Is It Time to Measure Burnout?
by Heather Bussing
Based on a study by the International Labour Organization, HR Executive Magazine recently reported that 840,000 people die each year from work related stress and its manifestations in our physical and mental health.
I also read a recent study by Bentley University’s Center for Health and Business and an organization called unBurnt who found that we are not just burned out, we’re crispy. Not only that, burnout diminishes innovation despite the fact that people often power through and can get things done.
The study of 554 participants across 15 industries found that:
86% reported moderate to high workplace burnout, Managers were ~1.7x more likely to report high burnout than individual contributors (38% vs 22%)
Caregivers were ~3x more likely to report high burnout vs. non-caregivers (51% vs 17%), with caregiving defined as either parenting, childcare, caring for an aging parent, or sick family member responsibility
Crispy. And it’s not just work. The caregiver stat is important. People who are caring for children or people who are ill or have disabilities that require assistance have a lot more on their plates. And caregiving is important and going to become even more relevant to the workplace as our population ages.
The things going on with our government are also exhausting to keep up with and extremely stressful for many of us, regardless of political affiliation. We are not okay, friends.
But the team at unBurnt did not just measure burnout, they also looked at how it affects work. Workplace burnout emerged as the strongest predictor of diminished innovation capacity, with a significant negative correlation of r = 0.79. It turns out people kept going, but their creativity suffered from burnout. Eventually, so does everything else. (See first sentence above.)
The study defines innovation capacity as:
“(A)n employee’s ability to engage in the deeper forms of thinking required for meaningful innovation, including focused work, strategic judgment, long-range planning, turning ideas into actionable solutions. Innovation Capacity is not simply whether someone is busy or generating ideas; it reflects whether they have the bandwidth and clarity to translate effort into durable organizational value.” -When Burnout Looks Like Productivity: The New Risk to Innovation Capacity
The biggest factors contributing to burnout were unclear role expectations, followed by unclear expectations about using AI in our work, then pressure to work through PTO, ineffective leadership and poor communication, and a meeting heavy culture where the meetings don’t accomplish anything.
Is this starting to sound familiar?
So I spoke with Alison Campbell, founder of unBurnt, and asked, what do we do?
Campbell advises tracking employee burnout. (She can help with this.) “We want to catch the early warning signs and start to address some of the causes. We also need to rethink how we are measuring workers’ capacity. What we learned is employees can continue generating ideas, stay busy, and appear productive. High burnout can coexist with activity and output, which breaks the assumption that performance strain always looks like withdrawal.”
Yet, Campbell cautions against a one-size-fits-all approach to burn out. The solution can be industry, organization, and individual specific depending on what’s going on, what the work is like, and the burnout profile(s).
So if you are concerned that burnout is a concern for your organization or even for you, unBurnt has some great resources to help you figure out if there are issues with workplace stress and capacity, whether you are personally burned out, and some great questions to ask and places to start.
And from the employment lawyer, me, before you fix anything, I do mean any thing, make sure you talk to your friendly legal department. Burnout often requires, rest, which often requires time off, which can implicate things like FMLA.
Most importantly, don’t wait until everyone and everything is falling apart or stalled out because people are out of juice for the creative work. That’s what we humans are good at.