Why Burnout Happens — and How Bosses Can Help

ALISON BEARD: Welcome to HBR IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review. I’m Alison Beard.

I don’t know about you guys, but I am exhausted. Any time I think I have a handle on everything that I need to do for my work and my family and friends, it all ramps up again. There’s always more to do. And if I’m honest, I don’t always feel up to the task. And I get that I’m much more fortunate than most. I can only imagine what it’s like for people working more stressful jobs, healthcare, education, retail, or manufacturing, and also balancing child or parent care right now.

2020 has been a ridiculously tough year. But those feelings I’m describing of overwhelmed frustration, ineptitude, sometimes apathy, they aren’t new. They’re signs of something our guest today has studied for decades, burnout. She says it’s a problem that organizations and individual managers need to be working much harder to identify and fix or better yet, preempt. She’s with us to talk about the many causes of burnout and how to protect against them.

Christina Maslach is a professor of psychology at a core researcher at the healthy Workplaces Center at the University of California, Berkeley. She joins me now. Christina, thanks so much for being on the show.

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Thank you for inviting me.

ALISON BEARD: So let’s start with the basics. Burnout is a term that we all tend to casually throw around, but it’s also thanks partly to your work, an official health condition, right? How do you define it?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Well, first of all, it’s not medical. That’s one of the mischaracterizations of it. And the World Health Organization has made that very clear. They call it an occupational phenomenon. Where in a sense it’s a normal stress response to a stressful situation. So what burnout is, is really a three-pronged experience. It does include chronic exhaustion, but it also includes feelings of cynicism and alienation from the job. A very negative sense about what you’re doing and the people you’re doing it with and so forth. And thirdly, a sense of personal professional ineffectiveness. I’m not really doing a great job, I’m not particularly proud of what this is. Maybe I’ve made a mistake, those kinds of things. So when you get those three together, that exhaustion, that cynicism, and that ineffectiveness, that’s what we talk about as burnout. It’s not simply one of those things. And that I think is also a problem in how people use the term. It’s not just exhaustion.

ALISON BEARD: How prevalent was it before the pandemic?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: It’s a good question. It’s a hard one to answer because it’s not like there’s an easy statistic that you can point to and say, “Oh, it’s this percentage of people in the workplace.” In general, when we were doing research on it, we would see if you’re really talking about the full blown burnout response of those negative scores on those three dimensions, it was somewhere around 10% of the population, work population. It would be higher in some professions than others. It might be higher in some organizations than others. It’s not like you’re burned out or not. You’re burned out if you’re in this minority of the population, but then there’s these other things that might be you’re on the way to burnout, but not quite there yet.

ALISON BEARD: What are some of the causes of burnout that you found in your research?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: What we are finding is that there are kind of six areas, at least six areas, of a fit between people and the workplace. And the issue is to what extent people can work effectively and deal effectively with these issues or not. At some level, if you want to stay, is it the person or is it the job? The data say, it’s the job more than it is the person. I would qualify that a little bit to say, you really need to look at that, it’s a relationship between people and their workplace. And the six areas just quickly. The one that everyone thinks of first is workload. And really what we’re talking about is the balance between the demands and the resources you have to do the job, time, tools, et cetera. When there’s a misfit or an imbalance there, the demands are very high and you don’t have the resources to get the job done.

The second one is very important, is control. And what I mean by that is the amount of autonomy and choice and discretion that people have in carrying out their job. And when you do not have adequate autonomy, this leads to high levels of stress, very negative reactions by people who are being locked in and not allow to improvise or improve, or try and do the best job possible. Third area has to do with reward or positive feedback. And what we’re finding is it’s not just about, salary or benefits, that kind of thing. Most important thing is recognition. That people notice and care and let you know when you’ve done a good job. A good day is nothing bad happens, but you rarely get that positive feedback when things go well. The fourth area is what we call community, and what we mean by this is the workplace community.

These are the other people you come in contact with and work along with. It could be teams, colleagues, people you supervise your boss, and what those relationships are like with other people. So what’s the sort of social, the interpersonal climate. And when there is a lot of hostility, competitiveness, destructive competitiveness, lack of support, lack of trust. Fifth area has to do with fairness, and this is really about the presence of impartial and ethical practices and policies. And you’re being treated unfairly.

