Burnout

Do you blame yourself for not being good enough to cope? Do you feel guilty?

Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash

• Do you ever feel overwhelmed by your job?

• Do you wonder why you wanted this job in the first place?

• Is you dream job turning into a nightmare?

• Do you manage people who seem fed up and needy?

Do you blame yourself for not being good enough to cope? Do you feel guilty?

I bet that the biggest mistake you make in thinking about burnout is to see it as an individual problem; as something that happens to people who are in some way ‘weak.’ You locate burnout firmly within the individual. It logically follows that the solution should be an individual one. It’s your problem - go and sort it out! Perhaps to get some therapy, or do a resilience course, or learn mindfulness. 

I take a different view of burnout. A view which is in agreement with the World Health Organisation. Burnout isn’t an individual problem it is a work and organisational problem that finds expression in individual people. People burn out because of poor organisational culture; one that is terrible at allocating work and organising workflow. A culture that separates you from the meaning and purpose of your job - leading to negativity and detachment.

Most companies approach to burmout is a bit like the managers of a nuclear power station who find out that some employees are suffering with radiation sickness. They send them off for treatment, but don’t bother to fix the radiation leak that caused the sickness.

It’s also worth remembering that for every person that ends up going off sick with burnout there are probably ten more on the verge of burnout.

It is the responsibility of the organisation to solve the causes of burnout. If the organisation does not take up that responsibility, then the individual - you- need to take responsibility for protecting your health and wellbeing.

It is the business culture that pushes people either towards stress, mental ill-health and burnout, or conversely to psychological safety and high performance. Leaders set the culture, which means an organisation reflects its leaders’ values, priorities and emotional intelligence. When the leaders of an organisation understand that burnout can happen easily, they can take action to minimise the conditions that lead to burnout. These ‘anti-burnout’ actions will have a direct impact on performance and productivity, then positive change becomes possible.

Organisations with high levels of burnout have  three common factors:

1. Excessive collaboration

2. Poor time management and boundaries

3. A tendency to overload the most capable people with too much work
   

These factors destroy your ability to focus on complex tasks, and they sabotage your time away from work, which is necessary for recovery. The inability to switch off at the end of the workday is the biggest predictor of burnout.

Three company bad habits that fuel burnout:

Excessive collaboration

Do you ever get sick of the endless rounds of meetings at work to ensure that everyone is consulted and included in decisions? That is what I mean by excessive collaboration. Most organisations demand collaboration far beyond what they need to get the job done. This results in overloaded diaries and back to back meetings, rather than time used productively to get things done.

Poor time management and boundaries

In many organisations, the demand for high productivity has significantly outpaced the development of organisational processes and structures to support this demand. Most of the time, you will have to work out how to manage you time and workload. Work cultures often push and push to get more and more done; and most of us have limited ability to fight an organisational culture where overwork is seen as normal and is actively rewarded.

Overloading of the most capable

‘If you want a job done, give it to the busiest person,’ so the saying goes. Employee workloads have increased, usually without a commensurate increase in staff numbers. As a result, managers often overestimate how much can be accomplished by employees who feel constantly under pressure and who usually end up working unpaid hours by staying late or taking work home. The best people, and those whose knowledge and skills are most in demand, become the biggest victims of overload. 

Three steps to create an anti-burnout culture

Here are three ideas that will help you to minimise the risk of burnout in your team:

Step 1: Encourage psychological safety

Psychological safety is the essential characteristic of a high-performance organisational culture. 

A culture of psychological safety is one in which people feel they can speak up, express their concerns and be heard. In a psychologically safe workplace, people are not full of fear and not trying to cover their tracks to avoid being embarrassed or punished. This is a workplace where people can offer suggestions and take sensible risks without provoking retaliation. 

Step 2: Reverse-engineer the three factors that contribute to burnout 

Keep meetings to a minimum – and keep them short (minimise excessive collaboration)

Unnecessary meetings burn up time and become an obstacle to getting the work done. Many people don’t like meetings because they would rather be getting on with the task at hand. In some organisations, where the work is emotionally difficult, organising excessive meetings is an unconscious tactic to avoid the work.

Step 3: Improve workplace time management and boundaries

Poor boundaries between work and home is the defining theme in burnout. Leaders face a constant dilemma between improving performance/output and making sure their employees look after their health by taking breaks and not overworking. Often leadership teams prioritise the former and neglect the latter. This may be an effective strategy in the short term, but disastrous in the long term. Organisations should proactively and assertively  create a culture where work is done in work time, and home is for rest and recuperation (for family, friends, hobbies and interests).

The problem is that the senior leadership team is hopeless at doing this themselves. They usually have the worst work–life balance of anybody in the organisation.

Leader have to set an example and model the very behaviour that they want to see in others.

Take care of your most capable people 

I sometimes do an exercise with the leadership teams I work with. I ask them to make a list of the people in their team. Then I ask them to reflect on why they ordered the list in the way they did. For example, why did they put ‘James’ at the top of the list rather than at the bottom or somewhere in the middle? The answers are always interesting. Some people order the list based on how long each person has been in the team; others order it depending on how close individuals sit to them. Most managers put at the top of the list either their ‘go-to’, most capable people or their ‘pain in the backside’ people. This exercise can reveal a lot about how these leaders view their teams and work. Those who place the ‘difficult’ team members at the top of the list can be preoccupied with looking after people and be problem-focused. Those who put their ‘go-to’ people at the top are often more preoccupied with the task than the well-being of people. This is a simplification, but there is a grain of truth in it. 

No one wants to work in a miserable overworked team, and no one would want to be a miserable exhausted manager…there is another way.

I've created this Burnout Self-Assessment Questionnaire. It's designed to help you identify potential signs of burnout in your current work situation. It's not a substitute for professional advice, but it can give you valuable insights and guide you in making necessary changes to ensure you maintain a healthy and balanced work-life integration.