Top Up Together
Next week (6th -12th October) is Mental Health Awareness Week, with the 2025 theme Top Up Together. This year’s theme is an invitation: to stop thinking of wellbeing as a solo project and to begin seeing it as something we build and sustain together. If you want to find out more about MHAW you can here
In our workplaces, wellbeing is too often framed as an individual responsibility: Do your mindfulness. Get more sleep. Go for a walk at lunchtime. While these are valuable, they miss the deeper truth—our wellbeing is profoundly shaped by the people around us.
In our workplaces, wellbeing is too often seen as an individual activity or responsibility. something we do (like going to the gym) by ourselves outside of work time. Of course our individual self-care is essential but the focus on individuals misses the wider notion of collective wellbeing. In some cultures asking how you are, involves enquiring about their family. The assumption is that no one is truly well if those closest to them are not. That demonstrates a more collective approach to wellbeing.
This Mental Health Awareness Week, I want to invite you to consider what collective wellbeing might look like for your team or organisation. This won’t just be every individual doing well on their own, but the team intentionally supporting, replenishing and building one another up. Flourishing together asks more of us, but also provides more for us than seeking to flourish alone. Once we have a shared sense of what collective wellbeing means, we can begin to grow a mindset of doing things together that add to our health and happiness at work. This is a shift away for me doing my little routines towards us finding ways to top up together.
Foundational to this idea of communal wellbeing is the truth that we need each other, yet we are living in a society that has lost our sense of interdependence.
When Geese migrate, they fly in a V formation. The bird at the front breaks the air resistance so that it is easier for those following. Geese take turns leading, when the front bird tires another takes it place at the front. They share the work and have a procedure for supporting each others energy. Imagine if we organised our teams like geese do, taking turns leading and resting.
Workplace wellbeing is often approached as though we expect everyone to be the bird working hardest all the time. The focus is on keeping each individual bird flying at their peak. A collective approach to wellbeing, asks something different: that we help to keep each other topped up, and that we step in to support each other when we are tired.
As a team or workplace, we can start thinking about how to build collective wellbeing through the five ways to wellbeing. Each day of the week offers a theme that we can use to focus our activities.
Monday: Me Whakawhanaunga /Connect
Building a sense of connection through kindness is the foundation of our team wellbeing. We can’t top up together unless we are connected, and connection is built through kindness. One of the biggest challenges to connection is time. In workplaces under pressure to meet outcome targets building relationships with teammates can be deprioritised. As a society we are becoming increasingly poor at relational exchanges. Support and scaffolding are often needed to encourage genuine connection. At the same time may workplace connection strategies feel contrived which builds dislike and ineffectiveness.
Connect Ideas For Your Team
Match staff into random pairs and give them 5 minutes to talk about something non work related. Support them to begin by providing a list of prompts such as: share about one of the following: a hobby, a favourite place, favourite tv show, something about their kids, their childhood home, their dream holiday.
Tuesday: Tukua / Give
We know that giving to others, being generous or kind has positive wellbeing benefits for both the giver and receiver. For those I work with in helping professions, where our work already involves so much giving we actually need practice receiving rather than giving. This can be an uncomfortable identity shift for those of us used to being in the ‘helping role’. I have been challenged by this myself over the last few weeks, as I rest my foot to recover from ligament tears. I have been unable to help others as I am used to, and have also had to ask for help. You might like to reflect: Do you give more than you receive? What might stop you receiving gracefully from others? How can you make receiving part of team culture?
Give/Receive Ideas For Your Team
In a team meeting set aside some time for a “help exchange”. You could give this a work focus, inviting people to ask for help with an element of their work. If you want it to increase connection and fun as well, you could make it a non work activity (perhaps with a caveat that it can be done in a couple of lunch hours).
Wednesday: Me kori tonu / Be Active.
Have you noticed that it is those who already enjoy physical activity and are already fit; the gym goers, the trampers, the marathon runners, are the ones that talk about it most at work? Yet is probably those of us who struggle to make physical activity part of our daily routines that most need encouragement and celebration.
