Over four million American workers quit their jobs each month in 2022. And poor mental health is skyrocketing as 70% of the C-suite with the weight of the world—or at least the company—on their shoulders considered quitting to search for a job that responded to their mental health and well-being. A recent survey from Slack found that burnout is on the rise globally, most significantly in the U.S., where 43% of middle managers reported burnout—more than any other worker group. What’s going on? The pressure is on business leaders to learn soft skills to deal with employee burnout. But are they burning out from getting stuck between trying to balance emotional intelligence and enforcing performance?
Work Stress And Job Burnout Are Different Animals
Job burnout is both a people killer and a career killer. The World Health Organization (WHO) officially classified burnout as a medical diagnosis, including the condition in the International Classification of Diseases: “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” Burnout is diagnosed by four symptoms:
- Feelings of energy depletion, exhaustion and fatigue
- Increased mental distance from your job
- Feelings of negativism or cynicism related to your job
- Reduced professional efficacy
Many people treat burnout as stress and try to push through it, but stress and burnout are not the same. The fatigue that comes with burnout is different from the stress you might have after a long day or week’s work. The fatigue can be so severe that it’s crippling. And although there’s controversy over the incidences of burnout, it’s real.
Research from Gallup reveals that working less isn’t enough to reduce stress, improve well-being or prevent burnout. It’s part of the story, but not the whole story. So what’s the other part? Gallup’s analysis of employee burnout found that the missing piece is how employees experience their workload that has a stronger influence on burnout than the number of hours they work. Plus, when it comes to overall well-being, the quality of the work experience has 2.5 to three times the impact than the number of days or hours worked. It’s what you’re doing during work hours that really matters, according to Gallup’s analysis.
Many business leaders are at a loss of how to handle employee burnout or even what to do about their own. Many solutions attempting to lessen burnout and increase well-being focus on decreasing work: limiting access to email, requiring fewer days or fewer hours or mandating that employees use their vacation time. The assumption is that the less people work, the better they will be able to recover from job burnout, but this is a myth. The key symptom of burnout is exhaustion in the form of a deep fatigue that isn’t curable by rest or time off.
While burnout is a form of stress, it’s important to know the distinction between the two. You can recover from stress with certain management techniques, but burnout results from cumulative stress that hasn’t been managed. Once burnout gets its hooks into you, you can’t cure it by slowing down, taking a long vacation or working fewer hours. You’re already out of gas, and you’ve given up all hope of surmounting stressful work obstacles.
Gallup lists the primary causes of burnout at work as: unfair treatment, an unmanageable workload, lack of role clarity and a lack of communication and support from a manager. Gallup data suggests that the quality of a manager sets the foundation for all the other causes. Managers are advocates for their team members, addressing unfairness, helping manage priorities and clarifying expectations. In most cases of burnout, Gallup found that a good manager was missing.
How Business Leaders Can Prevent Burnout
Unfortunately, there’s no quick fix for burnout because recovery takes time. And it can end up destroying the trajectory of the burnt-out employee’s career. The biggest antidote is preventive measures. In Gallup’s Wellbeing at Work, authors Jim Clifton and Jim Harter offer five burnout prevention action items:
- Make sure everyone in your organization knows their strengths. Use a strengths-based strategy to design an employee experience—from attraction to hiring to onboarding, engagement and performance—that leads to a culture of high development.
- Remove abusive managers. No organization should tolerate managers who destroy the lives of the people you rely on to get work done. In today’s workforce, bad managers are your highest risk.
- Up-skill managers to move from boss to coach. Use proven methods to transition your managers’ mentality from boss to coach. Think of this as a yearlong journey that starts with learning about high-performance teams. Each manager should become an expert at setting goals and providing meaningful feedback at least once a week.
- Make well-being part of career development conversations. Once managers establish trust, they along with their teams, can dream big together—not just about career goals and development but about life and overall purpose and well-being.
- Working less doesn’t mean happier work. So it’s important to find ways to make career well-being a focus in your organization.
Are Managers Burning Out Trying To Prevent Burnout?
There is no rolling back the clock to the old days when employees subjected themselves to harmful corporate demands to keep their jobs. No longer are managers willing to pay the price of burnout as a “normal” side effect of hard work. Companies that want to attract and retain workers and compete in today’s global economy will have to take tangible actions to encourage kind communities at work, increase access to needed mental health resources and affirm and cultivate a culture of respect for all employees.
Research shows that businesses clearly believe they have a significant role to play in employees’ well-being with almost a third (32%) saying that it’s their responsibility to a great extent. But leaders can’t do it all on their own, with some burning out trying to deal with employee burnout. Bryan Adams, CEO and founder of Ph.Creative, says CEOs are expected to put work challenges before their own self-care, and many leaders feel like they’re fighting an uphill battle. Business leaders are being called upon—perhaps even pressured—to develop the skills of empathy, compassion and kindfulness to be effective. And although those skills are essential, many get stuck trying to balance emotional intelligence and holding employees to a standard of performance.
“I think a lot of business leaders get stuck in mistakenly thinking that their job is to ‘therapize’ their team,” Britt Frank, author of The Science of Stuck, told me. “It’s important for leaders to know that you don’t have to be a therapist to your employees, and you don’t need to know why they’re stuck to get them unstuck. That’s a therapist’s job. Business leaders can be brokers of resources, but they do not need to get caught up in the why and be therapists to their people. You don’t need to know why they’re stuck to help them get unstuck,” Frank concludes.