Job burnout is a dragon scorching the modern workplace

by Terry Bragg

Job burnout is a three-headed dragon that is creating serious problems in the modern workplace. The fiery breath of this dragon increases absenteeism, boosts turnover, lowers productivity and damages health. The three heads or dimensions of job burnout are exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy.

The irony is that job burnout has been increasing in both robust and sluggish economies. During good economic times, workers have too much to do without enough time to do it. During economic downturns, downsizing and fear of losing your job creates emotional and physical stress that can lead to burnout.

The three dimensions of job burnout
Let’s examine the three dimensions of job burnout.

Exhaustion. Exhaustion is both physical and emotional. This is more than feeling tired. You feel depleted and spent. Having too much work and too little time to do it, or having work that exceeds your physical capabilities causes physical exhaustion. Emotional exhaustion is often a result of role ambiguity, lack of support or conflict at work.

For example, I recently read a headline stating that U.S. workers are afraid to take a sick day. Because of the sluggish economy, employee absenteeism is down. Patients are requesting more prescriptions from their doctors for pain killers to help workers stay at work. Many workers are afraid that they will lose their jobs if they take time off.

Cynicism. Cynicism is emotionally distancing yourself from others. It is an attempt to depersonalize or disengage yourself from the situation that you are in. Cynicism is a sign that serious bad attitudes have set in.

Inefficacy. Inefficacy or ineffectiveness is where you lack a sense of personal accomplishment. You burn out because you’re working very hard and yet feel like you’re not accomplishing anything.

Solve burnout by changing your workplace and workers
Preventing or remedying job burnout requires both individual change and organizational change. Most job burnout interventions have focused on individual-driven solutions rather than organizational solutions. Consequently, the focus has been on teaching stress management techniques, assertive communication skills and time management techniques.

The advantage of this approach is that it focuses on the one thing a person can influence and control: themselves. Although you can’t control what happens to you, you can control your behavior, thoughts and responses.

Studies by social psychologists, though, show that burnout is more of a social than individual phenomena. Burnout is contagious and can quickly consume a work environment conducive to burnout. Burnout often spreads because of unrealistic work demands, autocratic management styles, prolonged unresolved conflict in the workplace, and violations of the psychological contract between employers and employees.

To solve the problem of job burnout, we need to change the work environment and educate workers. We need to create work environments that engage workers. In addition, we must educate workers on how to adapt and cope better to the stresses of the workplace.

Engagement is the opposite of burnout. Energy, involvement and efficacy characterize engagement. Note that burnout relates to job demands like workloads and the emotional demands of the job. Engagement relates to resources like job control, availability of feedback and learning opportunities.

Many workplaces have the formula backwards. They want to get more out of their workers by working them harder and longer. A typical situation is where an organization reduces its workforce. Management exhorts the remaining workers to work smarter and do more with less. But the work systems and processes do not change to support working smarter. In effect, people only work longer and harder. This is like trying to get more work out of a horse by telling it to work smarter and then whipping it until it drops. This approach promotes burnout and reduces productivity.

For example, many years ago I worked for a company that laid off a significant portion of its workforce. When explaining the situation during a meeting with the surviving workers, the production manager blamed workers for not working hard enough. He said that the remaining workers would have to pick up the slack or they would end up like their unemployed associates.

Although the company downsized the workforce, it didn’t reduce the amount of work or improve the efficiency of its work processes. Soon workers became physically exhausted and emotionally spent. Cynicism spread and became the norm. Soon workers felt that no matter how well they performed, the company wouldn’t recognize or reward their efforts. Job burnout became an epidemic in this company. The company paid for it with lower productivity and greater scrap and rework.

The situation didn’t improve until the company replaced the management team with managers who understood that they needed to improve the work environment and the work processes. They also needed to help individuals better adapt to and cope with the stress they experienced and the demands of the job.

Job burnout can quickly char your work environment. Battle burnout by sincerely engaging your workers. You’ll create a work environment with more energy, involvement and effectiveness.

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