We know that being active is good for our mind and body, improving workplace resilience and stamina. But it often feels too personal to talk about in relation to collective wellbeing. Beyond workstation set up, or the occasional lunchtime joint yoga session we don’t tend to include activity as part of our team culture. It can help bring it back into the workplace if we think of activity in its simplest possible terms.
Be Active Ideas For Your Team:
Ask a teammate if they have been outside today.
Start a daily routine, such as an open invitation to jointly walk a lap around the building at 3.15pm.
Normalise fun “stand-and-stretch movement moments during the workday.
Thursday: Me aro tonu/ Take Notice.
Taking notice is about slowing down and being aware of and attending to the here and now. Some of us might practise this through mindfulness or meditation, these are often individual activities. Practicing mindfulness and meditation together is beneficial, helping us with the activity,and supporting out wellbeing in ways that enable us to relate and work better, it doesn’t directly increase the sense of connection between us.
Let’s think of collectively being aware of the here and now as attending whole heartedly and mindfully to each other. Too often in conversations we are distracted by our own thoughts of the to do list,our inner thoughts or something like wanting lunch. We can take notice together by committing to being fully present in our conversations.
Take Notice Ideas For Your Team
Commit to being fully present with one another for a day.
Take the time to notice how each other is - does anyone seem a bit off, or stressed?
If you are having a conversation be fully in it, don’t multi-task, try and focus away from distractions.
Friday Me ako tonu / Keep Learning.
Our minds need exercise, just as much as our bodies. It is easy to fall into familiar patterns of thinking and habitual ways of doing things. Learning together isn’t simply about running a “lunch and learn”. Without genuine engaged discussion, this is often individual learning done in parallel. Collective learning means being willing not to know, to be curious and to apply what you are leaning together. Sometimes what we most need to exercise our minds is not so much more information but more creativity, to stretch our thinking into new spaces. We can do this by using more creativity focused tasks, and by focussing on generating as many ideas as possible, the good ideas are usually not first, but we often stop too early.
Keep Learning Ideas For Your Team
Model Sophie in a Bizarre Bra from the World of Wearable Arts Show
Invite your team to play with ideas. Start with something deliberately absurd to free up creativity. For example: If we were to design a bizarre bra that represented our workplace what would it look like? Come up with as many ideas as possible.
We are stronger when we top up together
When we approach wellbeing as a collective responsibility the five ways to wellbeing become more than individual checklists they become team practices that enhance cohesion, provide encouragement and increase flourishing for all. As teams we are stronger when we top up together.
Workplace Stress:Why Individual Capacity Matters More Than Fairness
Caring for staff well-being is a tension for radically kind leaders. They want to prioritise and care for staff well-being but are also aware of having to balance this with organisational priorities, the work that must be done, and fairness to all team members. These are difficult challenges to balance, yet successfully supporting staff to manage the stresses and strains of work is key to burnout prevention.
Burnout is the result of chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.
But what does “successfully managing stress” actually mean?
It might help to think of the workplace as going on a tramp (hike). In this multi day expedition we are all carrying big tramping backpacks. We come in different sizes, and have variations in strength. Some have old backpacks that are worn and shabby, getting a bit thin in places; others have the latest brand new backpacks. Some team members already carry a few old rocks from their lives or previous jobs. We all need to carry equipment and supplies for our journey.
The backpacks represent our capacity to manage (or cope with) stress. Our workloads and work demands are like all the equipment and supplies we need to carry. The amount we can carry depends on how big and strong we are, the condition of our backpack, and how many tramps we have completed back to back.
Stress is a highly individual experience, we all have different capacities and skills for handling it, and what stresses some people may not stress others. Thats why knowing your team well is such an important factor for kind leaders who want to prevent burnout. When leaders know their team, they can better understand the condition of each member’s backpack and size and strength. In other words their individual capacity for workload and stressful situations.
Kind leaders consider the following as they evaluate what they are asking their team to carry:
A realistic workload. If the load is bigger than the team member’s backpack it is unrealistic. They can’t carry more than what fits.
