You can reduce job demands, sure, by improving work-life balance or hiring more people.
But you can ALSO keep job demands the same and increase workplace resources.
And in fact in many cases it’s not possible to reduce job demands (e.g. hospice workers, teachers, nurses)
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What levers can you pull to adjust job resources? Well:
1. Workload
2. Control (autonomy)
3. Rewards (financial or otherwise)
4. Community
5. Fairness (or perceived sense thereof)
6. Values (you’ll want to make sure the work is consistent with your employee’s values)
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I think what surprised me the most is that the pioneers of burnout research mostly see this as a boss/workplace/employer issue, and emphasise interventions that fix the working environment, NOT interventions to help the burnt out individual.
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The model I’ve included above is from Leiter and Maslach, and is relatively new, relatively untested work. Source here: researchgate.net/publication/23
But it builds on the decades of research Maslach has done on burnout, and is being actively tested.
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Anyway, I say all of this to provide background to what I’m about to say next:
A huge chunk of mainstream burnout advice appears to be “get better work-life balance” or “do self care”. But this is NOT what the research says.
The research says fix the work env or … get out!
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This is either depressing or amazing news, depending on where you stand.
Depressing: if you’re an employee with no power over your workplace, it’s just a matter of time before you burn out.
Amazing: if you’re an employer, there are systematic ways to stave off burnout.
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In fact, and this goes further, and this is a TRULY WILD thing, the thing that people don’t seem to want to talk about — your goal can be more than just “stave off burnout”, your goal can be “create work so engaging that your employees work long hours and feel totally energised.”
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In the burnout literature this is known as “work engagement” or “engagement”, a state that is the opposite of burnout.
It comes with its own inventory.
commoncog.com/g/burnout/#wha
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There was a piece sometime back by about what she missed working at Stripe, and the piece generated a lot of the usual “work-life balance” vs “no work-life balance” arguments.
One way of reading it is just “this is what engagement looks like”.
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I’ll end this thread here.
tl;dr — most people think in terms of ‘work-life balance’ but the research seems to be more nuanced.
The reality: burnout is about a mismatch of job demands and resources, and if you align it, you can create ridiculously engaging work environments.
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Whether that’s an unalloyed good is an exercise that’s left to the alert reader.
But I guess there’s no harm if you design a workplace that’s somehow as engaging as, say, tennis? 🤷♂️
I’d like to see more writing on that!
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something I am curious about is doctors/nurses working during the pandemic and the dynamics there
I am sure there will be more research in the coming years, but it might help us understand burnout better
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A huge amount of the research is actually from the medical establishment, mostly because nurse burnout + quit rates have been horrible for decades now.
But, yes, there’s likely going to be more work from the pandemic. E.g. how to balance demands and resources when demand spikes?
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The most helpful thing ive ever come across on this subject is David whytes book the three marriages. To be polemic: the general idea of work life balance is ridiculous in the first place.
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The more subtle point: life is dynamic and asks different things of us at different times - in our relationship work, family, partners, kids, friendships. The best we can do in the pursuit of an authentic experience of life is to make sacrifices as consciously as possible
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