How to Recognise Burnout in your team (And what to do about it)
I don’t know about you, but it has really felt like the last three years have taken it out of us – a pandemic, talent market shortages and upheaval, a cost-of-living crisis and unprecedented weather events have really stripped a lot of people of any stores of emotional resilience they may have had. Unsurprisingly, this has had its impact on the workforce, something that cannot be ignored as we weather the next few years.
Burnout among employees has reached an all-time high. In a recent survey by Future Forum, 42% of 10,243 respondents say they are experiencing burnout — up from 39% in May 2021 when it was first measured. Forty-six percent of women say they are burned out compared with 37% of men. And 48% of workers under age 30 said they feel burned out at work compared with 40% of workers age 30 and up. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially classified burnout as a medical diagnosis, including the condition in the International Classification of Diseases: “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
These are alarming and important stats for any business owner to consider as they clearly have long-reaching impacts on business. How can managers and business owners help? The pressure on business leaders to learn soft skills to deal with employee burnout is mounting. But will this cause these same leaders to burn out themselves by trying to balance emotional intelligence and enforcing performance?
Work Stress vs Burnout
It is important to understand specifically what burnout is and appreciate it is not the same as stress. Job burnout is both a people killer and a career killer and it is difficult to manage (and impossible in most cases to “push through”). Burnout is diagnosed by four symptoms:
1. Feelings of energy depletion, exhaustion, and fatigue.
2. Increased mental distance from your job.
3. Feelings of negativism or cynicism related to your job.
4. Reduced professional efficacy.
It’s easy to treat burnout as stress and try to push through it, but stress and burnout are not the same. The fatigue that comes with burnout is different from the stress you might have after a long day or week’s work or from personal pressures. The fatigue experienced with burnout can be so severe that it’s crippling to an individual, and although there’s controversy over the incidences of burnout, there is no doubt it is real and it is dangerous for business owners to ignore.
Research from Gallup (a global analytics and advice firm that helps leaders and organizations solve their most pressing problems) reveals that working less isn’t enough to reduce stress, improve well-being or prevent burnout. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story. So what’s the other part?
Gallup’s analysis of employee burnout found that the way employees experience their workload has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours they work. Plus, when it comes to overall well-being, the quality of work experience has up to three times the impact than the number of days or hours worked. It’s what you’re doing during work hours that really matters, according to Gallup’s analysis. This means that traditional ideas of reducing hours, which have been used to assist in managing stress just really will not cut it. You can recover from stress with certain management techniques, but burnout results from cumulative stress that hasn’t been managed. Once burnout gets its hooks into you, you can’t cure it by slowing down, taking a long vacation or working fewer hours. You’re already out of gas, and you’ve given up all hope of surmounting stressful work obstacles.
Many business leaders are at a loss on how to handle employee burnout or even what to do about their own (as with most psycho-centric conditions, it is non-discriminatory in whom it affects). Many solutions attempting to lessen burnout and increase well-being focus on decreasing work: limiting access to email, requiring fewer days, fewer hours or mandating that employees use their annual leave. The assumption is that the less people work, the better they will be able to recover from job burnout. This is a myth. The key symptom of burnout is exhaustion in the form of deep fatigue that isn’t curable by rest or time off.
Gallup lists the primary causes of burnout at work as unfair treatment, an unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity and a lack of communication and support from a manager. Gallup data suggests that the quality of a manager sets the foundation for all the other causes. Managers are advocates for their team members, addressing unfairness, helping manage priorities and clarifying expectations. In most cases where burnout occurred, Gallup found that a good manager was missing. This is another example of how important your managers are in your organisation – it’s not an easy job that’s for sure (with great power, comes great responsibility).