This generates a lot of the cynicism and anger that we see with burnout. And then sixth is what we talk about as values. And this is really the meaning, the importance of the work that you’re feeling proud of what you’re able to accomplish, that you’re doing the right thing. That you are making a difference in a positive way for whatever it is that you happen to be involved in. So those six areas are not independent, they often overlap. For example, it could be there as a reward for good work, which is a reward issue, but people see it as being rigged to go to the wrong people and not the ones who deserve it, which is a fairness issue. So these six areas in a sense, give you six different paths to begin to think about how could we begin to improve things in the workplace so that there’s a better match, a better fit between people and the job.

ALISON BEARD: I think individuals have a pretty good sense for when they’re beginning to feel burnout, even if they don’t know why. How can a manager identify it in an employee and figure out what’s driving it?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Let me give you a couple of responses to that. One is a concern that something is not working with the employee and you don’t know why and what can we do about it. If there’s a focus on the wellbeing of the employee and trying to figure out, it could be a burnout problem, but it could be something else that’s going on in their life that it’s making their commitment and their work more difficult or challenging. Having a way of checking in with them and talking supportively, as opposed to grilling them and making them feel like, “Oh my God, I better not tell how I’m really feeling, because then I’ll be in trouble or I’ll not get a promotion or something like that.” So it’s really, they’re feeling stressed. They’re not healthy. They are isolating themselves. They’re trying to sort of pull away from the job even when they’re there. They’re taking time off, they’re absent.

But there has to be up to do that a real sense of trust. That I can talk to you and say, “Here’s what’s going on right now and why I’m having some problems.” And not feel that this is actually going to put me in further risk for problems. The other thing I would say is that often it’s not just an individual employee, it’s often a group of people. Because they’re working together, they influence each other. It’s something that’s happening in the workplace that’s affecting more people. And to try and approach a team or a unit or whatever to sort of say again, checking in, how are things going? What could we begin to do? Where are the little pebbles in your shoe that are, really affecting everybody? And what could we begin to think of as possible solutions or, innovations that might help that?

Then you get away from what I think is one of the major problems with burnout, which is to blame the person and make the individual feel that he or she is inadequate. Has a weakness, has a whatever. And people will fight hard to hide that and not talk about it. When we know that it’s not about the weak person, we know that there is a problem in the workplace, that some people may react more strongly to than others. And so we really need to focus on the job situation.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And some of the immediate solutions that people tend to jump to are focus both on the individual and on overwork. Unplug, take a vacation, meditate, delegate. And so as a boss, you really need to get beyond that and start looking at other potential causes and then other fixes.

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Yeah, you’re right. The tendency has been really, we’ve got to fix the person, the individual. And what that brings is a lot of blame, which is not helpful at all in terms of solutions. Now, most of the things you’ve mentioned that are thought of as how to fix the person, don’t actually fix the person, but they can help the person cope with the stressors, which is different. It’s sort of saying, “Gee, you’re in a tough situation. How about if you did this? You can take the long hours better.”

It’s sort of ironic in a way that one of the leading recommendations for what to do when you’re stressed out by work is get away from work. Don’t go to work. Take time off, be absent, take a vacation. Do all those kinds of things. Which begs the question, what is the problem with the workplace that the best solution is to get away from it? At some point, how can I say that? You’ve probably heard this phrase, “If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen.” Which doesn’t also ask the question and what’s wrong with the kitchen? Why is it so hot? So there’s nothing wrong with coping. Keeping yourself healthy and relaxing, all of those things. But they don’t fix the problem, which is where the stress is coming from.

