Managing Burnout in the Workplace

A Guide for Information Professionals

Nancy McCormack, Catherine Cotter

• Publisher: Chandos Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781843347347
• eBook ISBN: 9781780634005
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Information professionals are under constant stress. Libraries are ushering in sweeping changes that involve the closing of branches and reference desks, wholesale dumping of print, disappearing space, and employment of non-professional staff to fill what have traditionally been the roles of librarians. Increasing workloads, constant interruptions, ceaseless change, continual downsizing, budget cuts, repetitive work, and the pressures of public services have caused burnout in many information professionals.Managing Burnout in the Workplace concentrates on the problem of burnout, what it is and how it differs from chronic stress, low morale, and depression. The book addresses burnout from psychological, legal, and human resources perspectives. Chapters also cover how burnout is defined, symptom recognition, managing and overcoming burnout, and how to avoid career derailment while coping with burnout. - Focuses on burnout in relation to information professionals and their work - Explores how burnout is identified and diagnosed and how it is measured in the workplace - Provides an overview of interdisciplinary research on burnout, incorporating studies from various areas

1

What is burnout?

Abstract:

This chapter discusses recent changes in the workplace which have resulted in greater sources of stress for workers. Burnout is defined and distinguished from low morale, depression and stress. A consideration follows on how burnout manifests itself in terms of changes in behavior, feelings, thinking and physical and mental health.

Key words

burnout

low morale

depression

stress

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

Fourth Edition (DSM-IV)

International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems

10th Revision (ICD-10)

changes in feelings

changes in health

changes in thinking

changes in behavior

Introduction

Over the last several decades, profound changes have occurred in much of the workplace. Budgets have been cut, workers have been downsized and often fewer employees have been left to carry out the same amount of work.

As a result, the pace of work seems far more relentless than it did only a few brief decades ago. Workers are more harried than ever, yet attempting to control or limit the volume of work assigned is often futile. An individual who says no to more work might, at best, be regarded as someone who is not a team player. At worst, saying no is viewed by the organization as unacceptable, and a step towards dismissal.

Given this demanding pace, time away from work should be the period during which an employee can relax and recover from the stresses of the day. Instead, setting clear boundaries between work time and personal time has become, for many, impossible. Employees are frequently expected by their employers to check their email at work and at home, and to be reachable at any time of the day or night, including vacation. Finding a work–life balance is made more difficult as a consequence of this “constant connectivity” and results in even greater stress on the individual employee (Study, 2012).

One might think that upper management would find some way to reward employees for accepting the grinding pace and the greater intrusions of the job into their private time. Instead, in an era of shrinking resources, individuals higher up the food chain are often as worried about their own survival as the people who report to them. As a result, supervisors may take credit for projects done well but may be slow to show support when things are going badly through no fault of the workers (Maslach and Leiter, 1997). Without such support from superiors, workers find it even harder to shoulder the stresses of the job. Eventually, the volume and pace of work, along with a myriad of other factors in the workplace, break down many individuals so that they can no longer function. Burnout is often the end result.

Burned out workers are those who find themselves suffering from severe emotional fatigue, which is frequently accompanied by physiological symptoms. They feel distressed, alienated, inadequate, and unmotivated. These employees often become unrecognizable to their colleagues, particularly as they withdraw from social and other interactions. Their behaviour also changes; they may exhibit signs of depression or anger, and may turn to drugs or alcohol or employ other dysfunctional coping behaviors in an effort to deal with the stress.

Overwork, of course, is a major contributing factor to burnout. An excessive workload and an unremitting pace are no longer facts of life only in third world sweatshops. Today, even in wealthy, industrialized countries, overwork has been found to contribute to serious illness and, somewhat surprisingly, death. In countries such as Japan, for example, death from overwork even has a name – karoshi. Since the 1980s, 30,000 Japanese have been recognized officially as having been victims of karoshi, i.e., their deaths have been recorded as having come about as a result of overwork (Pannozzo and Landon, 2005).

As for other industrialized countries, while accurate information on death from overwork is harder to find, it has become more common to find statistics on workplace stress and the role it plays in serious health problems. The president of the American Institute of Stress (AIS), Paul J. Rosch, MD, FACP, says that chronic workplace stress often leads to significant health problems such as high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, heart attacks and strokes and can aggravate many already existing conditions (Walter, 2012).

