Assessing Burnout — A Case (and Tool) for Change
By: Organizations For Impact
Tags: Management, Surveys, Leadership, Hr Talent Management, Burnout

Written by Arief Kartolo & Christine Yip, edited by Lillie Sun

They say knowledge is power — the sooner you can recognize the symptoms of burnout, the quicker you can take steps to resolve it.

At Organizations for Impact, we believe that awareness is the critical first step to preventing and addressing the risks of burnout. In this post, we’re sharing a statistically validated survey tool to help individuals identify and understand the symptoms associated with burnout, and provide leaders and managers with a tool to use to help manage a team that might be at high risk for burnout.

Awareness is the first step

Experiences of burnout across workplaces are becoming increasingly common. In a 2018 survey of working Canadians, Morneau Shepell found that 1 in 3 Canadian were more stressed from work than they were 5 years ago. Deloitte’s marketplace survey of over 1,000 professionals found that 77% had experienced burnout at their current job.

Despite this, there is still very little that is being done to address burnout. Deloitte’s leadership survey found that 69% of professionals feel that their employers aren’t doing enough to address the problem. While there are many reasons why this is the case, we know many people still suffer in silence, unaware that they are on a path to burnout, or unsure of where or who to go to for help. Burnout still carries a harmful stigma, leading many to ignore the warning signs out of fear that they will be seen as lazy, incompetent or simply “not cut out for the job.” This prevents individuals from speaking up and seeking the appropriate help, leading to serious burnout along with other mental and physical health problems. See our blogpost “Demystifying burnout and what to do about it” for a more detailed discussion on the impacts of burnouts to individuals and organizations.

While we still have a long way to go before burnout is seen as legitimate management issue, increasing our awareness of the signs and symptoms of burnout and having the tools to track and monitor burnout in our teams is an important first step.

Assessing your signs and symptoms

Listed below is the survey tool developed by organizational researchers to measure and better understand experiences of burnout. An online version that allows individuals to self assess and analyze their scores immediately is available here. The tool is a statistically validated 10-item scale that assesses the extent to which an individual is experiencing symptoms of burnout by assessing their levels of apathy and exhaustion towards work — the two primary symptoms of burnout. Apathy is associated with having a negative attitude toward work, and exhaustion is related to the depletion of both mental and physical energy at work.

The purpose of sharing this scale is to help individuals identify and understand the symptoms associated with burnout, and provide leaders and managers with a tool to use to help manage a team that might be at high risk for burnout.

It should be noted that this is not a diagnostic tool. This scale cannot diagnose whether someone is burnt out or not. However, it can be used to help increase awareness of the symptoms of burnout and inspire action to create healthier work habits and work environments.

Response Scale:

Never (1), not often (2), some of the time (3), very often (4), and all of the time (5)

Survey Items:

Employment Apathy Items:

· I feel my work is meaningless

· I am not motivated at my job

· Work is not fulfilling for me

· I feel as though I am hitting a wall at work

· I feel dissatisfied with work

Employment Exhaustion Items:

· I think my job is making me sick

· I do not have the energy to complete my work

· I feel mentally exhausted from work

· I feel physically exhausted from work

· Thinking about my job makes me tired

What Makes This Scale Different

While employee surveys are a dime a dozen, many do not meet the psychometric standards required to ensure their validity and reliability. This means that there is no way of proving that the survey is measuring what it intends to measure, or that the results are generalizable and reliably capture the same behaviors and attitudes across different groups being measured. The scale above has been developed using the appropriate statistical techniques to ensure both the validity and reliability of the measure. For more details, please refer to the academic article the authors published here.

How to use the scale

This burnout assessment tool can be administered in multiple ways.

1. Individual employees can administer, assess, and score this burnout assessment themselves. This can help individuals to become more aware of their own mental health by identifying their own symptoms associated with burnout.

2. Managers, leaders, and HR professionals/consultants can administer the assessment across their teams. This can help identify patterns of high stress and burnout at the organizational level, which can be used to build a case for making changes to certain management processes or behaviours.

However, given that burnout is a very sensitive topic that can carry harsh stigmas, there are some important factors to be mindful of when you are administering the burnout assessment tool as a manager:

The tool is intended only for developmental purposes, not performance appraisal.

Showing symptoms of burnout does not mean that the employee is weak or incompetent. It is important to communicate that the results from this assessment are not indicative of their performance level, and will not be used for performance appraisal. Employees may be reluctant to provide the full picture of their mental health if they are afraid that their responses are “incorrect” or would be reprimanded.

2. Respect the privacy and anonymity of responses.

Burnout is an extremely sensitive topic. It is important to respect the privacy and anonymity of those who responded to the assessment to ensure the accuracy and validity of the results. To ensure anonymity and privacy of the data, managers should administer the measure to a group of employees, rather than singling out an individual team member, while ensuring no identifying information (e.g., names, gender, role) is collected during the process. Engaging a third party to administer the tool and analyze the results can also ensure that employees privacy is protected and confidentiality is maintained.

3. Follow up with your employees — but only use the aggregated results.

“Why am I doing this if nothing ever changes around here?” An assessment without action can discredit efforts and undermine change initiatives in the future. Employees’ morale may suffer as a result of false expectations. It is important to follow up with your employees to communicate the results and discuss the patterns that might have emerged across the team or business unit. Ask questions and invite collaborative conversations to devise appropriate and meaningful strategies for burnout prevention.

The Key Takeaways

An important step to minimizing the risk of burnout is to increase awareness of its signs, symptoms, and negative implications to the health and wellness of individuals and organizations. In this post, we have provided an evidence-based assessment tool to help individuals and managers determine the extent to which themselves or their teams are experiencing symptoms of burnout. While there are many benefits to assessing symptoms of burnout, there are also risks. Today, burnout still carries a negative stigma, meaning many people are afraid to share their experiences out of fear that it might reflect poorly on their job performance. This means, that any attempt to assess or address burnout has to do so with care, respecting the privacy and sensitivity of the data being collected.

At Organizations for Impact, we believe that awareness is the first step towards making important changes to the work habits and management practices that contribute to burnout. These changes will play an important role in encouraging efforts to better address high pressure, stressful working conditions, leading to healthier and more productive work environments.