Anti-burnout

How to Create a Psychologically Safe and High-performance Organisation

Michael Drayton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367460532
• eBook ISBN: 9781000330076
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

Burnout results in people feeling exhausted, cynical, detached and hopeless – even depressed and anxious. This book looks at burnout from an individual, group and organisational perspective. It uses anecdotes from the author's life; and examples from literature, poetry and art to bring the subject to life. Based on the latest scientific thinking on burnout and evidence-based ideas, this practical, easy read book gives leaders the knowledge they need to create a psychologically healthy and high performance culture at work.

After reading this book, you will understand more about burnout than 90 per cent of the population. You will know what to do to prevent burnout in other people and in yourself. Anti-burnout is an academically rigorous book, written in a friendly, engaging, conversational style. It contains lots of anecdotes, examples from the arts and stories that illustrate and bring to life the practical advice on preventing burnout. Anti-burnout will answer these questions:

• What exactly is burnout?
• How does burnout affect individuals, teams and organisations?
• What causes burnout?
• How can I understand and support people with burnout?
• How can I prevent myself from burning out?
• What are the obstacles to preventing burnout?
• How does remote working affect burnout?
• What can I do to create a workplace culture that prevents burnout?

This book is helpful because it relates the scientific literature on burnout to real life. Anti-burnout looks at the individual factors in burnout, including personality and mental health. It also looks at how the dynamics of teams and how work is organised relate to burnout. Finally, the book investigates organisational culture, leadership and burnout. This book is essential reading for leaders and managers who want to minimise burnout in people in their organisation. It will also be essential reading for anyone with an interest in mental well-being at work such as occupational health practitioners, researchers and human resource professionals.

Section 1

Person

1

What is burnout?

Pause for a moment and think about burnout. What image comes to mind? Is it a frazzled man or woman who is agitated and not coping? Is the person running around trying to keep up, or maybe sitting at a desk in front of a computer looking exhausted and defeated?

Burnout is all of these things and a whole lot more. When most people are asked to consider burnout, they think of it as being synonymous with overwork. They might explain burnout as exhaustion caused by too much work. However, exhaustion is only one part of the burnout jigsaw. Other pieces include psychological and spiritual factors like cynicism, hopelessness and helplessness, and detachment – not only from work but from life. These psychological, emotional and spiritual aspects of burnout are a lot more damaging to people than the physical exhaustion.

The writer Sam Keen described burnout thus: “Burnout is nature’s way of telling you, you’ve been going through the motions, your soul has departed; you’re a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administering stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.” (Keen, 1992)

I won’t be offering any false optimism in this book. I will explain the science behind burnout and provide some practical suggestions to remedy it.

Box 1.1 The history of burnout

The term ‘burnout’ was first used in New York in the 1970s to describe how volunteers who worked with the city’s population of drug addicts were emotionally affected by their work. The term was coined by the American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger, who helped to develop the free clinic movement in New York to support people suffering from addictions. Freudenberger, who devoted a large amount of time to these clinics, without pay, observed the gradual emotional exhaustion and declining motivation in some clinic volunteers, and termed this phenomenon ‘burnout’. He defined it as “a state of mental and physical exhaustion caused by one’s professional life” (Freudenberger, 1975). Jobs can be exhausting for lots of different reasons. Some people do jobs that are tedious, lack meaning and are badly paid. Others do very emotionally demanding jobs, working with people in pain (like the New York drug workers in Freudenberger’s clinic). Some do jobs where the demands far outstrip the resources, and others work for employers who treat them badly. Whatever the situation, people can’t simply absorb these stresses. They manifest in physical exhaustion, cynicism, detachment from the work and greatly reduced performance.

Why understanding burnout is important for you

There are three reasons why it is important for you to understand burnout, whether you are a leader, a busy manager or work for an organisation:

• Having a good understanding of how and why burnout occurs might prevent you from burning out.
• If you are a manager and you have a direct report who’s at risk of burnout or is suffering with burnout, then it’s important to know what you’re dealing with and how you can best help.
• If you are a leader in an organisation, then understanding burnout will help you to develop an organisational culture where burnout is a thing of the past. This will translate into a highly engaged workforce and a high-performance, creative and generally happy organisational culture.

In this chapter, I describe in detail what burnout is; and believe me, it isn’t very pleasant, let alone optimistic. It makes for grim reading. But at the end, you will know more about burnout than 99 per cent of the population. You will know and understand your enemy – and burnout is your enemy.

Once you understand the problem and how complex it is, we can start to come up with some solutions.

Many years ago, I trained as a clinical psychologist. One of the first things that gets drummed into you in training is that when a person turns up for help with a problem (let’s say depression), you have to really understand the problem, the person and that person’s life before rushing into treatment. Often, when treatment fails it’s because the psychologist hasn’t taken the time to really understand the factors that constitute the problem. Maybe they’ve taken a cookbook approach, thinking that the treatment for depression with the best evidence base is cognitive behavioural therapy, and so that’s what the person got. But what if the person’s depression was the result of unspeakable childhood trauma or a head injury which they didn’t think was relevant and didn’t disclose? Then all the CBT in the world ain’t gonna help. Similarly, burnout is usually addressed like this, with off-the-peg cookbook solutions that more often than not fail to have any impact whatsoever.

So before we rush into solutions, let’s spend a bit of time trying to really understand the problem of burnout.

Burnout: the World Health Organization gets involved

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) included burnout in the International Classification of Diseases (11th Revision; ICD-11), in the section entitled ‘Mental and Behavioural Disorders’ (World Health Organization, 2018).

What is ICD-11?

