Tag: the burnout challenge

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.

The Burnout Challenge

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.