Are we all burned out?

Nowadays we are all ‘talking’ about mental health and burnout, but maybe not everything about mental health at the workplace is burnout. So, first let’s take a step back and reflect on what burnout actually is.

Burnout is a type of work-related stress, characterised by emotional exhaustion and reduced personal involvement at work.

People with burnout experience feelings of energy depletion, reduced empathy and compassion towards others. Also, they feel less professionally fulfilled, because they start to evaluate themselves more negatively, as well as their situation and performance at work and thus begin to feel less motivated and dedicated to their jobs. On top of that, their wellbeing and satisfaction with life is affected, as well as their relationships with friends and family, which start to deteriorate (Ordem dos Psicólogos, 2020). In this state of exhaustion, people no longer have the ability to recover from stress. However most people have resilience and can bounce back and feel better if they take the time to rest, recover and cope with their emotions in an active and proactive way.

According to Grant (2021) we are not collectively experiencing burnout, because we still have energy and it’s not even depression because we don’t feel hopeless. Maybe what we are feeling is languishing, a sense of stagnation and emptiness. Languishing lies in the middle of a continuum between depression and flourishing, a state where people experience positive emotions. It is the absence of wellbeing, we don’t have symptoms of mental illness, but on the other hand we don’t function at full capacity either.

When we think about it, perhaps sometimes we are too quick to judge and say that something is burnout, when in fact we just feel more tired, and we simply don’t have everything we would normally need do to fight it and deal with stress effectively. Because of the recurrent lockdowns people had to make major adjustments to fit to the new reality, especially on how the work was done, but also how rest and recover was done.

While it’s true that because of these changes some people found themselves facing more demands, maybe the real problem lies on the fact that people were lacking the resources they needed to face the new challenges in their work-life integration.

Because we have been living in a situation of uncertainty due to the pandemic for such a long time, there might be a lot of people that are languishing right at this moment and are not aware. This can be a problem because while it’s not depression or burnout, languishing represents a big risk for mental health (Grant, 2021) and organisations can play a crucial role in offering help and help people find ways to cope with these emotional states.

So, it’s perhaps time to change our perspective and start thinking about what we can, individually and collectively do, to change our current experience and how we can recover from stress and tiredness.

Having this in mind, what can managers do to help people move from languishing to flourishing, enhancing their wellbeing in a profound and helpful way?

Here are a few tips on how to do that (Michigan State University, 2020; Fisher, 2018; Wigert & Agrawal, 2018):

• Encourage employees to have real weekends and vacations: leaders must create an environment were taking time off is appreciated and fostered, because people need time to disconnect, focus on other aspects of life and recharge. We have seen recently several examples of radical time out for the entire company such as Bumble recent case.

• Create a culture of recognition: the expression of gratitude towards employees can make the work environment less stressful and enable them to better deal with their demands.

• Promote healthy work-life integration: people must have a healthy work-life balance, ensuring they also have time to exercise, for family and self-care, in order to promote it within the organization too.

• Monitor workloads and scheduling: it is normal to have moments where the workload is heavier, however people can’t be expected to have such workloads and demanding schedules all the time. So, it´s up to the managers to make sure people are not tasked with unreasonable workloads and prolonged rigorous schedules.

• Create goals and learning and development paths: lack of opportunities for growth and development can be a big source of stress for people. So, by helping them obtaining new skills and knowledge, managers can help them adapt to challenging and new situations. Also, if managers set clear goals with people in their team, they know what is expected of them and can be more engaged.

• Practice open communication: managers must ensure people receive timely and transparent information and understand how their performance is according to their goals, since no communication can cause stress. Also, they should listen and seek feedback from employees, to make them feel included and a sense of control over their work.

• Encourage teamwork: it is important that managers create an environment where teamwork thrives and teams are cohesive and committed, since co-workers can be a source of emotional support to one another.   

• Listen to work-related problems: people need to feel managers care about them and their problems, so it´s important that they feel they are listened and that managers understand their needs, in order to better support them.

Managers can play a crucial role by starting to acknowledge the current state of feelings and emotions we are dealing at the workplace and foster and support concrete and evidence-based ways of reducing stress and increase flourishing in their teams.

Organisations can actually address mental health risks by investing in real resources to boost emotional management and active coping skills, but it’s also time to reflect on the deep and systemic ways that work is designed and distributed, because people are now in need of much more than employee branding activities and initiatives.

References

Fisher, J. (2018, July 31). How Managers Can Prevent Their Teams from Burning Out. Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2018/07/how-managers-can-prevent-their-teams-from-burning-out#

Grant, A. (2021, April 19). There’s a Name for the Blah You’re Feeling: It’s Called Languishing. The New York Times. Available at: https://www-nytimes-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.nytimes.com/2021/04/19/well/mind/covid-mental-health-languishing.amp.html?fbclid=IwAR0DGn7ET8B2JZ9ns7-t2oTR7qFmDVoFnjTsXaz-U5sqq9jJPr8lwmzGGgs

Michigan State University. (2020, February, 20). How Managers can Reduce Employee Stress and Burnout. Michigan State University. Available at: https://www.michiganstateuniversityonline.com/resources/leadership/12-ways-managers-can-reduce-employee-stress-and-burnout/

Ordem dos Psicólogos. (2020, Agosto). Perguntas e Respostas sobre Burnout. Available at: https://www.ordemdospsicologos.pt/ficheiros/documentos/doc_perguntas_respostas_sobre_burnout_vf.pdf

Ordem dos Psicólogos. (2021). Resiliência – todos podemos lidar com situações desafiantes. Eu Sinto-me. Available at: https://eusinto.me/bem-estar-e-saude-psicologica/autocuidado-resiliencia/resiliencia-todos-podemos-lidar-com-situacoes-desafiantes/

Wigert, B., & Agrawal, S. (2018, July 16) Employee Burnout, Part 2: Wha Managers Can Do. Gallup. Available at: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/237119/employee-burnout-part-2-managers.aspx