Employee burnout: How leaders can effect change

Imagine you have just been appointed CEO. In a recent internal survey, your employees have been shown to have low levels of engagement and satisfaction with their work, to a point where many have expressed a desire to leave the company. What would you do?

Employee burnout can manifest itself in many different ways, including low levels of engagement and work satisfaction, actively wishing to leave, and not recommending the workplace to others. According to the World Health Organization, burnout is an occupational phenomenon driven by a chronic imbalance between job demands (e.g. workload pressure and poor working environment) and job resources (e.g. job autonomy and supportive work relationships). It can result in mental and physical health challenges for individuals affected, such as those associated with negative stress responses, anxiety, and depression, and can severely impact an organization.

In brief, burnout is bad for both the individual and businesses. And while much is being done to address burnout and its symptoms, not all of it is proving effective.

New research by the McKinsey Health Institute (MHI) suggests that as a senior leader, there is a great deal you can do to directly improve the situation-—both by driving material change across the organization and by increasing your accountability and leading by example.

Perhaps most fundamental is ensuring that your organization is addressing employee mental health and well-being as a strategic priority. This means that a standardized measure of burnout is established and given parity with other key performance metrics, such as those used for finance, safety and quality, employee turnover, and customer satisfaction. This is a strategy that should be led from the top.

When one large organization achieved a 7 percent reduction in employee burnout rates (compared with an 11 percent increase in the national average within the industry over the same period), the CEO believed that leadership and sustained attention from the highest levels of the organization were “the key to making progress.”

Senior executives at the organization recognized employee mental health and well-being as a strategic priority. Executives publicly acknowledged the issues and listened to employee needs through a wide range of formats—including town halls, workshops, and employee interviews (separate research suggests that leaders are not listening to their people nearly enough). They prioritized issues and defined clear, time-bound measurable goals around them.

In addition, MHI research has identified several key factors in the battle to beat burnout, all of which benefit from a “lead by example” approach and endorsement at the senior level:

• Reducing toxic workplace behavior: this includes unfair or demeaning treatment, non-inclusive behavior, sabotaging, cutthroat competition, abusive management, and unethical behavior from leaders or coworkers that lead employees to feel undervalued, belittled, or unsafe.
• Promoting a sense of inclusivity and belonging: this means ensuring organization systems, leaders, and peers foster a welcoming and fair environment for all employees to be themselves, find connection, and meaningfully contribute.
• Offering sustainable work: organization and leaders promote a model that enables a healthy balance between work and personal life, including a manageable workload and work schedule.
• Providing a supportive growth environment: managers at all levels demonstrably care about employee opinions, well-being, satisfaction, and provide support and enable opportunities for growth.
• Holding the organization accountable: this would require organizations to gather feedback, track KPIs, align incentives, and measure progress against employee health goals.
• Demonstrating commitment from leadership: leaders consider employee well-being a top priority, publicly committing to a clear strategy to improve employee mental health.
• Offering access to resources: the organization should offer easy-to-use and accessible resources that fit individual employee needs related to mental health.

Finally, perhaps the most radical step we can take as senior leaders is to show our own vulnerability and help remove stigma. Stigma has been shown to have real costs to workforce productivity, often exacerbating underlying conditions due to the fear people feel in seeking help for mental health needs.

When CEOs and others at a senior level are willing to step forward and publicly discuss their own struggles with mental health using non-stigmatizing language, they help to remove the shame, prejudice, or discrimination employees frequently perceive towards people with mental health or substance-use conditions. This helps to promote a psychologically safe culture from which everyone can benefit.

The issue of workplace burnout is complex, but research shows that we can make a difference in the lives of our employees and the success of our businesses by fully committing to the creation of non-toxic work environments and practices where all employees feel welcome, heard, and valued.