ALISON BEARD: When we’re trying to solve the problem. We want to see what the root cause is. Which of those six, what combination of those six is creating the burnout. And I’d love to delve into a few of them in detail. So lack of control, we’ve talked about it at something we’re all feeling this year. And everyone really can feel it at work from time to time, whether you’re a frontline worker who’s upset about a new shift or you’re a CEO worrying about unpredictable economic conditions. So how do you work on a problem like that?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: The interesting thing is to look at the situation and find out where you’ve got some wiggle room to do things differently. You often have to be looking at, for example, what is making it difficult now for the team to work, and not get together? What changes could we make so that we can get this done in a shorter amount of time? Or do we need all hands on deck for this? Could we rotate some of the other things in terms of the responsibility so that some people are on and other people are off? You’re trying to find a build in where there can be some improvements. One of the things that we often see when people talk about a lack of control is that they are not ever included in any kind of assessment or decision-making about how to do the work.

Even though things are changing, it’s like somebody else is making a decision that’s going to affect all of us here in the office. But nobody ever talks to us who actually are the engineers carrying this out, what would work? What would make a difference? How we could improve the job. It’s a top-down. And there really needs to be more input from more people. It doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right or they come up with the best solutions. But they can provide better perspectives on where there might be some points that we can make changes. We’re not locked in. We don’t have to do it that way.

And I think at this time of COVID, we are being forced, even if we haven’t done it before, to rethink how we do our job. So, in some sense, this is the time to really think out of the box and not assume we’re just going to go back to normal and do what the old way. I find with control also is that there are often things that we do that are really not necessary.

And what happens is that things keep getting added to our workload, but it rarely gets any subtraction. So it’s really thinking about where there may be ability to put in a little bit more choices, a little bit more innovations. And getting people to then implement those, and takes time because there’s going to be glitches and you need to practice and get into the new routine and whatever. But having more collaborative input, customizing it so that it fits ours rather than being standard practice are really critical to this and committing to keep working on it until we get it right.

ALISON BEARD: And I can how a manager could approach it that way and even implement solutions, not just for control, but also for things like community or sense of belonging, fairness, rewards, for his or her team. Is that enough? Or does the person need to figure out a way to make the entire organization change for the problem to stop?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: My own experience in working with different organizations on research is that you rarely have a situation where everybody is having the same experience and responding to the same thing, particularly in larger organizations. So we will see differences between different units in terms of the work they do, or the kinds of people that are employed, the kind of skills or things that they have. And so, I don’t think it’s wise to approach it as there’s going to be a single solution that will work for everybody and we have to all be on the same page. My own sense of this is that a more bottom up strategy, is a better way to go and to find out. There may be some things that affects the company as a whole or the organization as a whole. I’ve seen those too.

I remember once one organization turned out the big issue, which shocked the CEO, was fairness. And that people really thought that an award company-wide that recognized special work that somebody had done was going to the wrong people. Somehow there was some brown nosing going on and cheating and all this kind of thing. And they fixed that by getting together a bunch of people to say, what was wrong. Figure out how to do it differently, actually design a better process and then put it into effect. And everybody felt, “Wow, this was a lot better. We’re now doing something special, but we’re doing it for the people who really themselves have accomplished something and deserve that recognition.” Now, not only did they fix that one little problem, but the thing with making a small change that begins to make a positive difference is that it builds hope.

There’s a sense of, “Oh, well, if we could have fixed that, we could fix this thing over here, which is also …” So again, where I’ve seen greater success is where you start with these smaller things. Not with a big, overarching let’s redesign healthcare for the 21st century, which is going to cost billions of dollars. No, you need to actually be looking at okay … it’s like the advice that people give to individuals. Think of at the end of the day, how would you rate your life experience? And let’s say on a 10 point scale. And let’s say, you think, “Well, okay, given everything, it’s mostly good, but some problems. It’s a six.” The challenge is just add one. What could change to make it a seven? Not would make it a 10. So what are the easier things, the doable things, the low hanging fruit, the things that if we could just begin to make those kinds of shifts, it would help people?

They would feel they participated in coming up with an answer. They carry it out. It gives them the hope that, “Well, hey, we could now do another one.”