How Business Leaders Can Prevent Burnout
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for burnout because recovery takes time. The biggest antidote is prevention. In Gallup’s Wellbeing at Work, authors Jim Clifton and Jim Harter offer five burnout prevention action items:
1. Make sure everyone in your organization knows their strengths. Use a strengths-based strategy to design an employee experience—from attraction to hiring to onboarding, engagement and performance—that leads to a culture of high development.
2. Remove abusive managers. No organization should tolerate managers who destroy the lives of the people you rely on to get work done. In today's workforce, bad managers are your biggest risk.
3. Up-skill managers to move from boss to coach. Use proven methods to transition your managers' mentality from boss to coach. Think of this as a year-long journey that starts with learning about high-performance teams. Each manager should become an expert at setting goals and providing meaningful feedback at least once a week.
4. Make well-being part of career development conversations. Once managers establish trust, they, along with their teams, can dream big together—not just about career goals and development but about life, well-being and overall purpose.
5. Working less doesn't mean happier work. It’s important to find ways to make career well-being a focus in your organization.
How can you prevent your managers from burning out too?
There is no rolling back the clock to the old days when employees subjected themselves to harmful corporate demands to keep their jobs. Managers are and should not be willing to pay the price of burnout as a “normal” side effect of their hard work. Companies that want to attract and retain employees will have to take tangible actions to encourage kinder communities at work, focus on pastoral care activities, increase access to needed mental health resources and affirm and cultivate a culture of respect for all employees.
In our experience dealing with many SMEs and larger employers across NZ, we have seen that businesses largely believe they have a significant role to play in their employees’ well-being. But leaders can’t do it all on their own, with some burning out trying to deal with employee burnout. Business leaders are being called upon—perhaps even pressured—to develop the skills of empathy, compassion and kindness to be effective. Although these skills are essential and many have them naturally, others can get stuck juggling emotional intelligence and holding employees to a standard of performance. It’s a tricky balance!
It’s important for leaders to know they don’t have to be therapists for their employees, and you don’t need to know why they’re stuck to get them unstuck. That’s a therapist’s job. Business leaders can be brokers of resources, but they do not need to get caught up in the why and be therapists to their people. Becoming a therapist alongside your “day job” as a manager is draining and unhealthy.
So, what are some practical things you can do in your business? As we have discussed, burnout is born from unmanaged and sustained stress so let’s avoid the “ambulance at the bottom of the cliff” scenario and consider acting sooner to manage stress.
Two things we know about wellness, in general, are that: there’s no singular element that signifies overall well-being and that each dimension of wellness is interrelated. It is important that we look at all elements of wellness and see if you can address each of these in a way that is appropriate for your business industry, size and structure (unfortunately there is no “one size fits all”).
Below are the seven dimensions of wellness – for each, consider how your business can support your employees in making improvements:
Physical – How your body operates and feels. Can you offer in-house exercise, coordinate lunch walking groups or encourage participation in community physical pursuits?
Mental – How your mind handles stress and influences your emotions.
Financial – Your sense of confidence in your finances and financial goals
Occupational – Your sense of fulfilment and happiness in your professional life
Relational – Your sense of belonging and authenticity in your interactions with others.
Spiritual – Your connection to a sense of purpose (in a religious or secular way)
Recreational – Your connection to creativity, hobbies and interests
Lastly, remember to think flexibly: Flexible workers were 57% more likely to say their company culture has improved over the past two years compared with fully in-person workers — and they cite flexible remote work policies as the primary reason, finds Future Forum. Allowing some element of flexibility, appreciating that employees have lives which can be inherently stressful and giving them some leeway to work from home or remotely can keep people motivated and engaged and make them feel like the business “gets them” and “sees them”. Flexible workers are also more likely to feel connected to their direct manager and their company’s values compared with those who are back in the office full-time.
If stress is inevitable, managing this properly, and stopping burnout from eventuating should be too. If you need help with burnout management and prevention at a business level, feel free to get in touch with us for a confidential chat. At Core HR, we are always happy to share our knowledge and provide you with the expert HR guidance your business needs.