Stress and burnout also make the likelihood of workplace accidents greater. Burnout has been linked to the risk of developing back problems and other musculoskeletal disorders in the upper body (Kalia, 2002). It is known to have a connection with diabetes, suppression of the immune system, memory loss, and the shrinking of neurons in the brain (Contenta, 2010). Researchers have, in addition, found a correlation between job stress and burnout and “various self-reported indices of personal distress, including physical exhaustion, insomnia, increased use of alcohol and drugs, and marital and family problems” (Maslach and Jackson, 1981).

What does all this mean for the workplace? As these and other studies indicate, employees pay a high cost as a result of burnout. But they are not the only ones. Worldwide, the syndrome presents a serious problem for all kinds of businesses, organizations and the economy as a whole. For example, in 2002, the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work estimated that work-related stress disorders in Europe resulted in a yearly economic cost of approximately 20 billion Euros (about 25 billion US dollars) (Awa et al., 2010).

In 2005, it was reported in the press that one in five workers in Scotland thought their jobs were “highly stressful” (Gray, 2005). Several years later, in 2011, the UK’s Health and Safety Executive (an independent body which conducts research and keeps an eye on work-related health, safety and illness issues) estimated that stress was responsible for 10.8 million lost workdays that year (Health and Safety Executive, 2011).

In the United States, in 2009, a survey conducted by the American Psychological Association found that 69 percent of all employees felt that their job was a significant source of stress. Forty-one percent felt stressed during a typical work day and more than half of those surveyed thought that stress had a negative impact on their productivity at work (Levinson, 2012). That same year, the US National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) reported that 26 percent of workers are “often or very often burned out or stressed by their work,” and 29 percent said they felt “quite a bit or extremely stressed at work” (NIOSH, 1999, p. 4).

A price tag in the neighbourhood of $300 billion per year is what the American Institute of Stress has estimated stress and burnout on the job costs US businesses (Walter, 2012). It has also estimated that more than 75 percent of all visits to doctors are stress-related (Kalia, 2002). Costs are incurred as a result of reduced productivity and revenue, decreased job satisfaction, increased absenteeism and sick leaves, job turnover, low morale, and the necessity for replacement workers, along with compensation, litigation and disability claims. Employees who are burned out are also less inclined to assist their colleagues on the job and less inclined to care about the organization or its goals. It is worth noting that next door to the US, Health Canada has also reported problems related to stress: it is responsible, for example, for an annual price tag of C$3.5 billion as a result of absenteeism by Canadian workers (Contenta, 2010).

Several continents away, a 2010 University of Melbourne and Victorian Health report found that, in Australia, job stress and depression resulting from excessive pressure in the workplace cost the economy approximately A$730 million a year. Researchers arrived at this figure by estimating the costs of lost productivity, of finding replacement workers and of medical treatment of work-related mental health problems (“Huge cost,” 2010). As these figures show, burnout is a serious problem internationally.

To what extent the numbers are rising from one country to the next is not as clear. Despite the approximately 6,000 books, chapters, dissertations, and journal articles which have been published on burnout in countries around the globe over the last 35 years (Schaufeli et al., 2009), comprehensive country-wide data on burnout is not always easy to find, in part because it is not officially recognized in all countries as a specific health problem in and of itself. One country which does keep statistics – the Netherlands – has discovered that at any given time, 10 percent of employees are burned out (Senior, 2006).

Individual studies of various professional groups have also been conducted over the years and have estimated that, for example, approximately one out of every five doctors in the US and Germany is burned out at any given time and more than one in four are burned out in Great Britain (Awa et al., 2010). Reports also indicate that between 30 and 40 percent of teachers are burned out at any one time (Awa et al., 2010).

Clearly, the literature indicates that burnout results in tremendous costs to individuals, organizations and the economy. Nonetheless, the factors which contribute to burnout seem to continue unabated in the workplace, and recent surveys point to a rise in the number of burned out employees (“Jobs Mail,” 2005).

While relatively few statistics exist for individuals in the information professions, the reality of the problem of burnout pertains equally to them. Not surprisingly, economic costs in thes...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• About the authors
• Chapter 1: What is burnout?
• Chapter 2: Factors contributing to burnout
• Chapter 3: Burnout and information professionals: how we got this way
• Chapter 4: Are information professionals burned out?: Research and opinion
• Chapter 5: How burnout is measured in the workplace
• Chapter 6: Burnout: the legal perspective
• Chapter 7: Gender, burnout and work-related stress
• Chapter 8: Symptom recognition and preventing burnout
• Chapter 9: Managing and overcoming burnout
• Index