Fighting for resilience and understanding the warning signs.
By Pete Mercer
There are few things more corrosive to the morale and productivity of your team than burnout. Individuals struggling with burnout are facing three interrelated symptoms of exhaustion, cynicism, and inefficacy. While it’s certainly not a new subject of attention for those in high-stress environments, it has become a focal point of discussion for people like Dr. Jacinta Jiménez.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Dr. Jiménez, the award-winning author of The Burnout Fix, psychologist, and leadership coach, about the challenges of working in an environment that creates burnout, how to identify symptoms of burnout and what it takes to improve resilience in the workplace.
Mental health is such a critical component to the success of individuals in high-stress jobs, which is why burnout is so prevalent in fields like healthcare and sales. When it comes to understanding and diagnosing burnout, Dr. Jiménez said, “It’s important to highlight that burnout is not a clinical syndrome. In May 2019, The World Health Organization recognized burnout in the International Classification of Diseases, 11th Revision as an occupational phenomenon resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.”
What causes burnout?
Burnout is not a new concept, but it has grown in prevalence and notoriety in a post-COVID world. The pandemic put people in situations of unprecedented grief, disconnection, and uncertainty, completely derailing our day-to-day processes and environments. Even now, we are still feeling the aftershock of the pandemic. As a result, burnout is on the rise.
Dr. Jiménez said, “A 2023 study by Aflac has revealed that employee burnout rates in the United States are now higher than at the peak of the pandemic, with over half (59%) of American workers experiencing moderate to high burnout. On top of the challenges introduced by the pandemic, employees are facing high-productivity expectations and economic pressures. These combined factors contribute to a growing incidence of burnout, impacting mental health and well-being significantly.”
There are many contributing factors to burnout, and it certainly would not look the same for everyone. From an employment perspective, Dr. Jiménez provided six examples of how people can experience burnout from their workplace, saying, “Individuals who have a significant mismatch in one or more of these areas are going to find themselves more susceptible to burnout.”
1. Work overload – High-stress jobs and inadequate resources are huge triggers for burnout, especially mid- and post-COVID.
2. Lack of control – Without the appropriate levels of responsibility or resources to complete the job, many people can feel like they have no control over their role at work.
3. Insufficient reward – The lack of regular acknowledgement, as well as financial, social or other rewards for their work effort, impacting their engagement and incentive to work.
4. Breakdown in community – This breakdown is the result of high levels of conflict within
the workplace and low levels of interpersonal trust.
5. Lack of fairness – Inequity and unfairness in workload and pay, mishandlings of evaluations, and improper conflict resolution processes can negatively impact the morale of an employee.
6. Values misaligned – When the values and goals of the individual don’t match up with the organization, it can feel like mismatched puzzle pieces that are being forced together.
Understand the warning signs
At some point, we have all experienced some level of burnout or stress, but we may not understand what it looks like. The first step to reducing burnout is to understand and identify the warning signs when they make themselves known. The challenge with burnout is that it can look different for everyone – the same goes for the causes of burnout, no two situations are the same for everyone.
Dr. Jiménez said, “The difficult thing about burnout is that it can’t simply be reduced to burnout or not burned out – it’s not an ‘on and off’ switch. Burnout is far more insidious; it is like corrosive drips of stress, which en masse, take a toll on our personal and professional functioning.”
While burnout can affect everyone differently, there are some consistent warning signs. Dr. Jiménez provided five examples to look for:
1. Emotional changes – You may experience an increase in worry, exhaustion, irritability, and edginess.
2. Psychological and behavioral changes – These include difficulty with focus, making mistakes, and having a hard time keeping up with demands and responsibilities.
3. Personal and professional relationships – Personal and professional relationships may suffer, which could result in failed interactions at work and home.
4. Physical symptoms – Burnout can manifest with physical symptoms where people experience prolonged levels of exhaustion, headaches, and other stress-related issues.
5. Decrease job satisfaction and performance – Ultimately, burnout can lead to decreased job satisfaction, negative work attitude, and impaired professional performance.
Just like anything else, confronting these symptoms head on is the best way to navigate the challenges of burnout. We should be actively tracking our mental health stability, just like we track our physical well-being – it’s just as important.
She said, “You cannot detect something if you’re not actively monitoring it,” she said. “It’s important that both people leaders and employees actively monitor for burnout. The sooner you can detect burnout, the more opportunity you have to course-correct early on. I recommend setting aside a weekly 15–20-minute hold on your calendar each Friday to actively check in with yourself.”
Fighting for resilience
Fighting for resilience can be a frustrating and challenging uphill battle. It never ends, which makes the outcome even more important. Resilience isn’t just about getting back up after you’ve been knocked down – it’s about navigating these issues before you have even reached them. Resilience requires consistency. Just by adopting short, frequent activities into your day to mentally recharge and focus for a few minutes, you can make enormous strides towards a healthier balance.
On the topic of resilience, Dr. Jimenez uses the metaphor of a seesaw. “On one side, you have adversity – the challenges and stressors of life. These could be personal setbacks, professional challenges, health issues, and so forth. On the other side are protective factors – these are the resources, both internal and external, that help us cope with these challenges. The fulcrum on which the seesaw rests represents our genetic set point for resilience.”
She argues that while some people may be genetically predisposed to resilience, an inherent ability to push through adversity, it’s still a dynamic process that needs to be cultivated and stretched to ensure that you can still shift the balance of the seesaw in your favor. The more work you put in, the more manageable the challenges will feel on the other side.
What it takes to win
Aside from these micro-resilience practices, employees need the support of their leadership teams and organizations to be truly resilient in challenging work environments. Dr. Jiménez said, “An organizational culture that does not guard against these six person-job mismatches is perpetuating a work environment in which the most resilient individual will eventually find themselves struggling.”
If we truly want to address this burnout epidemic, we need resilient people, teams and organizational processes – Dr. Jiménez said that the resilience of an organization “depends on the interconnection of the individual, team and organizational levels.” To do that, leaders can set up conditions, practices, and policies that promote what she calls the “ABCs of Steady-Pulse Teams and Organizations”: agency, benevolence, and community.
Agency, or the capacity to act, is a critical piece of the equation. One of the leading causes of burnout is unrealistic work demands, and many leaders inadvertently weaken the pulse of their people and teams by imposing demands, while also removing their sense of control. Leaders need to effectively communicate expectations and ensure that the working environment is reasonable.
Benevolence goes a long way to facilitating trust, fairness, and acknowledgement for an organization’s employees. Dr. Jiménez said, “No matter how prestigious your company is or how many rewards you offer, if an employee finds himself or herself on a team or in an organization that does not foster goodwill, those perks will not go very far.”
Community fosters connection. These interpersonal interactions between the people in your organization play a major role in their experience at the organization. When elements of the community are fragmented and fractured, the resilience of your people, your teams, and your organization will ultimately weaken.
Dr. Jiménez said, “We are human beings, not machines – when company cultures ask their people to deny their humanity for the sake of overwork and productivity, they are creating an environment that is ripe for burnout. Our capacities as humans must be recognized and honored.”