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Exhausted, thin-skinned, cynical - everyone reacts differently to excessive stress at work.
Employees do not have to find their way out of exhaustion alone.
This is where companies should start.
Photo: Yaroslav Danylchenko / Stocksy
At the beginning of the corona pandemic, I felt like I was in one of those disaster films: I was standing in front of a rapidly spreading fire.
The whole city was about to go up in flames.
And although I sensed that disaster was looming, I was frozen in shock and could only watch helplessly.
Jennifer Moss
is a workplace expert, international keynote speaker and award-winning journalist.
She is the author of the bestselling book Unlocking Happiness at Work - (Kogan Page, 2021) and the book The Burnout Epidemic (HBR Press, September 2021)
I have been dealing with burnout for years and develop countermeasures together with companies.
Yet nothing has shaped my perspective on the issue more than what happened in 2020.
For a long time I had warned: »Burnout is only getting worse.
People are sick!« Then we were all thrown in at the deep end: In April 2020, 2.6 billion people were living in lockdown, 81 percent of the world’s jobs were – in whole or in part – inaccessible.
A huge percentage of knowledge workers started working from home.
Many stayed in touch through the video conferencing service Zoom, which has seen its daily active user count soar from 10 million to 200 million.
This sudden turn revealed what few had achieved before: it revealed how thin-skinned,
exhausted and weary we all were - and had been for quite a while.
On top of that, it made our burnout even worse.
How bad is burnout really?
Although the term burnout was coined in the 1970s, physicians still argue about how exactly it should be defined.
In 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) finally included “burnout” in its International Classification of Diseases (ICD).
In the ICD 11, which will apply from January 2022, burnout is described as a »syndrome due to chronic stress at work that is not successfully processed«.
This formulation recognized that burnout is more than an individual employee problem: it is an organizational problem that requires an organizational solution.
If you analyze the real causes of burnout, it quickly becomes clear that the problem is almost always wrongly addressed.
According to Christina Maslach, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, Susan E. Jackson of Rutgers (State University of New Jersey), and psychology professor Michael Leiter at Deakin University, there are six main causes of burnout:
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