Burnout is a common problem these days, and it is not something that can be left to the individual. Like a single flame in a dry forest, if you leave it alone it will affect and impact others around and that flame could grow into a conflagration that impacts the morale of an entire organization.

Recap: Burnout and Safety

Beth Genly, a registered nurse, wrote an article in a recent issue of Professional Safety magazine that addresses burnout and its potential impact on workplace safety. In my first post this week, I covered some background of the issue of burnout and its impact on safety among workers, whether the burnout came about on the job or because of work/life imbalance stresses. Where it comes from is ultimately irrelevant – the presence of burnout shows indications of increased risk of injury and/or death among those who experience burnout symptoms.

Genly noted in her article that in some research conducted on 10,000 workers in Finland, those that experienced symptoms of burnout once a month or more had a 19-percent greater risk of having a serious time-loss injury than those who experienced burnout less than once per month. On the other side, when burnout was addressed among nurses in Pennsylvania hospitals, it was found that increasing the staffing levels of nurses at hospitals to lower caseloads not only resulted in a 30-percent drop in burnout, but also an equal decrease in hospital-borne infections of patients and an overall saving for the hospital of upward of $70 million in one year. These savings were including the increased payroll costs by increased nurse staffing.

What If You See Burnout?

Genly laid out three key traits or characteristics of a worker suffering from burnout, and implied the importance of managers, supervisors and co-workers to watch out for some of the signs and be ready to address it as a legitimate workplace safety issue and hazard. Many times, people won’t leave their job or change the source of the burnout until the symptoms have been manifested for a while. By then it may be too late in some respects.

Burnout is not something that is left to the individual. If an individual suffers from burnout, chances are he or she becomes less productive and less of a team player. And when a person is less productive, to keep up productivity means the rest of the team has to step up their productivity to cover the slack. And sometimes when that happens, there may be another worker in the team that may be pre-disposed to burnout and that person could become less productive, thus putting more stress and strain on the rest of the team, and so on.

With reports of employment still being down but productivity being up over a few years ago, you can kinda put the math together that more people are working harder and longer than before in order for businesses to be as or more productive than before. Therefore, burnout has a pretty decent chance of happening more often.

Assessing Burnout Risk

It’s a tall task, but it’s possible to assess workers in their overall risk of burning out by taking a look at personal skills and behaviors that have shown to counter the risk of burnout and increase safety of all workers. There are more than 60 personal attributes that have been found over 40 years of medical research into burnout, and they have been grouped into five areas of personality. The more skills and behaviors displayed by in individual, the less likely that person will succumb to burnout. Let us take a quick look at these skills and behaviors that would be valuable in a worker.

  1. Taking care of self. This is a fancy phrasing for sleep. The less sleep workers get, or the more night and rotational shift work they have, research shows a strong correlation with burnout for those who do not get the healthy amount of sleep every night.
  2. Mindfulness. This is where workers find ways to put away the past and future thoughts and focus solely on the present. “Live in the moment,” it is called. Meditation techniques or courses about how to reduce stress and distraction to focus mental energy has been shown to have benefits to workers in reducing their burnout symptoms. The goal is to be focused on the current moment and learn to block out any thought that is not relevant to the current moment.
  3. Belonging. Burnout in some ways simulates depression, in that those who are burned out tend to distance themselves from others and lose a sense of community or connection with others. To combat this, companies that have mentoring opportunities and some team dynamics among groups where team members have to collaborate to get work done or they spend time in social settings can contribute to a reduction in burnout symptoms. Helping everyone feel like they belong to something bigger than them, and encouraging them to feel that their role is important, helps reduce that disconnection that is consistent with burnout. The key point to remember here, though, is that this is most effective when it works bottom-up rather than top-down.
  4. Coping. This refers to educating individuals about their ways of coping with stress and exhaustion, and providing support and strategies to improve the coping mechanism to combat the mental and emotional exhaustion that predicates burnout.
  5. Tasking. As an earlier point focused on a worker’s ability to “live in the present,” there are many people that claim they can do wonders when multitasking. Research has shown that, however, only about one in 40 people have an innate ability to multitask and do all the tasks well. And as people do multiple tasks at the same time, and fail to do them effectively or efficiently, that adds to the stress levels and thus increases burnout risk. For most people, having the mental focus on the moment should also include focus on only one task at a time in that moment. This reportedly reduces stress and mental and emotional exhaustion among many workers.

Burnout is all about safety. If you witness signs of burnout among any workers, encourage them to get some help in dealing with their issue so that they can get back the mental and emotional focus that is contrary to burnout. Encouraging workers to have a purpose for their work, focusing on a singular moment and a singular task at a time, can generate enough variety as to suppress boredom and can keep the mind stimulated rather than exhausted with redundancy.

If a worker is too far gone because the symptoms weren’t caught in time, rather than letting them go, consider a well-deserved vacation where they get away from work for a couple or few weeks, encouraging them to get some help with their burnout and then meet with them again at the end of vacation to discuss how to get them back engaged and productive. When they are not engaged, they are distracted – and we have covered the dangers of distracted workers.