Some workplace metrics are easy to measure – from levels of profit and loss to rates of sickness and absence – while measuring levels of burnout is an altogether more complex task. It’s also increasingly becoming an agenda item in the boardroom.
Burnout is a syndrome resulting from chronic unresolved or ineffective management of stress in the workplace, and more recently it has been classified as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ (not a medical condition) by the World Health Organisation. Identifying burnout in the workplace isn’t always easy. When people feel burned out by their work, you won’t necessarily see it – human beings can be adept at masking the signs – particularly if we don’t feel psychologically safe enough in our working environments to reach out.
‘Pluralistic ignorance’ –is a term used to describe when we feel something is wrong, or we’re not on top of our game, but instead of talking with someone about it, we carry on as normal. And, subsequently, because everyone else is doing the same thing, we may perceive others are OK and the problem is ourselves. But behind these masks, others may be in a similar boat.
Burnout is commonly characterised by things such as energy depletion, exhaustion, impaired attention and concentration, mental distancing from our work, apathy or aversion to work (but not laziness), feelings of negativity or cynicism towards our work, through to intense feelings of being overwhelmed.
Burnout is not limited to high pressure roles. It can impact anyone because the underlying drivers are common factors across today’s working environments – high work demands and perceived lack of job control, mismatch between reward and recognition, perceived lack of community, lack of fairness or organisational justice, or a mismatch between individual and corporate values, for example.
Gallup’s 2024 State of the Global Workplace global study identified that a quarter of leaders around the world feel burned out often or always; around 40% of those with people management responsibilities experience stress on a daily basis. We know that burnout leads to chronic fatigue, irritability, insomnia and reduced motivation. Physically, it can manifest through headaches and muscle tension, high blood pressure and a loss of appetite.
In the workplace, burnout manifests through reduced innovation and productivity, absenteeism, presenteeism and reduced quality of work – and it represents a significant cost to UK business both in financial and, more importantly, human terms. However, quoting large financial impact numbers means little compared to understanding how stress and burnout actually impacts your own organisation’s people, performance and bottom line.
No matter which studies you look at, the evidence for addressing stress and, in turn, burnout, and improving wellbeing is a no brainer. Ultimately, higher wellbeing and engagement drives down turnover, absence and safety incidents – whilst turning up customer loyalty, sales, innovation, production, profitability.
So how do we get on top of this global occupational phenomenon? Ultimately, what we’re talking about is optimising our people experience in the workplace. There is very limited scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of tertiary interventions – such as helplines and health apps – in addressing stress and burnout, largely because we’re rarely comparing homogeneous approaches to workplace wellbeing.
However, it is the primary factors, driven from the top down, that make life at my company amazing or awful: does the design of my job – the way work is organised, the quality and safety of my working environment, the culture, the working relationships etc. – enable or inhibit my work experience?
So how can we do this? Fundamentally, we need to understand our people ‘enablers’ and our people ‘inhibitors’ so we can create informed, relevant and impactful approaches. Know what data and information to look at – and look at it holistically – and know what to do with it.
For example, are your people managers creating stress or do they help your people thrive in their work? Do they simply manage – or do they lead, inspire and coach? Are you ‘managing’ or ‘mitigating’ stress? How well do you understand your exposures to work stress? How well do you understand the relationship between work-stress and your employee engagement? How well are your managers equipped to identify and address signs of stress in their teams? Do your teams have sufficient control over their roles? What meaning do your employees find in their work?
Only by having an informed picture of your enablers and inhibitors, can you embed relevant and effective interventions. Otherwise, are you just hoping that your approach is going to work? We’ve encountered thousands of different approaches in organisations around the world in addressing worker wellbeing, both informed and creative, to the typically less effective ‘off-shelf’ approaches. But beating burnout fundamentally requires senior leaders and decision-makers to understand the prevalence and drivers of stress in their organisation. After all, the health of the workplace is indicative of the health of the workforce.
Beating burnout requires HR and SHEQ leaders to review policies around flexible working, working time directives, and workplace stress, and providing employees with the opportunity to feed into the design, development, and delivery of workplace wellbeing strategies. It requires budget holders to see the links between burnout, productivity, and profits. Ultimately, burnout reduces productivity and reduced productivity reduces profits.
It also requires employees to actively participate in workplace offerings, before burning out becomes burnt out. From sharing in ‘time to talk’ sessions to offering Employee Assistance Programmes such as counselling services, it all helps to contribute to a culture of clarity, communication, and collaboration; in which colleagues feel comfortable to share their stress, rather than bottle it up.
Beating burnout requires commitment, clarity, and communication from business leaders and decision-makers. It means putting worker wellbeing front and centre, investing in wellbeing programmes, promoting work-life balance, and encouraging open and stigma-free communication.
Ultimately this begins with leadership: the way you role model best practice and lead your organisation to adopt a better working culture. And it ends with thriving workers: a happier workplace, and hopefully also higher profits. Employees who find meaning in their work – those who connect with the mission, vision and values of the organisation, who are empowered – are more creative, more likely to feel they can raise new ideas or objections and ultimately, more likely to feel in better health, and at lower risk of work-related stress and burnout.
In my mind, that’s a no brainer.
