Culture begins with leadership

Host: You mentioned leadership development. Do you find starting with leadership development helps organizations?

It always begins with leaders. In any organization, culture changes based on how the leadership not only speaks but how they act. If you have a policy, but it's not modelled at the leadership level, you're not going to find it acted upon throughout the entire organization. I find using leadership development, my professional healthcare background and years of research on burnout prevention make quality changes throughout an entire organization.

My burnout story

Host: What is your relationship with burnout? Do you have a backstory that led you to strategize and specialize in burnout prevention?

Yes, I know burnout intimately and went through burnout myself. I was in a leadership development role, project management, and training teams and leaders. I was also on a crisis line, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I flourished in that leadership development space, but when you combine that with the pressures of crisis management, it became overwhelmingly stressful, and I went through burnout and compassion fatigue.

When that happened, it changed my entire life. Now I've spent years developing ways to prevent burnout, researching what causes it, and how to recover. And I've created systematic processes to help others do just that, both on an organizational and individual level.

Where does burnout come from?

There is a lot of confusion because there's so much on social media that would imply burnout is essentially just a word we use to cover all kinds of umbrella issues. As a result, we see many uninformed recommendations, like taking a bubble bath to solve our problems, without any research to back it up.

Workplace stress that has been unsuccessfully managed is at the root of burnout. We're talking about overwhelming stress, not the basic stress we easily overcome on a daily basis. We're talking about stress that becomes overwhelming because the pressures keep coming too hard and too fast. Interestingly, research shows that the highest achievers in any given organization are most at risk for going through burnout.

What are the early warning signs of burnout?

Considering burnout is due to unmanaged workplace stress, the first symptom is too much chronic stress. We all come across stressors throughout our day, many of which we manage without a problem. We get over it; it's gone. It doesn't even register on our radar at the end of the day. But it's when we're stressed all the time that we become exhausted.

In the early stages of burnout, people find they're tired but don’t think it’s that big of a deal. But over time, that fatigue progresses to exhaustion. And when I say exhaustion, it's physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion. Employees can’t show up to work at their best and produce at their very best when they're exhausted, physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Many people develop minor illnesses. For example, they used to get colds once a year. Now they're getting two colds once a month, and they wonder what’s happening. Perhaps they begin getting minor infections. We don't like to talk about that, but it’s a common reality.

Often, people start having stressful dreams where they wake up in the middle of the night, having dreamed they're at work, and everything is going wrong. That's an indication that they’re not shutting off from work, and it’s creeping into every part of their life.

You can see how early burnout warning signs are quite insidious. That's why it's hard to spot in the early days and one of the reasons why it's so critically important for individuals to understand the warning signs and for managers, supervisors, and team leaders to understand so that they can keep their team healthy.

Are leaders concerned about stress & burnout?

When I speak with leaders about their experiences, they indicate overwhelming stress and burnout are causing them concern. It comes down to at the end of the day, they have no time or energy left for their family or friends. That doesn't sound like a life that's flourishing.

Why does burnout affect an organization’s highest achievers?

They are deeply devoted, passionate and give it their all. They are the ones who care. They're the ones who genuinely want to produce. So you put extra work on their plate, and they say, “okay, I'll push through. I’ll do this because I care about the company.” Burnout often affects the people you want to retain most; it's your top talent. Without proper support, they will leave the organization to find one with a workplace culture that will sustain them.

Research shows that to replace just one person in your organization who has burned out costs a company 1.5 to two times that person's annual salary. To make that clear, let’s say someone makes $100,000 annually in your organization. To replace that employee will cost anywhere from $150,000 to $200,000. Based on that number, prevention is a much more cost-effective strategy for any organization.

Are burnout and stress two different things?

Stress is a natural response to any crisis situation. It's related to survival. Our brain reacts immediately to stress and puts us into a fight, flight or freeze response. That's normal and healthy when a lion is chasing us, and we want to get away. We're now in a situation where those stress responses are happening perhaps ten times an hour, sometimes hundreds of times a day. Our systems were not meant to deal with that overwhelming exposure, so we need stress management techniques, which is a popular topic I train on in corporate workshops.

Is Burnout an individual or workplace culture issue?

We tend to think about burnout prevention in terms of how we can manage our self-care and boundaries. That's important, but the overwhelming evidence shows that burnout is due to an organization’s workplace culture and systems issues.

What can organizations do to prevent employee burnout?

1. Train managers to recognize the signs of burnout

Train your managers, team leaders, and supervisors to recognize the symptoms of burnout. Educate managers to have empathy and emotional intelligence around that whole conversation.

2. Open the burnout conversation by creating psychological safety

Train leaders to open the conversation with their team around burnout because most don’t naturally know how to have that conversation. It's a touchy subject. Many employees are terrified to talk with their team leader about where they're struggling. Without those open, honest conversations, the employee cannot receive the support and resources they need.

When experiencing burnout, an employee’s productivity will not be the same. How do they sit down with their manager and say, “I think I'm burning out. Can you help me?” if they don’t feel psychologically safe? But suppose their manager is well trained on how to handle those conversations with empathy and connection. In that case, it creates a psychologically safe environment in which the employee can speak honestly and openly and receive the resources they need.

3. Communicate policies around priorities, boundaries, and autonomy

This is such a huge part of preventing burnout. Do employees have the ability to make choices around where they work, when they work, and how they work? Do they feel they have an equal voice at the table? Or do they fear being chastised if they speak up and say, “I've got this great idea,” or “I think this could work differently”?

Do employees feel connected to the job in terms of their values? Do they feel connected to the mission and vision of the company? Sit down with your employees and see how many of them can recite your mission, vision and values. If they can't, there's a problem in the organization because employees need to feel connected to purpose and meaning. When there is a deep connection to vision and purpose, employees tend to perform better and are more likely to remain committed to the organization.

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About the author

Bonita Eby is a Burnout Prevention Strategist, Executive Coach, and owner of Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development Inc., specializing in burnout prevention and wellness for organizations and individuals. Bonita is on a mission to end burnout. Get your free Burnout Assessment today.