Burnout isn’t a personal problem, it’s an organizational problem

Sophia Zaia | August 2023

This is an excerpt from Breadth and Depth, the PowerLabs newsletter. Sign up below to get the next edition in your inbox. Part two of this series is here.

re:power and the Analyst Institute published a survey last summer on the primary needs and challenges organizers face in their work. The number one issue organizers raised was burnout.

Burnout is often seen as a personal problem, but the accompanying report recommends that organizations "address (and if possible, prevent) organizer burnout at a systems level rather than at the individual level."

Decades of research agree.

Burnout is caused by problems with organizational structure, practices, processes, culture and leadership.

It’s not an individual problem that can be fixed with self care, time off, or boundary setting.

Our progressive organizations are trying to take responsibility for so many of the world's problems. Adding responsibility for the emotional well-being of every employee to that list may feel just outside the bounds of what managers can handle without burning out themselves. However, emphasizing personal responsibility instead of systemic change may worsen things.

If a person sees burnout as their problem and changes their behaviors and mindset, they may get temporary relief. If they experience burnout again weeks or months later, they may feel like it's a personal failing.

This cycle of burnout and band-aid fixes can compound the overwhelming exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and detachment, and a sense of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. At the organizational level, burnout can cause turnover and the subsequent loss of knowledge, experience, and mentorship for new employees.

Luckily, there are ways to design our organizations and our work to support people to stay in the game that don't require adding "workplace therapist" to your list of job responsibilities.

Researchers Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter have been studying workplace burnout and approaches organizations can take to reduce it since Maslach first started hearing the term while interviewing workers for a research project in the 1970s. Their book The Burnout Challenge: Managing People's Relationships with Their Jobs (2022) clarified so many things about the workplace burnout I've experienced and witnessed around me, and I'm excited to share some of those things here.

What is burnout?

As Maslach and Leiter write, burnout isn't just about the exhaustion we often associate it with:

The negative impact of these workplace trends creates an employee experience of a crushing exhaustion, feelings of cynicism and alienation, and a sense of ineffectiveness—the triumvirate known as burnout. The burnout syndrome occurs when people experience combined crises on all three of these dimensions, most of the time. They feel chronically exhausted; they have withdrawn mentally, socially and emotionally from their work; and they have lost confidence in their capacity to have a constructive impact. Basically, this means that they are experiencing high stress, a hostile job environment, and a pessimistic evaluation of themselves. (emphasis mine)

The six causes of burnout

I've felt confused about the cause of my own burnout in the past.

I was working with many of my best friends at an organization whose mission I was behind 100%, when I accepted a middle-management role where I had to follow directives that weren't aligned with my values. I felt powerless under a manager who didn't consult me on decisions directly impacting my team. I felt I could barely continue slogging through my work and almost quit.

I ended up switching roles. My new manager constantly uplifted my team's work and gave us just the right balance of guidance and trust. I had the power to make decisions, and finally felt proud of my work again. Even though I often worked more hours than before, I almost immediately regained energy and motivation.

The problem wasn't the length of my to-do list or my self-care routines; it was about autonomy, values, and recognition.

Burnout has six causes that can be identified and addressed collectively by people in the organization.

Work overload: The most widely understood cause of workplace burnout. Work overload can be caused by having too many tasks on your plate or having to take on too much emotional labor.

Lack of control: The degree to which workers feel they are not in control, cannot act with autonomy, and are not granted flexibility. The authors state: "lack of control is often a more serious issue for workers than workload per se. It can easily lead to a sense of inefficacy and cynicism." They've also found that "situations with high demands and low control lead to distress. But situations with high demands and high control do not."

Insufficient rewards: When workers do not reap sufficient financial, social, or emotional rewards for their work (including the intrinsic rewards of meaningful and challenging work). Factors include an imbalance between negative and positive feedback, a lack of feedback, and the feeling that their accomplishments are routinely ignored.

Breakdown of community: When people do not feel a sense of belonging in their workplace. The need for belonging can be thwarted by racist and sexist remarks, sarcastic comments, talking behind others’ backs, or belittlement. A breakdown of community can also stem from unsupportive managers who may be quick to assign blame yet have difficulty receiving feedback themselves.

Absence of fairness: The extent to which decisions are viewed as unjust, people aren’t treated with respect, and various processes and outcomes are biased and discriminatory. The authors state that "unfair treatment marks its targets as lacking legitimacy in the community, excluding them from full membership, and injustice can move directly to exploitation."

Value conflicts: Maslach has said this may be particularly prevalent for social justice organizations. Value conflicts can come from multiple directions—a sense that the organization preaches one thing while practicing another; the incompatibility of declared values, leaving employees unclear which takes priority; and when organizers have to capitulate on their values, as when having to support legislation that's a step in the right direction, but doesn't go far enough. "When highly paid employees quit their jobs," Maslach and Leiter write, "even despite offers of more money or other benefits, it is this 'soul erosion' that is pushing them away."

What can we do about it?

While the response is often to address burnout at the individual level through coping strategies or medicalization, Maslach and Leiter "strongly disagree" with this approach. Their research has led them to understand burnout as a consequence of the relationship between the individual and their workplace.

The authors use a "canary in the coal mine" analogy. When a canary (burnt-out individual) starts to show signs of distress, we have several options for how to respond. If we see the burnout issue as an individual one, we could encourage the canary to beef up, become more of a buzzard, or pull themselves up by their bird bootstraps. If we see the issue as a worker-workplace match, we could see those distress signals as clues pointing to ways to make the workplace context more sustainable for workers.

While it may at times be true that an individual and their workplace just aren't a good fit, rather than immediately jumping to that conclusion, organizations can work on improving the workplace context in ways that could enhance the experience of all employees and strengthen their work and organization in the process.

As Maslach and Leiter remind us, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. They recommend the three-Cs approach to addressing workplace burnout—collaborate (with everyone affected to find the right solutions), customize (to your workplace culture and the type of job), and commit (to sustaining the effort, recognizing change takes time and there will be bumps along the way).

Sophia Zaia is an Associate Consultant at PowerLabs where she specializes in improving the effectiveness of staff and volunteer teams.

She has experience both leading and coaching self-managing volunteer teams, mid-level teams and senior leadership teams at the Sunrise Movement, on Jessica Cisneros' 2022 campaign for Congress, and in the fossil fuel divestment movement.

She directed the Sunrise Movement's distributed voter contact program in 2020, resulting in more than six million phone calls made and more than one million postcards sent through efforts organized by a self-managing team of fifty-plus volunteers in their teens and early twenties. You can read more about it here and here.