Offsetting Burnout

I attended a Zoom burnout session. In future blog entries I’ll talk about what I learned there.

While burnout is NOT the employees fault some things can help alleviate the stress that are person-centered as referred to in The Burnout Challenge:

Staying Healthy

Getting enough sleep

Relaxing

Understanding oneself

Developing new skills (on the job)

Getting away from the job

Getting social support

In terms of developing new skills on the job circa 2008 I took training to help customers create resumes and conduct job searches.

This made all the difference in sparking joy at work.

It can be tough when staff feel they can’t approach management to get things done in terms of the 6 causes of burnout. What if the upper echelon doesn’t see fit to change things?

A new 2023 book at the library titled Exit Interview was a memoir and expose of working in the corporate Amazon office. The woman author said she had in effect sold her soul: After 12 years working in that environment she no longer recognized the person in the mirror.

I buy things on Amazon that I can’t find locally or anywhere else. I admire Jeff Bezos for how he transformed Amazon from an online bookseller in 1997 to the Marketplace of the World. However I’m NOT a fan of how Amazon treats its workers. Warehouse staff are given health insurance precisely because their jobs in the warehouses cause ill health.

Sadly the cure for burnout is not job-hopping if you risk going “out of the frying pan into the fire.” The next job you get could be like reliving the old job.

I will talk further in future blog entries about visionary ideas for making the workplace a better place to work.