required a student to exhibit leadership, foster a sense of community, act as a peer resource and manage daily operations. At first, she did not believe she could do it.
Today, as a new business owner, parent and researcher, Campbell carefully monitors her schedule to avoid overload. She devotes time each week to rigorously managing her calendar. If the week ahead is particularly busy, she’ll table a few items to protect the “non-negotiables” on her calendar — family time and running, a key stress reliever.
“There is always the risk of overdoing it when you are passionate about what you're building, but I am very mindful of maintaining practices that I know keep me well so I can be at my best as a founder, a parent and a human,” Campbell says.
“This will be a lifelong practice,” she adds “And at any time, it is always okay to restart.”
Looking Busy May Mask Burnout in the Workplace
While employees with the busiest calendars are often seen as the most productive as they take meeting after meeting and juggle multiple projects, their ability to make strategic contributions may be diminishing over time. In other words, the high achievers could be burning out.
According to research recently released by Bentley’s Center for Health and Business (CHB) and unBurnt, a company specializing in workplace wellness, burnout is not only widespread in the workplace, but it is becoming the strongest predictor of diminished innovation capacity.
The report, “When Burnout Looks Like Productivity: The New Risk to Innovation Capacity,” was authored by Danielle Hartigan, Bentley’s Chester B. Slade Professor of Psychology who serves as the CHB’s executive director, and Alison Campbell ’07, founder and CEO of unBurnt and an executive in residence at CHB. Kingsolomon Ehinola, a student in the MS Business Analytics program, also contributed to the report. Hartigan and Campbell presented their findings at the Bentley Alumni Conference held earlier this month.
The team surveyed 544 working professionals across 15 industries and discovered that 86 percent reported moderate to high workplace burnout. Their research showed that the employees reporting the highest levels of burnout continue engaging in strategic work like idea generation, responsiveness and task completion, but they are less likely to sustain this work over time. This group most identified with the survey statement, “I do many things, but none of them well.”
Workplace factors most strongly associated with burnout included ambiguity, uncertainty and instability in the work environment. Among the 33 factors measured in the research, unclear role expectations showed the strongest correlation to burnout.
Not only does this result in negative consequences like stress-related illnesses and lack of job satisfaction for individuals, but it can undermine a company’s long-term strategic goals if planning is based on the anticipated output of employees who are running out of steam, the report says.