Burnout: If you are a corporate leader, why should you care?

By Steffen Wirth

You’ve probably been hearing the term “burnout” a lot recently. It seems to be a subject that has been growing in awareness among business leaders.

So 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 tell if someone has burnout?

Let me answer these questions with my personal experience

Twice in my 30+ year career as an engineer and manager at a major international 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, especially 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 accumulation of stresses in a typical job plus one’s home life, the chaos of world news, and our need to be “always on” social media and the internet.

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, 11^th 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 21^st century, given the increasingly competitive, high pressure VUCA business world. Of course, burnout is not a contagious disease like a virus, which is easy to identify. But the condition is becoming more and more prevalent among employees at all levels.

In my view, this suggests that corporate leaders need to begin paying attention to the potential impact of burnout on your business. Why take chances losing key executives or employees when the cost of replacing them and training new people might far exceed the healthcare cost of helping them prevent burnout? There’s also a huge cost of burnout due just to lost productivity when people take time off to de-stress. And don’t forget the impact on a company’s capability for creativity and Innovation when key people go on long-term leave for burnout.

Consider these statistics:

The increase in sick leave based on burnout has increased by 850% (2004 – 2019) according to German Health Data.
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 estimated $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. The questionnaire has been used at two large global companies with excellent results and feedback. In these pilot tests, the questionnaire identified that about 35% of executives show signs of burnout at one of the four stages we define. Those companies and others are now exploring adopting a unique training program we offer to teach leaders and employees how to proactively prevent burnout and develop lifelong habits of wellbeing. Our goal is to empower everyone to become more responsible for their own health and to be proactive in staying healthy.

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 team and/or employees learn about better health and well-being as well as preventing burnout, please contact us. We can support your organization as to which steps to take next to get back on track and keep everyone healthy.