By Steffen Wirth
You’ve probably been hearing the term “burnout” a lot recently. It seems to be in the news on a daily basis. In early March this year, Congress even passed the Dr. Lorna Breen Health Care Provider Protection Act, a new legislative bill designed to prevent and treat the growing incidence of burnout among doctors. Dr. Breen’s burnout from handling months of Covid-19 emergency room cases was tragic and led her to commit suicide.
Should you be concerned about burnout among the executives and employees in your organization? Is it your responsibility to help them? How can you even know if someone has burnout?
Let me answer these questions with my personal experience
Twice in my 30+ year career as an engineer at a major German automotive company, I experienced significant, debilitating periods of physical and mental exhaustion. I was barely able to work or even to live a normal home life. The first time it occurred, I tried to get back to normal on my own. I didn’t want to tell anyone about it, fearing that others would think I was weak or had mental illness problems. I sought to heal myself, but it took more than a year to recover and feel like myself again at work.
The second time it occurred ten years later, I could not work at all. I consulted a medical doctor who conducted a full battery of blood, urine, and saliva tests on me. The results showed that I was suffering from serious vitamin and mineral deficiencies, particularly vitamin B12. The most indicative test result showed that my cortisol levels were so low that I was literally starting to experience adrenal gland failure. Cortisol is the hormone that helps us deal with stress. Without sufficient cortisol, it is difficult to cope even with minor stress, let alone the stresses in a typical job.
I have now recovered and have spent the past five years researching the physiology and psychology of burnout. I have read widely in the scientific literature of endocrinology, internal medicine, and psychology, interviewed dozens of medical doctors and therapists, and met with other employees who experienced burnout. Together with a medical doctor at the University of Vienna, Austria, we developed a holistic questionnaire that can detect if someone is in one of the stages of burnout that we were able to precisely define.
In this time, I have learned that burnout is a serious chronic mind/body condition. Its symptoms include a constellation of physiological problems and these often engender mental consequences such as emotional exhaustion, negativity, indifference, moodiness, anxiety, depression, inability to focus, feelings of isolation, and loss of one’s drive and motivation to work. The World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases, 11th Edition (ICD-11) now recognizes burnout as a codifiable medical diagnosis that doctors can use to prescribe treatment.
The Impact of Burnout on Companies and Organizations
Some researchers are literally calling burnout the next pandemic of the 21st century, given the increasingly competitive, high pressure VUCA business world. Of course, burnout is not a contagious disease like a virus, but the condition is becoming more and more prevalent among employees. In my view, this suggests that corporate leaders truly need to begin paying attention to its impact on your business in lost productivity and health care costs. Consider these statistics:
- The increase in sick leave based on burnout has increased by 850% (2004 – 2019) according to German Health Data AOK
- Overall workplace stress is estimated to cost the US economy more than $500 billion dollars each year, with 550 million workdays lost due to stress on the job.
- The specific cost of lost productivity per year due to burnout in the US is estimated at about $952 per employee on average and in Europe at approximately 1,063 Euros. That amounts to between $125 billion to $190 billion in the US and 240 billion Euros in Europe.
- Worldwide, 615 million workers suffer from depression and anxiety, according to a recent WHO study, which costs the global economy an estmated $1 trillion annually in lost productivity.
So what should you do?
If you believe there might be people in your organization who exhibit signs of burnout, I recommend that you begin taking steps to help them. People with burnout are often afraid to admit it or to tell others, for fear of being labeled weak or mentally ill. Burnout is debilitating and a huge waste of human talent and productivity that no company can afford. In its later stages, the physiological and mental symptoms can even become life-threatening. Burnout should not be taken lightly. The earlier it is diagnosed and treated, the better the chances are that the individual can recover fully and not suffer as I did.
The holistic questionnaire we created is, to our knowledge, one of the first to help recognize burnout in employees. We field tested the questionnaire in several well-known German companies with excellent feedback and results. In one pilot test, the questionnaire identified that about 15% of the 300+ executives showed signs of burnout at one of the stages we define. That company and several others are now exploring adopting a program we created to teach their leaders how to recognize and prevent burnout.
We invite you to refer any individual in your organization to our questionnaire. It is 100% free and the results are confidential and provided only to the individual. The benefit of the questionnaire is that If the results indicate a stage of burnout, the person can feel much more comfortable consulting a medical doctor and obtaining the battery of tests that can provide a more formal medical diagnosis of burnout.
If you would like to speak to us about your entire organization using the questionnaire or having your executive teams learn about the training program we offer to help leaders recognize and prevent burnout, please contact us.