Control. Team members should have some say about what is in their backpack, and how it is packed. No one wants to discover a suprise rock.
Reward. Staff want some treats in their backpack, but mainly they want their work to be noticed, valued and acknowledged (not necessarily with monetary reward).
Expressed Values. Staff want to carry what is important to them, aligned with their values. They want to see the organisation’s values expressed in daily actions.
We are not tramping alone, but as part of a community. In today’s disconnected and individualistic society, it can be challenging to establish a sense of team. When we tramp as part of a group we look out for one another, and encourage one another on places of the trail or times of the day that are difficult. On a tramp with good friends, the stronger members might even carry more equipment than those who are smaller, or not as strong. This can be challenging when thinking about fairness in contrast to individual capacity. Tensions often arise if people feel they are carrying more than others. Creating a true culture of care within a team helps negotiate these tensions around fairness and capacity. People are more willing to help each other if they feel connected and see themselves as working towards a common shared goal (rather than the many individual goals teams often have).
As we explore managing stress using the backpack analogy, we see several ways for kind leaders to help staff manage stress:
Helping team members get stronger, for example, sending them on a workplace stress management or resilience course.
Ensuring that our team members aren’t carrying too much, by making sure their workloads are realistic.
Supporting staff to put down their backpacks regularly, making sure they are taking holidays and encouraging them not to answer work emails after hours.
Understanding what rocks team members may be carrying from previous experiences, and helping them leave them behind.
Individuals are complex, with different capacities reactions and responses. A common misconception is that kindness is treating people fairly, but true kindness is seeing people as individuals, recognising their unique needs and responding well to those needs. Kind leaders understand that stress and our ability to manage it is experienced uniquely and requires individual responses.
Stay Kind
Christina
Nourish to Flourish: Self-Care Strategies for Visionary Leaders
For renegades, visionary idealists and changemakers, all those who advocate on behalf of others, being ambitious about wellbeing is essential. Kindly radical Leadership begins with ourselves. Like a tree trunk that must be strong and well rooted with the right nourishment to withstand the weather and bear fruit, our efforts to create radical change are strengthened when we nourish and tend to ourselves. We need a strong, well-rooted core to advocate for others in our workplaces and bring about the transformative changes we dream of. One thing I have learnt over the years is that the bigger the change you are advocating for, and the stronger your conviction to stand for your values, the more disciplined you need to be about nourishing yourself.
Here are four practical tips for nurturing your resilient core
Change: Start Small and Be Intentional
Change happens in small intentional moments of moving towards a new direction. It is rarely as black and white as we often represent it as especially in today’s world of valuing transformation.
Where you are trying to priortise yourself and your own needs, instead of making grand, idealistic plans, focus on small, actionable moments throughout the day that align with nurturing yourself. (This applies to the organisational changes you envision also).
As an example at the moment I am trying to become fitter, by exercising more and we know this is beneficial for our whole being so its an important if challenging part of nurturing ourselves. I have been focussed on looking for opportunities to generally add more movement into my day. Things like standing up and doing one lap of the office, or doing 2 pilates moves every hour. Small moves can be effective if you are going in the right direction.
Reflection: Tune Into Yourself
The answers for nurturing yourself are not ‘out there’ or even here in this blog. They are within you. We are so accustomed to seeking information externally that we often forget to explore the wealth of information that comes from within us. This type of self awareness or attunement is is crucial in sustaining our wellbeing. If we we are aware of our own bodies, minds and spirits and able to observe well our own reactions, responses and activity give us the insight needed to identify what feeds our energy and well-being and what diminishes it. For example I recently read an article that demonstrated that participants opinions about their sleep quality had more impact on their mood during the day than the objective data given by sleep trackers. How you think and feel in your mind, body and spirit is more important than some of the information that we now have available to us. Tuning into ourselves requires us to tune out from all that is around us so take some pauses during the day to check in with yourself.
Self-Compassion: Practice Tenderness
Self-compassion is a vital skill for protecting against burnout and nurturing well-being. However its not something that comes naturally to many of us who tend to focus our compassion towards others. Self-compassion is a learnable skill but it takes time and practice (and it is easy to criticise yourself for not being compassionate enough).
