Burnout signs have risen 33% in 2020; here are seven ways to reduce risks

How severe is job burnout right now as a workplace issue? And what can employers or individual workers do to protect themselves? A data trove of 1.75 million employee-engagement surveys this year by LinkedIn’s Glint Platform provides some powerful clues. 

If you suspect that burnout concerns are on the rise after seven months of dealing with a pandemic, social isolation, work-from-home, school disruptions and major layoffs -- you’re right. 

Glint’s August reading shows 5.41% of employees provided free-response comments that spoke to fatigue, being overwhelmed and other potential signals of burnout. By contrast, January’s reading was just 4.08%. The past two years have averaged 4.12%.

Compare those two numbers, says Glint people scientist Eric Knudsen, and you’re looking at a 33% jump in a measure of burnout risk that has never exceeded 5% in the last two years (as far back as can be measured). Because free-response comments capture only part of the burnout experience at work, he points out, the full number of people feeling exhausted, ineffective, and disconnected from work may be considerably higher. 

For nearly 40 years, psychologists and management experts have been studying burnout, focusing mostly on individual coping strategies. There’s been only a “thin body of work” about ways that companies can act on a larger scale, changing overall practices to make burnout less common, as psychologists Michael Leiter and Christina Maslach noted in a 2014 book, “Burnout at Work.”

Then came the COVID-19 crisis, instilling a rare urgency to overhaul work norms in the name of getting burnout risks under control. “This is the biggest experiment of its type that American business has ever run,” observes Pat Wadors, chief talent officer at ServiceNow, a Santa Clara, Calif., software company.

Already, Glint’s data shows that companies that score highly on certain traits are registering burnout-signal rates significantly below the nationwide average -- and often less than half the rates for companies that score poorly on those same yardsticks. 

There are seven of these traits, ranging from good work-life balance to rapid engagement with employee feedback. It’s too early to say whether these traits themselves help reduce burnout risks, or whether they may simply be part of a larger cluster of factors that all correlate with lower burnout stresses. Either way, they deserve a closer look.

First, good career opportunities: When the U.S. economy seized up last spring, Glint data shows that employees’ happiness briefly rose, perhaps out of sheer gratitude for still having a job amid widespread unemployment. More recently, though, happiness scores have sagged.

Companies lately have been making a lot fewer promotions, as this article documents, and that may have soured many employees’ moods. 

Bucking the trend are employers like Nixon Peabody, a large U.S. law firm headquartered in Boston. Its custom of promoting a group of rising stars each January to partner-level status remains alive and well, says Stacie Collier, the firm’s professional personnel partner. “In fact, we will have a spectacular partnership class,” Collier said in an interview this week.

The lesson: when it’s possible to advance in turbulent times, people notice. Knowing that promotions really do happen reduces the spirit-numbing anxiety that even excellent work won’t bring any rewards.

Second, good work-life balance: Anthony Ross, management department chair at the University of Missouri’s Trulaske College of Business, has a simple rule for after-hours work messages. “If it’s really urgent,” he says, “people can call my cell phone. And if it’s not, I let them know that I won’t be looking at email until the morning."

Prof. Ross’s policy doesn’t just set healthy boundaries for himself. It’s also a signal to fellow academics that unplugging from work is an essential long-term habit, especially if a work-at-home office is just a few steps from the dinner table or a child’s play area. When there’s never a break, productivity ultimately suffers, and burnout becomes a greater risk.

Third, good communication: Corporate leaders can't magically cut through a thicket of uncertainties to tell everyone when the familiar patterns of pre-COVID life will resume. But it’s important to brief employees anyway on “what we know, what we don’t know, what factors we’re looking at, and how we’re going to make a decision,” says ServiceNow’s Wadors. 

Limited information is far better than nothing, Wadors says, especially because if management stops saying anything, the rumor mill will fill the silence somehow -- often with dire scenarios that are demoralizing and beyond even the grimmest likely outcome. 

Fourth, strong company culture: The May 25 killing of Minneapolis's George Floyd while in police custody sent shock waves through America. Millions of employees participated in protests or rallies, and the concerns associated with the Black Lives Matter movement became an urgent part of the workplace conversation. Reactions ranged from anger to a sense of hopelessness, creating new burnout risks. 

Realizing that silence wasn’t an option, many company leaders denounced racial injustice with a bluntness seldom seen before. Some companies also re-examined their counseling and mental well-being programs, making a greater effort to provide advisers whose own backgrounds and identities were relevant to employees needing support. 

It’s hard to know the impact of these actions. But human-resources executives see them as the right steps in any case -- and a sign of a supportive culture.

Fifth, effective team collaboration: According to Glint data, employees’ sense of connection at work has declined significantly in recent months. Some 37% of employees now feel less connected to their colleagues, and 31% feel less connected to their leaders. Companies with the least erosion in this sense of connectedness show markedly lower rates of burnout signals than those where feelings of isolation are more intense.

With many people still working remotely, how can a sense of connection be revived? Nixon Peabody has had success with video workshops on resilience, in which employees share stories of how they’ve overcome adversity. ServiceNow has helped working families arrange shared tutoring sessions remotely -- including situations where one employee’s knowledgeable teen can coach someone else’s grade-schooler on math or science.

Sixth, learning and growth opportunities: Dutch scholar Evangelia Demerouti has argued that burnout often arises when employees feel they’re putting a great deal into their jobs -- and getting almost nothing back. That’s an intense issue at many universities now, particularly for junior faculty who haven’t earned tenure yet. Their ambitious research projects may be frozen if conditions for field work have become impossible.

Acting quickly to battle such problems, many institutions have allowed junior faculty who are part way along the tenure track to request a one-year extension. Instead of having five years to prove themselves, they might now have six. Such adjustments make personal growth possible again, either by waiting out today’s delays or switching to another research project that can be completed even in current straits.

Seventh, clear action on employee feedback: With K-12 schools facing limits in reopening their physical campuses, that creates intense strains on working parents. Homes now must do triple-duty as residences, office space for the parents, and a make-shift virtual school for children. Trying to be a reliable, polished presence at office video-conference meetings amid all this chaos can be harrowing.

ServiceNow’s leaders have been hearing a lot about such challenges. The solution: starting a lot of work meetings at 9:05 a.m., instead of 9 a.m. Those extra five minutes give working parents a chance to get their children settled at a screen for the start of school, without missing the beginning of an office call. 

Such adjustments are more prosaic than heroic. But they smooth away some of the current era’s irritations, in ways that make it easier for employees to feel a little less frustrated -- and a little more optimistic. 

Methodology

The measure of burnout risk cited in this article is calculated from a study of Glint survey comments submitted by respondents when asked about their happiness at work over a two-year period from August 2018 to August 2020. The data is based on employee surveys from roughly 400 companies and over 400,000 employees. Survey comments referencing burnout risk factors (fatigue, workload, stress) are identified by Glint’s Narrative Intelligence text analytics engine, and the number of these comments at a company as a percentage of all of its comments is calculated. The metric’s range is 0% to 100%.