Original Complete article from Fast Company - Jennifer Moss

BY Jennifer Moss 6 minute read

For over a millennium, we’ve turned the concept of burnout into tragically biased memes—those gray-washed stock images of a guy resting his head in his hand as he gloomily stares at his blank computer monitor; a single match with its flame recently snuffed out; a harried mom carrying three bags of jam-packed groceries while multiple kids tumble out of the van. And, in response to the stock photo way we see this serious illness, we’ll lose nearly $1 trillion in productivity globally each year, spend $190 billion in healthcare outlays, and 120,000 people will die from burnout in the United States alone.

And what about the pandemic, which made an existing problem exponentially worse? 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 of, “Burnout is getting worse. People are sick!” Then we were all suddenly thrust into unknown territory. 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.

Well-being in a crisis

I started writing my book, The Burnout Epidemic, in early 2020. For years, as a journalist and consultant helping leaders combat burnout, I’d witnessed the pernicious effects of burnout, but the pandemic took the problem to epidemic levels. We’re beyond burned out.

In late 2020 and into early 2021, I teamed up with [researchers] Michael Leiter, Christina Maslach, and David Whiteside, director of insights and research at YMCA WorkWell, to better understand the impact of the pandemic on well-being and burnout. Our survey 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, 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; 67% of respondents worked at or above a supervisor level.

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

• 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 as the reason.

• 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.”

Read the complete article at Fast Company