You may like to try this exercise:
Imagine how you would hold a little kitten. Most of us hold a kitten tenderly, with care and soothing words.
Now think about how you hold your own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. If you are like most of us there is probably some judgment, criticism, or resistance. Thats ok, but now we are going to try something different.
Imagine that your thoughts, feelings, and sensations are little kittens. Try holding them gently, with compassion and soothing words.
Self-Care: Focus on the Basics
You need care too. Advertising can have us believing that self-care is indulgent tretats, However real self-care is not indulgent, in fact its often hard work. Treats and things that we enjoy are important too but self-care is broader than that. It involves actively taking care of yourself in all the ways that keep your body, mind, and spirit healthy. Boring but essential things like brushing our teeth, health check ups and doing our posture exercises are mundane, essential and often hard for those of us that are busy caring for others to priortise.
Identify two things you need to do to keep yourself well—and book them into your calendar this week.
Conclusion
To continue to be kindly radical leaders well we need to nourish ourselves so that we have a solid foundation for standing up for our values and bringing our visions of a better future to life.
If you need help caring for yourself you may like to come to my workshop in February: Lead with Resilience in 2025
Stay Kind
Christina
Kindness is the Antidote to Burnout (Part 2)
The antidote to burnout, if released in individuals, organisations and societies is kindness.
Where Kindness Flourishes And Flows Burnout Will Not Occur.
Burnout isn’t an individual problem; rather it is caused by a complex interaction between workplace conditions, individual preferences and characteristics, and societal expectations.
Effective prevention needs to address all these layers. Workplace well-being programmes that focus solely on the individual will remain largely ineffective in preventing burnout because they are only addressing one layer of the problem. It is a bit like making a diary free trifle by changing the custard type but neglecting to substitute the cream on top.
Once we start digging into the layers and interactions required for a comprehensive burnout prevention strategy it can become overwhelmingly complex. This is where kindness is so powerful. Kindness is a foundational attitude that can cut through this complexity.
The Strength Of Kindness
Kindness at work is not simply being nice, soft or trying to make everyone happy. Kindness has strength, It doesn’t shy away from honesty, discomfort or hard conversations. Kindness is a sense of warmth and care towards others well-being, it involves considering other people’s perspectives, connecting meaningfully with them and making space for our own and others feelings. Kindness is a blend of attitudes, motivations, feelings and actions.
As an example my physiotherapist is warm and kind, but to treat my frozen shoulder effectively he needs to stretch my frozen muscles, creating a little pain to restore movement. He observes carefully, assessing how much I can handle, using his expertise to guide each stretch, and he offers reassurance through his tone. Sometimes pushing until it hurts is the kindest thing to do, but it can be done with warmth and compassion.
Pro-Sociality In The Workplace
In psychology kindness is part of the theory of “pro-sociality.” Pro-sociality “refers to a broad set of behavioral, motivational, cognitive, affective, and social processes that contribute to, and/or are focused on, the welfare of others” (Hart & Hart, 2023). Pro-sociality includes the study of a diverse range of motivations and behaviour such as why people volunteer, empathy, sympathy, social support and financial donating.
An organisation that has kindness as its foundational value will intentionally create a culture where kindness permeates all levels and corners of an organisation. This is a bit like how the layers of a trifle eventually drip through to the next layer down. So conditions are created in which people can flourish rather than burnout. A kind organisation will strive to develop kind individuals, foster kind interactions, promotes kind leadership, and establishes systems, and structures that support kindness. This foundational framework of kindness within a workplace is then free to flow outward, enhancing client and service-user experiences.
Kind People
In healthcare and social services, staff are generally orientated towards care and kindness. But for these individuals to flourish at work they need to be treated with care and kindness. They need leadership that recognises and supports the emotional complexity of their work and deeply understands the impact of their connection to other’ suffering. Kind staff expect a safe place to express their emotions and to show up authentically with whatever they are carrying from the challenges of their work.
