Here is an excerpt from an article written by Jennifer Moss for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

Credit: Peter Greenwood/Folio Art

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Chronic stress was rampant even before the pandemic. Leaders can’t ignore it any longer.

When the Covid-19 pandemic began, I felt as if I were in one of those disaster movies, standing in front of a rapidly spreading fire as an entire city was about to be engulfed in flames. And despite feeling that a massive disruption was imminent, I could only watch in shock.

I’ve studied burnout and worked with organizations to address it for years, but nothing would inform my understanding of the topic more than living through 2020. For some time I’d been sounding the alarm: “Burnout is getting worse. People are sick!” Then we were all suddenly thrust into unknown territory: By April 2.6 billion people had gone into lockdown, and places of employment for 81% of the global workforce were fully or partially closed. A huge percentage of knowledge workers began doing their jobs from home — many collaborating on Zoom, whose daily active users skyrocketed from 10 million to 200 million. This sudden shift did what little else had been able to accomplish before: expose how thinly stretched and worn down we all were — and had been for a while. And it also made our burnout much, much worse.

Just How Bad Is Burnout?

Although the concept of occupational burnout originated in the 1970s, the medical community has long argued about how to define it. In 2019 the World Health Organization finally included burnout in its International Classification of Diseases, describing it as “a syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed.” This language acknowledged that burnout is more than just an employee problem; it’s an organizational problem that requires an organizational solution.>

When you analyze the real causes of burnout, it becomes clear that almost everyone has been attacking the problem from the wrong angle. According to Christina Maslach of the University of California, Berkeley, Susan E. Jackson of Rutgers, and Michael Leiter of Deakin University, burnout has six main causes:

1. Unsustainable workload
2. Perceived lack of control
3. Insufficient rewards for effort
4. Lack of a supportive community
5. Lack of fairness
6. Mismatched values and skills

While these are all organizational issues, we still prescribe self-care as the cure for burnout. We’ve put the burden of solving the problem squarely on the shoulders of individual employees. “Let’s just recommend more yoga, wellness tech, meditation apps, and subsidized gym memberships — that’ll fix it,” we say. But those are tools for improving well-being. When it comes to preventing burnout specifically, they won’t be effective. We desperately need upstream interventions, not downstream tactics. In this article I’ll describe tactics companies can use to address some of the organizational roots of burnout.

Teaming up together, Leiter, Maslach, and David Whiteside, the director of insights and research at YMCA WorkWell, and I created a survey that analyzes the state of burnout and well-being during Covid-19. We combined several evidence-based scales, including the Maslach Burnout Inventory General Survey (MBI-GS), a psychological assessment of occupational burnout, and the Areas of Worklife Survey (AWS), which assesses employees’ perceptions of work-setting qualities that affect whether they experience engagement or burnout.

With support from Harvard Business Review, we gathered feedback from more than 1,500 respondents in 46 countries, in various sectors, roles, and seniority levels, in the fall of 2020. Sixty-seven percent of respondents worked at or above a supervisor level.

What did we learn, in a nutshell? Burnout is a global problem. Some stats:

• 89% of respondents said their work life was getting worse.
• 85% said their well-being had declined.
• 56% said their job demands had increased.
• 62% of the people who were struggling to manage their workloads had experienced burnout “often” or “extremely often” in the previous three months.
• 57% of employees felt that the pandemic had a “large effect on” or “completely dominated” their work.
• 55% of all respondents didn’t feel that they had been able to balance their home and work life — with 53% specifically citing homeschooling.
• 25% felt unable to maintain a strong connection with family, 39% with colleagues, and 50% with friends.
• Only 21% rated their well-being as “good,” and a mere 2% rated it as “excellent.”

The 1,500 people in our survey not only much more squarely fit the burnout profile than did the nearly 50,000 respondents who had taken the MBI-GS before the pandemic, they also scored very high on exhaustion and cynicism — two predictors of burnout, according to the MBI-GS. “These survey responses make it clear that a lot of people are having serious disruptions in their relationship with work,” Leiter notes. “It’s not surprising that people are more exhausted — people are working hard to keep their work and personal lives afloat. But the rise in cynicism is even more troubling. Cynicism reflects a lack of trust in the world. So many people feel let down by their government’s poor preparation for the pandemic, as well as by the injustices in work and well-being that the pandemic has highlighted.”

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