Passion is often symbolized by fire or a flame. So it makes sense that when a worker or person experiences a lack  or loss of passion for work or life, there is a term called “burnout.”

Burnout can be seen as an emotional disorder, where a person loses the emotional investment in his or her work or daily life, for whatever reason, and finally decides that it just isn’t worth continuing in the work and he or she leaves the work or the job. While many of us appreciate that passion can leave us when we lose sight of what we are working or living for, there is a danger that a person may continue in the job even after feeling burned out and just can’t bring him or herself to leave and at least take a break from work to get perspective.

The concept of burnout was addressed in a recent Professional Safety magazine article by registered nurse Beth Genly which discussed burnout and its effects on workplace risks and potential processes for addressing the problem so risks can be mitigated for the workers affected by burnout and their colleagues who work around them.

Burnout: Perception vs. Reality

Years ago, there was a basic perception that burnout was strictly emotional, and that burnout rate among workers were highest in those fields that were perceived to be very difficult emotionally for workers – fields such as law, social work and medicine (areas where suffering and depressing circumstances are often prevalent).

What subsequent studies and research have found, however, is that burnout is not strictly emotional, and that symptoms or signs of burnout can appear in a percentage of workers across virtually all industries  What has been discovered is that there are three qualities of burnout that may appear in workers, either one at a time or all at once, and as we’ll discuss in a minute, these factors can play a large role in adding risk of injury to workers at a work site.

  • Emotional exhaustion: Mental and physical exhaustion tend to follow this quality, in which a worker is very emotionally involved in his or her work constantly and works long hours and many days at a heightened emotional level.
  • Impersonalization: The worker does not feel like an individual, but just as another “worker bee.” Workers who feel like they’ve been impersonalized will tend to withdraw socially, be emotionless or cranky when responding to people or act cynical around others.
  • Loss of Value: The person working starts to feel like his or her work isn’t valuable or isn’t making a difference in “the world,” and that then makes the worker start to believe he or she has no or less value as a person compared someone else.

As a co-wrker, supervisor or manager, keeping an eye on these factors with workers and addressing them as they appear can go a long way toward keeping those worker engaged and safe.

Burnout as a Risk Factor

If you have ever experience emotional or mental depression, whether from the loss of a family member or news of a layoff, a divorce or some other factor, you can understand how it might affect you mentally and physically. But you may not know that any mental depression, never mind emotional, can leave you more at risk for a serious injury on the job or in life. Burnout can have the same effect, as research has shown a correlation between  burnout and risk of serious injury.

One study in particular followed 10,000 workers at a Finland forest product company over eight years (the amount of time that medical records are tracked and easily accessible through national healthcare databases) and considered each worker’s Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI) score, which takes into account the levels and frequency of the three established traits listed earlier.

What was found among the workers studies was that for every tick upward on the MBI score, a worker had a 10-percent higher risk of suffering a serious injury (resulting in time-loss and hospitalization). And when the workers were divided into groups categorized by frequency of burnout symptoms, those who had burnout symptoms only once a moth had a 19-percent greater risk of serious injury than everyone else who felt burnout less often.

All it takes is to feel burned out once a month?!!

Burnout Causes Mistakes

In the healthcare industry, any mistake can be dangerous, and the greater the mistake, the higher the risk of permanent damage of death to a patient, not to mention the expense to a hospital and/or an insurance company in dealing with these claims. And as you might guess, burnout can directly lead to mistakes due to the mental fatigue and confusion that can develop as a symptom of burnout.

While there are some conflicting studies about the effects of burnout n different occupations within the healthcare industry (some doctors experience relatively little burnout and yet have a pattern of mistakes), one study in specific had positive results in regards to increasing nurse staffing levels at more than 160 hospitals in Pennsylvania.

What was discovered were actual bonus benefits, besides decreasing burnout among nurses. Not only did increased staffing of nurses decrease burnout by about 30 percent (a remarkable number in just one year), but that also there were 30 percent fewer hospital-based infections in patients (translated as, fewer mistakes by doctors and nurses which led to infections and diseases not already present in patients when they checked in). This concept of less treatment of patients due to these acquired infections resulted in savings for the hospitals of as much as nearly $70 million.

And yes, that is savings while paying out more in payroll due to increased nurse staffing. Better nurse-to-patent ratios mean less burnout, lower caseload for nurses, better attention to patients, and fewer mistakes and thus resultant infections in patients, which then saves money on treatments and additional days in the hospital for patients.

In my next post, I will delve into the rest of Genly’s article that goes into strategies to address burnout and steps for an “intervention” regardless of the burnout stemming from the workplace or from a work/life balance imbalance.