Kind people often need support and training to turn their kindness towards themselves. Their drive to care can lead to self-sacrifice, so they benefit from a solid framework of self-care, self-awareness, and clear boundaries to protect their well-being. Self-kindness is a vital antidote to the weight of their own expectations, which can be a significant source of stress in many in the helping professions.
Kind Interactions
Kindness is expressed in the space between people, whether they’re colleagues or managers and their teams, or a group of senior leaders. Kind workplaces recognise that relationships are essential for both employee well-being and effective work. They allow time and space for interacting, connecting and befriending seeing it as a vital part of employees working life. Kind organisations encourage and support staff to tend to their own stress, understanding that stress can be a source of unkind interactions. They can support kind interactions by providing training and coaching in communication, positive interactions, repairing minor grievances, conflict resolution, diversity and self-awareness. These skills can no longer be taken for granted but must be actively and intentionally cultivated.
Kind Leadership
Kind people and kind interactions need the support of kind leadership. I am convinced that to create a flow of kindness that sustains and protects staff, this flow must start at the governance level and extend throughout the organisation. Imagine if every leader in your organisation committed to creating a kind, healthy workplace that actively prevents burnout. Kind leaders understand that burnout prevention starts with eliminating the conditions that foster it, such as unrealistic workloads and unclear role expectations. This must of course include for the senior leaders themselves who are often facing unmanageable or unachievable workloads. Leader workloads are often exacerbated by the way that leaders tend to have high standards and a deep desire to do an excellent job. Leaders need just as much support as their staff if they’re to lead with kindness.
Staff now expect their leaders to be empathetic and trustworthy, and to support their career growth and well-being. Kindness can be thought of as a bit soft, and misinterpreted as going easy on people or being unfailingly positive. Kindness is not that fluffy. Honesty, integrity and being invested in peoples growth are all part of being a kind leader. This means that having high standards, having boundaries, providing discpline or feedback are all part of kind leadership.
Yet training and support for leaders to develop their human or soft skills and to balance empathy and kindness with clear boundaries and honest feedback are often lacking.
One of the sources of stress for middle managers and team leaders is being caught caught in between competing demands. On one hand they’re pressured by senior management to ensure high-quality service despite fewer resources, and on the other they’re expected to support their team’s well-being. Burnout is not just an issue for frontline staff. A report from DDI earlier this year reported that 72% of leaders often feel used up at the end of the day. They also discovered that leaders were deeply concerned about burnout on their teams but only 15% felt prepared to prevent employee burnout.
Kind Systems
Kind people, kind interactions and kind leadership are supported by kind systems. Organisations aren’t entities in themselves even though we talk about them that way, they’re made of people. These people are often following rules, regulations and guidelines that constrain their value based decision making. A kind organisation has clearly articulated values that are overtly expressed in behaviour. Values go beyond posters on the wall; they’re “live”, enacted and demonstrated in daily actions and interactions creating a feel of the ‘way things are done around here.”
These live values are like the heartbeat of the organisation, enhancing connections between people and providing a cohesion of vision, and guidleines for decision making that enable creativity. Policies and procedures often have a rigidity to them that blocks people who want to be kind. People are individuals with a variety of experiences, constraints and needs. Kindness requires flexibility to meet people’s different needs in different ways this helps establish and maintain equity.
Jason Fried claimed that “policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to unlikely-to-happen-again situations.” In health and social services, organisations are dealing with people in challenging situations, it is essential that leaders understand how trauma and pain can influence organisational decision making. In addition many workplaces are still integrating the impact of covid and recent funding and/or staffing cuts. The emotional impact influences peoples ability to make strategy and decisions. Policies should be created with input from those who understand the impact of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue and the emotional complexity of care work.
Future Ready Workplaces Must Be Shaped By Kindness
Kindness is a core competency for the workplaces of the future. It’s not just a “nice to have”, it will soon be something employees actively demand, becoming a key element for those who want to be an employer of choice. These workplaces will have kindness deeply embedded in ineractions, actions, leadership and systems, it will flow through every level. By doing so, organisations will eliminate, or mitigate the personal, societal and systemic conditions that lead to burnout, allowing all employees to flourish - and that’s what employees want.