ALISON BEARD: What are some other specific interventions that you’ve seen work?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: What’s interesting is that in many cases, it’s not that people have gone and put in place a standardized practice, but they’ve often have either taken a recommendation and customized it to make it more workable in their organization, or sometimes they’ve stumbled upon things by chance that actually make a positive difference. And then they keep following up on that. So for example, I was talking with medical teams. And one of them, and I asked them, “Let me know what you’re doing, in terms of some of the stressors of burnout.” And one group came up to me afterwards and said, “Oh, well, here’s what we’re doing in terms of the huddle that we have in the morning when we’re going on shift.”

And one day one of the people said, “I’m really sorry. I had this awful problem. My child is really sick and I don’t have any care, only in the morning. And then I don’t have anything in the afternoon. Is there some way we can do something?” And she is someone who would not often spoken up. People were very hierarchical, the top people speak and the other ones don’t. And she was hesitant to even raise this, but then somebody said, “Oh, wait, yeah, we can help. You know what we could do? We could change this little thing, whatever.” And so they helped this person with this problem. And then it sort of changed the tone of the huddle so that people gradually became more comfortable with raising some concerns or some issues like, “I haven’t said anything, but I do think Mrs. Jones is having some problem with her therapy or whatever.”

And they wouldn’t have raised it before and now they did. And it’s began to change the way the huddle worked. And they now call it the cuddle huddle because they know each other better. They feel they can trust each other. They can say, “This isn’t working, or I’m not sure I got this problem here.” And people aren’t going to dump it on them. They’re actually going to say, “Okay, let’s see how we could fix this or handle this better.” So it doesn’t take more time, but the dynamic began to change. And this was all from an accident in some places. But in this case of the woman raising the issue about her sick child. But when I told other people about it, it’s kind of like, “Oh, we could change that. We could do the huddle differently.” And figure out how to actually use it to build a better community, a social community where we trust each other, we work together. We’re not afraid to raise a problem or an issue and see if we can’t find a solution.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. What would you say to a worker who feels like their boss, isn’t aware of their burnout and isn’t trying to prevent it? What can that person do?

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Again, I would say you need to organize. You’ve got to make it a social thing, not an individual one. Anytime it’s just an individual and I need to talk to my manager or the boss or whatever, the common response often is, “Well, what’s wrong with you? What’s your problem? Nobody else is doing it, et cetera, et cetera.” And you don’t always get the traction. You don’t get something that, somebody says, “Yeah, well, let’s talk about it and see if we can figure out how we can do this better or what would make the job better. Or maybe you need a lateral shift or maybe, whatever it happens to be.”

I think when it’s people working together, finding like-minded colleagues and being able to develop enough of kind of a trusted social network and social relationships, then you can be into A, perhaps figure out some little solutions you can do on your own under the radar, without anybody else having to know, because you’re doing it at your discretion and you’re making, “Okay, we can do this differently in terms of intake.” And just go ahead with it. Or to actually then go to the manager and say, “We have some ideas about making some changes and we’re all thinking this would be a better way to go. Could we try it out for a while? And, we’re willing to work with this.” Or, various kinds of things like that.

Christina Maslach: So that it seemed really more as a shared issue. It’s a, we issue, not just a me issue. Because often, the things that are causing people these kinds of problems, it’s not just one person or individual here, individual there. And a lot of other people are just suffering in silence or going along with it, or maybe they figured out some other better ways of coping, but maybe they could share those with other people so that they actually do better. So the power of the social group, the relationships, and working collaboratively with people to sort of stay. And I think there’s probably a better way to initiate that conversation now with the pandemic, because there’s not a lot of great ideas and solutions yet as to what we do. And so we really need all hands on deck to put our heads together and sort of say, “Okay, what might be some things that we might try?” And not shy away from just the little stuff, because it’s the little chronic stuff is really the cause of burnout. And that’s what we need to sort of see where can make those one point changes.

ALISON BEARD: Christina, thanks so much for being with me today.

CHRISTINA MASLACH: Okay. Thank you.

ALISON BEARD: That’s Christina Maslach, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. She’s also the author of “The Truth About Burnout: How Organizations Cause Personal Stress and What to do About It.” She has a forthcoming book from Harvard University Press.

This episode was produced by Mary Dooe. We get technical help from Rob Eckhardt. Adam Buchholz is our audio product manager. Thanks for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Alison Beard.