Leaders: 60% of You Are at Risk of Burnout. How Can You Stop It From Happening?

When the World Health Organisation officially classified burnout as an ‘occupational phenomenon’ in May 2019, nobody could have foreseen what was coming less than a year later with the COVID pandemic.

According to a recent survey by Deloitte , 77% of all professionals have experienced burnout in their current job. Executive burnout in particular has been on the rise for many years and has been pushed to new highs by the pandemic. The Global Leadership Forecast 2021 from Development Dimensions International  shows that nearly 60% of leaders feel used up at the end of the workday, a strong indicator of burnout. More concerning still is that 44% of those leaders expect to change companies in order to advance, and 26% expect to leave within the next year.

With such a significant impact on both individual wellbeing and organisational performance and progress, how can organisations begin to address the leadership burnout risk?

Identifying burnout and its impacts

The first step is to recognise when leaders burn out. It’s not as simple as just asking them if they feel it: the majority will answer that they do, without fully understanding the nuances of what the term means.

When it comes to burnout, those who love their jobs, perform well, have a high level of commitment and resilience to the organization and have effective coping mechanisms in place are more likely to succumb to it. Because of this, pinpointing a person's vulnerability to burnout is a difficult task.

Burnout has a real and measurable impact on both individual mental and physical health and wellbeing, and on organisational productivity and success as a whole. In fact, burnt out employees are 63% more likely to take a sick day and are 18% less productive, costing organisations 34% of employee’s annual salary.

Identifying and measuring the often-hidden symptoms of burnout is therefore critical to both individual and organisational wellbeing. Such symptoms can be complex, but include increased feelings of emotional exhaustion, the development of negative or cynical attitudes and feelings, and reduced personal accomplishment.

Understanding that these are critical pointers of burnout means it is possible to pinpoint leaders within your organisation who are more susceptible to burnout, and work to address root causes.


Measuring and managing burnout risk

But understanding symptoms and identifying likely burnout candidates is only part of the solution. Using measurement tools that deliver an early warning indicator is the best way of flagging where burnout is most likely to occur among leaders and across senior teams.

Burnout risk measurement is a unique way of assessing burnout here, providing a deeper understanding of the aspects of leaders’ personalities that may be putting them risk of burnout.

ENGAGE’s Burnout Risk Indicator is such a solution and is design to flag to leaders how they can stay conscious of these issues and tackle them pre-emptively. In addition, it provides advice on how to play to their strengths to mitigate burnout risk, and highlights the factors that are likely to increase stress. Additionally, it allows a team of executives to identify group resilience and talk about how they can work together to ensure they remain robust.

This can help organisations act on more specific aspects of burnout and pinpoint where the biggest issues are most common across the organisation. In the past few months, we've worked with a number of clients to identify the need for more resources, look at process improvement and job design, or look at the pastoral behaviours of individual leaders.

One client in particular had a high number of employees anecdotally reporting burnout, including senior leaders. Through a targeted, risk-measurement approach, we identified that in reality many were suffering from exhaustion, but actually had good levels of job efficacy and low levels of cynicism. This gave the company a clear understanding that burnout wasn’t as widespread as feared, but also indicated where they needed to focus their efforts in order to reduce workloads while maintaining productivity, engagement and morale.

A long-term preventative approach

Of course, prevention is always better than cure. Preventing burnout must be as much of a focus as treating it for today’s leaders and HR departments.

To achieve this, wellbeing needs to be a priority even at leadership level – something that is so often missed as part of organisational wellbeing approaches. What’s more, it must be thought about holistically and the root causes addressed rather than the symptoms.

There are some fundamental drivers of poor workplace wellbeing and burnout that are tied much more closely to the employee experience and day to day role than you might think: how work is distributed, whether people are able to make decisions to deliver on their work, and how clear they are on their own goals. This applies as much to leaders and senior executives as it does to frontline employees.

Being strategic about preventing burnout rather than tactical is what will lead to positive change, and measuring perceptions of these elements using data is the best way to drive evidence-based, targeted action. 

If all you’re doing to address burnout is giving employees a free day off, a lunchtime yoga class or some free fruit, it might be appreciated but it won’t solve any problems – so you might want to think again.