Stay Kind,
Christina
Kindness is the Antithesis of Burnout - Part One
Can you imagine what the world would be like if everyone could turn up to work we love, bringing our full selves, expressing our values, feeling like we belong and are contributing to the world? That’s the world I dream of, personally I love working, when its the right work and workplace for me. I believe that engaging in meaningful work is good for our well-being, it allows us to use our strengths, express our passions and satisfy our achievement striving (of course all these things can be found outside of paid work too).
But this isn’t the world we live in. Work (or perhaps workplaces) aren’t always good for us. Something that should be satisfying and life-giving turns, it becomes the opposite, depleting and heartbreaking. Social progress, global pandemics and events of our time have made work something we have to do rather than something we delight to do. Many years ago after I had been studying workplace wellbeing and stress for a number of years, I added to my understanding by getting an insider experience of burnout. I remember trying to share with a family member why I had resigned my job and was taking a break and they were completely unfamiliar with the term, and had no understanding of it at all. That is in sharp contrast to 2023 when it seems like everyone is talking about burnout. It has almost become a catch-all phrase for any experience of stress while working. In spite of all the webinars, information and conversation about burnout; sources of stress, workplace demands and the numbers of unhappy, depleted employees are continuing to rise. The current dialogue isn’t actually helping reduce experiences of workplace stress and burnout. We need to deepen our understanding of burnout, its causes and how we can prevent it, so that more employees can enjoy their work and are liberated to do their best work.
What is Burnout
Christina Maslach had just finished her PhD, and before she settled into her next role she volunteered to help out her colleagues with what was to become the influential Stanford Prison Experiment. This was an experiment conducted in 1971 using US College students to study the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. What she saw when she paid the researchers a visit disturbed her so much that she was influential in halting the experiment early. This experiment also influenced the trajectory of her career, as she became interested in the impact of the work environment, workplace culture and demands on the well-being of workers. As she researched and talked to workers such as prison staff and other human services workers, she realised that there was a repeating pattern of reaction to occupational stressors that she began to measure and research as burnout.
Maslach defines burnout as “a psychological syndrome emerging as a prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job” (Maslach and Leiter, 2016).
Maslach and her colleagues have identified three main dimensions of burnout:
Feelings of overwhelming exhaustion.
Growing cynicism and a sense of detachment from clients and the job.
A sense of ineffectiveness or feeling that nothing was being accomplished.
The World Health Organisation has drawn on Maslach’s work for their own definition of burnout which is “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, characterised by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion, increased mental distance from ones job, or feelings of negativism and cynicism related to one’s job and reduced professional efficacy”. (ICD-11). Recent researchers (Parker, Tavella, Eyers, 2022) discovered and emphasised a fourth significant dimension of burnout and that is cognitive issues, such as struggles concentrating and difficulties remembering. Maslach’s original research was very focussed on identifying the organisational factors that created burnout. The more recent WHO definition has been criticised, as it does not make it clear that burnout is primarily a reaction to workplace conditions, rather it can make it seem like it is the employees responsibility to manage workplace stress.
What causes burnout
From the beginning of burnout research it has been emphasised that there are particular characteristics of the workplace that increase the likelihood of staff experiencing burnout. The impetus is on businesses and organisations to engage carefully in preventing burnout by considering these aspects of work that make burnout more likely.
Too much work and unclear role expectations.
Not enough control over the work and resources needed to do the work.
Insufficient reward for the work done.
A lack of a sense of connection to other people in the workplace.
An absence of fairness.
Conflicts in values between the individual and the organisation.
Work that involves emotional complexity and a deep sense of connection to the work.