ICD-11 is a book that clinicians use to diagnose mental health problems. It contains detailed descriptions of mental illnesses, and lists of signs and symptoms (diagnostic criteria) that a person would have to meet to be diagnosed with a particular mental illness. Take depression, for example. There are three groups of symptoms that characterise a depressive episode: first, low mood; second, disturbances in physical functioning such as poor sleep and appetite; and third, problems with thinking such as poor concentration and memory. In order to be diagnosed with depression, you would need to be suffering with specific signs or symptoms from each of these groups. (I go into this in more depth in Chapter 2.) Being diagnosed with depression isn’t as simple as just feeling fed-up; there’s more to it than that. ICD-11 covers all mental disorders from depression right through to serious mental illnesses such as schizophrenia.

The organisational context of burnout

Burnout is included in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, not as a mental illness. It’s interesting to note the emphasis on ‘occupational’ rather than illness.

Burnout is described in the chapter ‘Factors influencing health status or contact with health services’. This chapter makes the point that burnout only occurs in the context of working for an organisation, whereas other mental health problems can occur in any context.

This is important to note, because it means that employers and workplaces are necessary conditions for burnout. In other words, burnout is not just an individual phenomenon existing within an individual person. Burnout is the consequence of a dysfunctional system.

The mistake that many employers make is to locate burnout firmly within the individual and fail to see the circumstances surrounding that individual that have led to them suffering burnout. The problem, it is assumed, is a ‘weak’ individual who is not coping with the day-to-day stresses of work. The solutions that emerge from this wrong assumption target the individual. Often, such solutions include things like antidepressant medication. These are sometimes supplemented with psychological techniques like time-management training, mindfulness or cognitive behavioural therapy. These interventions are positive and helpful, but they are still individual solutions to a systemic problem. They only tackle one factor contributing to the problem. The other factor is the workplace environment that triggered the burnout in the first instance.

For every employee that goes off sick with burnout, there will be many others on the edge of burning out. Burnout is a symptom that something is going wrong in the organisation – an underlying organisational ‘disease’ that has to be diagnosed and cured. We have to help the individual suffering with burnout, and I talk about how we do this later, but the organisation also has a responsibility to address the situation that led to the burnout in the first place.

“A state of vital exhaustion”

The WHO describes burnout as “a state of vital exhaustion” (World Health Organization, 2018). I think that’s a terrific (and rather poetic) description. The word ‘vital’ conjures up images of energy and liveliness, and of something that is absolutely essential. ‘Exhaustion’ is a state of extreme physical and mental tiredness, and to exhaust something means to use it up to the point where all reserves are depleted. These two words beautifully sum up the experience of burnout. The person suffering from burnout feels exhausted. They feel that their resources have been completely depleted. At the same time, the person experiences a sense of agitation and energy. They feel that they just can’t switch off or relax. All the people I have met who have been suffering with burnout have experienced this combination of agitation and exhaustion.

ICD-11 goes on to describe burnout as being:

a syndrome conceptualised as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed. It is characterised by three dimensions:

1. feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion;
2. increased mental distance from one’s job, negativism or cynicism related to one’s job, and;
3. reduced professional efficacy.

Burnout refers specifically to phenomena in the occupational context and should not be applied to describe experiences in other areas of life. (WHO, 2018)

This definition focuses squarely on the occupational context of burnout rather than the individual ‘illness’ context. It follows that the best way to avoid burnout and help people suffering with burnout is to focus on fixing the workplace as well as ‘fixing’ (helping and supporting) the individual employee. A systemic and multi-level approach to burnout is important.

Burnout is related to poorly managed stress in the environment, rather than weakness on the part of susceptible employees. Taking an individual approach to managing burnout brings to mind the experiences of shell-shocked soldiers and airmen in both World Wars. According to military psychiatrists at the time, shell shock (or PTSD as it would now be known) was a result of individual weakness rather than the hellish conditions of trench warfare or the terrible casualty rates of World War II bomber crews. Servicemen who developed shell shock would have their military records stamped with the terrible acronym ‘LMF’, which stands for lack of moral fibre. These soldiers were told that the cause of their shellshock wasn’t the appalling environment but a weakness in their personality. That attitude persists in many organisations, where burnout is attributed to the weakness of the employee rather than the toxicity of the organisational culture and environment. This attitude adds to the distress of the individual, who sees themselves as being weak as well as burnt out. It also absolves the organisation of any blame, guilt and need to change.

Box 1.2 Rob’s story

It is one a.m. and in the bedroom of a modest semi-detached house in a London suburb Rob lies next to his wife, Marie, who is quietly snoring. He is wide awake and staring into the darkness. Two hours ago he was exhausted. He couldn’t keep his eyes open, let alone focus on the TV programme he was watching with Marie. Now, he can’t sleep. He is worrying about work. Rob’s typical pattern is to fall asleep quickly and then wake up a few hours later with a feeling of panic.

He decides to get up, thinking that he may as well be working rather than just not sleeping. He swings his legs out of bed, puts on his slippers and dressing gown, and tiptoes quietly downstairs to the kitchen. He pours himself a large whisky and switches on his laptop, which he’s left open on the kitchen table, and begins work.

Rob is the in-house solicitor and company secretary of a global professional services firm. The firm is in the middle of a multimillion-pound piece of litigation, which Rob is leading. He feels terrified that he has missed something, because his concentration and memory have been terrible of late.

As he stares at the screen, he hears Marie padding down the stairs. He quickly hides his drink in the cupboard over the sink. A brief argument follows, the gist of which is Marie telling Rob of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• About the author
• Introduction
• Section 1: Person
• Section 2: Role
• Section 3: Organisation
• Index