Burnout: why rest isn’t enough

Understanding drivers of the Great Resignation

Burnout isn’t just about long hours. It’s also about feeling a lack of control, a conflict of values, insufficient community, insufficient reward, and more.

Rest is important, but rest alone isn’t enough. It can even backfire, giving us a false sense that we should magically feel better and leading to confusion, doubt, and self-questioning when we don’t.

Looking to better understand the Great Resignation? Let’s look at the six causes of burnout, first identified by psychologists Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter — and how each is contributing to the masses of employees walking out the door.

Burnout Cause #1. Perceived Lack of Control

This includes feeling like we have don’t have the autonomy, resources, or decision authority that we need to do our jobs. It can feel even worse for those who have high levels of responsibility.

Lack of control also occurs when priorities change frequently — something that was already a challenge pre-pandemic, as employers contended with a panoply of technology, demographic, regulatory, and other market shifts.

But nobody has control during a global pandemic. Almost two years in, many teams still feel whipsawed or adrift. And even the best leaders typically aren’t practiced at managing this level of ambiguity.

Burnout Cause #2. Values Mismatch

Organizational value statements tend to get thrown around in normal times. But in times of uncertainty, employees want to feel that organizations are living those values in every single decision. With so many unknowns, staff want to know what they can depend on.

Many employers falsely believe that staff loyalty to mission — a great cause, a wonderful product — is the same as aligned values. It’s not.

Values aren’t just about what the work is, but how it gets done. Frustration over Covid policies, leadership communications, office politics, workload, DEI challenges, and more can lead to employees feeling a values disconnect.

Burnout Cause #3. Insufficient Reward

Many organizations simultaneously face staffing vacancies, stressed budgets, and climbing demands. Unfortunately, that’s made “doing more with less” a harsh reality.

Employees may feel under-compensated from a monetary standpoint — and that’s on top of almost two years of a reduction of other types of rewards.

For some, the intrinsic reward of feeling good at one’s job has been lessened due to pandemic strains. Others have missed extrinsic rewards like travel or free meals or social appreciation (i.e., being praised in the hallway by co-workers).

Meanwhile, many staff have simply changed the cost-benefit equation that they’re using to assess their employment situations. Pre-pandemic, more workers were likely to overlook other frustrations (i.e., values mismatch) for a longer time if they were satisfied by their paychecks. What we might think of as existential reward—does this align with my purpose?— is carrying more weight, due to both pandemic soul-searching and overall burnout.

Burnout Cause #4. Community Breakdown

Crisis brings people together in new, lasting ways. But it can also lead to interpersonal strain, and make it difficult for individuals to provide support, empathy and grace for one another when it’s needed most.

In addition, community means something different after almost two years of the pandemic. Early in the pandemic, Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic, that the remote world meant that “you are as close to the people and communities on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram as you are to the Slack messages and chats of your bosses and colleagues.”

Thompson predicted a rise of free-agent entrepreneurship, as workers’ ties to their organizations weaken and they’re able to find stronger community through online global networks. Much of the same logic applies to those moving from employer to employer, especially as individuals pursue hybrid or remote opportunities.

Plus, the Great Resignation has become its own feedback loop. As departure announcements continue, remaining staff take on extra work. They miss their friends and colleagues. Their own sense of the stability of the community is shaken.

Burnout Cause #5. Work Overload

Workload discussions often focus on the simplest question: how many hours is someone working? But workload sustainability isn’t just about hours. Different tasks require different amounts of mental and emotional energy. That’s why the helping professions have always held the highest burnout risks.

Additionally, doing something that you’ve done a hundred times already is different from doing something for the first time. And all employees, at all levels, are needing to think, act, and learn in new ways. To truly understand the “overwork” part of burnout, we need to consider the mental and emotional loads at work that have been building across the last two years.

Furthermore, work overload is happening on top of the stress, change, and new demands that employees have been facing in their personal lives as well.

Burnout Cause #6. Lack of fair and equitable treatment

Unfairness can impact anyone, no matter their identity or background. Many staff are currently frustrated that their organizations’ COVID-19 or hybrid work policies seem wrong or unfair. This can be in comparison to their peers or friends in other roles or teams at their own organizations, or in other workplaces altogether.

Additionally — and this can’t be said often enough — all the burnout causes on this list have always been greater for marginalized groups. For example, individuals of all identity groups may feel insufficiently rewarded in a do-more-with-less environment, but that’s on top of existing unequal pay (the gender wage gap is at 82 cents per dollar, and much lower for Black, Native American, and Latina women).

It’s natural for employers to want to blame the remote work environment for any community breakdown. Often this underestimates pre-COVID problems, especially from a DEI perspective. Many non-white individuals and women have expressed a sad benefit of the remote environment: they don’t feel the impact of daily micro-aggressions and biases as strongly online.

Take the burnout from COVID-19 that everyone is collectively experiencing, and then consider that’s on top of every single item on this list already at unsustainable levels for women, BIPOC individuals, and other marginalized groups before the pandemic began. That makes DEI challenges even more important to address — not doing so is tantamount to what I’ve written about as related to the psychological concept of institutional betrayal.

For more on the challenges of organizational culture check out my book, BEYOND LEANING IN: GENDER EQUITY AND WHAT ORGANIZATIONS ARE UP AGAINST.

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