A few years ago when we had a summer drought I planted some drought resistant plants - unfortunately they are not thriving under the current conditions of heavy persistent rain. Plants have different needs, some cope well with drought, others cope well with having wet feet. The characteristics of the plant interact with the conditions in which it is growing, for the plant to thrive and throw off aphids and other pests there needs to be a good match between the conditions and its characteristics. People are like plants, our individual characteristics, needs and sensitivities interact with our workplace conditions. An organisation can be high in all those characteristics and not everyone in the organisation will experience burnout. Burnout isn’t simple or linear. Burnout is created in the interaction between an individual (with their preferences, values, history, personality and skills), the job role (what is required of them) the organisation (with its history, values, systems, management structures and policies) and the society and culture within which they are placed. Research shows some individual characteristics make someone sensitive to burnout. This doesn’t mean that they will develop burnout but like plants they will be more sensitive to workplace conditions. These individual characteristics include:
A tendency towards high expectations and perfectionism.
Emotional reactivity and high degrees of empathy.
Sensitivity to judgement.
Intraversion.
A high sensitivity to stress.
Burnout Prevention
Burnout is top of mind for many professions at the moment, often burnout is presented with a degree of urgency and fear. Most studies show that burnout feelings are common for those in healthcare and social services, it may be that we just didn’t talk about it as much before so a lot of those feelings went unacknowledged. Taking away the fear and normalising these burnout feelings as part of our experience as people helpers can help people to talk more openly with their team leaders and colleagues about their feelings of burnout. Burnout feelings after all are signals that things are not good with our environment and ourselves (or the interaction between), they are signs that restorative actions need to be taken. Burnout feelings become harder to manage the longer they are ignored or suppressed and when no action is taken in response to them. If people begin to fear burnout it becomes harder to discuss openly and to take restorative action.
The current public dialogue about burnout tends to fall into two extreme positions. On the one hand it is all the fault of our current work environment, work is then the enemy and is bad for us and we should spend our days working in the garden, surfing, knitting or some other extreme opt out measure. This position tends to obscure and suppress the delight and joy that work can and does bring us (when we are not burned out). The other extreme focuses on the individual and can have a blaming or shaming tone, these are the articles or opinions that suggest that those people that burnout are unable to manage their own stress - they just need a bit more resilience training and to attend better to their self-care. This neglects the complex interaction between individuals and the work conditions and often results in organisations not making the structural changes they need to ensure their staff are valued and supported and that workplaces conditions are not those that cause burnout.
It is challenging to understand the complexity of the interaction that occurs between an individual, their social environment, and their workplace. It is clear that just as recovery from burnout involves a multi-dimensional approach so too must burnout prevention. It is much more complex than simply providing resilience training.
The Opposite of Burnout
Not burned out is hardly something to aspire too, its a little like saying you no longer want to be unfit. If we want to aspire to the other end of the continuum, we need a definition and understanding of what that positive state is. Engagement has been proposed as the positive pole to burnout (Schaufeli,W., Salanova, M., Gonzalez-Roma, V., & Bakker, A. 2002). Engagement is a persistent “positive fulfilling, work-related state of mind that is characterized by vigor, dedication, and absorption”. I can remember times in my working life, where everything seems to fit together, experience, expertise and the needs of the people I am working with - They can be heady and energising days when you think you have found the exact right role for you - that feeling could be described as engagement. Workplace engagement is a huge topic, and one that has generated a lot of theorising and research. While holding an idea of what the positive aspects of not-burned out might look like is helpful it doesn’t give the whole picture for those of us who are seeking to work to prevent burnout. Engagement is an outcome of great workplace conditions (the opposite of whose as identified as contributing to burnout) and great role, person fit, but that still doesn’t necessarily create the whole picture of how to prevent burnout.
Parker, Tavella, and Eyers (2022) found that ‘burnout rates appear lowest in those whose work is simply a job, higher in those who view their work as a career and highest in those whose work is at the level of a 'calling.' Those who consider their work a calling are often highly engaged, but in my experience that high sense of engagement and emotional connection to their work and clients leaves them more open to burnout not less. If we are going to build a society, workplaces and individuals who are resistant to burnout we need to move up a level, from engagement and burnout to a higher principle.
The antidote to burnout, if released in organisations, societies and individuals is kindness.
Where kindness flourishes and flows burnout will not occur.