I recommend reading the Burnout Challenge: Managing People’s Relationships with Their Jobs by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter. Decades of research support the authors’ claims.

You might not be a manager who can institute systemwide change. Yet reading this book when you’re an employee can help you to lobby for change with higher-ups and find out how to make your job less stressful.

The six root causes of burnout are: workload, control, rewards, community, fairness, and value mismatches. Contrary to popular belief the fix for this chronic stress is NOT self-care that the employee engage in outside of work.

Burnout isn’t an individual issue; It’s a situational stressor in the workplace. You are not to blame nor are any coworkers for not being able to handle this toxic environment.

The analogy the authors use is how miners sent a canary into a coal mine to see how the bird would stand up to the atmosphere. A canary that did not remain in robust health signaled danger.

Yet too often the “I” focused attempts to alleviate a staff member’s burnout are like expecting to “toughen up” the canary so it can withstand the pressure in the coal mine. Instead of making the coal mine healthier to work in.

Individual effort and management attention are required at the same time. The authors advocate that leadership perform routine and ongoing “checkups”–like a medical checkup–to assess the health of the workplace and pinpoint future areas of concern. Employees should be asked for input and the solutions should be customized to the individual company. There should be long-term commitment to doing what it takes to sustain positive outcomes.

Coming up what we as employees can do to manage what goes on. Again knowing that often management practices are at the root of the burnout.