Does Your Business Have a Burnout Culture? Here’s How To Tell

Burnout is estimated to cost the economy more than $500 billion annually. It can lead to high employee turnover, low morale, high absenteeism, and lost productivity, all of which stifle business growth. If you’re seeing signs that your company could have a burnout culture, here’s how to assess the problem and what you can do about it.

There are a couple of ways to identify that your employees are feeling overworked and underappreciated. Most experts rely on the three main symptoms identified by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974: lack of motivation, unhappiness at work, and a sense of inefficacy.

There are a few different tools you can use to diagnose the cause, or causes, of burnout at your company — the Maslach Burnout Inventory is one example. Alternatively, you can set up one-on-ones with your managers, send out anonymous surveys, or reflect on your own to understand from where the issue stems.

“[Ask] yourself as a leader, what is making my staff so unhealthy? Why does our work environment lack the conditions for them to flourish? How can I make it safe for them to work here every day? We have to dig into the data and ask our people what would make work better for them,” wrote Jennifer Moss in Harvard Business Review. Jennifer Moss is an author and speaker on burnout, workplace well-being and employee happiness.