Career Coach Monique Valcour has a client whose resting heart rate never dips below 100 beats per minute. He’s not an Olympic athlete, but he does happen to have an incredibly stressful job.
Valcour, also a business management professor, works with people like this who are experiencing job burnout. She joined WPR’s "The Morning Show" along with Eric Garton, a partner at the business consulting firm Bain & Company in Chicago and co-author of the book "Time, Talent, Energy: Overcome Organizational Drag and Unleash Your Team's Productive Power."
"It would be highly surprising to me to find very many individuals (who) haven’t experienced burnout at some point in time during the course of their career," Garton said.
In other words, burnout is extremely common; it’s also not a problem to be taken lightly. It’s estimated to cost over a $100 billion a year in healthcare spending in the U.S. alone, according to figures that Garton pointed to, and the associated health risks are serious.
Signs someone might be suffering from burnout
Burnout is not just prolonged or intense stress. Burnout happens when "people feel like they can no longer bring their full selves to work everyday. It can get so bad that people can no longer come to work every day, which is probably the most extreme form," Garton said.
The three biggest signs of burnout are exhaustion, cynicism and feelings of inefficacy, Valcour said.
The exhaustion people with burnout experience isn’t just physical; it’s emotional. It’s a sense "of just not having any more to give, and feeling that you’ve got very few emotional resources to cope," she said.
Cynicism encompasses a lost sense of meaning or purpose in your job, a lack of trust in or respect for your company’s leadership and/or mission, and a lack of connection to your colleagues and/or clients, she said.
In addition, people with burnout start to be ineffective at their jobs; tasks that used to be easy become difficult and time-consuming. This can happen in spite of years of experience and high expertise, Valcour said.
Myths about burnout
It’s a personal problem:
People tend to think of burnout as a personal problem: people who experience burnout must just be less mentally resilient and more susceptible to stress. In reality, though, burnout is usually a problem with the organization and not with the individual employee, Valcour and Garton said.
"Oftentimes, burnout is a completely hidden problem. Even though it’s often driven by organizational factors, it tends to be treated as an individual problem. Often, there’s a lot of guilt (and) shame for people who are experiencing burnout that there’s something wrong with them," Valcour said.
Institutional problems like poor time management, unclear or unrealistic expectations, over-reliance on digital workflow tools, giving too much work to the most capable employees, and too much collaboration are all factors that can lead to employee burnout.
Employers and managers should make sure employees have realistic workloads, do their best to get to know everyone who works for them, and set a good example.
Burnout is a sign that someone has a bad work ethic or low motivation:
Burnout can — and does — happen to everyone, Valcour said. And in fact, some research shows that people who are high-achieving and highly engaged at work are more likely to experience burnout, in part because their hard work may be rewarded with increased responsibility.
Burnout is a problem that affects every kind of worker in every kind of industry, although people with perfectionist tendencies may be more likely to experience burnout, Valcour noted. Some professions also seem to have higher rates of burnout than others.
Just practice self-care and you’ll be able to avoid burnout:
Although practicing self-care (eating well, exercising, getting enough sleep, doing things you enjoy, spending time with loved ones, going to therapy, etc.) is necessary to stay content and afloat at your job, it won’t change the way your company is operated.
"Of course, ultimately individuals have to take care of their own health. That might mean they have to change employers or profession if they cant’ find a solution that’s going to work for them. But no individual can solve this problem on their own. Organizations have the responsibility to create that time for people to recharge themselves," Garton said.
In the end, most of the burden rests on the company, he said.