Burnout: What We Should Know About This Pandemic At Work!

Researcher’s Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter have been pioneers of burnout research in the psychological literature for nearly three decades, with formally introducing the burnout concept, writing many influential articles and books as well as creating a widely used burnout assessment — Maslach Burnout Inventory.

The scientific definition of burnout is that it is a “psychological syndrome” which appears after continued exposure and response to long-standing interpersonal stressors on the job. The natural image of a flame, dying out and reducing to ashes seems to resonate with people’s actual and very real experiences of deterioration over time. The initial “fire” of enthusiasm and dedication towards the job and company has “burned out” leaving the person exhausted and depleted.

Do you often surf the web trying to recognise if you’re burnt out at work?

Maslach and Leiter have identified three broad signs of burnout, which has also been adopted by the WHO to recognise this in individuals. The three broad signs include people feeling:

1. Depleted or exhausted : The person feels like they have overextended their emotional and physical resources. They feel drained and used up without any source of support . A common complaint is “I’m overwhelmed, overloaded and overworked.. It’s just too much!”
2. Cynicism and feeling detached from work: If people are working too hard and doing too much, they start feeling exhausted. In an effort to help themselves, they may try to cut down and reduce the amount of time and energy they want to devote to the job. Overtime, this may build up as negative feelings and emotions associated with the job and people at work. People go from trying to do their very best to doing their bare minimum — “How do I get through, get my pay check, and be out of here!”
3. Reduced professional efficacy: This refers to feeling incompetent and unproductive at work. The mismatch in expectations and lack of resources or support from people at work lowers our confidence in our abilities. People experiencing this often feel “What am I doing? Why am I here? Maybe this is wrong for me”

Experiencing these signs of workplace burnout also diminish our desire to learn, grow and develop for the future. A burnt out employee’s energy and mental focus will be only enough for daily survival and effort to complete the required tasks.

Do you question how real this burnout at work phenomenon really is?

• When Stanford researchers looked into how workplace stress affects health costs and mortality in the United States, they found that it led to spending of nearly $190 billion — 8% of the national budget in healthcare — and nearly 120,000 deaths each year.
• A study by the APA claims that burned-out employees are 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job, and 63% more likely to take a sick day.
• According to a 2019 Gallup study, 28% of full-time employees reported feeling burned out at work “very often” or “always.” An additional 48% reported feeling burned out “sometimes.” That means most full-time employees — nearly eight in 10 — experience burnout on the job at least sometimes.
• The pressure to address job burnout became so intense in 2019 that the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared burnout an occupational phenomenon in its global standard for diagnostic health information, the 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases.
• Even scarier, burned-out employees are 23% more likely to visit the emergency room.

Uncertainty was a defining characteristic of 2020, and with it came record-high levels of burnout.

How did we get here?

Research has identified a few areas of workplace culture which contribute to burnout:

• Unmanageable Workload: When your workload is in sync with your capacity to get the work done, you can finish tasks, have time to rest and recover and are productive. When you feel continuously overloaded at work though, these opportunities don’t come by as often. In sports psychology, coaches use the term “mental quicksand” to describe how moments of poor performance can cause athletes to feel overwhelmed. This causes a ripple effect when it furthers poor performance and continues to bring them down. Even the most high performing employees can quickly shift from feeling optimistic to hopeless when workload becomes unmanageable.
• Perceived lack of control: Research draws a clear link between lack of control and high levels of stress on the job. Feeling like you lack autonomy, access to resources, and a say in decisions that impact your professional life can take a toll on your well-being. This generally happens when we are often micro-managed, or when we are held accountable for things without being given any control over it. Other everyday examples of feeling like we lack control and autonomy are — Being called into work at the last minute on our day off, given extra work at the end of a workday or being asked to go on an official trip with very little or no notice. These situations have an important impact on stress and burnout.
• Insufficient Rewards: If the rewards for your job don’t match the amount of effort and time you put into them, then you’re likely to feel like the investment of time and effort is just not worth it. These rewards could be in terms of salaries or other special perks, or recognition.
• Fairness: Think about whether you believe that you receive fair and equitable treatment. For example, were you given due credit for your work/ideas? Or was it overlooked, or even worse, credit was given to someone else? When we feel like our workplace is unfair and unequal, we start getting more detached from it and lose our commitment towards the company. It goes without saying that we feel frustrated and angry when we are wronged or treated unfairly at work or otherwise.
• Value alignment: Values are the ideals and goals that initially attract people to the job and internally motivate them beyond salary and other tangible benefits. Value conflict can arise when we highly value something that our company does not place high on their value cards. Under such conditions, employees can struggle between doing what they want to do versus what they have to do instead. This causes engagement and motivation levels to significantly drop. A common example of this is when people value a culture of truth and honesty, but find themselves in a company where lying or shading the truth becomes necessary for success. Such a mismatch on a continuous basis is likely to pave the way for burnout.
• Social support at work: Ongoing relationships with people at work as well as support from our managers is central to burnout. When there is an environment of trust, and people have our backs, it acts like a psychological buffer against prolonged stress and burnout. But when there is a breakdown in support, there is almost always hostility and conflict which also leads to burnout.

Employee burnout isn’t a new challenge in the workplace, but with the pandemic of 2020 that has followed through in 2021, it is crucial for companies and employees alike, to understand its triggers to be able build a healthier workforce, both offline and online.