Bonita Eby, owner of Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development Inc., was recently interviewed on a podcast hosted by Nova Mutual Insurance Company entitled How to Flourish and Prevent Burnout. This article contains part of the podcast interview.
Host: Tell us about yourself and what you do.
I'm a Burnout Prevention and Organizational Culture Consultant and owner of Breakthrough Personal & Professional Development, Inc., specializing in burnout prevention and wellness for organizations and individuals at the intersection of health and leadership development. I’m on a mission to end burnout.
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 leadership not only speaks but also acts. 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 that 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 have gone through it myself. I was in a leadership development role, on project management and training teams, 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 it with the pressures of crisis management, it becomes overwhelmingly stressful, and I experienced burnout and compassion fatigue.
When that happened, it changed my entire life. Now I've spent years developing ways to prevent burnout, researching its causes, and exploring how to recover. And I've created systematic processes to help others do just that, at both the organizational and individual levels.
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, such as taking a bubble bath to solve our problems, without any research to back them up.
Unmanaged workplace stress is at the root of burnout. We're talking about overwhelming stress, not the basic stress we easily overcome each day. 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 at the highest risk of 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 encounter stressors throughout the 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 constantly stressed 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, dreaming 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 why it's so critically important for individuals to understand the warning signs and for managers, supervisors, and team leaders to do so as well, so they can keep their team healthy.
Are leaders concerned about stress & burnout?
When I speak with leaders about their experiences, they indicate that overwhelming stress and burnout are causing them concern. 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, “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 replacing 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 handle that overwhelming exposure, so we need stress management techniques, which I often train on in corporate workshops.
Is Burnout an individual or workplace culture issue?
We tend to think about burnout prevention in terms of managing our self-care and boundaries. That's important, but the overwhelming evidence shows that burnout is driven by an organization’s workplace culture and systems.
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 demonstrate empathy and emotional intelligence throughout that conversation.
2. Open the burnout conversation by creating psychological safety
Train leaders to open the conversation with their team about burnout, because most don’t naturally know how to have it. 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 an employee is experiencing burnout, their 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 in handling 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 company's mission and vision? Sit down with your employees and see how many 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 a sense of 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 & Organizational Culture Consultant, 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.
