Burnout: An Avoidable Crisis
Burnout is topping the list of challenges for those in leadership, culture and people management roles today. In the process, endless mentions of burnout in the news, on social media, or in our own lives puts us at risk of normalizing this condition into our culture.
As we habituate to living with burnout, is the problem getting worse?
In a recent Forbes article, the World Health Organization officially defines the condition:
"Burnout is a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterized by three dimensions: 1) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; 2) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and 3) reduced professional efficacy. Burnout refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life."
Burnout =
Physical Exhaustion + Performance Decline + Cynicism
The critical component of the WHO definition is chronic workplace stress. Burnout is considered a cycle entered into after months or years of carrying a high stress load with little to no respite or evidence of alleviation coming in the future. This is an important distinction.
The same Forbes article provided the following statistics:
"According to Gallup, 23% of employees report feeling burnout at work very often or always, while an additional 44% reported feeling it sometimes."
This means that 23% of employees are already stuck in the burnout cycle, and 44% are in the early stages of burnout. For these purposes, we can say that 67% of employees are somewhere in the cycle of burnout. This is a shocking number of individuals experiencing the mental, physical and behavioral/performance effects of running, uninterrupted, on adrenaline, heavy workloads and little to no downtime.
A Cycle with a Solution
But, there is good news: Burnout is an avoidable business crisis, solved with less effort (and resources) than you think.
Researchers around the globe have been uniquely positioned to study burnout before, during and after the pandemic, and we have more knowledge than ever.
In our work analyzing environments for harmful stressors, we consider this question:
How can we change the environment to support the people?
(image: W3RKWELL Culture Course)
A recent article titled: Worker wellbeing and productivity in advanced economies: Re-examining the link found that there exists a false belief that hustle culture equals success, meaning the more employees produce, the better the returns for the company.
According to this study, that is categorically untrue.
From the article:
"The experience of chronic stress is linked to a number of physical
health risks and physical health-related behaviours, including high
blood pressure, heavy alcohol use, low physical activity, and smoking
(Belkic et al., 2004; Giga et al., 2003). Poorer physical health may
therefore be one route through which work-related stress is able to have
detrimental effects upon productivity. Stress can also have a direct effect
on the body’s physiology systems. Using data from the Whitehall II
longitudinal study of civil servants in London, Chandola et al. (2008)
showed that work-related stress could directly influence CHD via
repeated activation of the autonomic nervous system (characterised by
lower heart rate variability) and dysregulation of the hypothal-
amic–pituitary–adrenal axis (this system controls the cortisol circadian
rhythm).
Chronic, continuous exposure to work-related stress can lead to
burnout (Lee and Ashforth, 1996). Burnout is characterised by physical,
mental and emotional exhaustion, cynicism, and impaired personal ef-
ficacy (Bakker et al., 2003). As burnout is characterised by reduced ef-
ficacy, it is commonly shown to be linked to lower productivity across
measures such as absenteeism, presenteeism and intent to change jobs
(Dewa et al., 2014). Halbesleben and Rathert (2008) even demonstrated
that physician burnout had a detrimental effect on patient outcomes
such as time taken to recover after discharge from hospital and patient
satisfaction."
Our Leadership Call to Action:
This week, become more present with the way your company is structured. Ask your managers, “Where in our days can we create recovery breaks?”
Small breaks created by reducing or eliminating meetings can greatly mediate mental cloudiness, exhaustion and distractions while also acting as protective factors to burnout.
Interested in learning the How-To’s from the behavior science on burnout? Join the waitlist* for our Culture Course on burnout below.
*you will not receive communication other than a notification when the course is open
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Like this article? It was adapted from our Weekly Ten newsletter.
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