Years ago I suffered burnout as a game developer. Monthly milestones, quarter of a billion dollar budgets, and a company culture that treated overwork as a badge of courage. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had become unceasingly tired, irritable, and devoid of emotional interest. I’m not a licensed healthcare professional but I can tell you what burnout is like.
It’s not just up to the individual to describe it, though. There’s a medically accepted definition. The World Health Organization says it’s an “occupational phenomenon”, and defines burnout as prolonged response to chronic interpersonal stressors on the job.
Typically we think of burnout as being driven by workload. You work too much, you burn out. And yep, that can happen. But the most commonly accepted model is that there are six factors that can lead to burnout and just one can be enough to produce symptoms. The leading researcher in this space is Christina Maslach and she describes the six factors like this:
- Workload – Work overload occurs when job demands exceed human limits. People have to do too much in too little time with too few resources. Increased workload has a consistent relationship with burnout, especially with the exhaustion dimension
- Control – Control includes employees’ perceived capacity to influence decisions that affect their work, to exercise professional autonomy, and to gain access to the resources necessary to do an effective job.
- Reward – Insufficient reward and lack of recognition increases people’s vulnerability to burnout by devaluing their work and increasing their feelings of inefficacy.
- Community – Community is the overall quality of social interaction at work, including issues of conflict, mutual support, closeness, and the capacity to work as a team. When these workplace relationships lack support and trust, or are characterized by incivility and unresolved conflict, then the risk of burnout is higher.
- Fairness – Burnout is more likely when people perceive the workplace to be characterized by inequity, lack of reciprocity, and an effort–reward imbalance.
- Values – When there is a value conflict on the job, and thus a gap between individual and organizational values, workers will find themselves making a trade-off between work they want to do and work they have to do. Research has found that a conflict in values is related to all three dimensions of burnout.
In my case workload was likely the primary driver, but I’d also say lack of control and minimal rewards contributed. Mandatory unpaid overtime away from your loved ones and hobbies is not adequately compensated by having a burrito delivered to your desk.
I want to talk more about burnout in my next few posts. Here I’ve listed the contributing factors, but we need to talk about how the symptoms present, and what a company can do to prevent burnout in the first place.