I regularly speak to executives who are in a mild state of panic. Such was the case a few months ago. I had a conversation with the founder of a hip tech company. He was afraid that one of his employees would collapse, because he was showing all the symptoms of burnout. Enough reason to take immediate action.
Burnout is hot: one can safely speak of a true hype. Media score with headlines such as "the burnout epidemic" and "more and more employees suffer from burnout symptoms. But are the headlines justified?
Around the turn of the century, there was the mouse arm. Anyone whose muscles were even slightly sore pulled self-diagnostic to Google. The hype grew. The number of true mouse arms remained the same over that entire period (until now), however.
Now, the symptoms of mouse arm are fairly easy to recognize. With burnout it is a lot more difficult. A burnout is often preceded by fairly general symptoms such as sleep and/or concentration problems, uncertainty about your own functioning and physical complaints such as fatigue and headaches.
Consequently, there are countless situations where people have such symptoms, but nothing at all or something completely different is going on.
Currently, there is no uniform burnout diagnosis on which science agrees. Burnout is also not mentioned in the handbook of mental disorders (the DSM).
That does not mean, by the way, that burnout does not exist. On the contrary. In fact, I am convinced that we should be careful that the number of actual burnouts does not get much higher.
Because, on what do we base the current burnout situation? The NEA (National Survey of Working Conditions) is the best-known survey surveying burnout. But this questionnaire dates from 2000. Just two years after we were all still fully convinced that the cell phone was an unnecessary luxury.
The questions and statements in the survey focus on burnout symptoms. In addition, they are work-related: "At the end of a working day, I feel empty" and "I feel completely exhausted by my work. It does not ask about stress caused by private situations, colleagues or one's own behavior. Thus, this survey is incomplete.
For example, someone who experiences tremendous stress because he spends too much time on social media and therefore does not finish his work on time, someone who is bullied by colleagues and does not dare to bring this up, or someone who is so ambitious that he is getting ahead of himself, this quickly gives him a mark of potential burnout.
So we get stuck with symptoms, but don't figure out the cause. And that's where I think it goes wrong. Understanding the number of potential burnouts is certainly important, but finding out how to prevent them is more important.
Eventually I also spoke to the employee involved. He was an ambitious man who had lost his head. The work was becoming too much for him and he was not comfortable in his own skin. This frightened him. And his employer even more so.
He had been advised by a coach to take an occasional walk and to plan his day better. That would be the best approach. A one-size-fits-all approach seen more often in the form of time management training and company discounts on gym memberships.
In the worst case, the afflicted person is sent home temporarily and then slowly returns to the same place, with no actual change. Then it is only a matter of waiting for the next burnout symptoms.
Even during the first session with the employee, it became clear that the reason for his burnout symptoms was not so much the workload, his private situation or physical condition. The real cause was purely the lack of communication with his manager.
A month later, he had a different position, with a different manager. Where he is now thriving. What seemed like burnout according to all the symptoms, turned out to be remedied with a good talk.
