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:

1. Feelings of overwhelming exhaustion.

2. Growing cynicism and a sense of detachment from clients and the job.

3. 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.