Taking Burnout Seriously

6 Nov

Last week was International Stress Awareness Week and this year’s theme is Beyond Stress Management: From Stigma to Solutions.

The Health and Safety Executive defines stress as “the adverse reaction people have to excessive pressures or other types of demand placed on them”.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace Report 2023 highlights that stress remains at an all-time high with 44% of the global workforce experiencing stress a lot the previous day. This is an increase of 8% over the last 10 years.

Burnout

The World Health Organisation (WHO) defines burnout as a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.

It is characterized by three dimensions:

feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one's job; and
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.

The size, scale and causes

A new McKinsey Health Institute survey across 30 countries found that the global level of burnout is 22%. In the UK it is 20% and in North America it is 16%.

In the UK 99% of businesses employ 0-249 employees. This means that in a business with 100 employees 20 could be suffering from burnout and in an organisation with 50 employees 10 could be suffering from burnout.

Individuals suffering from burnout are 23% more likely to visit the Emergency Department (Gallup).

If 22% of the lights in your organisation didn’t work what would you do?

Gallup research identified the top 5 reasons for burnout as:

Unfair treatment at work
Unmanageable workload
Lack of role clarity
Lack of communication and support
Unreasonable time pressure

Gartner’s research highlighted that manager responsibilities have increased twofold since the start of the pandemic and a Gallup survey found an increase in manager burnout, manager disengagement, managers looking for another job and feeling like their organisation doesn’t care about their wellbeing.

Burnout will impact on an organisation’s productivity, profitability, engagement, absence and retention levels.

Preventing Burnout

Review manager role expectations, and workloads and identify process blockages.
Meet with team members for a minimum of 15 minutes weekly to check in and better understand their challenges, workloads and what they need from you as their manager.
Step back and consider how you as a leader may be contributing to stress or burnout within your team. Research from the Work Institute found that managers impact employees’ mental health (69%) more than doctors (51%), therapists (41%) or spouse/partner (69%).
Call out inappropriate behaviour and seek ways to promote psychological safety within the team.
Provide the team with the skills required to become psychologically resilient.